Hamlet and the Prayer Book

More from Targoff, discussing Hamlet’s relation to the differing views of worship in the Elizabethan period. Targoff complains that “what is strikingly, and mistakenly, absent from our accounts of the Elizabethan settlement is precisely what the play interrogates in staging Claudius’s prayer: the belief that external practices might not only reflect but also potentially transform the internal self . . . Hamlet does not, as we might expect, consider the discrepancy he articulated at the beginning of the play between ‘actions that a man might play’ and ‘that within which passes show.’” Instead, “Hamlet adheres to the possibility that external practice might serve as both a criterion of outward judgment and as a vehicle of inward change.” Yet, “however ambivalent Hamlet [the play] may ultimately be about the transformative capacity of external behavior, the Church of England was firmly aligned behind it.”