Free Will in Hamlet ?

I

Shakespeare’s decision to make Hamlet a student at Wittenberg was an innovation on the known sources, a masterstroke that guaranteed Martin Luther a significant role in the future world of Hamlet scholarship. By contrast, Erasmus has remained very much in the background. ¹ Yet the great debate between Erasmus and Luther (1524–25) creates an opening for Erasmus, one that scholars of the play have long overlooked, if only because the main texts—Erasmus’s On the Freedom of the Will and Luther’s On the Bondage of the Will—were not translated into English for centuries.

That Shakespeare had some consciousness of the great debate cannot be doubted. The participants and their disagreement were too significant to be ignored. Ben Jonson, for instance, took sides in his commonplace book, Discoveries (7:535–36), championing Erasmus over Luther. The debate marked the permanent divisions between Christian humanism and the Reformation—which is why Quentin Skinner referred to it as a “definitive breach” (2:4). The debate’s impact on Shakespeare’s mind was to foster an atmosphere of ideas that was by its nature traceable to many analogous sources, and reducible to none. To reconstruct this atmosphere entails risks: it is not a matter of nailing things down. But if we begin with Hamlet’s being a student at the University of Wittenberg, where Luther had held the chair in biblical theology, we may proceed by means of Shakespeare’s text to Luther’s argument for predestination and the bondage of the will, and thus to the debate in which that argument achieved its most memorable expression. If we go so far, it is impossible to exclude Erasmus.

Recent studies by Brian Cummings and Ricardo Quinones have clarified the debate’s historical significance. For Cummings, its real meaning, aside from “the celebrity of its participants,” is that “literature and theology cannot, after all, escape each other” (148). Taking Cummings’s observation as a starting point, we may say that Shakespeare elaborates upon it: “literature and theology cannot escape each other—nor can they be reconciled.” In Hamlet, the discourses of literature and theology, of humanism and reform, jostle and jar as a consequence of their occupying the same text. Hamlet embodies this core instability. He wants to hold “as ’twere the mirror up to nature” (3.2.22) and a “glass” (3.4.20) to his mother’s soul. He asks the players to “reform” their bad acting (3.2.38), after declaring, “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of a king” (2.2.605–606). Hamlet, in other words, shifts rapidly between, or may be said to condense, the registers and impulses of literature and theology, humanism and reform.

For Quinones, “Erasmus represented the advanced stage of European consciousness in his time, while Luther was suspicious of consciousness, its traps, its lures, its self-flatteries and self-promotions” (58). ² Shakespeare absorbs and recasts what Quinones calls the agonistic “dualism” of the great debate, internalizing both sides of the argument. If he achieves the greatest authorial consciousness that we know, he shows a necessary suspicion of that consciousness, of “its traps, its lures, its self-flatteries and self-promotions.” In this respect, the author of Hamlet bears comparison to the Luther who wrote, “If I lived and worked to eternity, my conscience would never be assured and certain how much it ought to do to satisfy God. For whatever work might be accomplished, there would always remain an anxious doubt whether it pleased God or whether he required something more, as the experience of all self-justifiers proves” (Luther in Rupp, 329). This speaks to “conscience” making “cowards of us all” (3.1.84) with peculiar force. We gain a preliminary sense of the pressure exerted by Luther on the play by noting that Hamlet’s conscience, even as it thwarts his humanistic desire for action and the active life in general, becomes a spur to his creator’s consciousness, or larger recognition, of the conflict between literature and theology. ³ And though we cannot call that consciousness Erasmian, we will understand it better if we grasp its Erasmian qualities.

