Hamlet in Purgatory

Published in Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 11.1 (2002): 75-92.

Historicism in Purgatory

David Schalkwyk

It would be wrong to claim that the New Historicism is dead, or

that it is dying, although a case could be made for the latter.

Certainly, it no longer claims the headlines, or even the front

pages, of critical news and attention, as it once did, in the mid-

1980s and early 1990s. In Renaissance studies, where it has been

most influential, it remains dominant; but the excitement (both

critical and laudatory) of its emergence has waned. For some

years now, seminar discussions at the annual Shakespeare

Association of America conference have been organised around the

somewhat startling idea that historicism may not be the only way

of reading Shakespeare after all. At the 2002 meeting the

question achieved official recognition with a plenary session

devoted to the question “Beyond Historicism?” And in a paper

entitled “Shakespeare’s Laundry List” Marjorie Garber decried

the thoughtless preoccupation with the historical, and the

deplorable displacement of the literary text by the remotest and

most insignificant scrap of contemporary, material text:

Shakespeare’s laundry list instead of King Lear.

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Although Garber intended to decry only the excesses of the new

obsession with history, her charge reiterated an old, and

somewhat conservative, criticism that had been levelled at the

New Historicism from its inception: that it valorised the

marginal above the central, and that it did so via the

questionable, indeed irrational, use of mere anecdote and

analogy rather than proper historical evidence and logical

argument. In the heady years, after the seminal publication of

Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning in 1980—when

“theory” somewhat belatedly established a beachhead on

Shakespeare and Renaissance studies, which then remained as the

heartland of the old, conservative enemy, liberal humanism—such

unorthodox inversions were thoroughly in the spirit of a new,

anti-canonical cultural politics. What Derrida had achieved

with the texts of a logocentric philosophical tradition,

Greenblatt was extending, in a different way, to the central

figure of Anglo-American, high-cultural imperialism. But

paradoxically, the new marginalising readings of Shakespeare

merely entrenched his canonical status. There has never been as

much attention paid to Shakespeare as in the past twenty years;

or, for that matter, as little attention paid to his contemporary

dramatists.

The relationship between what soon coagulated into the notion of

the “New Historicism” and other theoretical positions remained

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complex, even fraught. Feminists attacked the new movement

almost immediately, claiming that it overlooked gender and

perpetuated the old, patriarchal hegemony of the men’s club of

literary scholarship and criticism.1 Conservative formalists

and less avante garde historicists accused it of ignoring genre;2

Marxists charged that it was in fact no more than a form of

Saussurean synchronism in disguise,3 accusing it of indulging in

a whim for “arbitrary connections”;4 cultural materialists

decried its Foucauldian defeatism and its complicity with

American capitalism, while Foucauldians accused it of

misappropriating Foucault.5 Stanley Fish, dismissing both its

political pretensions and those of its critics as being

professionally irrelevant, recognised a godsend for the

profession when he saw it. In the afterword to the classic essay

collection devoted to the movement, he urged his fellow

1 . Edward Pechter, “The New Historicism and it Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama”, PMLA 102.3 (May 1987), 292-303.

2 . Jean E. Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” English LiteraryRenaissance , 16 (1986), 31, and Carol Thomas Neely, “Constructing the Subject:

Feminist Practice and the New Renaissance Discourses”, English Literary Renaissance 18 (Winter 1988), 5-18.

3 . Richard Wilson, “Introduction: Historicising New Historicism”, in New Historicism and Renaissance Drama , ed. Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton (London

and New York: Longman, 1992).4 . Walter Cohen, “Political Criticism of Shakespeare”, in Jean E. Howard and

Marion F. O’Connor (eds.), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 18-46 (p. 33).

5 . Suzanne Gearhart, “The Taming of Michel Foucault: New Historicism, Psychoananlysis, and the Subversion of Power”, New Literary History 26.3 (Summer

1997), 457-80.

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professors of English (in the words of the Alka-Seltzer ad) to

“try it, you’ll like it”.6

Fish has turned out to be prophetic: almost all critics in

Renaissance studies have tried it—and liked it. Or at the very

least they have found it extremely useful. The surveys of

critical work done on Shakespeare in 1999 and 2000 in the

Shakespeare Survey point out that all of the work was historical.

Indeed, it is very difficult to get work published in the major

journals, and be taken seriously by the interpretive community,

without evidence of some engagement with historical material. An

author of two superb books on Shakespeare’s relation to the

modern complained at an SAA seminar on the limits of historicism

in 1999 that one of his chapters had been rejected by a leading

Shakespeare journal for not being historical enough. This

hegemony is evident in the kinds of comment that work now elicits:

papers or books are “important” rather than “insightful”,

“interesting” rather than “illuminating”, and one of the most

common formulae of praise is the comment that the reader has

“learnt a great deal” from one’s work. Why was Fish so insightful

about the power of this movement, back in 1987?

