Hamlet in Purgatory: Expanded Edition: 4 (Princeton Classics) - Softcover

Greenblatt, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691160244 ISBN 13: 9780691160245

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. His many books include Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which won a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. He is a general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and The Norton Anthology of English Literature

From the Back Cover

"Beyond its brilliant illumination of Hamlet, Stephen Greenblatt's book uses historical evidence to probe the nature of human memory--by nature insistent, contradictory, in every sense haunted--as it copes with the stark, yet mysterious reality of death. With a rare combination of learning, imagination and grace Greenblatt has created an exciting work of scholarship, alert to the ways a great work of art can both resemble and transform other modes of discourse and perception."--Robert Pinsky

"Hamlet in Purgatory is a virtuoso exercise in untangling the interwoven threads of feeling and belief in early-seventeenth-century England . . . In this bold and brilliant book, Greenblatt demonstrates utterly compellingly why Hamlet can still hold our spiritual attention today."--Lisa Jardine

"My understanding of the traditions concerning Purgatory, both learned and popular, has been gratifyingly deepened by the rich detail of Greenblatt's study. . . . The nature of the ghost of Hamlet's father is an old scholarly puzzle, but Greenblatt's book raises the discussion to a new level, and does so without dogmatism, rather with a subtle acceptance of the ambiguities inherent not only in the Ghost but in the great play as a whole. The book will be welcomed by all who care about the subject, and for the insights already known to abound in this scholar's work."--Frank Kermode

"Stephen Greenblatt is a famously beguiling writer. That power of enchantment does not fail him here. His skill as a storyteller is constantly on display. But so too is his no less renowned skill as a skeptically demystifying cultural critic. The result is a book whose remarkable energy derives, as does that of Hamlet itself, from the mutually contradictory impulses it so tellingly expresses."--Richard Helgerson, University of California, Santa Barbara

"This book is a brilliant essay on memory. Although it serves as a learned history of the idea of Purgatory and a subtle reading of Hamlet, it is primarily a book about how a culture faces loss, one that is gracefully, even movingly, written and one which reveals, as always, Greenblatt to be an unusually sensitive critic and thinker."--David Scott Kastan, Columbia University

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Hamlet in Purgatory

By STEPHEN GREENBLATT

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2001 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-16024-5

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS......................................................
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................................
xi
PROLOGUE...................................................................
3
CHAPTER ONE A Poet's Fable................................................
10
CHAPTER TWO Imagining Purgatory...........................................
47
CHAPTER THREE The Rights of Memory........................................
102
CHAPTER FOUR Staging Ghosts...............................................
151
CHAPTER FIVE Remember Me..................................................
205
EPILOGUE...................................................................
258
NOTES......................................................................
263
INDEX......................................................................
315

CHAPTER 1

A POET'S FABLE

Early in 1529 a London lawyer, Simon Fish, anonymously publisheda tract, addressed to Henry VIII, called A Supplication for theBeggars. The tract was modest in length but explosive in content:Fish wrote on behalf of the homeless, desperate English men andwomen, "needy, impotent, blind, lame and sick" who pleaded forspare change on the streets of every city and town in the realm.These wretches, "on whom scarcely for horror any eye dare look,"have become so numerous that private charity can no longer sustainthem, and they are dying of hunger. Their plight, in Fish'saccount, is directly linked to the pestiferous spread throughoutthe realm of beggars of a different kind: bishops, abbots, priors,deacons, archdeacons, suffragans, priests, monks, canons, friars,pardoners, and summoners.

Simon Fish had already given a foretaste of his anticlerical sentimentsand his satirical gifts. In his first year as a law student atGray's Inn, according to John Foxe, one of Fish's mates, a certainMr. Roo, had written a play holding CardinalWolsey up to ridicule.No one dared to take on the part of Wolsey until Simon Fish cameforward and offered to do so. The performance must have beenimpressive: it so enraged the cardinal that Fish was forced "thesame night that this Tragedy was played" to flee to the Low Countriesto escape arrest. There he evidently met the exile WilliamTyndale, whose new English translation of the Bible, inspired byLuther, he subsequently helped to circulate. At the time he wroteA Supplication for the Beggars, Fish had probably returned to Londonbut was in hiding. He was thus a man associated with Protestantbeliefs, determined to risk his life to save the soul of his country,and endowed, as were many religious revolutionaries in the 1520sand 1530s, with a kind of theatrical gift.