I will argue that the great debate is a conceptual source text for Hamlet, and that its resonances in the play extend from the thematic tension between free will and predestination to the competing worlds of humanism and reform, out of which complexity and dissonance Shakespeare salvages what moral coherence he can. In his consciousness of this fractured dialectic, of this difficult reality of scarcely complementary forces at work in the mind and in society, Shakespeare may have been forced to think through Luther’s contempt for the stage. If the anti-theatrical arguments of Stephen Gosson and Philip Stubbes had the insect power to harass and annoy, motivated, as they were, by “the Protestant abhorrence of ceremony and spectacle” (McDonald, 319), Luther had the power of mind to penetrate more deeply: “Man has free choice—if, of course, God would hand over his own to him! … But that is not the way for theologians to talk, but for stage players” (Luther in Rupp, 143). For Luther, the theater of the world was not worth defending in and of itself, and Shakespeare certainly leaves open an anti-humanistic reading of his play. ⁴ But the playwright engages both sides of the debate by employing methods characteristic of Erasmian skepticism: recourse to ambiguity and suspension of judgment. To quote Erasmus at his cautious best, “so far am I from delighting in ‘assertions’ that I would readily take refuge in the opinions of Skeptics, wherever this is allowed by the inviolable authority of the Holy Scriptures and by the decrees of the Church” (Erasmus in Rupp, 37). Luther’s central point, repeated almost ad nauseam, was that the argument over free will was essential (pace Erasmus), that the debate itself was meaningful precisely because the question of free will was paramount—and so the assertive Luther achieved his definitive breach. Shakespeare, we have said, absorbs and recasts the agonistic “dualism” of the great debate, internalizing both sides. He takes very seriously Luther’s denial of free will and his anti-humanistic doctrine of the two Kingdoms: Satan’s and God’s. Luther’s being in the right is a possibility that haunts this much-haunted play. Suspending judgment, the author of Hamlet does not resolve the great debate or the topics that follow closely in its wake. He applies Erasmian techniques of ambiguity and silence to frame questions that, within his understanding, must remain open: whether we have free will, whether tragedy is defensible, and how far Christianity can countenance the violence inherent in humanism, which we may define in an Erasmian spirit as “the wider plain of the Muses” (Erasmus in Rupp, 36), including the plain of Ilion. This framing of questions leaves us to attend to moral and interpretive dilemmas that are the signs of Shakespeare’s severest limitations as a moralist—limitations that may strike us as an expression of spiritual crisis on Shakespeare’s part, though we do not have the biographical facts to get a clear picture of that crisis, or to connect Shakespeare’s personal experience to the writing of the play. ⁵ But we may suggest that Shakespeare’s life as a playwright—his labor writing lines for men and women in the grip of destiny—gave intimate focus to the doubts and questions about the will and salvation that he grapples with in Hamlet. A theologian discusses any number of mysteries in order to carve out a position; a tragedian, having to express these mysteries in the flesh, may prefer to suspend judgment.

Before going forward, I want to offer some brief qualifications with regard to context. First, I acknowledge that Shakespeare’s use of methods characteristic of Erasmian skepticism takes place amidst broader currents of “skeptical faith” in sixteenth-century England (Cox, xii), where not only Erasmus, but Thomas More as well as skeptical writings newly translated from antiquity all play a role in shaping skeptical Christian sensibilities. Second, following a long tradition, I accept the likely influence of Montaignean skepticism on Hamlet (Shapiro, 297). Moreover, I recognize that certain strands of thought connect my reading of the play to the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” and, in particular, to Montaigne’s emphasis on “the inanity, the vanity and nothingness, of man” (397). Even so, John Cox’s point that Shakespeare, unlike Montaigne, employs biblical references in his writing to convey “the moral imperative that is inherent in the Christian sense of destiny” (231) applies to Hamlet and pulls in the direction of the great debate with its hundreds and hundreds of biblical references. Third, given my concern with the raw power of Luther’s doctrine of justification in his debate with Erasmus, I am passing over Luther’s pastoral writings on sanctification, exhortation, and admonition. These writings would be relevant to this essay were we occupied with Luther’s life and influence beyond the great debate. To borrow from Skinner’s account of Luther’s position, I am not discussing free will in the ordinary, practical sense of men and women being free “to eat, drink, beget, rule” (2:6, cf. Rupp, 286). The Luther of the debate happily conceded free will on this everyday level. It was to him a sop he could throw to Erasmus—with more than a dash of scorn. I am also passing over the question of Purgatory, which scarcely enters the debate, with Luther himself dismissing it among “irrelevancies” and “trifles” (Luther in Rupp, 333); in any case, it has probably attracted sufficient attention in recent decades. Fourth and last, I am suggesting that it was due in part to the great debate that Erasmian ideas, particularly on free will, were circulating in the English religious bloodstream when Shakespeare took up Hamlet. Gregory Dodds observes astutely that “in most accounts of English opposition to Calvinism, anti-predestinarianism simply appears in the 1590s.” Of the Elizabethan period, Dodds writes, “anti-predestinarian thought was present … in the writings and thought of Erasmus … Erasmus’s legacy was … firmly established in English religious culture” (112). In Dodds’s account, Erasmian ideas influenced the controversy over free will that boiled over at Cambridge University in 1595, leading to the formulation of the Lambeth Articles (112–15). Erasmus’s influence would only grow with the rise of the Arminian movement (193–200). If Calvin’s deterministic worldview inspired a continuing, countervailing interest in Erasmus among English divines, we may infer that Luther’s position in the debate cast a long shadow.

