Hamlet

RELIGION
Wittenberg is a town in the Saxony-Anhalt region of Germany. The university of Wittenberg, at which the priest Martin Luther taught philosophy, was founded in 1502 (it was transferred to Halle in 1815). Luther (see below) preached and was buried in Wittenberg's Stadkirche. Elizabethan audiences would also have associated the town with Christopher Marlowe's play, Dr Faustus, which is set in C.15th Germany, mostly in Faustus' house in Wittenberg.

Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a devout Roman Catholic monk with a passionate desire to reform the Christian church. Luther was ordained a priest in 1507 and became a teacher and preacher at the University of Wittenberg the following year. He was Professor of Biblical Exegesis from 1512-1546 and wrote an attack on the sale of indulgences - remissions for punishments of sin. The attack was in the form of 95 theses, which he nailed to the door of the Schlosskirche in 1517, despite being warned against such an act by the Catholic Church. The main point of Luther's theses was to deny the Pope the right to forgive sins. Today, Lutheranism is the major religion in many North European countries: there are in excess of 40 million Lutherans in Germany and Lutheranism is the national faith of Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland and Denmark.

Protestantism and the Reformation
During the C.16th in Europe, the political power of the papacy, papal wealth and authority were challenged in a move to reform the Roman Catholic Church. Protests such as Luther's, aided by the printing press, gave rise to Protestantism, a branch of Christianity which includes Anglicans (called Episcopalians in the USA), Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Pentecostals and Presbyterians. Today there are something in the region of 300 million Protestants around the world. The term 'Protestant' was first used in 1529. Henry VIII, a devout Catholic who in 1521 had been awarded the title 'Defender of the Faith' for his anti-Lutheran book Assertio Septem Sacramentum, broke from the Catholic Church and proclaimed himself Supreme Head of the Church of England. Two chief tenets of Protestantism are that the Bible is the only source of truth and sins can be forgiven through faith in Jesus Christ. The Protestant church is less liturgical, less reliant on sacramental faith and practices. Instead it emphasises preaching and hearing the word of God.

A sceptic is one who refuses to believe statements without rigorous proof or philosophies, theories or religious views without substantial evidence. Scepticism, then, is a doctrine that nothing can be known without certainty - even the evidence of the senses is hard to prove. The sceptical viewpoint in Hamlet is first represented by Horatio: when the Guards wait with Horatio for the ghost of Hamlet's father to return, Horatio, a student at the University of Wittenberg (see above), says "Tush, tush, 'twill not appear" [1.1.29].

Tuesday 20th April
From Jacqui O'Hanlon's rehearsal diary:

Both Hamlet and King Lear open with the problem of succession. When Michael Boyd was training as a theatre director in Russia (the former USSR), one of his fellow directors wanted to stage a production of King Lear but at the time, the Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982, state president from May 1977) was ill and the play considered too politically dangerous. To write a play about succession in Elizabethan times was also a dangerous political act. The stakes were very, very high.

Protestant or Catholic? - Breaking with the old faith
On his deathbed, Henry VII advised his son, the future Henry VIII, to preserve the Spanish alliance and marry Catherine of Aragon, widow of Henry's elder brother, Prince Arthur. Under Holy Writ, such a marriage was unlawful, but papal dispensation was given. Henry's queen did produce a male heir - Henry, Prince of Wales - but the prince died in 1511, when just 6 weeks old. For 5 years after his death, his mother suffered a succession of still-births and miscarriages until the future Queen Mary I was born in 1516. Henry VIII (who ruled from 1509-47) declared his marriage invalid, broke with the Roman Catholic church and remarried - 5 times. His son by Jane Seymour, who became Edward VI, ruled from 1547-1553 and was a devout Protestant. Edward was succeeded by his half-sister, Mary, a devout Catholic who ruthlessly tried to suppress Protestantism in England. During her reign (1553-8), she had 283 Protestant martyrs burnt, so earning the nickname 'Bloody Mary'. Mary repealed her half-brother's laws which meant that, for a short-lived period, England returned to the old faith. When Mary died (of influenza) and was succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth, England once again became Protestant. Mary Queen of Scots was the half-French daughter of Scotland's last Catholic king, James V. She was Elizabeth's cousin (Mary's paternal grandmother, Margaret, was sister to Henry VIII) and a Catholic. Surrounded by favourites and unwisely counselled, Mary was forced to abdicate by an exasperated Scotland, leaving her one-year old son James VI to assume the throne. Mary fled to England, where Elizabeth saw her as a threat and had her executed in 1587.

