Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet and the forms of oblivion

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Volumn 33, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 261-280

  Beckwith, Sarah ^a  

^a DUKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 60950215061     PISSN: 10829636     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10829636-33-2-261     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. The two works I examine here are the chapter entitled "The Mousetrap" on Hamlet in Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000);
2. and Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. I am very grateful to Miri Rubin and Lyndall Roper for their invitation to present this work at the Institute for Historical Research, Senate House, London, in May 2002, and for the comments of the participants of that seminar. This essay was initiated as a result of mutual reading and conversations with David Aers, for whose presence and collegiality I remain thankful.
3. This is part of the Edwardian Forty-Two Articles of 1553, ed. Joseph Ketley, in The two liturgies, A.D. 1549, and A.D. 1552: with other documents set forth by authority in the reign of King Edward VI, Parker Society, vol. 29 (Cambridge, 1844), 532.
4. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
5. James Simpson, "Ageism: Leland, Bale, and the Laborious Start of English Literary History, 1350-1550," New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 213.
6. Margreta De Grazia has recently written about the close identification of Hamlet with the beginning of the modern age in "Hamlet before Its Time," in Modern Language Quarterly 62 (2001): 355-75.
7. She examines the reception of Hamlet between 1600 and 1800, which she sees as having been elided from attention by Hamlet's identification with the modern. In the turn toward the ghost in recent criticism of the play, De Grazia foresees the possibilities of a forestalling of presentist approaches to Hamlet. The three recent works on Hamlet that turn to the ghost are Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory; Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass's chapter "Of Ghosts and Garments: The Materiality of Memory on the Renaissance Stage," in their Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
8. and Anthony Low's article quoted by Greenblatt, "Hamlet and the Ghost of Purgatory: Intimations of Killing the Father," English Literary Renaissance 29 (1999): 443-66.
9. "But my principal concern is England: to understand what Shakespeare inherited and transformed, we need to understand the way in which Purgatory, the middle space of the realm of the dead, was conceived in English texts of the later Middle Ages and then attacked by English Protestants of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries," (Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 3).
10. Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997);
11. Peter Womack's, "Imagining Communities: Theatres and the English Nation in the Sixteenth Century," in David Aers, ed., Culture and History, 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 91-146;
12. Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997);
13. Anthony Dawson, in Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Edward Yachnin's The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare's England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
14. and Michael O'Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
15. Here the Eucharist is reified as "the thing itself." It will be part of my argument below that this is a characteristic way of treating the Eucharist. I use the term reification in preference to the quite technical connotations assumed by the term fetish, but I think the genealogies are worth exploring as they have been recently by Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, "Fetishisms and Renaissances," in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor (London: Routledge, 2000), 20-35, following the work of William Pietz. I cannot, in the space of this essay, detail the complex transformation of the sacrament of penance and its imbrication in the liturgical, social, and theatrical ways of imagining community. I hope to pursue this task in future work on the inheritance of medieval theater.
16. Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 163. The "wicked son" is a motif throughout the book, linking the different chapters cowritten by Gallagher and Greenblatt. In Hamlet in Purgatory, Greenblatt tells us in his prologue that his own father's will made it apparent that he could not and did not rely on his own sons to say the kaddish, the Aramaic prayer for the dead. Like the wicked son of Practicing New Historicism, Greenblatt shows himself, discontinuing the traditions of his own inheritance. These revelations, woven as they are in a reading of the play's generational hauntings, are part of the sheer charm and liveliness of Greenblatt's account. For Low's account of Hamlet as "killing the father" in which Hamlet "remembers" only in relation to vengeance and not prayer for his father's soul, hence killing him by forgetfulness, see "Hamlet and the Ghost of Purgatory," 443;
17. and Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, note on 305: here the "Reformation, Enlightenment, romantic, and modernist periods all require an attack on patriarchal tradition."
18. For a profound exploration of skepticism in relation to Shakepearean tragedy, see Stanley Cavell's Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), the implications of which are best appreciated (in fact unlikely to be appreciated except)
19. in reference to Cavell's The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
20. Whereas Greenblatt uses skepticism to mean something like reasonable doubt, Cavell treats skepticism as any view that takes the existence of the world to be a problem of knowledge. It might be suggested here that it was part of Hooker's complaint against puritan thought that it overemphasized intellectual cognition. For example, Hooker thought he detected in puritan thought that "the full redemption of the inwarde man . . . must needs belonge unto knowledge onlie"; Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V, 60.4, in The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill, 7 vols. in 5 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977-98), 2:257.
21. See also Debra Shuger's comments on this passage in her essay, Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. Arthur Stephen McGrade (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 257.
22. Both Shakespeare, according to Cavell, and Hooker regard skeptical epistemophilia as a diseased and destructive state of mind. Says Hooker in a comment on the exclusionary tactics of hot, "perfect" protestantism: "What their hartes are God doth knowe. . . . For neither doth God thus binde us to dive into mens' consciences, nor can their fraude and deceipt hurte any man but themselves. To him they seeme such as they are, but of us they must be taken for such as they seeme. In the eye of God they are against Christ that are not trulie and sincerelie with him, in our eyes they must be received as with Christ that are not to outward showe against him" (Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity V.68.8).
