Abstract
This chapter continues exploring the Protestant perspective on free will in Hamlet. This will is helpless (i.e. Laertes) and remains so even when bolstered by a strong conscience (i.e. Claudius), comprising an unerring guide to ethics (the synteresis) and the power to influence the free will. Nonetheless, for Protestants, all conscience could do was remind people of law, sin, and punishment. Efforts to ennoble the conscience were denigrated by Protestants as casuistry and identified with the detested Jesuits. In contrast, Protestants imagined a ‘regenerated,’ converted conscience, enabling Christians to instinctively follow God’s will. In Act Five, Hamlet boasts of possessing this conscience. Interestingly, however, Shakespeare seems more interested in exploring the unregenerated, fallen conscience—the one shared by all humans and even by all Christians who are not currently in a state of grace.
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Notes
- 1.
As Linda Woodbridge persuasively argues, “the theory that [revenge] plays discourage revenge does not stand up to theatrical or classroom experience.” English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 32. Woodbridge also notes, for example, that “unlike the [corrupt] judiciary” in these plays, “revengers demand evidence,” 11.
- 2.
Calvin, Institutes, 2.2.7, 264.
- 3.
One could imagine Hamlet facing this same Claudius if he had accused him, without evidence, of murdering Hamlet Senior:Verse
Verse That I am guiltless of your father’s death And am most sensibly in grief for it, It shall as level to your judgment ‘pear As day does to your eye (4.5.149–52).
- 4.
Stephen Orgel, The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 133.
- 5.
Philip Bosman, Conscience in Philo and Paul: A Conceptual History of the Synoida Word Group (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 50.
- 6.
Don E. Marietta , Jr., “Conscience in Greek Stoicism,” Numen 17.3 (1970), 177.
- 7.
Aryeh Kosman , “Aristotle on the Desirability of Friends,” in Aryeh Kosman, Virtues of Thought (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2014), 175. For the transliterations of Greek into English, see Olav Eikeland , The Ways of Aristotle: Aristotelian Phrónêsis, Aristotelian Philosophy of Dialogue, and Action Research (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), 402. Eikeland translates the terms as “study together” and “enjoy ourselves together.”
- 8.
See Laurel Fulkerson, No Regrets: Remorse in Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 34, 87. For a discussion of sunaisthesis in Aristotle, see Kosman , “Aristotle on the Desirability of Friends.” Kosman translates sunaisthesis as “co-perception, common awareness,” 176.
- 9.
Seth Bernardete, “Aristotle, De Anima III.3-5,” in The Review of Metaphysics 28.4 (1975), 611. Don E. Marietta , Jr., “Conscience in Greek Stoicism,” 178.
- 10.
As Philip Bosman points out, the earliest example we have of conscientia is in the Rhetorica ad Herennium of about 80 BC; he notes that the term’s non-reflective meanings (as being “an accomplice” and “potential witness”) are the more common contexts in the Latin writers. Bosman , Conscience in Philo and Paul, 71–2. The fact that syneidesis and conscientia both began to be more frequently used during the same historical era suggests the possibility that the Latin term may have influenced the Greek one. However, the fact that syneidesis appears (if only once) in the fragment attributed to Democritus (c. 460–370 BC), leads some scholars, such as Bosman , to believe that syneidesis is the earlier term, 75.
- 11.
Bosman, Conscience in Philo and Paul, 41.
- 12.
Bosman, Conscience in Philo and Paul, 50. C.A. Pierce, Conscience in the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1955), 23, 62. Pierce points out that the idea of conscience, via the syneidesis, is “one of the few important Greek words of the N.T. that have not had imported into them” an Old Testament context, 60.
- 13.
Pierce, Conscience in the New Testament, 118. Don E. Marietta , Jr. notes several examples of how syneidesis “occasionally referred to a good or approving conscience” in classical Greek texts. Marietta , “Conscience in Greek Stoicism,” 180–1. See also G. Molenaar for positive uses of the term in Seneca. G. Molenaar , “Seneca’s use of the Term Conscientia,” Mnemosyne 22.2 (1969), 180.
- 14.
Qtd. in Ingo Gildenhard, Creative Eloquence: The Construction of Reality in Cicero’s Speeches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 106.
- 15.
Qtd. in Ingo Gildenhard, Creative Eloquence, 106.
- 16.
Qtd. in R. S. White, Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 26. Translation is by Clinton W. Keyes in the Loeb edition.
- 17.
R. S. White, Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature, 27.
- 18.
See for instance, Tobias Hoffmann , “Conscience and Synderesis,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, ed. Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 255. For a discussion of Jerome’s probable intentions for writing about syneidesis here, see Douglas Kries , “Origen, Plato, and Conscience (Synderesis) in Jerome’s Ezekiel Commentary.” Traditio 57 (2002), 67–83.
