Prince Hamlet and the Protestant Confessional

Abstract

Shakespeare's dramatization of Hamlet's verbal assault upon his guilty mother, and his efforts to bring her to repentance, are a fine example of how the ‘priesthood of all believers’ was expected to operate at the end of the first Protestant century. Elizabethan audiences would have agreed with Hamlet's own assessment of his behavior, that he was being “cruel only to be kind.” This much-misunderstood scene is thus, in addition to its poetic and dramatic greatness, interesting for the insight it provides into the “pastoral” psychology recommended for the laity by leaders of the English Reformation.