Hamlet in Purgatory: Expanded Edition (Princeton Classics) - Softcover

Greenblatt, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691160244 ISBN 13: 9780691160245

Verlag: Princeton Univers. Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

In Hamlet in Purgatory, renowned literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt delves into his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father, and his daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory. It yields an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution--as well as a capacious new reading of the power of Hamlet. In the mid-sixteenth century, English authorities abruptly changed the relationship between the living and dead. Declaring that Purgatory was a false "poem," they abolished the institutions and banned the practices that Christians relied on to ease the passage to Heaven for themselves and their dead loved ones. Greenblatt explores the fantastic adventure narratives, ghost stories, pilgrimages, and imagery by which a belief in a grisly "prison house of souls" had been shaped and reinforced in the Middle Ages. He probes the psychological benefits as well as the high costs of this belief and of its demolition. With the doctrine of Purgatory and the elaborate practices that grew up around it, the church had provided a powerful method of negotiating with the dead. The Protestant attack on Purgatory destroyed this method for most people in England, but it did not eradicate the longings and fears that Catholic doctrine had for centuries focused and exploited. In his strikingly original interpretation, Greenblatt argues that the human desires to commune with, assist, and be rid of the dead were transformed by Shakespeare--consummate conjurer that he was--into the substance of several of his plays, above all the weirdly powerful Hamlet. Thus, the space of Purgatory became the stage haunted by literature's most famous ghost. This book constitutes an extraordinary feat that could have been accomplished by only Stephen Greenblatt. It is at once a deeply satisfying reading of medieval religion, an innovative interpretation of the apparitions that trouble Shakespeare's tragic heroes, and an exploration of how a culture can be inhabited by its own spectral leftovers. This expanded Princeton Classics edition includes a new preface by the author.

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Stephen Greenblatt With a new preface by the author

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"Beyond its brilliant illumination of Hamlet, Stephen Greenblatt's book uses historical evidence to probe the nature of human memory--by nature insistent, contradictory, in every sense haunted--as it copes with the stark, yet mysterious reality of death. With a rare combination of learning, imagination and grace Greenblatt has created an exciting work of scholarship, alert to the ways a great work of art can both resemble and transform other modes of discourse and perception."--Robert Pinsky

"Hamlet in Purgatory is a virtuoso exercise in untangling the interwoven threads of feeling and belief in early-seventeenth-century England . . . In this bold and brilliant book, Greenblatt demonstrates utterly compellingly why Hamlet can still hold our spiritual attention today."--Lisa Jardine

"My understanding of the traditions concerning Purgatory, both learned and popular, has been gratifyingly deepened by the rich detail of Greenblatt's study. . . . The nature of the ghost of Hamlet's father is an old scholarly puzzle, but Greenblatt's book raises the discussion to a new level, and does so without dogmatism, rather with a subtle acceptance of the ambiguities inherent not only in the Ghost but in the great play as a whole. The book will be welcomed by all who care about the subject, and for the insights already known to abound in this scholar's work."--Frank Kermode

"Stephen Greenblatt is a famously beguiling writer. That power of enchantment does not fail him here. His skill as a storyteller is constantly on display. But so too is his no less renowned skill as a skeptically demystifying cultural critic. The result is a book whose remarkable energy derives, as does that of Hamlet itself, from the mutually contradictory impulses it so tellingly expresses."--Richard Helgerson, University of California, Santa Barbara

"This book is a brilliant essay on memory. Although it serves as a learned history of the idea of Purgatory and a subtle reading of Hamlet, it is primarily a book about how a culture faces loss, one that is gracefully, even movingly, written and one which reveals, as always, Greenblatt to be an unusually sensitive critic and thinker."--David Scott Kastan, Columbia University

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Hamlet in Purgatory

By STEPHEN GREENBLATT

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2001 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-16024-5

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS......................................................
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................................
xi
PROLOGUE...................................................................
3
CHAPTER ONE A Poet's Fable................................................
10
CHAPTER TWO Imagining Purgatory...........................................
47
CHAPTER THREE The Rights of Memory........................................
102
CHAPTER FOUR Staging Ghosts...............................................
151
CHAPTER FIVE Remember Me..................................................
205
EPILOGUE...................................................................
258
NOTES......................................................................
263
INDEX......................................................................
315

CHAPTER 1

A POET'S FABLE

Early in 1529 a London lawyer, Simon Fish, anonymously publisheda tract, addressed to Henry VIII, called A Supplication for theBeggars. The tract was modest in length but explosive in content:Fish wrote on behalf of the homeless, desperate English men andwomen, "needy, impotent, blind, lame and sick" who pleaded forspare change on the streets of every city and town in the realm.These wretches, "on whom scarcely for horror any eye dare look,"have become so numerous that private charity can no longer sustainthem, and they are dying of hunger. Their plight, in Fish'saccount, is directly linked to the pestiferous spread throughoutthe realm of beggars of a different kind: bishops, abbots, priors,deacons, archdeacons, suffragans, priests, monks, canons, friars,pardoners, and summoners.