- 19.
Jerome, “Commentary on Ezekiel 1.7,” trans. Timothy C. Potts, in Conscience in Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 79–80; quote is 79.
- 20.
Potts , Conscience in Medieval Philosophy, 50.
- 21.
Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988), 130.
- 22.
Jonsen and Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry, 121.
- 23.
Jonsen and Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry, 127. To the extent that thirteenth-century theologians were interested in synteresis and distinguished it from conscience, Michael G. Baylor’s remark that “scholastic thought” did not distinguish “between ethics and religion” may need to be modified; synteresis is precisely an ethical rather than a religious concept. Michael G. Baylor, Action and Person: Conscience in Late Scholasticism and the Young Luther (Leiden: E. J. Brill 1977), 211.
- 24.
See Dennis R. Klinck , Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010).
- 25.
Camille Wells Slights, The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert , and Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 5.
- 26.
Slights, The Casuistical Tradition, 6.
- 27.
Qtd. in Klinck, Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England, 38.
- 28.
Qtd. in Slights, The Casuistical Tradition, 9.
- 29.
Christopher St. Germain, Doctor and Student (Latin 1523; English translation 1531) (London: 1761), 7.
- 30.
Qtd. in Slights, The Casuistical Tradition, 41.
- 31.
For background, see Luke Wilson, “Hamlet, Hales v. Petit, and the Hysteresis of Action.” ELH (English Literary History) 60 (1993), 28–30, 49–50.
- 32.
Wilson, “Hamlet, Hales v. Petit, and the Hysteresis of Action,” 29, 51.
- 33.
See Michael MacDonald , “Ophelia’s Maimèd Rites,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986), 310, 316.
- 34.
Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 249.
- 35.
Lowell Gallagher, Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 5.
- 36.
Abraham Stoll, Conscience in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 12; see also 119–21. In contrast, see for example, Gallagher , who refers (too loosely I think) to Elizabeth I’s difficulties in determining whether or not to execute Mary , Queen of Scots, as a “case of conscience” or a “test of casuistry.” Gallagher , Medusa’s Gaze, 42, 21.
- 37.
Michael G. Baylor, Action and Person, 177.
- 38.
Baylor, Action and Person, 177.
- 39.
Baylor, Action and Person, 205.
- 40.
Baylor, Action and Person, 201, 172.
- 41.
Alexandra Walsham, “Ordeals of Conscience: Casuistry, Conformity and Confessional Identity in Post-Reformation England, in Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, eds. Harald E. Braun and Edward Vallance (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 33.
- 42.
Randall C. Zachman, The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 32.
- 43.
Zachman, The Assurance of Faith, 104.
- 44.
Zachman, The Assurance of Faith, 104–5. This sort of logic is seen in “The French Confession of Faith,” 144.
- 45.
Calvin, Institutes, 4.20.16, 1504. As Peter A. Lillback notes, Luther made similar remarks, such as in his 1538 “Second Disputation Against the Antinomians.” Luther wrote, “if God had never established the law through Moses , the natural human mind would still have this notion to worship God and to esteem him highly.” Qtd. in Lillback, The Binding of God, 73.
- 46.
See Calvin, Institutes, 4.2.14–16, 1504. This passage and some of Calvin’s ideas regarding natural law are discussed in Matthew J. Tuininga , “‘Because of your hardness of heart’: Calvin and the Limits of Law.” Scottish Journal of Theology 69.3 (2016), 281–94. As Tuininga summarizes, for Calvin, “Christians should expect to find the natural moral law reflected in the politics and philosophies of all peoples and nations, not only in scripture,” 285. Luther expressed similar views, rejecting the Mosaic Law as an inferior version of the natural law.
- 47.
St. Germain , Doctor and Student, 6–7.
- 48.
Qtd. in Slights, The Casuistical Tradition, 12.
- 49.
Baylor, Action and Person, 171.
- 50.
Stoll, Conscience in Early Modern English Literature, 1.
- 51.
Qtd. in Stoll, Conscience in Early Modern English Literature, 28. Stoll , interestingly, reads the passage as an indication of “the movements of imperfect reason,” 28.
- 52.
Alexander Hume , “Ane Briefe Treatise of Conscience” (1594), in The Poems of Alexander Hume, ed. Alexander Lawson , The Scottish Text Society (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1902), 107.
- 53.
Robert A. Greene, “Synderesis, the Spark of Conscience, in the English Renaissance.” Journal of the History of Ideas 52.2 (1991), 208.
- 54.