II

Hamlet’s soliloquy in 3.1 is not about the freedom of the will or its bondage, but it does consider the closely related topic of the will and eternal salvation. Luther addresses this topic in his denunciation of Erasmus’s “moderate Skeptical Theology”: “it is not irreverent, inquisitive, or superfluous, but essentially salutary and necessary for a Christian, to find out whether the will does anything or nothing in matters pertaining to eternal salvation … For what we are doing is to inquire what free choice can do, what it has done to it (“Quid patiatur”), and what is its relation to the grace of God” (Luther in Rupp, 116). Quid patiatur, Luther’s Latin phrase, can be translated “what it may suffer,” a point I make to strengthen the connection to Hamlet’s range of concerns, without suggesting a direct and palpable textual link. Hamlet starts his speech in a humanistic vein, pondering how action and suffering relate to being, not to salvation. But his dilemma leads him in the direction of the Christian afterlife, and, as the soliloquy continues, he reflects on how “dread of something after death … puzzles the will” (3.1.79–81). Let us revisit the opening lines:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them.

(3.1.57–61)

Later in the soliloquy, Hamlet proceeds by juxtaposing classical associations between suicide and action, on the one hand, and, on the other, Christian associations between “patient merit” (3.1.75) and a life of passive suffering in which suicide is ruled out. He goes on to develop these thematic counterpoints, as I have suggested, by way of a Lutheran “conscience” (3.1.84) that frustrates his “nobler,” humanistic impulses entirely, vetoing both the will to commit suicide (the “native hue of resolution” at 3.1.85) and “enterprises of great pitch and moment” that, with the unnerving “regard” of conscience, “turn awry” “their currents” and “lose the name of action” (3.1.87–89). With respect to suicide—that Stoical Roman triumph—and to larger “enterprises” such as those associated with young Fortinbras, theological considerations do not so much correct as undo the humanistic impulse to act.

It is not that Hamlet is approaching a spiritual breakthrough, a Tower Experience (Turmerlebnis) à la Luther, for that would set the drama against itself, vanquishing humanistic action from the play. Rather, in what can be termed an Erasmian move on Shakespeare’s part, Hamlet speaks as one of the “fools of nature /… With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls” (1.4.54–56). In effect, his soliloquy expresses his puzzlement before the intellectual and spiritual crisis “of the time” (2.2.524), which we may interpret as the rupture between humanism and reform, between worlds that cannot be made to harmonize as one whole. By the light of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (XII.6–7), which Luther abhorred, being ought to pull in the direction of activity and actuality. We assume that Shakespeare, had it suited his purposes, could have propounded this metaphysical cliché much more clearly. Instead, he skews our categories of thought. In particular, the connection between non-being and action is metaphysically bizarre.

