Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt

Abstract

432 Reviews entries (such as 'Commedia dell'arte', 'Ronsard', and 'Guazzo') a bibliographic item displaces any comment on quite what they are about. In the introduction Gillespie acknowledges that the basis of this reference work throughout is 'the recent findings of other scholars'. These are primarily the editors ofthe single-play volumes ofthe leading Shakespeare editions included in Gillespie's bibliographies. This presents a problem. The greater part of Shakespeare's Books may be found in the detailed scholarly work of these editions, which are cheaply available individually and all collectively accessible in the institutions this dictionary is aimed at. Given this situation and the inflated price, I leave readers to draw their own conclusion . University of Reading Ronald Knowles Hamlet in Purgatory. By Stephen Greenblatt. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Prince? ton University Press. 2001. xii + 322pp. ?29.95 (pbk ?19.95). ISBN 0-691058733 -3 (pbko-691-10257-0). In this book Stephen Greenblatt illustrates how Shakespeare's ties to Catholicism have once again become a fertiletopic for scholars, particularly since the publication in 1985 of E. A. J.Honigmann'sground-breakingbook*S/*a&es?eare: The 'Lost Years' (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Many of the issues Honigmann raised were re-examined at the 'Lancastrian Shakespeare' conference held in England in 1999, with speakers sometimes working within their own narrow, and sometimes too limited, frameworks, all in an attempt to determine finallyhow Catholic Shakespeare really was. But as the recent work of historically based scholars, particularly Alison Shell, has shown, the question of Elizabethan and Jacobean England's ties to Catholicism can, with sufficientarchival research, be painstakingly, almost comprehensively, examined and constructed. Thus, the most recent, and most persuasive, scholarship on the Elizabethan and Jacobean culture of Catholicism takes into account as much available archival material (including pamphlets and documents, and records of every kind as well as literary and theatrical texts) as possible. In his book Greenblatt's eventual thesis is that Shakespeare used various medieval and contemporary religious pamphlets, tracts, and other written texts as a 'different' sort of source material for Hamlet. For Greenblatt, these documents 'stage an ontological argument about spectrality and remembrance, a momentous public debate, that unsettled the institutional moorings of a crucial body of imaginative materials and thereforemade them available fortheatrical appropriation' (p. 249). Once Green? blatt reaches this point of discussion of Hamlet specifically (in the last of the book's five chapters), he displays his usual stylistic and intellectual brilliance. Yet the road to this point is often too uneven to be fully persuasive. New historicists have granted themselves a licence to pick and choose their histor? ical evidence, often in a seemingly random way, as in Greenblatt's firstthree chapters on 'A Poet's Fable',' Imagining Purgatory', and 'The Rights of Memory'. The sparseness of historical documentation concerning Catholic treatment of purgatory from which Greenblatt draws his evidence in these three chapters about Shakespeare's influences is notable. An astonishing number of pro- or proto-Catholic tracts were published in English (either surreptitiously in England or on the Continent) between 1580 and 1605. Greenblatt's strategy of lookingat so very few of them, and depending so much on more arcane medieval tracts, looks dubious, especially compared with the kind of wide-ranging and extensive research that scholars such as Shell have been willing to undertake and use to their advantage. MLR, 98.2, 2003 433 In addition to limitations, Greenblatt gives short shriftto various other texts that might have greatly enhanced his examination of purgatory and the ghost-world: most notably medieval plays (and their palpable influence in the Renaissance) and Elizabethan and Jacobean non-Shakespearean plays. For example, in simplistically stating in chapter 4, 'Staging Ghosts', that 'two of the greatest playwrights of the age, Marlowe and Jonson, show surprisingly little interest in the popular stage figure of the ghost' (p. 154), Greenblatt shows surprisingly little interest in the drama of anyone other than Shakespeare. In addition, Greenblatt fails even to survey common theatrical conventions in which Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and their contem? porary dramatists engaged. Robert Greene (in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and in A Looking Glass for London, co-written with Thomas Lodge), William Rowley, Thomas Dekker...