As John S. Wilks points out in his study of conscience, the term synteresis was certainly not mocked by all writers of the time. He cites serious and technically accurate usages of the term by Timothy Bright (c. 1550–1615) in his Treatise of Melancholie and from Robert Burton (1577–1640) in The Anatomy of Melancholy . John S. Wilks , The Idea of Conscience in Renaissance Tragedy (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 11.
- 55.
Stoll, Conscience in Early Modern English Literature, 43, 28–9.
- 56.
Stoll, Conscience in Early Modern English Literature, 43.
- 57.
Stoll, Conscience in Early Modern English Literature, 80, emphasis in original.
- 58.
Stoll, Conscience in Early Modern English Literature, 22, 36.
- 59.
On the prevalence of this concept in English Renaissance culture, what she terms the ability of inner human emotions to “produce physical change in the world,” see Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 28.
- 60.
William Perkins, “A Discourse of Conscience” (“A Treatise of Conscience”) in The Workes of … William Perkins. 3 vols. (London, 1626–1631), 1:550, 1:516.
- 61.
Stoll , Conscience in Early Modern English Literature, 82. Stoll writes that after killing Duncan, the Macbeths “undergo a cacophony of sounds and a chaos of sights, their minds reverberating with an overcrowded, overwhelming conscience,” 82. This sort of formulation, however eloquent, seems to conflate, as Stoll does elsewhere, the conscience with the person. Michael G. Baylor warns against interpreting Luther in this way; he writes that not “every kind of mental phenomena … [is] an activity of the conscience,” Action and Person, 206.
- 62.
For instance, Calvin, Institutes, 1.5.1, 51–2.
- 63.
Qtd. in Baylor, Action and Person, 175.
- 64.
Greene, “Synderesis, the Spark of Conscience, in the English Renaissance,” 202.
- 65.
For the citations from Luther, see Baylor, Action and Person, 170.
- 66.
Luther, “Lectures on Galatians 1535; Chapters 1–4,” in Luther’s Works 26:35.
- 67.
Zachman, The Assurance of Faith, 33.
- 68.
See Calvin, Institutes, 1.11–12, 99–120. For an interesting discussion of the issue of spiritual versus material worship in Calvin, see Carlos M.N. Eire who contrasts Luther, for whom “the spiritual life could never be totally disembodied,” with Calvin, for whom “the superiority of the spiritual dimension over the material” is central. Carlos M.N. Eire , War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 72, 201. As Eire explains, Luther’s view would lead to acceptance, even promotion, of images while Calvin’s would oppose images. This distinction, moreover, might have ramifications for other elements of Protestant thought. I question, however, the extent to which Calvin distinguished the material and spiritual realms in the Christian life.
- 69.
Perkins, “A Discourse of Conscience,” in Workes 1:552–3.
- 70.
Perkins, “A Discourse of Conscience ,” in Workes 1:552–3. The difficulties Perkins has in assessing the ethical value of conscience are also reflected in other contexts of Reformation thinking. We can say the law itself is seen in this way, as is its primary Old Testament representative, Moses.
- 71.
Perkins, “A Discourse of Conscience,” in Workes 1:553.
- 72.
Perkins, “A Discourse of Conscience,” in Workes 1:553.
- 73.
Baylor, Action and Person, 246.
- 74.
Martin Luther, “Lectures on Galatians 1535; Chapters 1–4,” in Luther’s Works, 26:158 (Luther is commenting on Galatians 2:19).
- 75.
Luther, “Lectures on Galatians 1535; Chapters 1–4,” in Luther’s Works 26:158. Martin Luther, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1535), trans. Theodore Graebner (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1949), 58. For Luther’s Latin, see D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe. 121 vols. Weimar Edition (WA). (Weimar: Hermann Böhlhaus Nachfolger, 1888–2009), 40.1.271.
- 76.
Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians 1535; Chapters 5–6,” trans. Jaroslav Pelikan , in Luther’s Works, 27:4.
- 77.
Calvin, see Institutes, 2.7.12, 360. For the development of this concept by Melanchthon, see Timothy Wengert, Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben Over Poenitentia (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books), 1997. For the value of this concept in the Lutheran Churches, see “Formula of Concord,” 502.
- 78.
Wengert, Law and Gospel, 196. This narrative would contrast with Carl Trueman’s point that Melanchthon’s “development of the third use of the law” demonstrates “a significant shift away from the emphasis of Luther” and a movement toward Erasmian humanism. Carl R. Trueman, Luther’s Legacy, 78.
- 79.
Calvin, Institutes, 2.7.13, 362.
- 80.
Calvin, Institutes, 2.7.14, 362.
- 81.
Perkins, “A Discourse of Conscience,” in Workes , 1:538, 1:518.
- 82.
Perkins, “A Discourse of Conscience,” in Workes , 1:542, 1:540.
- 83.
Perkins, “A Discourse of Conscience,” in Workes , 1:542, 1:553.
