Hamlet’s Lent

The penitential imagery in Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ is a lens through which readers can experience Hamlet’s turmoil and tragic transformation.

"Still Life With a Skull and a Writing Quill," 1628, by Pieter Claesz. Oil on panel, 9 1/2 inches by 14 1/8 inches. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public Domain

Part of the genius of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is its unflinching look at the ultimate questions of human life, questions about death, doubt, and faith. One way Shakespeare enhanced those themes was through imagery associated with Ash Wednesday and Lent that runs through the work. Using this imagery, Shakespeare draws readers into an atmosphere colored by sin, penance, death, and what follows it.

The Religious Background

In the Christian tradition, Lent is a time of fasting, penance, prayer, and self-denial offered to God in reparation for sin and to achieve spiritual cleansing. This penitential season is also a preparation for Holy Week and Easter. It begins on Ash Wednesday and ends 40 days later, excluding Sundays, on Easter Sunday. Lent is meant to mirror Christ’s 40-day fast in the desert.

Traditionally, the Ash Wednesday liturgy includes a rite during which the people kneel and receive ashes on their forehead in the shape of a cross. During the rite, the priest or minister recites over the penitent these words: “Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” Thus the Lenten season is inaugurated with ashes, an ancient symbol of penance and a reminder of death, a “memento mori.”

That simple yet weighty liturgical sentence echoes throughout “Hamlet,” not least of all in the many references to “dust.” We might even say that the idea forms the heart of Hamlet’s meditations and soliloquies. He’s a man wrestling with death and with the effect that certain choices may have on his eternal soul.

Lent is a penitential season observed around the world. This 2025 photograph depicts the purple Lenten decor at Capers Chapel United Methodist Church in Little Mountain, S.C. Thomas Kirchel/CC BY-SA 4.0

According to literary critic Harry Morris, “Hamlet would know that an act of private revenge is evil; his need to find some way to kill Claudius without endangering his soul creates his delays.” Death, sin, and judgment lie at the heart of the play, and these are precisely three realities placed before  Christians on Ash Wednesday at the beginning of Lent.

This may be why Shakespeare saw Lenten imagery as fitting to express and explore the issues he wanted to deal with.

American actor Edwin Booth as Hamlet, circa 1870, photographed by J. Guerney. (Everett Collection/Shutterstock) 

The play tells the story of the prince of Denmark, Hamlet, whose father, the king, has been murdered by Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius. After the murder, Claudius took both the king’s wife and his throne. The action begins when Hamlet’s father appears to him as a ghost to tell him the truth about his (the king’s) death and to command Hamlet to avenge it. Hamlet, overcome with grief and anger, wrestles for much of the play with the task set before him. The process of avenging his father’s death (and the accompanying spiritual anguish) distances Hamlet from his loved ones and leads, eventually, to the deaths of many innocent people. Ultimately, Hamlet fulfills his task—but not before it costs him his own life and the life of others dear to him.

Religious Connections in Hamlet

The Lenten imagery begins early in the play. Hamlet wears black, a traditionally penitential color. Fasting figures centrally in Hamlet’s conversation with his father’s ghost near the play’s opening. First, the ghost describes himself in a penitential state:

I am thy father’s spirit, Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confin'd to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purg'd away.

The spirit’s atoning attitude influences Hamlet, who begins his own type of Lenten fast as a consequence of the ghostly encounter. Hamlet decides to sacrifice all pleasant memories so that only on the mission given to him by his father will live in his mind:

Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain.

Note that Hamlet uses the metaphor of a table being swept clean—an image of fasting. He begins a mental fast. Hamlet empties the table of his mind of all lesser thoughts, just as the Christian chooses to sacrifice certain joys, often foods, and dwell on more serious considerations during the period of Lent.

Further developing the Lenten and Ash Wednesday imagery, Shakespeare incorporated the idea of dust throughout in the play. In Act 1, Scene 2, Gertrude tells Hamlet: “Seek for thy noble father in the dust.” In Act 2, Scene 2, Hamlet famously sums up man as “the quintessence of dust” in a line that mirrors the Ash Wednesday ceremony almost word-for-word.

The catacombs are a physical reminder of human mortality. Gilmanshin/Shutterstock

Hamlet again alludes to the idea that “thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return” when, in Act 4, Rosencrantz asks him “What have you done, my lord, with the dead body?” and Hamlet replies, “Compounded it with dust, whereto ‘tis kin.”