In A Supplication for the Beggars, this gift leads Fish not only tospeak on behalf of the poor but also to speak in their own voice,crying out to the king against those who have greedily taken forthemselves the wealth that should otherwise have made Englandprosperous for all of its people. If his gracious majesty would onlylook around, he would see "a thing far out of joint" (413). Theravenous monkish idlers "have begged so importunately that theyhave gotten into their hands more then the third part of all yourRealm." No great people, not the Greeks nor the Romans nor theTurks, and no ruler, not King Arthur himself, could flourish withsuch parasites sucking at their lifeblood. Not only do they destroythe economy, interfere with royal prerogative, and undermine thelaws of the commonwealth, but, since they seduce "every man'swife, every man's daughter and every man's maid," they subvertthe nation's moral order as well. Boasting among themselves aboutthe number of women they have slept with, the clerical dronescarry physical and moral contagion—syphilis, leprosy, and idleness—throughthe whole commonwealth. "Who is she that will sether hands to work to get three pence a day," the beggars ask, "andmay have at least twenty pence a day to sleep an hour with a friar,a monk, or a priest?" (417). With a politician's flair for shocking(and unverifiable) statistics, Fish estimates the number of Englishwomencorrupted by monks at 100,000. No one can be sure,he writes, that it is his own child and not a priest's bastard who ispoised to inherit his estate.

Why have these diseased "bloodsuppers" succeeded in amassingso much wealth and power? Why would otherwise sensible, decentpeople, alert to threats to their property, their health, and theirliberties, allow themselves to be ruthlessly exploited by a pack of"sturdy idle holy thieves" (415)? The question would be relativelyeasy to answer were this a cunningly concealed crime or one perpetratedon the powerless. But in Fish's account virtually the entiresociety, from the king and the nobility to the poor housewife whohas to give the priests every tenth egg her hen lays, has been openlyvictimized. How is it possible to explain the dismaying spectacle ofwhat Montaigne's friend, Etienne de la Boétie, called "voluntaryservitude"?

For la Boétie (1530–1563) the answer is structural: a chain ofclientage and dependency extends and expands geometrically, heargues, from a small number of cynical exploiters at the top to thegreat mass of the exploited below. Anyone who challenges thissystem risks attack, both from the few who are actually reaping abenefit and from the many who are deceived into thinking thattheir interests are being served. Individuals may actually grasp thatthey have been lured into voluntary servitude, but as long as theyhave no way of knowing who else among them has arrived at thesame perception, they recognize that it is dangerous to speak out.

If those who see through the lies could share their knowledgewith other, like-minded souls, as they long to do, they could takethe steps necessary to free themselves from their chains. Thosesteps are remarkably simple: what is needed, in fact, is not a violentuprising but a quiet refusal. Since only a minuscule fraction of thesociety is truly profiting from the system, all it would take, werethere widespread enlightenment, is peaceful noncooperation.When the king demands his breakfast, one need only refuse tobring it. He may sputter in rage, but the rage will be as inconsequentialas an infant's, provided that the great majority of menand women have collectively determined to be free. But how isthat determination to be fostered? How is it possible for those whounderstand the situation to awaken others, so that all can act inunison? As long as they remain isolated, there is little that enlightenedindividuals can do, and it is risky for them to open their secretthoughts to others. If only there were little windows in each person,la Boétie daydreams, so that one could see what is hidden insideand know to whom one could safely speak.

For Etienne de la Boétie, the first and fundamental problem isto account for widespread behavior that seems so obviously againstinterest, and not simply against the marginal or incidental concernsof particular groups but against the central material and sexualpreoccupations of all human societies. Why do people allowthemselves to be robbed and cheated? Simon Fish is grappling withthe same problem, but his answer centers not on social structuresor institutions or hierarchical systems of dependency. After all, veryfew people think of themselves as actually dependent on the lazy,syphilitic monks and friars who shamelessly take advantage ofthem. These so-called holy men are not conspicuous figures ofwealth or might; on the contrary, unarmed and unattended, theydress poorly and go about begging. In Fish's account their placeat the center of a vast system of pillaging and sexual corruptionrelies upon the exploitation of a single core conviction: Purgatory.