III

The Mousetrap highlights the question of free will. Its very title suggests the overruling force of fate, equating man and mouse in a manner that is not flattering to human intelligence or human freedom. Readers of The Spanish Tragedy will recognize the relevance of Kyd’s play, in particular its play within the play. Discussing The Spanish Tragedy, Lukas Erne focuses on a conflict between Calvinism, which “stresses divine predestination,” and “Neoplatonic thinkers such as Pico della Mirandola and Ficino,” who “stress human free will.” Although Erne does not broach the possible impact of Luther or Erasmus on Kyd, he makes a point that applies equally well to The Spanish Tragedy and to Hamlet: “Whether Man is seen as God’s puppet or as the author of his own role and script, histrionic metaphors work to describe either view” (103). Hamlet evokes the famous example of Kyd’s Hieronymo and his Soliman and Perseda by inserting “a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines” (2.2.541) into the performance. He imposes his will on the stage-world of the players, as well as on Gertrude and Claudius, whose reactions he strives to “interpret,” much as he would “interpret” Ophelia’s “love” if he “could see the puppets dallying” (3.2.244–45). But his ability to establish moral agency is not clarified. As in Hieronymo’s case, there is “no way of deciding,” because “predeterminism and self-determinism, frame and play within are both contradictory and complementary, articulating an irreconcilable tension” (Erne, 106–107). As Erne suggests, the tension is inherent and structural: we are all actors trying to write our own scripts. It is a tension that Shakespeare fully realized. Hamlet in trying to pull the strings cannot decisively escape the prospect of predeterminism, which lurks, for instance, within the curiously incest-driven role of “Lucianus, nephew to the King” (3.2.242).

Fixing our attention on vows of love, Shakespeare makes them a test case for the will: “If she should break it now!” exclaims Hamlet, accidentally supplying an uncanny cue for the Player King’s comment: “’Tis deeply sworn” (3.2.222–23). Cooperation with God’s purpose regarding the union of woman and man (cf. Matt. 19:6) was a crucial idea for Shakespeare, not so much as a flash-point of controversy over the sacraments, as it was a means of exploring the nature of the will in the light of human sexuality. It is not, in this respect, sufficient to refer to marriage vows in Hamlet as speech acts in our contemporary sense, for the very important reason that, for Shakespeare, transcendent truth always exists prior to the speech act, and what is to be tried and tested is a character’s ability to speak and to act freely in accordance with transcendent truth. A character’s denying or resisting transcendent truth indicates a lack of freedom on his or her part, be it on account of lust, or some other sin. As a kind of Hamlet in miniature, The Mousetrap therefore calls the morality of the surrounding play into question. After all, what claim could the dramatist make for his art, what could “the purpose of playing” (3.2.20) be, if the stage were essentially a puppet show—a reduction of “man” ⁷ consistent with a world where “marriage vows” are “false as dicers’ oaths” (3.4.45–46), and “reason panders will” (3.4.89)?

Upon the question of free will hangs a choice as to what kind “of piece of work is a man”—is he a divine masterpiece or a bit of overheated “dust” (2.2.304–309)? The great debate was the moment when the clarity of the question and the consequences of the choice achieved their seminal expression. I want to suggest that, for the Shakespeare of Hamlet, the choice between the freedom of the will and its bondage prompted doubts and anxieties that inform Hamlet’s manic depressive utterance about the nature of “man.” These doubts, in turn, survive in a structural pattern that centers on number symbolism. To uncover this pattern, we must turn to the subject of Hamlet’s age at his death. This subject will lead us back to The Mousetrap, but we must first take a moment to gather our evidence. ⁸

Horatio’s account of the duel between old Fortinbras and old Hamlet extends to the ambitious maneuvers of young Fortinbras while it silently marks the birth date of young Hamlet (1.1. 83–111). This depth bomb sinks from view until it rattles us with the gravedigger’s remark at 5.1.147–48: “It was the very day that Hamlet was born.” It is the same gravedigger who mentions that Hamlet is now “thirty years” old (5.1.162). So we may sense a linking device, an act of calculated and deliberate artistry, in the repetition of “thirty” (and the use of “thirties”) in the opening words of the Player King:

Full thirty times hath Phoebus’ cart gone round

Neptune’s salt wash and Tellus orbèd ground,

And thirty dozen moons with borrowed sheen

About the world have times twelve thirties been,

Since love our hearts and Hymen did our hands

Unite communal in most sacred bands. (3.2.153–58)

