Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (review)

Abstract

(5) of that world view. The book sensibly does not argue that Hamlet’s Catholic nostalgia is proof of its author’s recusancy, and Curran’s learned and often subtle readings of nonShakespearean primary texts enrich many of the analyses he provides, especially of the “Strumpet Fortune” (chapter 5) and the ghost. The overall claim that both Hamlet and its central protagonist are devotionally conflicted rings true, but the play does not open its mysteries in response to the book’s application of puzzling, schematic characterizations of Protestantism and Catholicism. This may be partly because the play itself studiously refuses to define exactly what is Protestant and what is Catholic in Elsinore—a refusal that has generated countless subtle, suggestive, although often contradictory readings of confessional identity in Hamlet. Indeed, it may be in that refusal that Hamlet most fully and hauntingly depicts the theological, emotional, and psychological aftermath of the Reformation.