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The Sacrament That Haunts Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’

January 30, 2025

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The morbid thing is NOT to confess. The morbid thing is to conceal your sins and let them eat away at your soul, which is exactly the state of most people in today’s highly civilized communities.

—G.K. Chesterton

“It waves me forth again: I’ll follow it.”

Though our modern senses are dulled from gratuitous gore and uncreative jump scares, this is one of the most terrifying moments in the history of stagecraft: Prince Hamlet of Denmark meeting his father’s ghost. To be sure, Hamlet has had a tough week. Grieving the sudden death of his noble father; perplexed by the hasty, ill-considered remarriage of his mother (to Hamlet’s uncle, no less); and now finding himself beckoned by his undead father atop the watchtowers of Elsinore Castle.

But this wasn’t the first time the incorporeal king of Denmark, skull faced and arrayed in battle gear, had terrified the midnight watch. For several nights, the guards, Bernardo and Marcellus, were petrified by this inscrutable ghost stalking in and out of their watch. Paralyzed by incomprehension, they went so far as to bring the cool, studied Horatio to the platform to verify (and explain) what their eyes simply couldn’t believe.  

However, moments after Horatio chided their oafish superstition, he himself was confronted by the creature. Shuddering, the scholar insisted that the appearance of a dead king was “a precurse of fierce events.” Horrible things, he warned, happened after terrors such as these appeared. Just like the days prior to the murder of Julius Caesar, Horatio recalled, “The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead / Did squat and gibber in the Roman streets.” Such things were “harbingers preceding still the fates / And prologue to the omen coming on.” The ghost of a king meant crisis for the kingdom. 

But why was the ghost there at all? What cosmic dissonance accounted for such a black disturbance? 

It is the ghost who tells us.

I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. 

Gloomy, morose, and aching for rest, he explains. 

Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand
Of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatch’d:
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d,
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head:
O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!

Unfamiliar words in the ghost’s narrative are particularly revealing: Unhousel’d means that one did not receive the Eucharist. Unanel’d means one did not receive extreme unction (or last rites). The king didn’t simply die; he was murdered—killed unawares. This alone was a shock to young Hamlet who understood that his father died of natural causes. But even more, the king died in a state of mortal sin—deprived of the salvific graces found in confession and absolution. With his life cut short, he was unprepared. As such, his soul was imperiled and condemned to trouble the earth in a terrestrial purgatory or on an avenue to hell. 

There are two hauntings that occur in Shakespeare’s tragedy of Hamlet. The first, obviously, is the king’s ghost. But the second is more discomfiting. It is the haunting of unforgiven sins and the dark destiny of a sin-wracked soul. More than I ever realized, Hamlet is about a sacrament—the Sacrament of Confession. The play speaks to the confession of the king, the confession of Claudius, and the confession of Hamlet himself. 

A story of heroism and its tragedy with all of its achievements and its waste.

As we have already explored the unexpurgated sin of the king, let us turn to the murderer, Claudius. A riveting scene finds Hamlet intent on murdering Claudius, his father’s brother, murderer, and usurper of the throne. Hungry for vengeance, Hamlet spirits his way into the castle and gathers himself up behind a quiet Claudius kneeling in prayer. But poised with an eager knife desperate to be plunged in Claudius’ back, Hamlet hesitates. Claudius pains aloud in his prayer,

O, my offence is rank it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
A brother’s murder . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
Help, angels! Make assay!
Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe!
All may be well.

Hamlet cannot kill him.

Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I’ll do’t. And so he goes to heaven;
And so am I revenged. That would be scann’d:
A villain kills my father; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
O, this is hire and salary, not revenge.

To kill Claudius in the confessional—in a state of grace—is to commend the murderer newly with lily-white soul to heaven, whereas Claudius had sent the unwashed soul of the king to hell. No, Hamlet insists, this would not do. He’ll wait until the usurper is dripping with sin so that, being murdered with a blackened soul, he will descend into the darkest abyss.

Up, sword; and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed;
At gaming, swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in’t;
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,
And that his soul may be as damn’d and black
As hell, whereto it goes. 

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As everyone knows, Hamlet is a tragedy. Every major character dies: Ophelia, Polonius, Laertes, Claudius, Gertrude, and, lastly, Hamlet. Between swords, poisons, and drownings, Shakespeare is unsparing to the kingdom of Denmark. But what of Hamlet’s confession? As the father’s soul suffers and Claudius’ soul (because of his own murder plot against Hamlet) agonizes, what becomes of Hamlet’s?

Nothing good.

Poisoned and dying, in the play’s final scene, Hamlet breathes his last,

O, I die, Horatio;
The potent poison quite o’er-crows my spirit:
I cannot live to hear the news from England;
But I do prophesy the election lights
On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice;
So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less,
Which have solicited. The rest is silence.

Hamlet effectively instructs Horatio: Tell my rival, Fortinbras the Norwegian prince, who will tell the world of what was done here. A story of heroism and its tragedy with all of its achievements and its waste. It is a confession of sorts, but to the world, to history, to posterity. But not to God.

The real tragedy of Hamlet lies less in the dark fate of such lives than in the black fate of their souls. 

The hero of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the unwavering strength of the Sacrament of Confession. 

The tragedy is its neglect.