Religion and Ritual in Shakespeare's Hamlet: Purgatory

Introduction: Hamlet as Elizabethan Religious Drama

Shakespeare's Hamlet is perhaps one of the most famous and hotly debated literary artifacts ever written. Because literary critics and historians have discussed the work so often, however, it is easy to forget that Shakespeare wrote his tragedy as a play to be performed in the context of an Elizabethan production, before an Elizabethan audience. Considering Hamlet in light of its original audience offers a refreshing antidote to some of the more modern textual analysis of this performed text, which tends to view the central character as a kind of early existentialist.

Stephen Greenblatt's book Hamlet in Purgatory attempts to accomplish precisely this. Greenblatt advances the theory that Hamlet, rather than simply being a tragedy about a man who could not make up his mind, is really about a man wrestling with the shifting religious climate of early Protestant England—a country still in great religious flux. Greenblatt states that for Protestant reformers, the Catholic concept of purgatory stood as emblematic of the idea that "works" rather than faith sent one to heaven, and thus it was the crux on which the Catholic Church—"a vast system of pillaging and sexual corruption"—depended (Greenblatt 13). Hamlet begins in purgatory, with the ghost's injunction to vengeance, but ends in a far more theologically ambiguous place, as was typical of the Elizabethan religious climate of the period.

Purgatory, the Ghost, and the Obligation to the Dead

In the soliloquy that virtually everyone knows—even individuals who have never seen or read the play—Hamlet muses of the "undiscovered country" from which no traveler returns (3.1.81; 1706). How can he say this, given that his own father's ghost has been suffering in the fires of purgatory, being purged of all his unspecified sins? The question of purgatory recurs throughout the play, as Hamlet first worries that the ghost is a devil taking a "pleasing shape" that has deceived him, then stages a production to test Claudius's guilt, and finally refuses to kill his uncle while the man is at prayer for fear of sending him "straight to heaven" (2.2.577; 1704; 3.4.78; 1719).

In the purgatorial worldview advanced by the ghost of Hamlet's father, the dead are inexorably connected to the living. The living must take care to obey the wishes of ghosts and to ensure that proper funeral solemnities are given to those to whom they are bound by blood. Hamlet's initial wholehearted acceptance of the need for proper rituals for the dead—of "taking the ghost's word [and the ideology it represents] for a thousand pound"—is dramatized most clearly in his refusal to kill his uncle at prayer, as well as in the scene where he follows the ghost's injunction not to harm his mother even when his rage is most intense (3.2.264; 1715).

Ritual Performance and the Proper Mourning of the Dead

The nature of performance is tied, at its most basic level, to ritual, where the Elizabethans' most fundamental "hopes, fears, and desires" could be articulated (Mullaney 21). Throughout Hamlet, the prince is seen constantly questioning the best way to make amends for his father's death. What is the proper ritual performance—bloody revenge, a dramatized play, or some other, unspecified act—to ensure that what is right is done?

However, the idea of purgatory is not consistently advocated throughout the play. As early as the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, Hamlet presents a vision of "no more" without even a heaven or a hell. Later, in the graveyard during the "maimed" funeral rites for Ophelia, Hamlet is suddenly skeptical about the rituals attached to the burial of the dead and actually mocks Laertes' inflated declaration: "and from her fair and unpolluted flesh, / May violets spring…" (5.1.223–224; 1745). Hamlet responds by revealing himself and saying, among other things, "I'll rant as well as thou" (5.1.260–269; 1746).

Conclusion: A Play in Theological Transition

Thus, Hamlet in the graveyard seems to be viewing the world from a clearly different theological stance than the one he expressed when he refused to kill his uncle at prayer for fear that the murderer's words to God would send him "straight to heaven" (3.4.90; 1719). He is a different man from the son who clung to the ritual of mourning by wearing black clothes long after everyone else at court had moved on. It would be too reductive to say that Hamlet was "converted" to a straightforwardly Protestant worldview during his voyage to England. It would be fair, however, to suggest that the last two acts of the play—and the character of Hamlet as he appears in them—more forcefully support a Protestant point of view than the Hamlet of the first three acts.

In dramatizing this theological arc, Shakespeare gave his Elizabethan audience a mirror for their own religious uncertainty. The play does not resolve the question of what the proper ritual for the dead should be; it enacts, with extraordinary dramatic force, the confusion of a society that had lost one answer and had not yet found another.

Works Cited

Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. New York, 2002.

Greenblatt, Stephen. "Hamlet." Introductory essay to the play from The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton & Company, 1997.

Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Mullaney, Steven. "Civic Rites, City Sites: The Place of the Stage." From Staging the Renaissance, edited by David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass. New York: Routledge, 1992; 17–26.

Shakespeare, William. "Hamlet." From The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton & Company, 1997.

Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.