To Shakespeare’s audience, the symbolic possibilities of the circle-figure were many. Thus John Donne employed the figure in his “Valediction: Of Weeping”: “On a round ball / A workman that hath copies by, can … / quickly make that, which was nothing, All.” To George Puttenham, it bore “a similitude with God and eternitie” (111). If we may again summon the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino, we find divine love connected to each individual in a circle that “influences the human soul” and develops in it “an inclination toward love itself.” This “response, which is caused by divine love, manifests itself in the love of God and an activity of the soul” (Lauster, 62). In connecting divine love to “an activity of the soul,” Ficino assumes a more traditional metaphysic. Jörg Lauster has recently compared Ficino and Erasmus on the basis of several quotations that reflect their shared Neoplatonic sensibility. But while Erasmus, in one of his more renowned adages (II i 1), does refer to the circle in terms of “eternity” (140), he does not identify the circle-figure with divine love or the soul. In any case, the association between the circle and “love” occurs in the Player King’s speech through the thirty-year anniversary of a “sacred” marriage. Granted, this union is destined to be undone by death and deceit, though, in fact, we see the Player Queen breaking her vows only in the dumb show, because Claudius interrupts the actual performance.

The circle can also (as Donne shows us) signify nothing. Within 3.2, “nothing” refers to the nothingness of “dumb shows and noise” (12) as well as to the female genitalia as the production site of matter and flesh (119 and cf. 114). Indeed, “nothing” permeates all five acts, radiating beyond the bounds of signifier and signified, evoking the question of what is at stake in human speech, perception, and action. To leap ahead, Hamlet, at the time of his death, will either participate in the all of God’s loving will, or he will have achieved nothing, a vast amount of nothing, calling to mind Luther’s fundamental antithesis “between the ‘alls’ and ‘nones’ of which Paul speaks” (Luther in Rupp, 316), between the all of God’s grace and the nothing of free will. Luther does not employ the circle-figure, but “nothing” is the constant refrain of his argument, his hedgehog’s defense against the Erasmian fox: “For if it is not we, but only God, who works salvation in us, then before he works we can do nothing of saving significance, whether we wish it or not” (Luther in Rupp, 139). The examples could be greatly multiplied.

IV

What can the clownish gravediggers tell us about free will? The lines of the First Clown swarm with rhetorical vices, figures of speech that reveal his ignorant misapplication of a word, or, more esoterically, Shakespeare’s sleight of hand with theologically charged language:

FIRST CLOWN Is she to be buried in Christian burial, when she willfully seeks her own salvation?

SECOND CLOWN I tell thee she is; therefore make her grave straight. The crowner hath sat on her, and finds it Christian burial.

FIRST CLOWN How can that be, unless she drowned herself in her own defense?

SECOND CLOWN Why, ’tis found so.

FIRST CLOWN It must be se offendendo, it cannot be else. For here lies the point: if I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act, and an act hath three branches—it is to act, to do, to perform. Argal, she drowned herself wittingly.

SECOND CLOWN Nay, but hear you goodman delver—

FIRST CLOWN Give me leave. Here lies the water; good. Here stands the man; good. If the man go to this water and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes, mark you that. But if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself. Argal, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life.

SECOND CLOWN But is this law?

FIRST CLOWN Ay, marry, is’t—crowner’s quest law.

SECOND CLOWN Will you ha’ the truth on’t? If this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out o’ Christian burial.

