Hamlet in Purgatory
Stephen Greenblatt
334pp, Princeton University Press, £19.95
Rumour has it that at a recent literary conference in Los Angeles, the death of the so-called new historicism was officially announced. It isn't clear whether there was organ music, mass hysteria and a distribution of black armbands. If this brand of literary analysis really has pegged out, it died tragically young, having barely scraped past its 20th birthday. It was largely the brainchild of the American Renaissance critic Stephen Greenblatt, and sprung onto the literary scene just at the point when the fortunes of Marxist criticism took a sharp dip with the arrival of Thatcherism and global reaction.
Though John Prescott makes little play with John Donne, new historicism has some intriguing affinities with New Labour. For both social class is out, while power, images and homosexuality are in. New historicism is much taken with the theatricality of power, and so is Alastair Campbell. Much of it is an application of the theories of Michel Foucault to early-modern England, investigating power, culture and sexuality by placing fictional texts cheek-by-jowl with factual ones. Like New Labour, too, it is wary of the past, an eccentric attitude for historians (it is rather like zoologists disapproving of animals). But whereas New Labour is allergic to the past because it reminds it of socialism, new historicism doubts that we can know the past at all except in terms of the present. There are, naturally, differences. The new historicism doubts that there is such a thing as truth, whereas New Labour is sure there isn't.
The Los Angeles obituary, however, might well prove premature. For here is the progenitor of the trend, Greenblatt himself, springing back into print without a single black-edged page, for all the world as if nothing has happened. Like all his books, Hamlet in Purgarory is a rich repository of insights culled from the dusty byways of early-modern England. Purgatory, Greenblatt informs us, was invented in the 12th century, and the payment it involved for indulgences (or time out from frying) helped to raise colleges, oratories and cathedrals. Rarely has an extravagant fiction supported so material an edifice. One pope ingeniously allowed those praying while walking through a graveyard to receive as many years off their time in purgatory as there had been bodies buried in the graveyard since it was established. There were bargains and special offers, though money-back-if-not-satisfied deals posed something of a problem.
Purgatory is not wholly unattractive. According to medieval legend, the entrance to the place is to be found in one of the most sublimely beautiful of all Irish counties, Donegal, which some romantic tourists associate more with paradise. It was here, on Station Island in Lough Derg, that St Patrick did penance, and some of the more hardy of the Irish still endure a punishing annual fast there. Dante may have derived some of the Divine Comedy from Donegal.
But purgatory had its drawbacks, too. It was well worth trying to buy yourself out of the place, since it could involve being gnawed by immense worms, tortured with atrocious stenches, fried in pans or transfixed on a stake - all for perhaps 2,000 years. And this, as Greenblatt reminds us, was the good news: these were souls destined for heaven. Those bound for hell were, of course, beyond prayer. "If I knew that my father were wholly in Hell," one Renaissance commentator remarked, "I would no more pray for him than a dog that was dead." There was no room for sentiment in the economy of salvation.
Purgatory is where ghosts come from, and this book has a scintillating account of Shakespeare's complex interest in spectres and illusions. He is, Greenblatt points out, the only one of the major English Renaissance playwrights to follow the popular vogue of presenting ghosts on stage, and is intrigued by the way power can provoke nightmares and generate strange images. In an illuminating new-historicist move, the book compares this to the nightmares and phantasms bred by the Third Reich. The ghost in Hamlet is closely investigated, though Greenblatt refuses to take a position on whether it is from hell or purgatory. This, he points out, is a play that takes a position on almost nothing: whether the ghost is benign or demonic, whether Hamlet is mad or only feigning, whether he delays or just thinks he does, whether his mother is in on the murder of his father.
All this is suggestive stuff. Yet a book about purgatory ends up as a book about ghosts, given that ghosts are the only tangible bits of the afterlife that we have to work on. The book thus fails to cohere, a fact which its author might regard as a commendation, coherence being these days drearily passé. It doesn't really have a case to press, being, in new-historicist style, more thickly descriptive than argumentative; and there's an odd gap between its typically new- historicist early chapters,with their dense tapestry of allusions to obscure pamphlets, and its rather more conventionally minded chapters on Shakespeare. But as one who spent his childhood praying furiously in the hope of springing the soul in purgatory furthest from the door, I can guarantee that the subject, in Greenblatt's supremely skilled hands, has lost nothing of its repugnant fascination. Perhaps he should now write a book on limbo, a Caribbean dance that involves lowering the body under a stick a few inches from the ground.
