This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

The murder of old Hamlet isn’t a religious allegory for doctrinal upheaval. That’s not really how Shakespeare’s imagination works, unlike, say, his contemporary Edmund Spenser, whose epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590) begins with the knight Redcrosse encountering the beautiful pure Una, or the true Church, menaced by the monstrous Error, or ignorance or misinformation, and fiendishly impersonated by the scarlet woman Duessa, signifying Catholicism. These ciphers for big ideas are a long way from Shakespearean forms of characterization and circumstantial detail. Nevertheless, something of Hamlet’s nostalgia might be attributed to this specific kind of religious retrospection at the end of the sixteenth century.