(5.1.1–24)

A widely accepted source for the First Clown’s remarks on suicide is a famous Elizabethan legal battle about the drowning of Sir James Hales, a 1560 lawsuit that hinged on the relation of will and act. As Harold Jenkins observes in the Longer Notes to his edition of Hamlet,

Shakespeare’s knowledge of the arguments about suicide in the case of Hales v. Pettit, however come by, seems beyond question … The gravedigger’s division of an act into three branches (which turn out to be identical) is a recognizable caricature of the argument of the defending counsel that the act of self-destruction “consists of three parts: The first is the Imagination, which is a reflection or meditation of the mind, whether or not it is convenient for him to destroy himself, and what way it can be done. The second is the Resolution, which is a determination of the mind to destroy itself, and to do it in this or that particular way. The third is the Perfection, which is the execution of what the mind has to do. And this Perfection consists of two parts, viz. the beginning and the end. The beginning is the doing of the act which causes the death, and the end is death, which is only a sequel to the act.” (547)

We might ask, then, did Shakespeare’s interest in the great debate prepare his receptivity to Hales v. Pettit? Certain affinities and analogies hold between the two. Tripartite arguments were common, but we may observe that Walsh’s tripartite argument is similar both in topic and in structure to Erasmus’s tripartite analysis of human action, “quidam orthodoxi patres, tres gradus faciunt operis humani: primus est cogitare, secundus uelle, tertius perficere. Atq; in primo quidem ac tertio nullum locum tribuunt libero arbitrio quicquam operandi … Caeterum in medio, hoc est, in consensu, simul agit gratia et humana voluntas: sic tamen, ut principalis causa sit gratia, minus principalis, nostra voluntas” (De Libero Arbitrio n.p.). In my translation: “certain orthodox Fathers distinguish three stages of human action: the first is to think, the second is to will, the third is to perform. In the first and third, they attribute no action to free will … Yet in the middle stage, that is, in consensus, grace and human will act together, but in such a way that grace is the principal cause and our will is the secondary cause” (cf. Erasmus in Rupp, 80). We have no way of placing this text in the hands of Walsh or Shakespeare. If the power of suggestion counts, though, it is just possible to hear Erasmus’s use of perficio in the third part of Walsh’s tripartite argument. Erasmus focuses more on the will in regards to action, while Walsh focuses more on the act achieved by the will—an act that Walsh divides in two (cf. Erasmus’s hair-splitting middle stage), thereby curbing the will’s power and limiting its reach. For Walsh, a man can cause his suicide, but he cannot cause its effect.

More centrally, it may be that what Shakespeare heard in Walsh’s quiddities was the death knell of scholastic reasoning and psychology: obsolescence attracts humor and may have flavored the legal in-joke all along. It remains a sobering irony of the great debate that Erasmus, in order to defend the freedom of the will, was driven to an uncharacteristic reliance on scholastic analysis, on a mode of argumentation that Luther contemptuously dismissed as “carnalis” (Luther in Rupp, 262). In the analogies that hold between the legal reasoning of Walsh, the tripartite argument of Erasmus, and the gravediggers’ conversation, we may sense that Shakespeare is capturing a broad cultural shift away from scholastic modes of argument and the psychological principles that supplemented them. In this reading, then, the playwright was attracted to a delicious example of legal reasoning defeating itself—revealing, as Luther would insist on theological grounds, “the words of the law are spoken … not to affirm the power of the will, but to enlighten blind reason and make it see that its light is no light” (Luther in Rupp, 190). It was characteristic of Luther to stress an element of radical discontinuity between our intentions and what follows: “for everyone things have turned out differently from what he thought they would” (Luther in Rupp, 121). And we may hear Luther in the Player King’s rejoinder to his Queen: “Our wills and fates do so contrary run / That our devices still are overthrown; / Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own” (3.2.209–211); as well as in Hamlet’s choric nod to human blundering: “’tis the sport to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petard” (3.4. 213–214). Granted, these non sequiturs are only broadly analogous with the legal reasoning of Serjeant Walsh, but we are trying to understand Shakespeare’s angle of interest in the case.

The author’s difficulty persists in his effort to harmonize the two worlds of humanism and reform: if God or fate completely overrules human agency in this play about souls, the dramatist is left with a theater of, for, and by puppets. The telling phrase “will he, nill he” (5.1.17) speaks not only to the suicide’s case, but also to the dramatist’s—whose “name is Will” (Sonnet 136.14). It is extremely hard to locate agency. When the First Clown comes forward to clarify things, he assumes a transparent connection between will and damnation, but, in his boldly ruling on Ophelia’s death, he unwittingly delivers a grave satire on presumptuous ignorance. In other words, the issues at hand have become a lure or a trap for those who presume to pronounce on them. At the same time, even as theology faces the kind of mystery that Luther called an “insoluble problem” (Luther in Rupp, 331), the playwright cannot escape his theological concerns, because, while souls in Hamlet desperately need to be saved, “the purpose of playing” cannot be to save them. The drama, as Hamlet suggests, should serve a moral purpose. But it would be the purest idolatry, utterly naïve and dangerous, to consider it a substitute for religion.

