The Gospel according to Shakespeare

Notes

133 Notes Introduction 1. after these plays, Shakespeare wrote, or at least contributed to the composition of, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. For an examination of the meaning of “late” and “last” in the expression “Shakespeare’s late (or ‘last’) plays,” see G. McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2007). 2. and already from the “first” Hamlet, at lines 2125–2126 of the First Quarto (Q1) of 1603, where hamlet refers to the providence in the fall of a sparrow. Il primo Amleto, ed. a. Serpieri (Venice: Marsilio, 1997). Chapter 1. Amen for the Fall of a Sparrow 1. purgatory does not exist in the anglican afterlife, but the context of lines 1.5.9–13 is clear: the ghost says that he has been condemned to wander in the night for a certain time and to fast in fire during the day until the crimes he committed in life are “burnt and purg’d away.” See also Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (princeton: princeton University press, 2001). 2. See harold Jenkins’ commentary in Hamlet (arden Shakespeare, 1982), 387. 3. ophelia does what hamlet only desires and pretends to do: she goes mad and (maybe) kills herself. the ophelia who makes “fantastic garlands . . . / of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples” (4.7.166–67) seems the archetype of the “maiden and flowers” of the romances. 4. Jenkins underlines in his commentary that the elizabethans believed in both a general providence, manifest in the order of creation, and, within this, a singular or special providence, manifest in particular events. Calvin insisted on the latter. 5. Luke 12:35–40 and Matthew 24:44, as suggested by harold Fisch, The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake (oxford: Clarendon press, 1999), 113. 134 Notes to Pages 22–23 6. Both the Vulgate and the king James, as well as the Geneva Bible, refer to a lonely sparrow, though the hebrew original does not.this is the progenitor of all the lonely sparrows in Western poetry, including those of petrarch and Leopardi. See Giovanni pozzi, Alternatim (Milan: adelphi, 1996), 45–71 and 169–72. 7. in his Hamlet in Purgatory, Stephen Greenblatt examines the problem of religious imagination in Hamlet, placing it in the historical and cultural context of the period. i wonder whether the author (and the many reviewers) have not overlooked the most important question pertinent to the overall perspective offered by Greenblatt’s book as a whole, a question inevitably generated by the book’s very argument. Where (if indeed Shakespeare was imagining a place) does hamlet’s soul go after death? in heaven, one would irresistibly be tempted to respond, alongside the “Good night, sweet prince, / and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” pronounced by horatio upon his friend’s death (harold Jenkins’ commentary seems to concur). this might well be horatio’s pious desire, and as such ought not to be questioned. But hamlet, from a Christian perspective, is certainly guilty of the elimination of rosencrantz and Guildenstern (for which, as we have seen, he says that “even in that was heaven ordinant”), and of attempting and finally succeeding in killing Claudius. though hamlet and Laertes exchange a strange and partial kind of pardon, hamlet never explicitly repents for these other sins (which horatio knows about), nor talks about forgiving his uncle. neither, then, could purgatory be his final destination. So does not the scholar horatio know even the most basic theology, be it Catholic or protestant? or does he simply wish to bless hamlet, as Christians would traditionally do with their dying relatives and friends? and what could hamlet “say,” a few seconds before dying, to “You . . . / that are but mutes or audience to this act,” had he the time that “this fell sergeant, Death . . . strict in his arrest” does not leave him? a single silent tear is enough to save Dante’s Buonconte da Montefeltro in Purgatorio 5, and, led by God’s angel, he ends up in purgatory (while his father Guido, precisely because he has not repented, and notwithstanding a preventive papal absolution, ends up in hell in Inferno 27). is hamlet’s silence here a sort of confession? Will he, like his father, end up in purgatory? these are, as far as the text itself is concerned, redundant questions, but fundamental and inevitable for the reader. if we were to read or watch the play not...