23. Peter Lake in his superb and compendious new book, at the end of an analysis of a long and exhilarating analysis of Measure for Measure, makes a playful and relatively casual allusion to Hooker and Shakespeare in his and Michael Questier's The Anti-Christ's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 675 : "Has Shakespeare been reading Hooker?" These comments deserve further exploration not as a question of source or influence but as a set of culturally discernible preoccupations with the links between this kind of search for certainty and highly divisive practices. Cavell's brilliant insights about the skeptical dialectic of appearance and reality need to be thoroughly historicized in relation to these questions. For if, as he maintains, skepticism empties out the links between our expressive behavior and our words, surely the debates about inner man and outward show in sixteenth-century Reformation debates are a central arena for the exploration of the skeptical denial that language is essentially shared. Stephen Greenblatt "blurbs" the back of the first edition of Disowning Knowledge, but Cavell's views seem not to have influenced Greenblatt's views in any ways I can discern.
24. The memorialist view is Zwingli's. See Peter Newman Brooks, Thomas Cranmer's Doctrine of the Eucharist: An Essay in Historical Development (London: Macmillan, 1965), 70.
25. This was the subject of enormous controversy in the Middle Ages no less than in the Reformation; see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
26. In translations of scholastic terminology, the term species in Aristotlean physics is often translated as "appearances," which has led to some misunderstandings. This point is made in Graham Ward, Cities of God (London: Rout-ledge, 2000), 158.
27. Thomas Cranmer,"The Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Our Saviour Christ," in The Work of Thomas Cranmer, ed. G. E. Duffield (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965), 68-69, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. The latter quotation uses John 6.
28. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 406.
29. "Defense," 87-88. When Wyclif criticized a version of transubstantiation, it was because he thought the notion that there could be accidents without substance was ridiculous - How could you believe in the existence of material substance at all if this was your position? Far from being an extreme materialism, this was, on the contrary, the position of perfect fantasy and illusion.
30. It would be much truer of the history of eucharistic controversy to say that the leftover is in fact the problem for certain views of the Eucharist as they come to be articulated and defended in the late Middle Ages. So it is the leftover, for example, which is the focus of the persistent questioning at trials for Lollard heresy; see, for example, Paul Strohm, England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
31. The phrase "a poet's fable" from which Greenblatt's first chapter takes its title is from William Tyndale, An Answer to Thomas More's Dialogue (Cambridge, 1850), 143,
32. first cited in Hamlet in Purgatory, 35.
33. See James Simpson's excellent essay, "The Rule of Medieval Imagination" as a useful counterpoint to Greenblatt's claims, in Image, Iconoclasm, and Idolatry in the Middle Ages, ed. James Simpson and Nicolette Zeeman (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2002), 4-24.
34. Jeffrey Knapp comments that Greenblatt seems less committed to the idea of Shakespeare's participation in a secularization process in Hamlet in Purgatory, but adds: "It is not clear how this sense of enchantment counts for Greenblatt as nonsecular"; Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 238 n. 19, and 7-8.
35. The theme of the inculcation of fear runs like a leitmotif through the book; see also Hamlet in Purgatory, 88, 71, 104.
36. See Henry Charles Lea's massive History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1896),
37. which as Alastair Minnis points out in "Reclaiming the Pardoners" in this special issue, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33 (2003): 311-34, is still used as a key source for the medieval doctrine of indulgences.
38. Jean-Claude Schmitt's book, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), is an influence on Greenblatt in Hamlet in Purgatory.
39. See my Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), chap. 2, in which I analyze the reach and effects of such a functionalist version of ritual theory.
40. Anthony Low, "Hamlet and the Ghost of Purgatory," English Literary History 29 (1999): 3. Low specifically notes that Hamlet has forgotton the old way to pray for the dead: "The ancient liturgical formula from the canon of the Mass is "Memento, Domine, famulorum famularumque tuarum qui nos praecesserunt cum signo fidei, et dormiunt in somno pacis (Remember, O Lord, thy servants who have gone before us with the sign of faith and sleep in the sleep of peace)" (463).
41. Archbishop Grindal, "A Fruitful dialogue declaring these words of Christ: This is My Body," in The Remains of Edmund Grindal, ed. William Nicholson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1843), 43.
42. Thomas Cranmer, "Against the Articles of the Devonshire Men," in The Remains of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. Henry Jenkyns, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1833), 2:214.
43. Nicholas Ridley, "A Piteous Lamentation of the miserable State of the Church of England in the Time of the Revolt from the gospel," in The Works of Nicholas Ridley, ed. Henry Christmas (Cambridge, 1841), 50.
44. Peter Lake, "Religious Identities in Shakespeare's England," in David Kastan, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 64.
45. In many ways, as Patrick Collinson points out, the Royal Supremacy impeded as much as it furthered the cause of reformation. One of the consequences of "the failure of the state church to define and underwrite protestant orthodoxy" was a long-drawn out and "confused struggle" over the material, liturgical symbolics of religion. See Collinson, "Comment on Eamon Duffy's Neale Lecture and the Colloquium," in England's Long Reformation, 1500-1800, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (London: UCL Press, 1998), 72.
46. E.g., see Hamlet 1.2.2-7: "and that is us befitted / To bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom / To be contracted in one brow of woe / Yet so far hath direction fought with nature / That we with wisest sorrow think on him / Together with remembrance of ourselves," in which the unity of the body politic and the body of the king is betrayed by the blatant pomp and arrogant self-reference (and reduncancy) of self-remembrance. These and other citations of Hamlet are from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
47. With gratitude to Will West for allowing me to read some of his work in advance of publication. I have benefited from his reading of Hamlet in his chapter, "Holding the Mirror up to Nature: The Spanish Tragedy and the Humanist Theater beside Itself."