V

We return, then, to the question of how the action of the play comes full circle. Does Hamlet end as a self-deceiving puppet of fate, or as an instrument of grace, or possibly as a conquering soul cooperating with the will of God? ¹² The core issue of the great debate resounds in the final scene, starting when Hamlet comments on his aborted voyage to England, “There is a divinity that shapes our ends / Rough-hew them how we will” (5.2.10–11). Within this memorable affirmation lies an ambiguity involving the modal auxiliary “will” (“Rough-hew them how we will rough-hew them”) and the use of “will” as a regular verb akin to wish or intend. The first alternative throws a predestinarian light on our future; the second leaves us more to do on our own and therefore puts things in a more cooperative light, as if our “rough-hewing” contributed to God’s definitive and final shaping of our destinies. The ambiguity lies within the emphasis. Shakespeare extends this ambiguous terrain when Hamlet comments to Horatio, “Ere I could make a prologue to my brains, / They had begun the play” (5.2.30–31), a histrionic metaphor that hovers between agency and non-agency.

Hamlet affirms that his sea-voyage was providential, at least from his point of view. From Shakespeare’s point of view, it was an episode that went back to Saxo Grammaticus’s Historiae Danicae, but the playwright may also have had his eye on a variety of texts that treated the subject of piracy. ¹³ I would add that, rather famously, Rabelais, in The Fourth Book of Pantagruel (1552), used a sea-voyage to epitomize human cooperation with grace. To what extent, if any, Shakespeare knew Rabelais is uncertain. But we find precedent for Rabelais’s symbolic use of the sea-voyage in Erasmus (Erasmus in Rupp, 79, rebutted by Luther, 288) and in representative works of the Italian Renaissance (Cassirer, 77). What this particular set of comparisons suggests is that Shakespeare refused to make a Christian humanist triumph of the business. Hamlet does not steer a ship through a dangerous storm. In fact, he feels like a prisoner: “Methought I lay / Worse than the mutines in the bilboes” (5.2.5–6). This is Hamlet’s low point in terms of freedom, and Shakespeare’s most powerful image of the bondage of the will. And yet, improvising providentially, or improvidently provident, Hamlet finds himself entering into a mysterious action beyond the designs of man or woman. If our “indiscretion sometimes serves us well / When our deep plots do pall” (5.2.8–9), we are reminded of Claudius’s “discretion” (1.2.5), and of Claudius’s deep plots. The Christian fool, we may infer, is in a better position than the King.

This sympathetic reading of Hamlet is necessarily open to challenge. In rewriting Claudius’s letter and sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their death, Hamlet claims “heaven ordinant” (5.2.48). Seizing on this perceived cruelty of Hamlet, Roy Battenhouse may stand here for those who think Hamlet closes his eyes “against the truth” (382), that, in other words, he prefers damnation. It may be that Battenhouse is unwittingly playing the First Clown. And it may be that Battenhouse’s Hamlet is something of a scapegoat. The God of Hamlet is not very nice by our standards, but it was no infringement on his authority for him to approve Hamlet’s tricking his faithless companions, who, in the game of wills, it must be said, had already sold theirs to Claudius. More important, yet still leaving us on ambiguous grounds, Hamlet’s confidence that his actions are pleasing to God, and the fact that his conscience raises no objections, may evoke Luther’s belief that a conscience informed by grace knows it and can act with “the utmost possible certainty” (Luther in Rupp, 309). But still, we may conclude that Hamlet’s certainty is a parody of Luther’s teaching. ¹⁴