Simon Fish had already given a foretaste of his anticlerical sentimentsand his satirical gifts. In his first year as a law student atGray's Inn, according to John Foxe, one of Fish's mates, a certainMr. Roo, had written a play holding CardinalWolsey up to ridicule.No one dared to take on the part of Wolsey until Simon Fish cameforward and offered to do so. The performance must have beenimpressive: it so enraged the cardinal that Fish was forced "thesame night that this Tragedy was played" to flee to the Low Countriesto escape arrest. There he evidently met the exile WilliamTyndale, whose new English translation of the Bible, inspired byLuther, he subsequently helped to circulate. At the time he wroteA Supplication for the Beggars, Fish had probably returned to Londonbut was in hiding. He was thus a man associated with Protestantbeliefs, determined to risk his life to save the soul of his country,and endowed, as were many religious revolutionaries in the 1520sand 1530s, with a kind of theatrical gift.

In A Supplication for the Beggars, this gift leads Fish not only tospeak on behalf of the poor but also to speak in their own voice,crying out to the king against those who have greedily taken forthemselves the wealth that should otherwise have made Englandprosperous for all of its people. If his gracious majesty would onlylook around, he would see "a thing far out of joint" (413). Theravenous monkish idlers "have begged so importunately that theyhave gotten into their hands more then the third part of all yourRealm." No great people, not the Greeks nor the Romans nor theTurks, and no ruler, not King Arthur himself, could flourish withsuch parasites sucking at their lifeblood. Not only do they destroythe economy, interfere with royal prerogative, and undermine thelaws of the commonwealth, but, since they seduce "every man'swife, every man's daughter and every man's maid," they subvertthe nation's moral order as well. Boasting among themselves aboutthe number of women they have slept with, the clerical dronescarry physical and moral contagion—syphilis, leprosy, and idleness—throughthe whole commonwealth. "Who is she that will sether hands to work to get three pence a day," the beggars ask, "andmay have at least twenty pence a day to sleep an hour with a friar,a monk, or a priest?" (417). With a politician's flair for shocking(and unverifiable) statistics, Fish estimates the number of Englishwomencorrupted by monks at 100,000. No one can be sure,he writes, that it is his own child and not a priest's bastard who ispoised to inherit his estate.

Why have these diseased "bloodsuppers" succeeded in amassingso much wealth and power? Why would otherwise sensible, decentpeople, alert to threats to their property, their health, and theirliberties, allow themselves to be ruthlessly exploited by a pack of"sturdy idle holy thieves" (415)? The question would be relativelyeasy to answer were this a cunningly concealed crime or one perpetratedon the powerless. But in Fish's account virtually the entiresociety, from the king and the nobility to the poor housewife whohas to give the priests every tenth egg her hen lays, has been openlyvictimized. How is it possible to explain the dismaying spectacle ofwhat Montaigne's friend, Etienne de la Boétie, called "voluntaryservitude"?

For la Boétie (1530–1563) the answer is structural: a chain ofclientage and dependency extends and expands geometrically, heargues, from a small number of cynical exploiters at the top to thegreat mass of the exploited below. Anyone who challenges thissystem risks attack, both from the few who are actually reaping abenefit and from the many who are deceived into thinking thattheir interests are being served. Individuals may actually grasp thatthey have been lured into voluntary servitude, but as long as theyhave no way of knowing who else among them has arrived at thesame perception, they recognize that it is dangerous to speak out.

If those who see through the lies could share their knowledgewith other, like-minded souls, as they long to do, they could takethe steps necessary to free themselves from their chains. Thosesteps are remarkably simple: what is needed, in fact, is not a violentuprising but a quiet refusal. Since only a minuscule fraction of thesociety is truly profiting from the system, all it would take, werethere widespread enlightenment, is peaceful noncooperation.When the king demands his breakfast, one need only refuse tobring it. He may sputter in rage, but the rage will be as inconsequentialas an infant's, provided that the great majority of menand women have collectively determined to be free. But how isthat determination to be fostered? How is it possible for those whounderstand the situation to awaken others, so that all can act inunison? As long as they remain isolated, there is little that enlightenedindividuals can do, and it is risky for them to open their secretthoughts to others. If only there were little windows in each person,la Boétie daydreams, so that one could see what is hidden insideand know to whom one could safely speak.

For Etienne de la Boétie, the first and fundamental problem isto account for widespread behavior that seems so obviously againstinterest, and not simply against the marginal or incidental concernsof particular groups but against the central material and sexualpreoccupations of all human societies. Why do people allowthemselves to be robbed and cheated? Simon Fish...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton Univers. Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691160244
• ISBN 13: 9780691160245
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 348
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland