Why Hamlet doesn't kill Claudius by praying

Hamlet has his father's killer unarmed, kneeling, with his back to him. It's the chance that the entire play built. And he puts away the sword. Almost every reader reads this scene as yet another postponement of the undecided. It is not. The calculation that Hamlet makes there is theological, precise, and the play had already proven, seconds before, that he was wrong.

Father's accounts remain open

The starting point is what the specter told in the first act: Hamlet's father died in his sleep, poisoned by his own brother, without confession, without communion and without the anointing of the sick. He died with all his accounts outstanding before God, and that is why he is trapped in a purging fire, purgatory, until these sins are expiated.

Now Hamlet finds Claudius on his knees, alone, praying. And he does the math out loud: if he kills his uncle now, in the middle of prayer, Claudius's soul will be cleansed and go straight to heaven. Avenging his father at that moment would not be collecting a debt, it would be paying a salary. He would reward the killer with the one thing his father didn't have, a death in a state of grace, and let the victim continue to burn.

Hamlet puts away the sword. And the reason is not fear. It's that he takes the afterlife so seriously that it enters the calculation as a concrete fact, weighed the same as anything else.

The confession that Claudius makes and Hamlet doesn't listen

Here is the dramatic irony that is the heart of the scene, and that almost no popular reading mentions. The audience, and only the audience, has just heard Claudius praying alone, before Hamlet enters. And what he says undoes, at its root, Hamlet's calculation.

Claudius recognizes that he cannot truly repent, because he still has everything he killed for:

"That cannot be, since I am still possess'd of those effects for which I did the murder, my crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. May one be pardon'd and retain th' offence?" (Claudius, Hamlet, Act III, scene 3)

And he closes the prayer with an even more direct confession about his own spiritual failure:

"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go." (Claudius, Hamlet, Act III, scene 3)

In other words: Claudius himself says that that prayer does not go up. There is no grace there, because there is no real repentance, and there is no real repentance because he refuses to give back what the crime gave him. Hamlet enters the scene soon after. See a man on his knees. And it supposes a man in a state of grace.

That was exactly the moment when Claudius was furthest from heaven in the entire play, and it is exactly the moment when Hamlet decides that he is too close to be killed.

A technically wrong scruple

The point is not to say that Hamlet's theology is absurd. It is to say that, at that specific moment, she started with incorrect information, which only the spectator had. The religious scruple was, there, technically mistaken: Claudius' prayer was empty, and empty prayer does not change anyone's destiny.

The play builds this distance on purpose. Shakespeare lets you, who watches, know something that the hero doesn't know, and it's precisely this distance that makes the scene hurt.

The harshest accusation the play makes against Hamlet

Save the contrast, because it is the strongest argument against any reading that treats Hamlet as simply cautious or cowardly. Faced with the guilty king, proven guilty, kneeling and unarmed, Hamlet stops, thinks, calculates the eternity of the enemy's soul and decides not to act.

Faced with a figure behind a curtain, minutes later, he doesn't think about anything. He sticks the rapier and only asks afterwards: "How now? A rat?" (Hamlet, Act III, scene 4). It was Polonius, unarmed and innocent of the crime that Hamlet needs to avenge.

The same man who treats the soul of a proven murderer with this theological care kills, without a second's hesitation, someone who had no guilt in that specific crime. Hamlet's caution is not uniform. It appears exactly where the piece most needs it to appear, so that the sword doesn't come down at the moment it should, and it's missing exactly where it costs the most.

Continue: Hamlet, by Shakespeare: summary and analysis · Why Hamlet didn't inherit the throne · Legal guilt x moral guilt · Le notti bianche: Visconti films Dostoevsky in Rome
Source class (YouTube): Hamlet, de William Shakespeare (NousCast)