"Try what repentance can": Hamlet, Confession, and the Extraction of Interiority

IN HIS FILM ADAPTATION of Hamlet (1996), Kenneth Branagh under­ scores the confessional themes present in the play by setting two scenes in a Roman Catholic confessional box. In the first scene, Po­ lonius interrogates Ophelia about her relationship with Ham­ let-an interaction that reinforces the common association of the confessional with an obsession over female sexuality. In the second scene, Hamlet listens to Claudius's penitential prayer and becomes, as Mark Thornton Burnett notes, "an unpunctual but unconsoling father confessor."l By depicting Hamlet and Claudius in the confes­ sional box, Branagh introduces a conspicuous anachronism since the device was never used in early modem England and did not experience widespread use in Catholic countries on the Continent until the seventeenth century.2 Yet Branagh's inclusion of the confessional makes visually ex­ plicit a long-standing critical association of Hamlet with a father confessor that began as early as A. C. Bradley. Discussing Hamlet's exhortations to Gertrude to repent her sins, Bradley concludes, "No father-confessor could be more selflessly set upon his end of re­ deeming a fellow-creature from degradation, more stem or pitiless in denouncing the sin, or more eager to welcome the first token of repentance."3 Subsequent literary critics have expanded Bradley's position by positing that Hamlet takes on the role of a "Black Priest," "priest/king," and "priest manque."4 When viewed in the context of Branagh's inclusion of the anachronistic confessional box, the critical interpretation of Hamlet as a father confessor calls attention to another more conspicuous and charged religious anachronism present in Shakespeare's play. More specifically, the