Hamlet in Purgatory.

Cox, John D.

By Stephen Greenblatt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-691-05873-3. Pp. xii + 322. $29.95.

This book is a something of a departure for Stephen Greenblatt. As the inventor of New Historicism, arguably literary criticism's most domnant model over the last twenty years, he signals some dissatisfaction with the very thing he helped to bring about: "My profession has become so oddly diffident and even phobic about literary power, so suspicious and tense, that it risks losing sight of--or at least failing to articulate--the whole reason anyone bothers with the enterprise in the first place" (4). He is defending his attention to the "literary power" of "the amazingly disturbing and vivid" ghost in Hamlet. To be fair, Greenblatt has never resisted "literary power" as strongly as his ideological fellow-travelers, the adherents of cultural materialism (his preferred term is "cultural poetics"); nonetheless, he is arguably the single most influential exemplar of an explicitly politicized method in literary analysis, and his declared appreciation for aesthetic effect is revealing and important.

A newfound impatience with suspicion is evident elsewhere in this book. One of Greenblatt's most famous rhetorical trademarks is his ability to weave himself compellingly into his criticism; the epilogue to Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980) is a well known example. For the first time in a major book, however, Greenblatt identifies in Hamlet in Purgatory with the faith tradition that formed him. This identification is less informative and moving than the brief memoir he published in 2000 in The London Review of Books, but similarities between them are unmistakable. In Hamlet in Purgatory the identification comes not in the epilogue but in the prologue, where Greenblatt meditates provocatively on the recent death of his father and on some parallels between kaddish, the prayers recited by a Jewish son for his departed father, and prayers offered by Catholic Christians for those in purgatory, which is his subject in this book (5-9). "I am incapable," he says, "of simply bracketing my own origins; rather, I find myself trying to transform them, most often silently and implicitly, into the love I bring to my work" (5). With the possible exception of C. S. Lewis, I cannot think of a transformation of this kind in literary criticism that is more powerful and effective than Greenblatt's.

Despite these qualifications of suspicion, it would be a mistake to conclude that Hamlet in Purgatory is discontinuous with Greenblatt's earlier work. Evident in this book, and indeed in his memoir, is deep ambivalence: faith is always attended, if not overwhelmed, by suspicion. As Merold Westphal has argued, faith and suspicion are not necessarily opposites, but in Greenblatt the second seems to cancel the first: it is not clear that his appreciation for faith, no matter how personal or profound, ever moves beyond the aesthetic. In a materialist climate, that may be an important move, but it is still well short of faith itself, as Soren Kierkegaard well knew.

Hamlet in Purgatory begins with three chapters of historical background, introduced and concluded with discussion of two early sixteenth-century works, Simon Fish's A Supplication for Beggars (1528-29) and Thomas More's caustic response to it titled The Supplication of Souls (1529). Fish attacks purgatory as a major contributor to poverty, since belief in it siphons off money that should go to the poor and instead directs enormous expenditures to chantries, masses for the dead, and indulgences. More speaks rhetorically from the point of the view of the dead, who would be neglected in purgatory if the reforms Fish calls for were enacted. Beside the suffering of the dead, More argues, the suffering of the living poor pales by comparison. Greenblatt offers ample evidence from medieval works on purgatory to substantiate More's claim about the suffering of the dead in purgatory and incidentally to illuminate the statement of the ghost in Hamlet about what he is suffering "Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away" (1.5.12-13). A fourth chapter, "Staging Ghosts," treats ghosts in plays other than Hamlet, especially in Dr. Faustus and Richard III. This chapter also includes a stunning comparison between terrified dreams recorded by German Jews in the 1930s and the nightmares of Richard III (165-69). Chapter five is devoted entirely to Hamlet, for which the first four chapters serve as introduction, though Greenblatt makes no claims regarding sources. Source study, he once famously proclaimed, "is, as we all know, the elephants' graveyard of literary history," a position he does not retract in this book.

Greenblatt meets the considerable challenge of offering something fresh and provocative about Hamlet, surely one of the most written-about plays in history. While not pretending to have read all Hamlet criticism, Greenblatt pays honorable attention to his major predecessors, including many "old historicists," while still proposing a fresh and distinctive view. His point in focusing on purgatory is not to settle the many questions of the ghost's origin ("intricate arguments ... almost certainly doomed to inconclusiveness" [239]), nor to argue for Shakespeare's Catholicism (though he is sympathetic to that position [248-49]). Rather, he is interested in the way Shakespeare makes imaginative use both of traditional belief about purgatory and of skepticism about that belief--"a deliberate forcing together of radically incompatible accounts of almost everything that matters in Hamlet" (240)--in order to create compelling theater. Fish and More are both relevant, not as "sources" but as representing contradictory positions that "intensify the play's uncanny power" (252). "Hamlet immeasurably intensifies a sense of the weirdness of the theater, its proximity to certain experiences that had been organized and exploited by religious institutions and rituals" (253). What matters in Hamlet for Greenblatt, then, is not belief but aesthetic effect--"literary power"--that is generated by the artful juxtaposition of traditional (Catholic) belief and (Protestant) skepticism.

