Hamlet: A New Historicist\'s View

Hamlet: A New Historicist's View of the Significance of Purgatory in Shakespeare's Tragedy

The tragic figure of Hamlet has become such an integral part of our contemporary cultural landscape it is easy to forget the religious context that motivated Shakespeare to produce such a figure. However, to understand "Hamlet" a reader must understand the Catholic concept of Purgatory, and what it meant for the recently Protestant nation of England to have to collectively give up this notion. According to the New Historicist critic Stephen Greenblatt, England during Shakespeare's time was still haunted by the memory of the recent religious upheavals that had caused England to turn from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism, to Catholicism under Queen Mary, and then finally back to Elizabeth I's version of Protestantism.

In accepting Protestantism, the ordinary English people were forced to eschew many of their traditional ways of mourning the dead, and their belief in Purgatory, which entailed a responsibility of the living to help the dead escape from Purgatory through prayer and buying indulgences from the Roman Catholic Church. This shift in practice and attitudes did not occur as a popular movement, but from the top down, as the former 'Defender of the Faith' Henry VIII rejected Catholicism because he was unable to obtain an annulment from his first wife. Soon after Henry and his one male heir's death, Henry's first daughter of his rejected wife Queen Mary "Bloody" Tudor tried to expunge Protestantism from the land, only to be succeeded by Henry's second Protestant daughter Elizabeth. "The prevailing mood among historians has been to regard the translation of England to Protestantism as largely accidental, and certainly grudging. If England became a Protestant country, it is argued, it did so largely at the behest of its rulers and against its better judgment. If this was so, the transformation was indeed profound, for by the end of the century England and Scotland were rightly regarded as the cornerstones of Protestant Europe (Pettegree, 2001).

The shift to Protestantism was sudden, accidental, and changed English life. It occurred in a relatively short span of years. The culture that weathered this shift was the culture that produced "Hamlet" and New Historicist critics argue that it is necessary to understand cultural debates to understand apparent ideological contradictions in literature. Hamlet can only be fully understood as a man of his time (or of the time of the man that wrote the work, William Shakespeare). Stephen Greenblatt argues in his work Hamlet in Purgatory the prince can only be understood in the context of the debate over the existence of Purgatory. Purgatory was a Catholic notion, so the English monarchs wished for the English people to give it up, yet many people were reluctant to do so.

This historical debate over a religious concept also helps explain why Hamlet is at first eager, than reluctant, to believe in the existence of the ghost, and finally puts aside an obsession with what happens after death and simply accepts his fate by saying: "Let be" (V.2). Greenblatt notes that Catholic England was characterized by the "overwhelming importance of the doctrine of Purgatory" (Greenblatt, 2001, p.5.) English Catholics envisioned a place where people could work off minor sins after they died and where their relatives could work to free them. Although modern readers might mock the selling of indulgences and other "rituals... [like] the assistance that the dead could receive...supplement[ing] the liturgical ceremonies...with a variety of less formal (and less expensive) acts on behalf of their loved ones" this sense of responsibility, he argues, provided a great sense of comfort to many, and when it was removed, there was a psychological and cultural void for many of the 'new' reluctant or confused Protestants (Greenblatt, 2001, p.6).

The idea of Purgatory enabled people to maintain a connection with their lost, loved ones after death, a sense that they could 'do something' to help people who were no longer with them on earth. It is this place that Hamlet's father speaks of when he says that he must: "to sulphurous and tormenting flames/...render up myself...Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night...And for the day confined to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature/Are burnt and purged away." (I.5). At first, Hamlet believes the ghost is from Purgatory because of the vividness of these images. Then Hamlet constructs a test for the ghost as he worries: "the devil hath power/to assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps/Out of my weakness and my melancholy, / as he is very potent with such spirits" (2.2). In short, Hamlet begins to doubt the doctrine because the ghost ostensibly from Purgatory has asked him to commit a murder, to kill a king.

Hamlet seldom displays a consistent attitude to Purgatory in the play. In his most famous soliloquy, Hamlet says that death is a place from which "no traveler returns" indicating he doubts the ghost (III.1). Hamlet wrestles with the nature of Purgatory when hesitating about taking his revenge because he wishes to obey the rules doctrine: "A villain kills my father; and for that, / I, his sole son, do this same villain send/He took my father grossly, full of bread; / With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May; / and how his audit stands who knows save heaven?" (III.3). But in the graveyard he shows disrespect for the physical bones and relics of the dead, noting that even great men turn to dust: "The very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box; and must the inheritor himself have no more, ha?" (V.1). This disrespect for relics is Protestant, not Catholic in spirit. It is Laertes who is upset that Ophelia (a possible suicide) will not be buried with full Catholic rituals, not Hamlet. But despite these apparent denials of the reality of Purgatory, Claudius is a murderer, and the ghost's word is thus true.

Hamlet's internal debate over the responsibilities of the living to the dead, even if these responsibilities entail murder and the death of the king mimics the debate of England itself, as it moved from a new religious conception of the world and a new religious attitude towards the dead. The new, more austere English Protestant ethos denied the value of ritual and showing physical acts of respect for the dead. As a play, "Hamlet" seems so contradictory because it is a product of an age of a cultural anxiety of how to maintain a connection with loved ones who had died, now that Purgatory was officially prohibited.