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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 63.4 (2002) 539-542



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Hamlet in Purgatory. By Stephen Greenblatt. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. xii + 322 pp.

"There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave / To tell us this," replies Horatio when Hamlet reports that the Ghost has confided what amounts to a tautology (all villains are knaves). 1 That these lines should have been among Freud's favorites is no surprise. For in the age of psychoanalysis there was no need for the past to come from the grave; it resurfaced from the depths of the unconscious. Nor has modern criticism found much use for the Ghost. Because Hamlet's modernity depends on his being driven by internal forces, the Ghost can be no more than a theatricalization of what already resides in Hamlet's "prophetic soul" or "mind's eye." In Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory, however, there is need for the Ghost. Its appearance brings back not only Hamlet's dead father but a whole system of belief. At the center of this belief was purgatory, a place between heaven and hell where the dead were purged of their sins through excruciating pain. The great achievement of Greenblatt's book is that it brings the late Middle Ages to bear on the play valued from 1800 on as the inaugural work of the modern age. By focusing on the Ghost's provenance rather than on Hamlet's consciousness, Greenblatt turns critical attention back in time: from modern psychology to premodern theology.

As Greenblatt recounts, the notion of a liminal space called purgatory existed in both antiquity and early Christianity; from the twelfth century on, however, purgatory was imagined as an actual place in the recesses of the [End Page 539] very earth in which the dead were buried. Indeed, there were openings in the earth—in Stromboli, in Donegal, for example—thought to give access to this region. Pilgrimages were taken to these purgatorial gateways, much as legendary heroes made voyages to the underworld. "The border between this world and the afterlife was not firmly and irrevocably closed" (18); without a barrier separating the two realms, traffic between them was quite imaginable. It was not only that ghosts could ascend into the world of the living and that men, at least in legend, could descend into the domain of dead. More importantly and routinely, prayers said in this world could pass over to alleviate suffering in the next. But not all prayers were guaranteed efficacy: only prayers mediated by the church, and these prayers cost money.

One cannot imagine a better illustration of what Marx wryly called money's "truly creative power." 2 Money donated by the faithful turned into prayers uttered by priests, which in turn reduced purgatorial suffering for the dead. (By one estimate, the average Christian was sentenced to one thousand to two thousand years in purgatory.) Benefits were enjoyed all around. The deceased benefited by reduced sentences as well as by the knowledge that they were being remembered by the living. Their survivors benefited by the assurance that they were aiding the dead and would themselves at death be similarly assisted. Finally, the church profited, massively. These donations were a great source of church revenue. Its investments were visible everywhere: in the erection and maintenance of churches, monasteries, chantries, oratories, colleges, schools, hospitals—all foundations to keep the purgatorial process charitably in motion.

As Greenblatt establishes, purgatory lingers in Hamlet. He locates it in the linguistic bits and pieces surrounding the appearance of the Ghost: for example, in the oath by Saint Patrick, the legendary gatekeeper of purgatory, and in the phrase "certain term," a translation of ad tempus statuitum, a limited purgatorial sentence in contrast to eternal damnation (230). More striking still is that features of the play we credit to Shakespeare turn out to originate in common lore: the summoning of a scholar to interrogate ghosts, their frequenting of intimate conjugal spaces, their concern for the welfare of the souls of their wives, their reluctance to reveal the secrets of their prison house...

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