Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt (PDF)

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Stephen Greenblatt sets out to explain his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and his daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory. It yields an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution–as well as a capacious new reading of the power of Hamlet.In the mid-sixteenth century, English authorities abruptly changed the relationship between the living and dead. Declaring that Purgatory was a false “poem,” they abolished the institutions and banned the practices that Christians relied on to ease the passage to Heaven for themselves and their dead loved ones. Greenblatt explores the fantastic adventure narratives, ghost stories, pilgrimages, and imagery by which a belief in a grisly “prison house of souls” had been shaped and reinforced in the Middle Ages. He probes the psychological benefits as well as the high costs of this belief and of its demolition.With the doctrine of Purgatory and the elaborate practices that grew up around it, the church had provided a powerful method of negotiating with the dead. The Protestant attack on Purgatory destroyed this method for most people in England, but it did not eradicate the longings and fears that Catholic doctrine had for centuries focused and exploited. In his strikingly original interpretation, Greenblatt argues that the human desires to commune with, assist, and be rid of the dead were transformed by Shakespeare–consummate conjurer that he was–into the substance of several of his plays, above all the weirdly powerful Hamlet. Thus, the space of Purgatory became the stage haunted by literature’s most famous ghost.This book constitutes an extraordinary feat that could have been accomplished by only Stephen Greenblatt. It is at once a deeply satisfying reading of medieval religion, an innovative interpretation of the apparitions that trouble Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, and an exploration of how a culture can be inhabited by its own spectral leftovers.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Extremely well reseearched. Just a tiny bit too detailed for my taste but as he writes so beautifully & Intelligently it’s still a pleasure to read.

⭐I chose the book because I have loved all books by Greenblatt and I am something of a Shakespeare nerd – especially Hamlet. So I started reading it and I am thrilled…what an exciting topic to look into.Highly recommendable as everything by Greenblatt, and quite an “easy” read.

⭐”Hamlet in Purgatory” is a wonderfully written, thoughtful, and enlightening book. But it is less than I would have hoped for and probably less than most readers will expect.Greenblatt’s exposition of the history and literature surrounding the rise and demise of belief in Purgatory in England from 1,100 AD to 1,500 AD is enthralling. This history and literature highlights the basic human desire to connect with, remember, and perhaps even continue the work of the dead. Hamlet faces just such challenges as he struggles with the demands of his father’s ghost. And yet Greenblatt fails to delve into these universal issues. Nor does he provide a context for understanding the ghost’s injunction as one of the many profound issues in the play. To approach such fascinating issues without exploring them in full is a disappointment.”Hamlet in Purgatory” starts with a wonderful Prologue. Greenblatt tells how his own father’s passing away made his study of Hamlet and purgatory personally relevant.The first chapter reviews “A Supplication for the Beggars” by Simon Fish written in 1529. This tract is a letter to then King Henry VIII arguing that the church is using the concept of Purgatory to exploit believers. Greenblatt wonderfully sets the stage, explaining how over the course of the preceding 400 years “Purgatory had achieved both a doctrinal and a social success” (p.14). This tract by Fish was the start of the Protestant effort to challenge the legitimacy of Purgatory, an effort that had succeeded by the end of the sixteenth century. So that when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1601 Purgatory was doctrine that was rejected by the Anglican Church.The second chapter explores Purgatory as an artistic creation, and shows that the “dream” of Purgatory reveals our uncertainties about how to deal with the dead. Greenblatt nicely observes that in the case of Purgatory we can see how a “religious” concept develops. Unlike the concepts of Heaven and Hell, Purgatory was a relatively recent development, and could be seen to meet several needs: it provided a way to Heaven, albeit indirect, for those who were not evil but had not fully cleansed their souls before death, it provided the church a powerful mechanism for garnering continuing support (facilitating the path of those in Purgatory to Heaven), and it provided the living a way to stay connected with their dead.The third chapter reviews two works preceding Hamlet that dealt with Purgatory. The first is the story of The Gast of Gy, which describes a visitation from a husband to his wife and the dialogue that ghost had with the local prior. Greenblatt next reviews a tract by Sir Thomas More called “The Supplication of Souls.” In this tract More argues for Purgatory speaking, he claims, on behalf of “the voices of the dead burning in purgatorial fire” (p. 137).Chapter four moves to a discussion of the various ways that ghosts were staged in late sixteenth century theater. Most of the playwrights of the time, particularly Marlow and Jonson, showed little interest in using ghosts as characters (p. 154). It is to Greenblatt part of Shakespeare’s genius that he saw the dramatic opportunity in the ghost, and Greenblatt goes on to describe the use both of ghosts and of dreams in Shakespeare plays such as Comedy of Errors, Richard III and Macbeth. The breadth of what Greenblatt wants to cover is expanding nicely: “The deep link between ghosts and the power, pleasure, and justification of the theater is the thread that runs through the contradictory materials we have been examining: false surmises, panicky mistakes, psychological projections, fairies, familial spirits, vengeful ghosts, emblems of conscience, agents of redemption” (p.199).And so we come to the fifth chapter and Hamlet. Greenblatt has touched on some exciting material: the desire to stay in touch with the dead, the commonality between Purgatory and the dream world and the theater. But rather than bringing this material into a robust and balanced treatment of Hamlet, Greenblatt, at least for this reader, backs away. Greenblatt describes the power that Shakespeare creates by shifting the challenge of the ghost to “Remember me” from the “Revenge me” of the source material, and tries to explain the probable basis for this shift. Next, he shows how Shakespeare “went to the edge” in terms of what the censors of the day would allow with respect to placing Old Hamlet in Purgatory.As far as it goes this is elucidating. But here we are with this profound insight that part of Hamlet’s challenge is the challenge of remembering. And what does Greenblatt do with this? Rather than place this in the landscape of our most basic needs, fears and desires, which is to move closer to the fundamental appeal of the play, he brings it back to the discourse between More and Fish about Purgatory in the sixteenth century. While this was likely an influence on Shakespeare, to limit the discussion to these historically specific feuds is to miss the broader issues that Greenblatt comes so close to. Alas, I would recommend other books, perhaps Kitto’s, Mack’s, or Eissler’s treatments of the play, to be exposed to the broad expanse that this drama covers.

⭐An exhaustive investigation about the role of spirits from the other world mirrors the otherness regarded as the unknown wasteland of the human soul. I guess this passionate, interesting and eloquent study will absorb all your interest, taking into account we are talking the greatest Western playwright ever born, since the Greek tragic playwrights.

⭐This is an excellent book–excellent scholarship. I highly recommend it to anyone generally interested in medieval and Elizabethan accounts on purgatory, or to those who have an interest in Shakepeare studies. Even for those who don’t, this is an excellent book, and my interest in it grew with every turn of the page. It is rich and well-written.Chapter Two: “Imagining Purgatory” discusses various philosophical and medieval connections (via manuscripts) to Shakespeare’s texts (also see the classic, “The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy”). Chapter Three: “The Flights of Memory” (oddly enough, also see Derrida’s The Gift of Death/U Chicago Press, Staten’s Eros in Mourning, Derrida’s The Work of Mourning, and E. Scarry’s Body in Pain) is highly interesting material on the poetics of pain and suffering. Chapter Five: “Remember Me” is brilliant (also see Derrida/Levinas on the ‘adieu’ issue–U of Chicago and Stanford UP titles).Also see: Fish, How Milton Works (Harvard UP); Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton UP); Staten, Eros in Mourning (Johns Hopkins). I also recommend Robert Bell’s dissertation on the harrowing of hell (English/U of Maryland/CSULB Emeritus).

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