Finally, one of Hamlet’s most famous meditations on death relies heavily on the image of the dust of kings and the humiliation of decomposition: “To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?” Again echoing the words “to dust thou shalt return,” Hamlet proceeds:

Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam (whereto he was converted) might they not stop a beer barrel? Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

In his appearance, words, and actions, the morose Prince of Denmark seems to sum up the Lenten spirit. In fact, literary critic Zita Turi went so far as to argue that an allegorical combat between Lent, symbolized by Hamlet, and Carnival, symbolized by King Claudius, takes place in the play. When Claudius “organizes feasts and entertainments throughout the play, he is mocking kingship by appointing himself (and not being appointed by divine power) and he is incapable of prayer.” All of these are characteristics of the idea of Carnival. “Claudius could be interpreted as a variant of the Lord of Misrule [in that] he mocks kingship by ‘appearing in the usurped finery of the “real” king',” she wrote.

As a figure of Lent, Hamlet’s role is to the cleanse the kingdom of the drunken, sinful, lascivious spirit of Carnival, embodied in Claudius. Turi wrote that Hamlet “is against misrule and boisterous indulgence” but is “hindered by Claudius’s anti-lenten indulgence.”

The fact that Hamlet preaches and practices abstinence strengthens Turi’s case. For example, in Act 3, Scene 4, he counsels his mother to refrain from sexual relations with Claudius. In the pivotal dual scene, he turns down the goblet of wine—poisoned wine that causes the death of his mother, Gertrude. Metaphorically, perhaps, she has succumbed to the spiritual death of the self-indulgent Carnival spirit, symbolized by the goblet of wine, the very wine that Hamlet, the spirit of Lenten mortification, refused.

Shakespeare further emphasizes the connection between fasting, penance, and the awareness of death and judgment through one of the most famous “memento mori” scenes in all of literature: Hamlet’s interaction with the skull of Yorick.

The skull is a reminder of death just as potent as the spreading of ashes on the forehead, perhaps more so. It, too, is deeply rooted in the Christian tradition. Monks frequently kept human skulls on their desks to remind themselves of life’s transience and the need to prepare for death by living virtuously.

Prince Hamlet holding the skull of Yorick, 19th century, by Ronald Gower. Stratford-upon-Avon. Public Domain

In the graveyard scene of Act 5, Scene 1, this symbol takes center stage. Morris wrote:

“The skull is the first and one of the most important components of Shakespeare’s memento mori episode. Skulls we might say are every-where about the stage. The gravedigger produces for Hamlet’s inspection three separate and distinct skulls; and Hamlet’s further meditations, as in all memento mori poems, grow out of this aptly named and grim reminder.”

Hamlet’s heartfelt recognition of Yorick’s skull inspires his speech about Alexander, Caesar, and dust and the fact that all human beings, no matter how great, will die.

Faith, Hope, and Joy

Significantly, it’s Hamlet’s reflections on death in Act 5, Scene 1 that seem to finally restore equilibrium to his mind—and even faith, hope, and a kind of joy—suggesting that all this fasting and morose brooding might actually serve an important spiritual purpose. It might lead to light in the end.

Heading into Act 5, Scene 2 and the final showdown, Hamlet suddenly has the resolve he needs, the resolve he’s lacked for so long. Moreover, he’s found it within himself to trust in a higher power and no longer torment himself over his own fate.

In Act 5, Scene 2, he delivers lines critical to the arc of his character and the message of the play. These lines that reveal the internal peace he’s finally recuperated. In the words of C.S. Lewis:

“The world of ‘Hamlet’ is a world where one has lost one’s way. The Prince also has no doubt lost his, and we can tell the precise moment at which he finds it again. ‘Not a whit. We defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come: if it be not to come, it will be now: if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes?’”

Having undergone his Lenten penances and his memento moris, Hamlet is at last ready to face death and place everything in the hands of a Divine Providence. “The readiness is all. ... Let be.” If there is an Easter moment at the end of Hamlet’s Lent, this is it. The play is a tragedy, so we can’t expect to witness a complete resurrection. The fullness of Easter lies outside the bounds of the tragic narrative.

What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to [email protected]