Hamlet in purgatory
Stephen Greenblatt (Author)
This book delves into the author's 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
Print Book, English, 2013
Expanded edition View all formats and editions
Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2013
History
360 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
9780691160245, 9781400848096, 0691160244, 1400848091
1039600162
Prologue
A poet's fable
Imagining Purgatory
The rights of memory
Staging ghosts
Remember me
Epilogue