Hamlet in Purgatory 1st Edition by Stephen Greenblatt ISBN 0691160244 9780691160245

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ISBN 10: 0691160244
ISBN 13: 9780691160245
Author: Stephen Greenblatt

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.

Hamlet in Purgatory 1st Table of contents:

• Chapter 1: The Ghost and Catholicism

  • Early modern beliefs in purgatory and the afterlife
  • How the ghost’s appearance reflects contemporary religious ideas
  • The tension between Catholicism and Protestantism in Shakespeare’s England

• Chapter 2: The Religious Landscape of Hamlet

  • The historical and cultural background of early modern England
  • Catholic versus Protestant views on life after death
  • The Reformation’s influence on Hamlet and its characters

• Chapter 3: The Problem of Purgatory

  • The theological concept of purgatory and its role in Hamlet
  • The ghost’s purgatorial journey and its significance for Hamlet’s actions
  • Purgatory as a site of both suffering and hope in the play

• Chapter 4: The Play within the Play: A Test of Conscience

  • The role of the play-within-the-play as a moral and religious reflection
  • The theme of guilt, sin, and the search for redemption in Hamlet
  • The significance of conscience in purgatorial thought

• Chapter 5: The Politics of Purgatory

  • The connection between purgatory and the political structure of the state
  • The social order and the relationship between the divine and the secular in Hamlet
  • Hamlet’s struggle with justice and his sense of divine retribution

• Chapter 6: The Specter of Death: Hamlet and Early Modern Burial Practices

  • The physical realities of death and burial in Shakespeare’s time
  • How the graveyard scene reflects cultural and spiritual concerns about death
  • The symbolism of bones, bodies, and burial in the play

• Chapter 7: Hamlet’s Purgatorial Journey

  • Hamlet’s personal purgatory: suffering, indecision, and redemption
  • The character’s spiritual and moral transformation throughout the play
  • Hamlet’s final act and his own confrontation with death and the afterlife

• Chapter 8: The Legacy of Hamlet and the Afterlife

  • How Hamlet has influenced subsequent representations of the afterlife in literature and culture
  • The lasting impact of purgatorial themes in Shakespeare’s work
  • Modern readings of Hamlet and its relationship to the afterlife

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