In an essay that maintains the critical tradition of Hamlet’s likely salvation, Russell Hillier argues that the Prince’s “affecting ‘Let be’ (5.2.222) is a creative, not a defeatist utterance, a fiat akin to the divine fiat of Genesis 1, where creator and creature are reconciled to one another and cooperate in the unfurling of a providential plan” (181). It must be admitted, though, the context suggests little knowledge of this providential plan: “Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be” (5.2.220–22). “Let be” is, in effect, said in response to our being “fools of nature.” Hillier bridges the gap—between Hamlet’s purportedly Calvinist knowledge of providence ¹⁵ and his act of cooperating with grace—by means of enthusiastic textual interpretation. To be fair, Hillier advances a credible point: “Let be” is not defeatist. But it expresses not Hamlet’s creativity so much as his wise passiveness before questions and operations that he cannot decipher.

No easy conclusions follow. Humanism and theology do not, as in Rabelais, squarely support each other. Rather, they tend to expose each other’s blind spots. Like Pyrrhus, Hamlet achieves his revenge, but at what cost? The cycle of humanistic violence returns:

So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus stood,

And, like a neutral to his will and matter,

Did nothing.

But as we often see against some storm

A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,

The bold winds speechless, and the orb below

As hush as death, anon the dreadful thunder

Doth rend the region, so, after Pyrrhus’ pause,

A rousèd vengeance sets him new a-work …

Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune! All you gods

In general synod take away her power!

Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel,

And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven

As low as to the fiends! (2.2.480–97)

We may hope that to speak of Shakespeare’s visiting this Christian humanist battlefield is, at this juncture, not a stretch. The First Player’s speech culminates in an appeal for divine intervention that, however briefly, fuses a Homeric world with a Christian one, which emerges with the “fiends” of a Christian hell. Most strikingly, the reference to a “general synod” evokes Christianity and its long history of theological deliberations, including the recent synod that generated the Lambeth Articles. If the speech foretells Hamlet’s act of revenge against Claudius, yet it leaves us to contemplate—like everlasting ecclesiastics in an eternal synod—the relationship between the circle-shaped “wheel” of Fortune and the totality of God’s providence, including the mystery of the will.

The play’s action concludes rapidly and Hamlet’s last utterance underscores the limits of our knowledge: “The rest is silence” (5.2.360). ¹⁶ It may be that Erasmus would accept this uncertain dénouement: “nor should we through irreverent inquisitiveness rush into those things which are hidden, not to say superfluous: … whether our will accomplishes anything in things pertaining to eternal salvation; whether it simply suffers the action of grace; whether what we do, be it for good or ill, we do by necessity or rather suffer to be done to us … There are some things which God has willed that we should contemplate, as we venerate himself, in mystic silence” (Erasmus in Rupp, 39). According to Dodds, this view of “things” was upheld by Robert Cecil, in response “to the Cambridge dispute which led to the Lambeth Articles” of 1595. Seeing “precisely the position laid out by Erasmus and adopted by Elizabeth,” Dodds quotes court observer Humphrey Tyndall’s paraphrase of Cecil’s response that “the matters were too high mysteries for his understanding” (114–15). But before we award pride of place to Erasmus, we must remember that Hamlet’s “silence” is not necessarily a “mystic silence” before the “high mysteries” of God. His last words find him entangled in politics and worldly affairs, with several corpses littering the stage. Horatio fills the breach with his lyrical “flights of angels” (5.2.362), but then Fortinbras enters on cue, coming full circle in his own right, directing us to “his rights of memory in this kingdom” (391). “Remember me,” indeed (1.5.92). Nonetheless, we may observe that the playwright has attempted to illuminate the meaning of the most serious human actions, an effort that can be compared to chiaroscuro in painting, as humanism and theology cohere in a shadowy synthesis. In this sense, the indeterminacy of Hamlet’s fate is the sign of Shakespeare’s effort to master his own moral and dramatic limitations and come to grips with what he could and could not say. Shakespeare maintained the play’s action by pursuing the fate of the soul “beyond the reach” of humanism or theology, where the interpretation of words and actions breaks down and God alone can judge.