In the Name of the Father: Revenge and Unsacramental Death in Hamlet

This essay argues that in Hamlet, Shakespeare extends the conventional logic of Senecan revenge—the revenger’s quest to redress crimes against kin through a course of retributive blood justice—to the matter of Old Hamlet’s unsacramental death, which leaves him without the last rites of communion, penance, and unction. Shakespeare scripts revenge in such a way that these denied sacraments feature symbolically in Hamlet’s revenge on Claudius. This unique form of retributive justice and the soteriological anxieties it produces are made more poignant in a play set in Catholic Denmark and performed in Reformation England.