- Hamlet, the Reformation, and the Spectre of the Unassuaged Father
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Abstract:
- This essay takes as its starting point an observation of Carl Schmitt's: namely, that there is a taboo at the heart of Hamlet, a taboo which at once animates and obfuscates all that proceeds from it. Schmitt locates this taboo in the familial scandals of King James I and the religious schisms which accompanied them. Here, however, the current essay deviates. Rather than identifying the play’s ‘taboo’ with the familial ruptures of James I specifically, it will be argued that the religious controversies of the age worked themselves perforce into the most intimate aspects of all family life, transforming relationships among the living and the dead, and converging—after the death of the father—in the son's remembered image of that man. In short, the instructions and supplications of their Catholic forefathers placed on the younger, Protestant generation a duty which, under the current regime, they realised they could neither fulfill nor shirk in good conscience. This taboo—unutterable both at Elsinore and in the world of Elizabethan England—endows ghosts, purgatory, widowhood and 'maimed rites' with an otherwise mystifying significance in Hamlet.
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