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Article Excerpt
IN HIS FILM ADAPTATION of Hamlet (1996), Kenneth Branagh underscores the confessional themes present in the play by setting two scenes in a Roman Catholic confessional box. In the first scene, Polonius interrogates Ophelia about her relationship with Hamlet--an interaction that reinforces the common association of the confessional with an obsession over female sexuality. In the second scene, Hamlet listens to Claudius's penitential prayer and becomes, as Mark Thornton Burnett notes, "an unpunctual but unconsoling father confessor." (1) By depicting Hamlet and Claudius in the confessional box, Branagh introduces a conspicuous anachronism since the device was never used in early modern England and did not experience widespread use in Catholic countries on the Continent until the seventeenth century. (2)
Yet Branagh's inclusion of the confessional makes visually explicit a long-standing critical association of Hamlet with a father confessor that began as early as A. C. Bradley. Discussing Hamlet's exhortations to Gertrude to repent her sins, Bradley concludes, "No father-confessor could be more selflessly set upon his end of redeeming a fellow-creature from degradation, more stern or pitiless in denouncing the sin, or more eager to welcome the first token of repentance." (3) Subsequent literary critics have expanded Bradley's position by positing that Hamlet takes on the role of a "Black Priest," "priest/king," and "priest manque." (4) When viewed in the context of Branagh's inclusion of the anachronistic confessional box, the critical interpretation of Hamlet as a father confessor calls attention to another more conspicuous and charged religious anachronism present in Shakespeare's play. More specifically, the rite of private or auricular confession to a priest permeates Hamlet even though the rite was no longer considered by the Church of England to be a sacrament after the promulgation of the Thirty-nine Articles and, while retained in an altered form in the Book of Common Prayer, it effectively ceased to be administered in early modern England. Like the connection of the Ghost with the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory, Shakespeare's concentration on private confession signals a type of doctrinal simultaneity in which vestiges of the traditional religion coexist, trouble, and even threaten to undermine the current belief system.
Recent critics have observed the importance of confessional rites in Hamlet and early modern drama, but they have generally followed Foucault's connection of the rite to the establishment of a power relationship between the individual and authority figure and the development of individual subjectivity. (5) Foucault's interpretation of confession is nevertheless historically tendentious because it neither attends to pre-Lateran confessional practices nor acknowledges the reality that most medieval and early modern Christians made poor confessants. (6) Given pastoral constraints, such as the annual Lenten rush for confession leading up to Easter, traditional confessional practices offered little opportunity for a sustained imposition of ecclesiastical control over private life or an extended exploration of interiority, except for a small minority of the faithful. (7) Furthermore, Foucault's argument regarding confession points to the practice's capacity for social discipline and control, but his grafting of the consolatory potential of confession onto a power relationship forecloses the capacity for the penitent's genuine belief in the assurance of forgiveness. (8)
Against the Foucauldian emphasis on the connection between confession and social control, in this essay I posit that confessional rituals and language point to the diffuse tension between traditional rituals and inwardness that persisted throughout the early modern period and continued to be enacted on the English stage. In what follows, I demonstrate that Hamlet engages the changes in confessional practices by presenting both Catholic and Protestant confessional rites as offering the promise of consolation and reconciliation and indicating that these promises cannot be realized in the theological world of the play. I first examine the shifts in penitential practices during the period and the ways in which Hamlet's adoption of the role of confessor engages the ongoing theological and theatrical problem of determining the authenticity of another's confession. I then turn to consider how Hamlet's role as confessor complements his role as avenger and guides his attempts to negotiate the inherent tensions between inward thoughts and outward actions. Hamlet adopts and maintains the role of father confessor as part of an effort to validate his obligation to avenge the crimes against his father and himself.
