UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG Office: H523 nr 2 Department of Languages and Literatures tel 786 1769 English / Hans Löfgren hans.lofgren@eng.gu.se EN2D12 Seminar Notes: New Historicism and Hamlet Stephen Greenblatt, “Remember Me,” Hamlet in Purgatory The first problem: “There is a famous problem with all of these heavy hints that the Ghost is in or has come from Purgatory: by 1563, almost forty years before Shakespeare's Hamlet was written, the Church of England had explicitly rejected the Roman Catholic conception of Purgatory and the practices that have been developed around it” (235). The second problem: Purgatory is compatible with a Christian and, specifically, a Catholic, call for remembrance, but not with the call for vengeance typical of Senecan tragedy. This raises the possibility that the ghost of Hamlet's father might be from Hell (237). In fact, Hamlet fears that the ghost might be the devil, but the test he devises to establish the truth of the ghost's accusation "leaves the question of the Ghost's origin unanswered. (239). The questions which have notoriously plagued Hamlet criticism -- not only whether the ghost is real, from Purgatory or from Hell, but also whether Hamlet is mad or only feigning madness; whether Gertrude is innocent; why Hamlet delays, and so on -- are not questions which can be resolved. On the contrary, there is in the play "a deliberate forcing together of radically incompatible accounts." With respect to Greenblatt's focus, "a young man from Wittenberg, with a distinctly Protestant temperament, is haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost” (240). Hamlet's cruel joke about Polonius, that he is at supper, not where he eats, but where he is eaten, alludes to the Protestant critique of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. According to this doctrine, the bread of the Supper of the Lord was actually the body of God, something which Protestant theologians mocked in pointing to the absurdity of God's body passing through the intestines and being transformed into excrement (240-243). Greenblatt's point is that this is a Protestant practice of faith, since dwelling on the disgusting nature of materiality paradoxically leads to the contrary experience of the pure spirituality of the divine; "this revulsion [. . .] is the spiritual precondition of a liberated spirit. [. . .] But the problem is that the father's design is vengeance; vengeance, moreover, commanded by a spirit that seems to come from the place that

was for Protestants the supreme emblem of the corruption of the Catholic Church" (244) [The transition that Greenblatt makes between these two points is difficult to follow, but he seems to imply that if one remains obsessed with nauseating materiality, then Purgatory seems to offer itself as a preferable alternative.] Greenblatt speculates about a fifty-year effect, the longing of a new generation that follows the revolutionary generation which broke with the Catholic past for the relief offered by the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory. As partial evidence of Shakespeare's longing for this lost world, Greenblatt cites the 1757 discovery of John Shakespeare's, the father’s, "spiritual testament", the document in which John Shakespeare declared his intention "to receive at his death the sacraments of confession, Mass, and extreme unction" (248). Greenblatt's claim is not that Shakespeare himself was necessarily a secret Catholic sympathizer, but that he was making drama out of certain cultural possibilities. The Protestant Revolution had destroyed a "powerful method of negotiating with the dead" for most people in England, but not "the longings and fears that Catholic doctrine had focused and exploited." Greenblatt concludes that the space of the stage comes to substitute for the space of Purgatory. On that stage the ghost of Hamlet's father has now walked for over four hundred years, making Shakespeare's theater into a "cult of the dead" (254-256).