William Shakespeare's Hamlet contains myriad allusions to religion and spirituality, some of which are explicitly stated and would be obvious to even the most casual reader or playgoer. Others are more subtle, requiring more perspicacious scrutiny and in-depth historical knowledge to delineate the implications fully. The concepts of heaven and hell, the permissibility of suicide and murder, and the very nature of the divine all carry significant thematic weight, and the plot features Christian

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... ituals of funeral and prayer. The sacrament of Holy Communion and, more specifically, its Catholic manifestations are the primary focus of this paper; it does not require much effort to see various manifestations of Eucharistic transubstantiation revealed in the play's multiple references to bread, wine, body, and blood. This distinctly Catholic doctrine not only creates tension with other, more Protestant notions of theology in the play, but it also serves as a continuation, albeit a slightly modified one, of an older dramatic tradition: the banquet. Banqueting plays a significant role in many earlier revenge tragedies set in distant-and perhaps not coincidentally-pagan times, such as Seneca's Thyestes and Shakespeare's own Titus Andronicus; it is one of the more gruesome idiosyncrasies of the genre that many of these banquets contained scenes of cannibalism. I suggest that Shakespeare made modifications to the genre of revenge tragedy, replacing the grislier sequences and cannibalistic overtones with the idea of eating and drinking the transubstantiated body and blood within the Eucharist. By giving Hamlet a Christian worldview, the playwright was, consciously or unconsciously, repurposing a favorite Elizabethan genre into something more contemporary: a new subgenre of Christianized revenge tragedy. This indicates a significant recontextualization of a commercially successful, violent genre that had previously featured primarily pagan settings and ontologies. By keeping the demands of this form in mind, we can more fully examine the Catholic and Protestant references in the tragedy, most importantly, those of Communion, and see how its theology is intimately related to its dramaturgy.