Hamlet in Purgatory (review)

Reviews 239 were not 'normally' the Emperors from the 'thirteenth century' (p. 23), since their dominance only dated from 1438; and the 'General Crisis' of the seventeenthcentury debate was not launched in the 1970s by Trevor-Roper (who actually wrote on it in 1959), but by Hobsbawm in 1954 (p. 142). Quibbles aside, Graves's book will justifiably replace A. R. Myers's older, briefer survey in university and survey courses on Early Modern Europe. With i t s invaluable references to a wide range of works it will also prove a valuable start for students ofparliamentary history. Antony Howe University of Sydney Greenblatt, Stephen, Hamlet in Purgatory, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001; cloth; pp. xii, 322; 8 plates, 10 figures; R R P US$29.95; ISBN 0691058733. This is a masterly book, which deserves to be read by everyone interested in Shakespeare. Stephen Greenblatt, with a rare personal intensity, combines thorough and lucidly-presented scholarship with deft and sympathetic attention to Shakespeare's verbal and theatrical power, reading Hamlet in the context of sixteenth-century England's shift from Catholicism to Protestantism and the Reformers' dismissal ofPurgatory as 'a poet's fable' (Tyndale). His book is constructed to lead us towards Hamlet in the last chapter via consideration of Protestant attacks on earlier Catholic teachings and revelations about Purgatory, whence King Hamlet's ghost appears to his Wittenberg-educated son. In a well-established Greenblattian manoeuvre, he starts with a text some distance from his goal, but this one turns out to be far more central than many ofthe works that in his earlier studies have formed a tangential opening. Simon Fish's A Supplicationfor the Beggars (1529, reprinted, and hence canonised, as i t were, in Foxe's Acts and Martyrs, 1563) invited Henry V U I to repossess and redistribute to the poor the wealth of the Church, extracted from the populace in payment for prayers and masses for souls in Purgatory. (But this is the king whose last will speaks of the 'wealth [not 'health'] of our soul' (p. 23).) In its defence, Sir Thomas More promptly responded with A Supplication of Souls, in which souls in Purgatory plead not to be forgotten by their relatives, w h o should precisely be offering suffrages for their relief. 240 Reviews Between his considerations of these two texts, Greenblatt offers a rich evocation of the way Purgatory was imagined in late medieval writings, such as the Vision ofTundale, the Vision of William ofStranton, and the Revelation to the Monk ofEvesham (properly Eynsham). H e concentrates on a knight's journey to the otherworld at St Patrick's Purgatory in Ireland, as recounted in the Middle English Auchinleck manuscript version of Owayne Miles, and a purgatorial ghost's interrogation by a priest from southern France, known in Middle English versions as The Gast of Gy; both stories survived well into the seventeenth century. A s with Heaven and Hell, Purgatory can only be imagined, whether you believe in them or not, and because the third state was a late-comer, lacking secure Biblical sanction, its hold on belief depended all the more on how vividly the imagination could present it. Purgatory was afiction,as Protestants claimed, but then so was the afterlife tout court - yet the afterlife still lived where it always had, in people's minds, and ghosts still appeared. They appeared on stage too, most compellingly in Shakespeare's plays. Greenblatt offers incisive and suggestive accounts of spectres in Richard III, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth, amongst others, and finally arrives at Hamlet in chapter 5 'Remember me'. H e contends that, as for all purgatorial souls, the Ghost's appeal 'remember me' is paramount, and in obvious contradiction to his Senecan appeal to avenge his murder. But what the Ghost forgets, although he regrets his unreadiness at death, is to ask for suffrages, and Hamlet 'forgets' to offer them too. Horatio had intimated that the Ghost might request them, but got no response. Shakespeare, in other words, knew 'exactly how far he could go without getting into serious trouble' (p. 237). And he had gone, as usual, a long way in absorbing and feeling for the...