Report on “ Hamlet and ‘ A Matter Tender and Dangerous ’” Presenter George Hsieh

Introduction A. Motivation: To raise the issue of “the relation of the plays to early modern religious discourses”. B. Religion presented in Hamlet is “oblique and inconsistent”.

Introduction C. Thesis statement: The religious inconsistency in Hamlet is able to be resolved from a historicist interpretation, and in which the context of Roman Catholicism, Neo-Stoicism, and Protestantism will be included to analyze “Hamlet’s subjectivity”.

Roman Catholicism A. “The language and theology of Roman Catholicism emerge most clearly in Hamlet in the prince’s encounter with his father’s spirit, where the Christian and specifically purgatorial context that Shakespeare creates for the Ghost is rather surprising”

Roman Catholicism B. The historical context of Roman Catholicism in the 16th century England. 1. The influence of Catholicism is “undermined by the Reformation”. 2. By presenting the Ghost scene, Shakespeare may want “to establish a sense of distance between the world of old Hamlet and the official ideology of contemporary England”. 3. Hamlet’s dilemma results from the conflict between the old society presented by the Ghost, in which he has to be a revengeful son, and his Renaissance self- conscience.

Political Relation in Hamlet A. Renaissance court is “a world of humanist learning, secular politics, and religious division,” and the high aristocratic men are no longer bond to the old religious traditions. B. Being shaped by the Renaissance Reformation, Hamlet “unexpectedly finds himself displaced from the center of the court and regarded as a potential enemy of the state”.

Neo-Stoicism A. “Stoicism counseled self-adjustment rather than political activism and was dismissive or condemning of actual efforts to change the social order”. B. An alternative offered by Claudius to Hamlet.

Neo-Stoicism C. Stoicism plays as a refuge for Hamlet, but it never fully controls Hamlet’s behaviors. Hamlet’s instruction to the players in Act III implies that “[f]or Hamlet the theater is polity for which he prescribes an authoritarian government”. However, by involving in the performance, “in the world of the play the ideologies of Stoicism and humanism are failing more generally”.

Protestantism A. Wittenberf is the “source of radical Protestantism”, and by portraying the conflict within Hamlet, “Shakespeare may thus refer his audience to a contemporary society in which the established church was thoroughly reformed and evoke Protestant associations against the medieval Catholic traditions still alive in the play”.

Protestantism B. The emphasis on individual conscience and freedom may derive from the Protestant. C. Predestination. D. Political Activeness: “[a]ccording to the Protestant, the human subject of God’s grace was in fact less likely to be politically passive than to be active in the service of causes ratified by individual conscience”.

Conclusion Hamlet is characterized by the “combination of religious radicalism and social conservatism”, and the end of the play “explains the difficulty of trying to establish the political bearing of Hamlet’s change, in which a revolution in the order of subjectivity assists him in bringing down a corrupt government but nevertheless confirms him as a defender of traditional aristocratic society”.