In Hamlet in Purgatory, renowned literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt
delves into 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.
This expanded Princeton Classics edition includes a new preface by the
author.