The Question of Succession
When old Hamlet dies, it is not his son the Prince of Denmark who wears the crown but his brother, Claudius, who was, he says, fairly elected to the throne. Hamlet was written around 1601 when Queen Elizabeth had been on the English throne for 43 years. Elizabeth's reign was characterised by unusual stability - she managed to keep the lid on seemingly innumerable tensions. The Catholic empire of Spain had been defeated, Catholic plots quashed, trade routes were opening up and the seeds of Empire sown. At the start of her reign, many aspects of English culture and society were markedly medieval but Elizabeth had brought her country into the modern world. By the time Hamlet was written, 'Gloriana', "the greatest of queens" was old. The 'Virgin Queen' had no heir and had named no successor. Catholics and Protestants each hoped the new monarch would be of their faith.

The Earl of Essex
Many wanted to rule in Elizabeth's place - it has been said a dozen candidates strove to succeed her. One such was Robert, 2nd Earl of Essex (1566/7-1601), who declared that descent from Edward III gave him a claim to the English throne. Essex was the stepson of Elizabeth's favourite, the Earl of Leicester but he incurred the queen's disfavour by secretly marrying Frances Walsingham, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham [see section on spying below] and widow of Sir Philip Sidney. Essex, brave and handsome, was an ideal courtier and natural favourite. But he was also unskilled in political manoeuvre, incapable of dealing with mundane administrative tasks and often behaved in such a way that he angered the Queen. Overly ambitious and crippled by debt, Essex plotted to remove Elizabeth's councillors and overthrow her Government by force. On 8th February 1601, after a performance of Shakespeare's Richard II, a play about a weak monarch who was ultimately murdered by his rival, who became Henry IV, rebellion was unsuccessfully set in motion as Essex rode through the City of London shouting slogans. He was arrested, found guilty of high treason and beheaded on Tower Hill.

Arbella Stuart
Another contender was Arbella (Arabella) Stuart (1575-1615), cousin of King James VI of Scotland and a great- great- grand-daughter of Henry VII. Her claim to the English throne, therefore, was as strong as her cousin's. Orphaned young, she was brought up at Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth House by her grandmother, Elizabeth Hardwick ("Bess of Hardwick"), a phenomenally wealthy woman who had married and been widowed four times. There was talk of marriage between Arbella and her cousin King James and also of marriage to a descendent of John of Gaunt which, it was thought, would further her claim to the English throne. Arbella did not become queen. In a life which seems to have been frustrating and tortuous and exciting by turns, she suffered continual restraint and was barred from marriage lest she give birth to further threats to the throne. In 1611, Arbella disguised herself as a man, escaped her guards and set sail for the Netherlands where she hoped to meet the man she had secretly married on 22 June 1610. She was caught, imprisoned in the Tower and died four years later, after starving herself to death.

SPYING
Sir Francis Walsingham (c.1530-1590) was a diplomat, brilliant linguist and later Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State. A staunchly committed Protestant, Walsingham lived abroad during the terror of the 1550s, when the Catholic Queen Mary tried to return England to the old faith. He returned to England on Elizabeth's accession in 1558. As Controller of Intelligence, Walsingham masterminded a spy network which operated both in England and abroad. Among his agents, it is said, were Shakespeare's contemporary playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), whose death may have been a far more political affair than was made public at the time (Marlowe died, not in a Deptford tavern but in a government safe house run by a widow, Mrs Bull, who had family connections with Walsingham. Walsingham was the agent chiefly responsible for breaking up the Ridolfi plot in 1569 and uncovering the Babington Plot of 1586. Roberto di Ridolfo (also called Ridolfi) was a Florentine conspirator who organised a Spanish-backed Catholic plot to marry Mary Queen of Scots to the (Catholic) Duke of Norfolk, overthrow Elizabeth and prepare the way for a Spanish invasion of England. Anthony Babington was a wealthy Catholic noble who served as page to Mary, Queen of Scots when she was imprisoned in Sheffield. Walsingham intercepted coded messages which told of a yet another plan to murder Elizabeth and put Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne. Walsingham was rewarded neither financially nor with honours by Elizabeth and he died poor and in debt, despite long and faithful service to the Protestant queen. In rehearsal for the current production, Walsingham's role as spymaster general was discussed in conjunction with Polonius's role in court and amongst the large stack of books made available to the company was a copy of The Reckoning - the Murder of Christopher Marlowe by Charles Nicholl (Picador, 1992).

