Hamlet and the Reformation: The Prince of Denmark as “Young Man Luther”

William Shakespeare is like St. Paul, at least in this sense: both men have generated a secondary literature so vast that no reader can hope to master it all. Scholars are of course readers first, so they’re in the same bind. But they are also writers. So not only do they have to try to obtain at least a provisional mastery over the prior literature, they must also try to supplement that body of opinion with something new and fresh to say. Graduate students may smite their brows at one more tenure-qualifying monograph on sea-imagery in Shakespeare or on the subjective genitive in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and they may ask themselves how they are ever going to find an original topic for their dissertations. But duty calls. As the Preacher did not quite say: of the making of dissertations there is no end, and the writing thereof is a weariness to the flesh.

Yet secondary literature can still surprise with its fresh insights, even after all these years. To stick to Shakespeare for a moment, the famous Yale critic Harold Bloom speaks of the playwright’s achievement from a perspective that could only come after a long tradition of Shakespeare criticism:

Shakespeare’s most idiosyncratic strength [is that] he is always ahead of you, conceptually and imagistically, whoever and whenever you are. He renders you anachronistic because he contains you; you cannot subsume him. You cannot illuminate him with a new doctrine, be it Marxism or Freudianism or Demanian linguistic skepticism. Instead, he will illuminate the doctrine, not by prefiguration but by postfiguration, as it were: all of Freud that matters most is there in Shakespeare already, with a persuasive critique of Freud besides. The Freudian map of the mind is Shakespeare’s; Freud seems only to have prosified it. Or, to vary my point, a Shakespearean reading of Freud illuminates and overwhelms the text of Freud; a Freudian reading of Shakespeare reduces Shakespeare, or would if we could bear a reduction that crosses the line into absurdities of loss. Coriolanus is a far more powerful reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon than any Marxist reading of Coriolanus could hope to be.¹

In this article I propose that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet to illuminate the issues set in motion by the Protestant Reformation and has even managed to adumbrate some key insights into Martin Luther’s dilemma that arose only in the twentieth century. Specifically I argue that he has depicted the Prince of Denmark as “young man Luther” and in doing so has both anticipated and critiqued recent scholarly portraits of Luther.

The twentieth century witnessed a revolution in Luther scholarship, which on the Catholic side abjured polemics (very much including accusations of Luther’s “demonic possession”) and on the Protestant side recognized Luther’s thoroughly medieval roots and presuppositions.² But secular scholars joined the fray too. Under the influence of Freudian categories, they introduced an entirely new approach, most significantly in Erik Erikson’s psycho-biography Young Man Luther.³ Almost upon its publication, the book came under fire for its heavy-handed use of Freudian categories and its procrustean speculations about Luther’s childhood unmoored by evidence. Nor were these accusations made parti pris by only Lutheran historians and theologians but very much by historians with no confessional biases such as this comment from the pen of an Anglican historian:

Erikson believes that the adolescent Luther creates a God in the image of his own irascible father, shifts his obedience to this terrible Deity and releases the venom of his defiance against the Pope. Again, Luther is caned for speaking German in school-hours, so he becomes fanatically attached to the German language. Likewise his resentment against the severity of his mother causes him to dethrone the Virgin Mary. . . . When interpreted in the light of contemporary manners, [however,] Luther’s childhood and adolescence seem strikingly “normal” and unsensational. By the standards expected in that period, his parents were far from heavy-handed; they were...