STEPHEN GREENBLATT prefaces Hamlet in Purgatory with an extremely personal anecdote. He tells of his father who, obsessed with death his entire life, feared that his sons would not perform the Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayers for the dead, after his death. So, in his will, he set aside a sum of money to ensure that an organization that provides such services for a fee would carry out the ritual. When he discovered this bequest, Greenblatt felt slighted: His father had not trusted him to meet his filial duty. He recited the prayers, nonetheless, with, as he describes, a mixture of love and spite. Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me, implores the Ghost of Hamlet’s father after revealing that he has been murdered and urging the prince to hasten to his revenge. Yet Hamlet fixes his attention not on vengeance, but on remembrance: Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain Unmixed with baser matter. The Ghost has a clear sense of how he would like to be remembered—through swift and lethal retribution. But Hamlet does not take immediate action; he is distracted by his own thoughts. The uneasy spirit must find a way to push him forward if he is to gain any rest. Hamlet in Purgatory is concerned first and foremost with the power that the dead exercise over the living. This is not new territory for Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor at Harvard and editor of the influential Norton edition of Shakespeare’s works. As a founder of the "new historicism," he has for years been promoting a literary criticism that puts in the foreground the social and historical nature of representation—and with the ascendancy of this method of interpretation, Greenblatt has emerged as the preeminent American figure in Renaissance studies. The new historicism sprouted in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A group of young academics, uncomfortable with the New Criticism then dominant, met on a regular basis, with subversive intentions. Influential for most of the mid-century, the New Criticism, typified in Shakespeare studies by G. Wilson Knight, approached literature as if it housed eternal truths, which could be accessed only through close study of the symbols and images found in the text. The younger generation of scholars found this approach elitist and distorted: It presumed that there were universal truths applicable to all cultures, and it suggested that there was an upward progress in history—human beings, gradually enlightened, moving ever closer towards these truths. The new historicists sought to undermine all this by looking at literature in light of the historical circumstances of its production. Where the New Critics had found the triumphant and transcendent, they uncovered oppression and discord. Strongly influenced by Foucault and Lacan, Marxist aesthetics and feminist theory, the new historicists questioned the legitimacy of the canonical voices. As a corrective, they searched out an alternative history in the tangential, marginal, and what had hitherto been thought of as minor. The work that first brought wide-spread attention to new historicism was Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, published in 1980. Jacob Burckhardt, in his famous study The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, had presented the Renaissance, in Hegelian manner, as the period in which the autonomous individual, no longer encumbered by Medieval faith and superstition, and reinvigorated by the principles of humanism, began to emerge in Western culture. Seizing on a claim made by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his seminal work The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Greenblatt asserted, "Self-fashioning is in effect the Renaissance version of these control mechanisms, the cultural system of meanings that creates specific individuals by governing the passage from abstract potential to concrete historical embodiment." The individual evaporates into the haze of history. Of course, that leaves unanswered the question of how individual voices of writers separated from us by time, circumstance, and culture, nonetheless retain over us their powerful hold. This question is almost certainly unanswerable by the new historicism. But the death of his father seems to have pushed the question of Shakespeare’s power to explain and suggest universal human experiences back into the forefront of Greenblatt’s mind—for Hamlet is, at last, not just a Renaissance artifact, but an eternal presentation of sons who have lost fathers. In Hamlet in Purgatory, Greenblatt contends that the Catholic Church of the Renaissance had a vested interest in the preservation of ghosts. By advertising Purgatory, a middle state between Heaven and Hell, where souls are scoured clean of their inveterate sins, Rome secured its grip over the faithful. According to this doctrine, one could reduce one’s sentence in Purgatory only through the mediation of the clergy. Indulgences could be purchased or masses said for the deceased. Very few souls advanced directly to their final destination in the afterlife. Thus, the Church held, the dead did not disappear; they lingered on as shades, pleading for intercession, hoping to be remembered by the living. Protestant polemicists—Tyndale, Latimer, Donne—rallied against this belief. Purgatory, they declared, was a fiction, a vast poem crafted to transfer wealth into the coffers of the clergy. It was the worst sort of Papist propaganda, profiting off superstition and ignorance. Christians, the reformers argued, went straight to Heaven or Hell. Prayers for the deceased were pointless, even blasphemous. To give credence to ghosts was decidedly un-Protestant. As the Reformation took hold in England, the belief in Purgatory inevitably waned. Yet, Greenblatt maintains, ghosts were not so easily dispelled. The doctrine of Purgatory had been effective because it met a genuine human need. The succor given to the departed rebounded back upon the living. It was for the benefit of the living that the dead were remembered. However progressive their theology, not all Englishmen were prepared to forget those who had passed on. Thus even Henry VIII, who dissolved the monasteries and chanceries that made a brisk business off the sale of prayers for the departed, commanded upon his own death that a large sum be paid out to the poor, on the condition that they pray for his relief in the afterlife. Although he would not negotiate with Rome for the privilege, Henry also wanted to hurry his soul past the sufferings of Purgatory. He could not entirely divest himself of the belief in ghosts. The new Protestant faith had by Shakespeare’s day forced the old ways underground. Yet they remained there, under pressure, welling up at times, often violently. Shakespeare knew well that the past might be suppressed, but is never dispelled. Stephen Greenblatt reads Hamlet as elucidating this tension: 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, or, rather, with those who were at once dead and yet, since they could still speak, appeal, and appall, not completely dead. The Protestant attack on the "middle state of souls" and the middle place those souls inhabited destroyed this method for most people in England, but could not destroy the longings and fears that Catholic doctrine had focused and exploited. Instead...the space of Purgatory becomes the space of the stage where old Hamlet’s Ghost is doomed for a certain period to walk the night. The Ghost in Hamlet, Greenblatt insists, rising from the "middle state," is a Catholic ghost, while the prince, educated at Wittenberg, obsessed with literacy and language, is distinctly Protestant. The pair thus represent two worldviews in conflict with one another. Yet they, as father and son, are irrevocably conjoined: They share name and blood, a mutual hatred for Claudius and a mutual concern for the queen. However distasteful or repellent the Ghost’s call for revenge is to Hamlet, he cannot put it out of mind. That which haunts him charges the play with its enigmatic, yet undeniable energy. A document found in 1757 behind the tiles of the house in which the playwright was born (though since lost) has suggested to many scholars that his father, John, was a recusant Catholic. Greenblatt surmises from this that Shakespeare, who outwardly conformed to the Anglican creed, may have invested in Hamlet his own ambiguous feelings towards the faith of his father; moreover, by representing a ghost and Purgatory on stage, he registered, perhaps not consciously, his dismay upon seeing the older structures dismantled. Yet even as he posits this, Greenblatt backs away, as if having admitted there are evident general truths about human nature in Hamlet, he has said enough. It seems fairer to say that the jagged progression from a Catholic to a Protestant England forms the topography of Hamlet. The play itself is concerned with the broader question of transition—from one husband to the next, one king to another, from life to death. It is for this reason that the play is populated by so many dead fathers and their sons: old Norway and young Fortinbras, Polonius and Laertes, King Hamlet and Prince Hamlet. Stephen Greenblatt rightly situates memory at the heart of this matter. There is a sliding scale in Hamlet: At the one end, to remember is to surrender oneself to the obligations imposed by family, society, and history; and at the other end, to remember entails, simply and exclusively, what Claudius describes as the "remembrance of ourselves." As Hamlet in Purgatory gracefully expresses, it is our perpetual challenge to find a balance between these extremes. Peter Kanelos is completing his doctorate in political philosophy and literature at the University of Chicago.