Related sections
For more about indulgences, see Purgatory in the For Teachers section.


			Wittenberg is a town in the Saxony-Anhalt region of Germany. The university of Wittenberg, at which the priest Martin Luther taught philosophy, was founded in 1502 (it was transferred to Halle in 1815). Luther (see below) preached and was buried in Wittenberg's Stadkirche. Elizabethan audiences would also have associated the town with Christopher Marlowe's play, Dr Faustus, which is set in C.15th Germany, mostly in Faustus' house in Wittenberg. Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a devout Roman Catholic monk with a passionate desire to reform the Christian church. Luther was ordained a priest in 1507 and became a teacher and preacher at the University of Wittenberg the following year. He was Professor of Biblical Exegesis from 1512-1546 and wrote an attack on the sale of indulgences - remissions for punishments of sin. The attack was in the form of 95 theses, which he nailed to the door of the Schlosskirche in 1517, despite being warned against such an act by the Catholic Church. The main point of Luther's theses was to deny the Pope the right to forgive sins. Today, Lutheranism is the major religion in many North European countries: there are in excess of 40 million Lutherans in Germany and Lutheranism is the national faith of Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland and Denmark. During the C.16th in Europe, the political power of the papacy, papal wealth and authority were challenged in a move to reform the Roman Catholic Church. Protests such as Luther's, aided by the printing press, gave rise to Protestantism, a branch of Christianity which includes Anglicans (called Episcopalians in the USA), Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Pentecostals and Presbyterians. Today there are something in the region of 300 million Protestants around the world. The term 'Protestant' was first used in 1529. Henry VIII, a devout Catholic who in 1521 had been awarded the title 'Defender of the Faith' for his anti-Lutheran book Assertio Septem Sacramentum, broke from the Catholic Church and proclaimed himself Supreme Head of the Church of England. Two chief tenets of Protestantism are that the Bible is the only source of truth and sins can be forgiven through faith in Jesus Christ. The Protestant church is less liturgical, less reliant on sacramental faith and practices. Instead it emphasises preaching and hearing the word of God. A sceptic is one who refuses to believe statements without rigorous proof or philosophies, theories or religious views without substantial evidence. Scepticism, then, is a doctrine that nothing can be known without certainty - even the evidence of the senses is hard to prove. The sceptical viewpoint in Hamlet is first represented by Horatio: when the Guards wait with Horatio for the ghost of Hamlet's father to return, Horatio, a student at the University of Wittenberg (see above), says "Tush, tush, 'twill not appear" [1.1.29]. From Jacqui O'Hanlon's rehearsal diary: Both Hamlet and King Lear open with the problem of succession. When Michael Boyd was training as a theatre director in Russia (the former USSR), one of his fellow directors wanted to stage a production of King Lear but at the time, the Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982, state president from May 1977) was ill and the play considered too politically dangerous. To write a play about succession in Elizabethan times was also a dangerous political act. The stakes were very, very high. On his deathbed, Henry VII advised his son, the future Henry VIII, to preserve the Spanish alliance and marry Catherine of Aragon, widow of Henry's elder brother, Prince Arthur. Under Holy Writ, such a marriage was unlawful, but papal dispensation was given. Henry's queen did produce a male heir - Henry, Prince of Wales - but the prince died in 1511, when just 6 weeks old. For 5 years after his death, his mother suffered a succession of still-births and miscarriages until the future Queen Mary I was born in 1516. Henry VIII (who ruled from 1509-47) declared his marriage invalid, broke with the Roman Catholic church and remarried - 5 times. His son by Jane Seymour, who became Edward VI, ruled from 1547-1553 and was a devout Protestant. Edward was succeeded by his half-sister, Mary, a devout Catholic who ruthlessly tried to suppress Protestantism in England. During her reign (1553-8), she had 283 Protestant martyrs burnt, so earning the nickname 'Bloody Mary'. Mary repealed her half-brother's laws which meant that, for a short-lived period, England returned to the old faith. When Mary died (of influenza) and was succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth, England once again became Protestant. Mary Queen of Scots was the half-French daughter of Scotland's last Catholic king, James V. She was Elizabeth's cousin (Mary's paternal grandmother, Margaret, was sister to Henry VIII) and a Catholic. Surrounded by favourites and unwisely counselled, Mary was forced to abdicate by an exasperated Scotland, leaving her one-year old son James VI to assume the throne. Mary fled to England, where Elizabeth saw her as a threat and had her executed in 