This is an important argument, well presented and certain to become a landmark in studies of Hamlet. Where its central point is concerned, however, a caveat needs to be entered with regard to faith and the rhetorical strategy of pitting belief and skepticism against each other. A passage in Hamlet that Greenblatt does not discuss is the soliloquy in which Claudius admits his guilt and determines to repent (3.3.36-71). This soliloquy would seem to be theologically untroublesome, in that Claudius says nothing doctrinally offensive to either Catholic or Protestant (indeed, Jews and Muslims could affirm it as well: something very like it is at the heart of Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors). To be sure, his determination to confess on his own, kneeling and praying without a human intercessor, is arguably more Protestant than Catholic, but the description of his position before God seems pointedly ecumenical--"merely Christian," to adapt Lewis's phrase. Claudius acknowledges having murdered his brother in specific terms; he recognizes that his offense "smells to heaven" (3.3.36); he realizes that while it is the source of his earthly happiness it is also the source of his soul's peril, and he therefore resolves to repent.

More important, Claudius's soliloquy is the only firm evidence (Claudius uses the word himself [3.3.64]) in the play that he is guilty of his brother's death. Hamlet comes to mistrust the ghost, and his mistrust is consistent with traditional religion, as Greenblatt makes clear. It is also important that Hamlet's next recourse (the play-within-the-play) clarifies nothing, despite Hamlet's confidence that it does. He specifically identifies the murderer in The Murder of Gonzago as "one Lucianus, nephew to the King" (3.2.242), and therefore directly parallel to Prince Hamlet himself. To everyone who is not privy to the king's guilt (i.e., to everyone but Claudius himself, with the possible exception of Gertrude), Claudius's response to the play would obviously indicate his fear of a coup d'etat on the part of his nephew. To everyone but Claudius, The Murder of Gonzago thus functions in the same way that a command performance of Richard II functioned historically on the eve of Essex's rebellion in 1601: as an intimidation of the monarch on the part of an ambitious rival. As Greenblatt points out, the general cry of "Treason! Treason!" when Hamlet finally turns on Claudius (5.2.325) seems "to refer to the killing of the elected king, Claudius" (227). Nowhere does Claudius say anything to support Greenblatt's repeated claim that Claudius suspects that Hamlet knows about old Hamlet's murder, though he obviously must suspect it after he has seen the play. Since Claudius knows nothing about the ghost, he has no reason to suspect that Hamlet knows before the staging of The Murder of Gonzago. After the play Claudius says nothing to indicate that he thinks Hamlet knows, presumably because his political fear of Hamlet as a rival supersedes his uncanny fear of Hamlet as one who somehow knows the truth about the murder. Claudius's political instincts seem to make him aware that he is safest to carry on as if no one else suspects him, even if Hamlet does. Claudius's ordering Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet and his abetting Laertes' attempts at vengeance both seem explicable in terms of Claudius's fear of Hamlet as a rival, no matter how old Hamlet died. Claudius possibly fears discovery, as any murderer does, though he never admits his fear, but he certainly fears rivalry, as any ambitious politician must, and he says so repeatedly.

What I am getting at is that without Claudius's admission of guilt the principal question in criticism of Hamlet would not be why Hamlet delays but whether or not Claudius is guilty. Claudius's obvious statement of his guilt, unobjectionable to Christians of any persuasion who saw the play in 1601, is arguably the most important passage in the play. It substantiates the ghost's claim, if not the particulars of the ghost's description. It definitively clarifies Claudius's response to The Murder of Gonzago. It vindicates Hamlet's course of action, given the ghost's injunction. It blackens Claudius irrevocably because it shows him, in a moment of absolute candor, considering a radical change in his life yet ultimately unable to give up what he has already gained by murder, seduction, and coercive court politics. The searing honesty of his soliloquy is clarified by contrast with Henry V's prayer on the eve of Agincourt (Henry V 4.1.287-303), in which an ingrained habit of self-fashioning before human beings becomes a shuffling (to borrow Claudius's term [3.3.61]) before God as well. Only by relying on an audience's belief in the possibility of honest repentance and a radical change of life can Shakespeare clarify not only Claudius's spiritual peril and desperate failure but the reality of Hamlet's situation as well.

This is not to deny that Claudius's soliloquy is surrounded by corrosive tragic irony. Hamlet refrains from killing Claudius in the belief that the kneeling Claudius is repenting, whereas Claudius's attempt to repent is unsuccessful (3.3.97-98). Hamlet does not hear Claudius's admission of guilt and therefore lacks our definitive knowledge of it. Hamlet also misses Claudius's admission that his prayer is empty, and Hamlet therefore fails to act because of false confidence that what he sees (an act of repentance) is what he thinks it is. These are all ironies that defeat Hamlet and deepen his tragedy, but Shakespeare gives us knowledge that he withholds from Hamlet, and our knowledge makes all the difference. Without it Hamlet would not be Hamlet; it would be something like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead--brilliant, dark, and funny, but not imponderable and tragic. Most important, our knowledge depends on our faith that when people face God in complete candor we can and must believe them:

 But 'tis not so above.
 There is no shuffling, there the action lies
 In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled,
 Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
 To give in evidence. (3.3.60-64)

Claudius is not an unbeliever; he is simply a consummate and determined sinner, and his admission is what makes Hamlet more than a remarkable aesthetic achievement: it makes the play a challenging vision of human uncertainty in a distinctively religious setting that is charged with profound moral seriousness.

John D. Cox
Hope College