- 84.
Stoll, Conscience in Early Modern English Literature, 18.
- 85.
Brian Cummings, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity, & Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 227.
- 86.
Qtd. in Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise?, 321.
- 87.
Cummings, Mortal Thoughts, 69.
- 88.
Cummings, Mortal Thoughts, 71.
- 89.
Cummings, Mortal Thoughts, 71.
- 90.
Cummings, Mortal Thoughts, 80.
- 91.
Baylor , Action and Person, 259. Also 260–4. Susannah Brietz Monta notes that John Foxe likewise tried to ground Protestant claims of ‘conscience’ in “Protestant theology” rather than in “independent and wholly subjective” opinions. Susannah Brietz Monta, “ ‘Thou fall’st a Blessed Martyr’: Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and the Polemics of Conscience.” English Literary Renaissance 30.2 (2000), 267.
- 92.
Perkins , “A Discourse of Conscience,” 1:525 and 1:531; Calvin, Institutes, 2.2.24, 284. It is beyond of the scope of this study to explore the possibility that late sixteenth-century English Protestants, such as Perkins , opposed the idea of human law binding conscience not because they felt it to be theologically unsound (Reformed Protestants, in particular, praised capable civic magistrates) but because they feared the aggressive propaganda efforts, on the part of the Tudor and Jacobean governments, to control conscience through law. For example, as Rebecca Lemon notes, in 1606, Parliament passed the “oath of allegiance, which required all subjects over the age of eighteen to ‘sincerely acknowledge, professe, testifie, and declare in my conscience [that] … James is lawful and rightful King of this Realme.’” Lemon also points out, however, that James needed to clarify that he did not intend “to intrap or inthrall” the “Consciences” of his subjects. Rebecca Lemon , Treason by Words : Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 107–8, 118.
- 93.
Schreiner , Are You Alone Wise, 96. Schreiner cites Luther’s remark about Andreas Carlstadt (formerly Luther’s ally) who wrongly “wants to get to the Spirit first,” before consulting scripture, 88. Schreiner also quotes Calvin that “God does not promise his apostles a spirit that will create new doctrines for them; rather the spirit only confirms them in the gospel which was preached to them,” 106. The Marburg Articles of 1529, drawn up to create an alliance between Zwinglians and Lutherans , indicated that “the Holy Spirit, ordinarily, gives such faith or his gift to no one without preaching or the oral word or the gospel of Christ preceding.” See [Martin Luther], “The Marburg Colloquy and the Marburg Articles,” trans. Martin E. Lehmann , in Luther’s Works, American Edition, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan, Helmut T. Lehmann , Christopher Boyd Brown , et al. 79 vols. to date (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Press; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–), 38:87. It is interesting that it was the Pope whom Luther initially accused of interpreting the Bible without the proper spirit; in 1520, Luther wrote, “these Romanists think the Holy Spirit never leaves them.” “To the Christian Nobility,” in Luther’s Works, 44:133. Within a few years, however, it was the Anabaptists who were accused of doing this.
- 94.
See Schreiner , Are You Alone Wise, 99–100. Also see Luther’s treatise, “That a Christian Assembly or Congregation has the Right and Power to Judge all Teaching …,” trans. Eric W. and Ruth C. Gritsch , in Luther’s Works, American Edition, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan, Helmut T. Lehmann, Christopher Boyd Brown, et al. 79 vols. to date (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Press; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–), 39:301–14.
- 95.
Baylor, Action and Person, 221.
- 96.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 172. There are a number of ways in which Weber’s views can be modified; as Philip Benedict notes, “the history of accounting” suggests a different model for the rise of capitalism, wherein “techniques like double-entry bookkeeping” play at least as large a role as religious belief in the ability of many early modern people to accumulate wealth. Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed, 541.
- 97.
As Susan Schreiner notes, the German Anabaptists particularly valued gelassenheit; Schreiner traces the concept back to Johannes Tauler (c. 1300–c. 1361) and defines it as a “detachment of the soul from the world and the emptying or yielding of the soul in order that the divine might enter.” Schreiner , Are You Alone Wise?, 232; see also 250–3. For gelassenheit in Hamlet, see Laurent Milesi, “(Post-) Heideggerian Hamlet,” in Posthumanist Shakespeares, eds. Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 181–93, esp. 186.
- 98.
Martin Luther , “Sermons on the Gospel of St. John Chapters 6–8,” trans. Martin H. Bertram , in Luther’s Works, American Edition, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan, Helmut T. Lehmann , Christopher Boyd Brown, et al. 79 vols. to date (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Press; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–), 23:92.
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Gleckman, J. (2019). Free Will and Free Conscience in Hamlet . In: Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9599-5_14
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