Ritual Confession and the Problem of Assurance in Early Modern England
The presence of private or auricular confession and confessional language in Hamlet in many ways reflects the general trend on the early modern stage. The traditional rite appeared with noticeable regularity in almost every dramatic genre, ranging from early modern history plays (Peele's Edward I and Shakespeare's Henry VIII) to comedies and tragedies set in Catholic countries (Measure for Measure, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, and Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore) to anti-Catholic polemical dramas (Bale's King Johan, Marlowe's Jew of Malta, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and Middleton's A Game at Chess). Either in terms of England's religious past or contemporary examples on the Continent, the connection between ritual confession and Roman Catholicism constitutes the common theme in the majority of early modern dramatic representations of the rite. The presence of the sacrament of confession in these plays often signals religious, historical, and social differences between Protestant England and Catholic countries. In Hamlet, however, Shakespeare depicts remnants of traditional confessional rites in a Protestant context by evoking Lutheran Wittenberg. (9) The representation of confession in the play thus corresponds to developments in penitential practices that occurred during the English Reformation: on the one hand, a general shift away from sacramental auricular confession toward an unmediated, faith-centered confession to God, but, on the other, a retention of remnants of traditional confessional practices.
Early modern editions of the Book of Common Prayer retained a form of auricular, private confession and absolution in "The Order for the visitacion of the Sycke," which directed the priest to evoke the power to absolve sins granted to the Church by Christ and state: "I absolue the from al thy sinnes, in the name of the father, and of the sonne, and of the holy gost. Ame[n]." (10) Furthermore, in "The order for the administration of the Lordes Supper, or holy Communion" the Prayer Book instructs ministers to exhort those who cannot "quiet [their] own conscience, but requireth further comfort of counsel" to "come to me, or some other discrete and learned Minister of Gods woorde, and open his griefe, that he may receiue suche ghostly counsaile, aduice, and comfort, as his conscience may be relieued." (11) In contrast with the medieval church's requirement of annual auricular confession, the rite functioned as an exceptional means for achieving consolation and assurance in the early modern Church of England. Further, the Established Church rejected the medieval understanding of the priestly absolution as effecting forgiveness "from the actual performance of the sacrament itself." (12) It instructed instead, as Richard Hooker explains, that "private ministeriall absolution butt declare remission of sins." (13) Except for a few notable examples, after the institution of the Prayer Book, the practice consequently all but disappeared in the life of the Established Church and was commonly associated with post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism. (14)
The figure of the father confessor, too, became a vestigial reminder of the traditional religion. English Protestants frequently associated the office with historical and contemporary Roman Catholic intrusions into individual consciences and impingements on Christian liberty. Traditionally, the Church grounded its authority over penitents in the power of keys that Christ grants to Peter: "And I wil giue vnto thee the keyes of the kingdome of heauen, and whatsoeuer thou shalt binde vpon earth shall be bound in heauen: and whatsoeuer thou shalt lose on earth, shal be losed in heauen" (Matthew 16:19, Geneva Version). During the Reformation, however, the power of the keys came to symbolize the abuses of the medieval church. Calvin's description of Roman Catholic confession as a "ruinous procedure ... [by which] the souls of those who were affected with some sense of God have been most cruelly racked" reflects many early modern English theological and theatrical treatments of the rite. (15) Yet after the Reformation the position of confessor to the royal household and several penitentiary offices were retained, such as one held by Lancelot Andrewes at St. Paul's. (16) The underlying shifts in the penitential system nevertheless separated such offices from their sacramental beginnings and, like the diminution of the rite of private confession in the Prayer Book, they functioned as confessional institutions only in an attenuated sense.
This transformation of penitential practices reoriented the ways in which Christians achieved assurance of the forgiveness of their sins and reconciliation with God. With the English Church's move away from private confession, self-examination became the usual method for discovering and confessing sins and achieving reconciliation. This transformation protected the liberty of the individual conscience against perceived priestly intrusions and excessive anxiety in the penitential process. Alan Sinfield argues that the change from ritual confession to interior self-examination increased, rather than diminished, the anxiety of the faithful: "Protestant self-examination is in a way confession, but it shifts the whole business inside the consciousness.... This made the whole process more...
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