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.
Les mer
Expanded Edition
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781400848096
Publisert
2013
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Antall sider
352
Forfatter