Alms for the Dead

Fish was not alone in his theory. Elsewhere in the writings of theearly Reformers, we find similar claims for the overwhelming importanceof the doctrine of Purgatory, a doctrine already longunder attack in England by those heretics known as Lollards. "InGod's name, tell me," the king asks the impoverished Commonalityin the tragedy King Johan by John Bale (1495–1563), "how comeththy substance gone?" To which Commonality replies, "Bypriests, canons and monks, which do but fill their belly, / Withmy sweat and labor for their popish Purgatory." Tyndale similarlywrites of the churchmen that "[a]ll they have, they have receivedin the name of Purgatory ... and on that foundation be all theirbishoprics, abbeys, colleges, and cathedral churches built."

The claim obviously serves a Protestant polemical purpose byloading the immense weight of the entire Catholic Church uponone of its most contested doctrines, but in the heated debates ofthe sixteenth century, at least some English Catholics agreed. Writingin the 1560s in defense of Purgatory, Cardinal William Allen(1532–1594) claims that "this doctrine (as the whole worldknoweth) founded all Bishoprics, builded all Churches, raised allOratories, instituted all Colleges, endowed all Schools, maintainedall hospitals, set forward all works of charity and religion, of whatsort soever they be." Though it received its full doctrinal elaborationquite late—the historian Jacques Le Goff places the "birth ofPurgatory" in the latter half of the twelfth century—the notionof an intermediate place between Heaven and Hell and the systemof indulgences and pardons meant to relieve the sufferings of soulsimprisoned within it had come to seem, for many heretics andorthodox believers alike, essential to the institutional structure,authority, and power of the Catholic Church.

This degree of importance is certainly an exaggeration, but it isnot a complete travesty: by the late Middle Ages in Western Europe,Purgatory had achieved both a doctrinal and a social success.That is, it was by no means exclusively the esoteric doctrine oftheologians but part of a much broader, popular understandingof the meaning of existence, the nature of Christian faith, and thestructure of family and community. Hence, to cite a single Englishexample, the various fifteenth-century devotional treatises knowncollectively as The Lay Folks Mass Book include for recital after theelevation of the Host a vernacular prayer for the dead. The faithfulpray for those souls, "father soul, mother soul, brother dear, sisterssouls, sib men and other sere [relatives and other particular individuals],"who may be suffering in "Purgatory pain." The prayer—froma text that is not a piece of the official liturgy but a modelof private, vernacular faith, intended to be read while the priestsconduct the Latin Mass—pleads that bonds shackling these deadbe unlocked, so that they can pass from torment to everlasting joy.

The simple English prayer is evidence—to which much morecould be added—that the attempt to free souls from the prisonhouse of Purgatory was not exclusively the work of a priestly classof specialists. There was such a class, large in numbers, as Fish andother Protestant polemicists stridently insisted, whose maintenancecost a considerable amount of money. But their rituals,though regarded as particularly efficacious, were not the only assistancethat the dead could receive, and lay persons could supplementthe liturgical ceremonies that their donations sponsoredwith a variety of less formal (and less expensive) acts on behalf oftheir loved ones and themselves. In Catholic countries that did notpass through periods of iconoclastic violence, one can still see,particularly in small towns, many traces of this popular piety, oftenaccorded formal, if grudging, recognition by the church. Thus, forexample, embedded in the stone walls along the narrow lanes ofErice, in western Sicily, there are numerous small, rather crudevotive images beneath which elegant inscriptions, dating for themost part from the eighteenth century, promise the remission ofperiods of purgatorial suffering for those who stand before theimages and recite prayers (fig. 1). I asked a local resident once, anelderly woman, whether people still stopped and said the ritualwords. No, she replied, not any more. Was that, I inquired, becausethe practice was now regarded as superstitious? Not at all, she said;the priests now wanted you to pay for prayers in church. To besure, these prayers were much more powerful, but they were tooexpensive, and everyone she knew had stopped buying them. Butif the price came down, she added, more people would certainlywant them.

Along with private fasts and vigils, such prayers—casual, informal,recited in the streets—certainly did not replace the properintercessory gestures provided for by the "pious bequests" made inlarge numbers of wills, but they do clearly indicate that the task ofassisting the soul's passage to bliss was not entrusted entirely tothe certified authorities on the afterlife. Nonspecialists understoodthat they could do things in their everyday lives to ease the painof those they loved or to shorten their own anticipated share ofpostmortem pain.

Charity to the dead, whether performed privately or in public,by lay persons or by priests, began at home. But the effort to alleviatesuffering extended beyond the immediate circle of self, family,and friends to "all Christian souls." On All Hallows' Eve, beforeAll Saints' Day (November 1), bells rang throughout the night inEnglish towns and villages, as communities joined in prayers forthe whole, vast company of the dead, and on the day following,All Souls' Day (November 2), it was customary to distribute"soul cakes." John Mirk, canon of Lilleshall, Shropshire, in themid–fifteenth century, lamented that the custom of giving breadfor the souls of the dead—"hoping with each loaf to get a soulout of Purgatory"—was in decline, but it evidently survived, atleast in rural areas, into the eighteenth century. The Sarum Prymerof 1538 includes "A prayer to God for them that be departed,having none to pray for them." These are souls, as the prayer putsit, "which either by negligence of them that be living, or longprocess of time, are forgotten of their friends and posterity" andtherefore "have neither hope nor comfort in their torments."Similarly, the Sarum Horae of 1531 tells those who are entering agraveyard that Pope John IV has granted as many days of pardonas there are bodies buried in that place to those who recite aprayer that begins as follows: "All hail, all faithful souls, whosebodies do here and everywhere rest in the dust [Salvete vos omnesfideles animae, quarum corpora hic et ubique requiescunt in pulvere]:the Lord Jesus Christ, who hath redeemed both you and us withhis most precious blood, vouchsafe to deliver you from pains."Such customs implicitly acknowledge that an ordinary person'sprincipal focus is likely to be personal—the overriding concern iswith one's own fate or with the fate of particular, named lovedones—even as they give form to and reward a more capacioussense of connectedness. Though the rituals of everyday life centeredon the intimate and familial, they encoded the sense of alarger bond as well, linking the living with the souls of countlessprevious generations.

One does not need the whole elaborate doctrine of Purgatory,of course, to feel linked to the dead: memory and a sense of theshared human condition will suffice. To be sure, in most traditionalcultures this feeling of connectedness acquires a more specificset of topographical references, but this localization had alreadyoccurred many centuries before the invention of Purgatory.Christianity had long offered its believers two principal places,Heaven and Hell, in which to situate definitively those who hadonce lived in the world and had now ceased to exist. Purgatoryforged a different kind of link between the living and the dead, or,rather, it enabled the dead to be not completely dead—not as utterlygone, finished, complete as those whose souls resided foreverin Hell or Heaven.

It was not possible (or, in any case, not licit in orthodox Christianity)to pray for the souls in Hell, in hope either of mitigatingtheir pain or of augmenting it. The unspeakable tortures of thedamned could be contemplated with horror or with fierce satisfaction,but those who suffered for eternity were beyond the effectiverange of human intervention. Saint Augustine said that even if helearned that his father was burning in Hell, he would not attemptto do anything to succor him, for he knew that he was beyondassistance. The harsh sentiment is echoed in the fourteenth-centuryTreatise of the Manner and Mede of the Mass: "If I knew that myfather were wholly held in Hell," the text puts it, I would no morepray for him "than for a dog that was dead."

The blessed similarly had no need of human prayers; their condition,too, was fixed for eternity. The living might hope that theirfriends and family in Heaven might remember them and offerthem some spiritual assistance, but there was nothing that souls inbliss could want in return. A large group of the dead, however,continued to exist in time and to need something that they couldget only from the living, something that would enable them toescape from the hideous, dark prison in which they were trapped.

The lay community was obviously never as thoroughly boundup with a general concern for postmortem welfare as were thosemonastic and conventual communities where, in certain cases, itwas customary to pray daily in the actual presence of membersof the order who had died. The nineteenth-century ecclesiasticalantiquary William Maskell cites such a custom recorded at DurhamAbbey: "Also the monks was accustomed every day, to go throughthe cloister, in at the usher's door, and so through the entry, inunder the prior's lodging, and straight into the scentorie garth[churchyard], where all the monks was buried, and they did all bareheaded,a certain long space, praying amongst the tombs andthrowghes [sepulchres] for their brethren souls being buried there,and, when they had done their prayers, then they did return to thecloister." The formal arrangement that facilitated such observances—seatsdesigned to drain off the liquids from the corpses,etc.—may still be glimpsed, for example, in the somber architectureof an underground chapel linked to the cathedral on Ischia,a chapel that must have seemed to the nuns to be a powerful representationof the purgatorial afterlife.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Hamlet in Purgatory by STEPHEN GREENBLATT. Copyright © 2001 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691160244
• ISBN 13: 9780691160245
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344