SHAKESPEARE is my Homeboy

Hamlet criticism summary

Greenblatt, Stephen. "Remember Me" (Chapter 5) from Hamlet in Purgatory

Greenblatt begins this chapter by arguing that the Ghost scenes in Hamlet are significant, as they are an addition which Shakespeare made to his source materials. Greenblatt articulates a difference and development in Hamlet's strategy from remembrance to revenge. Greenberg focuses his attention of the significance of the Ghost, and its religious and metaphysical implications for the play, as well as the significance of the theme of remembrance in the play. Greenblatt's thesis on the significance of remembrance can be summarized in the following passage: "Remembering the dead, then, is vastly more complex, contradictory, and difficult than it had at first seemed" (Greenblatt 227).

Greenblatt suggests that Hamlet's "antic disposition" may in fact be a manifestation of an "excess of remembrance" and is similar in that way to Ophelia's grieving scene after the death of her brother (Greenblatt 218). Greenblatt argues that "remembrance," for Hamlet, turns from mourning to rage, in which Hamlet resolves himself to revenge his father's death. Greenblatt points out an irony of the play in that in the final act of revenge, "old Hamlet has in effect been forgotten" (Greenberg 227). This idea reinforces Greenblatt's thesis that the act of revenge diminishes or somehow excludes the drive of remembrance. [However, I wondered whether Hamlet's "remembrance" can be seen ultimately as the act itself? For example, as articulated in the Last Supper, and as distinctly reiterated as a part of every Catholic liturgy, Christ urged his disciples to "Do this in memory of me." In this case, we see that the act of commemoration is the remembrance itself.]

In discussing the shift from remembrance to revenge in the play, Greenblatt considers psychological readings of the play, which he argues have "the odd effect of eliminating the ghost as ghost" and rather turns the ghost into a traumatic memory or a stage machinery (Greenberg 229). Greenberg focuses his essay on the ghost as ghost, and the religious implications of such a choice by Shakespeare. First, Greenblatt raises the possibility that the ghost may come not from Heaven or Hell, but from Purgatory. Greenblatt argues that the ghosts question "Hic et ubique?" is "specifically connected to a belief in Purgatory" (Greenblatt 235). The ghost's presence in the play thus raises the tension between Catholic and Protestant worldviews that would have been contemporary with Shakespeare's audience.

In regards to the Protestant vs. Catholic identity of the ghost, Greenblatt addresses the "inconclusive" arguments of Prosser, Devlin, Joseph, Milward, and Battenhouse, and ultimately argues for both sides. The play demonstrates a "pervasive pattern, a deliberate forcing together of radically incompatible accounts of almost everything that matters in Hamlet" (Greenblatt 240). Ultimately, Greenblatt summarizes the conflicts of the play as follows: "a young man from Wittenberg, with a distinctly Protestant temperment, is haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost" (Greenblatt 240). Ultimately, Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare has "gone out of his way to unsettle or render ambiguous" these questions (Greenblatt 244).

Greenblatt tries to explain these contradictions in light of the "50 year effect" and the conflict which Shakespeare himself may have faced being raised in a recusant Catholic household. (Greenblatt 249). In conclusion, Greenblatt sidesteps the question of Shakespeare's own Catholicism in favor of an argument that Purgatory does exists in "the imaginary universe of Hamlet" as a "dream of passion" (Greenblatt 252) or a poetical, distinctly theatrical space.