Abstract
Luther tried to bury most of the biblical arguments bracing purgatory in books he labeled apocryphal and placed at the end of the Old Testament.' But purgatory maintained a hold over Renaissance imaginations, so that the Shakespearean stage, in order to discharge its ritual activities properly, enclosed the tropes of heaven, hell, and purgatory within its bounds.2 Hamlet's father's ghost urged revenge while he was in purgatory (1.5.10-13); ordinarily a place of moral purgation or spiritual cleansing, purgatory there functions as an imaginative holding-ground or realm of suspended animation, a place from which to remind the living of practical obligations or dictate to them about necessity.3
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