1587. When old Hamlet dies, it is not his son the Prince of Denmark who wears the crown but his brother, Claudius, who was, he says, fairly elected to the throne. Hamlet was written around 1601 when Queen Elizabeth had been on the English throne for 43 years. Elizabeth's reign was characterised by unusual stability - she managed to keep the lid on seemingly innumerable tensions. The Catholic empire of Spain had been defeated, Catholic plots quashed, trade routes were opening up and the seeds of Empire sown. At the start of her reign, many aspects of English culture and society were markedly medieval but Elizabeth had brought her country into the modern world. By the time Hamlet was written, 'Gloriana', "the greatest of queens" was old. The 'Virgin Queen' had no heir and had named no successor. Catholics and Protestants each hoped the new monarch would be of their faith. Many wanted to rule in Elizabeth's place - it has been said a dozen candidates strove to succeed her. One such was Robert, 2nd Earl of Essex (1566/7-1601), who declared that descent from Edward III gave him a claim to the English throne. Essex was the stepson of Elizabeth's favourite, the Earl of Leicester but he incurred the queen's disfavour by secretly marrying Frances Walsingham, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham [see section on spying below] and widow of Sir Philip Sidney. Essex, brave and handsome, was an ideal courtier and natural favourite. But he was also unskilled in political manoeuvre, incapable of dealing with mundane administrative tasks and often behaved in such a way that he angered the Queen. Overly ambitious and crippled by debt, Essex plotted to remove Elizabeth's councillors and overthrow her Government by force. On 8th February 1601, after a performance of Shakespeare's Richard II, a play about a weak monarch who was ultimately murdered by his rival, who became Henry IV, rebellion was unsuccessfully set in motion as Essex rode through the City of London shouting slogans. He was arrested, found guilty of high treason and beheaded on Tower Hill. Another contender was Arbella (Arabella) Stuart (1575-1615), cousin of King James VI of Scotland and a great- great- grand-daughter of Henry VII. Her claim to the English throne, therefore, was as strong as her cousin's. Orphaned young, she was brought up at Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth House by her grandmother, Elizabeth Hardwick ("Bess of Hardwick"), a phenomenally wealthy woman who had married and been widowed four times. There was talk of marriage between Arbella and her cousin King James and also of marriage to a descendent of John of Gaunt which, it was thought, would further her claim to the English throne. Arbella did not become queen. In a life which seems to have been frustrating and tortuous and exciting by turns, she suffered continual restraint and was barred from marriage lest she give birth to further threats to the throne. In 1611, Arbella disguised herself as a man, escaped her guards and set sail for the Netherlands where she hoped to meet the man she had secretly married on 22 June 1610. She was caught, imprisoned in the Tower and died four years later, after starving herself to death. Sir Francis Walsingham (c.1530-1590) was a diplomat, brilliant linguist and later Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State. A staunchly committed Protestant, Walsingham lived abroad during the terror of the 1550s, when the Catholic Queen Mary tried to return England to the old faith. He returned to England on Elizabeth's accession in 1558. As Controller of Intelligence, Walsingham masterminded a spy network which operated both in England and abroad. Among his agents, it is said, were Shakespeare's contemporary playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), whose death may have been a far more political affair than was made public at the time (Marlowe died, not in a Deptford tavern but in a government safe house run by a widow, Mrs Bull, who had family connections with Walsingham. Walsingham was the agent chiefly responsible for breaking up the Ridolfi plot in 1569 and uncovering the Babington Plot of 1586. Roberto di Ridolfo (also called Ridolfi) was a Florentine conspirator who organised a Spanish-backed Catholic plot to marry Mary Queen of Scots to the (Catholic) Duke of Norfolk, overthrow Elizabeth and prepare the way for a Spanish invasion of England. Anthony Babington was a wealthy Catholic noble who served as page to Mary, Queen of Scots when she was imprisoned in Sheffield. Walsingham intercepted coded messages which told of a yet another plan to murder Elizabeth and put Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne. Walsingham was rewarded neither financially nor with honours by Elizabeth and he died poor and in debt, despite long and faithful service to the Protestant queen. In rehearsal for the current production, Walsingham's role as spymaster general was discussed in conjunction with Polonius's role in court and amongst the large stack of books made available to the company was a copy of The Reckoning - the Murder of Christopher Marlowe by Charles Nicholl (Picador, 1992). For more about indulgences, see Purgatory in the For Teachers section.