Whatever the personal or cultural and political goals of its

initiators, the New Historicism has settled into its status as

6 . Stanley Fish, “Commentary: The Young and the Restless”, in The NewHistoricism , ed. H. Aram Veeser (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 303-16(315).

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professional best practice because it answers so well to the

demands of the profession of English in North America. As Fish

has described the profession, it consists of a closed group—an

interpretive community—that has as its chief end its own

reproduction: through a series of arduous indications and

apprenticeships to the hierarchically structured rewards of

tenure, professorships, chairs of professional organisations,

international conferences, prizes, and other trappings of

professional success and power.7 Unlike countries like South

Africa and England, the PhD in the USA is a purely professional

degree. One endures its seven years of purgatorial testing

solely to qualify yourself to put others through the same

process: to become a professor in English. Once the dreaded

hiring interviews at the biggest academic stockyard in the world—

the annual meeting of the Modern Languages Association (MLA)—has

been successfully negotiated (or more or less successfully, for

what matters is by whom you get hired) there are further hurdles

to clear: the PhD must be turned into the first book to get tenure

and exchange the badge of Assistant Professor for that of

Associate Professor. (Some faculties, like Harvard, have not

tenured one of their junior faculty for years.) Then comes the

second book, a possible promotion to full Professor, and then the

third and fourth to get a more lucrative offer from a more

prestigious university. Driving this process is a relentless

demand for the new. Again, unlike other countries, where the

7 . Stanley Fish, Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (New York: Clarendon, 1995).

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requirement to make “a lasting contribution to knowledge” might

be offset by evidence of having “covered the field”, a PhD in this

system has to break fresh ground. So, at least in theory, do the

first, second, third and fourth books.

How does one bear this impossible burden of innovation? When I

began my very different academic career, in a staunchly Leavisite

South African English Department, I was actively discouraged

from publishing. All that could be profitably said about the

great works of literature had already been said, I was told, by

minds much greater than my own, and I would best confine myself to

teaching well and often. To an extent, this was true. There was

little more that could be squeezed merely from attending to the

words on the page, no matter how well developed one’s critical

sensibility. The advent of theory offered plenty of scope for

saying something different. There was, however, nothing as

powerful as the new forms of historicism for satisfying the

insatiable appetite of the American profession for the new. The

archive is virtually infinite, and armed with the respectably

new-historicist methods of analogy and the anecdote, neophyte

and high officer-bearer alike could produce the startling, the

interesting, the unthought-of, the much-to-be-learned-from.

The New Historicism has thus, as Fish predicted it would,

provided a perfect machine for the Purgatorial trials of the

American academy, combining just the right combination of

testing pain and teleological hope for the hordes eager to enter

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the gates of that heavenly profession. It is difficult to see

what could replace it as the fundamental engine of the profession

of Shakespeare in America, even if many scholars are beginning to

find its methods tediously predictable.

At the same SAA conference at which Marjorie Garber questioned

the relevance of Shakespeare’s laundry list for our

understanding and enjoyment of his literary work, Stephen

Greenblatt was invited to deliver a plenary address (thus marking

his position relative to Garber and others in Fish’s celebrated

professional hierarchy). In a paper characteristically witty

and engaging, the founder of the New Historicism showed that his

capacity for surprise and irreverence remains undiminished. For

he dared to descend into an abyss that has for decades been

declared out of bounds by every form of criticism and theory: the

dreaded, forever-to-be-shunned, twilight regions of

biographical criticism. For an hour Greenblatt speculated about

the relation between Shakespeare’s life and his work—on the

effects of his family life, his country-town upbringing, his

inferior class status, and the resulting dream of restoration for

personal and family loss in the plays and poems. Afterwards he

declared, disarmingly, that he was merely having fun, like

“driving a 1950s Chev”. But this was not a 1950s Chev. It was a

return to a period before synchromesh gears or hydraulic brakes—

perhaps even to a time before the internal combustion engine.

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But that is not quite true: there has been a subtle, though

submerged, return to biography lately, not only in the number of

new accounts of Shakespeare’s life, but also in the latest

interest in the possibility of his having been a recusant: a

closet Catholic in Elizabeth’s fiercely and brutally Protestant

regime.8 The session in which Greenblatt participated was called

“Writing Cultural Biography”. But to write biography,

especially, cultural biography, is one thing: tying Shakespeare’s

life to his art quite another. The other two speakers stuck

carefully to the lives of people who were not primarily authors:

they assiduously refrained from drawing any connections between

the life and the text. Greenblatt went much further, speculating

shamelessly on the ways in which the shape of Shakespeare’s plays

may have followed that of his personal experience. Most of his

audience seemed to be unimpressed. He told us nothing new; the

paper was not interesting; we could learn nothing from it. And,

of course, it could offer no model by which a thousand PhDs might

bloom. I look forward to Greenblatt’s forthcoming excursion into8 . See for example: Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His

Life (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), Russell A. Fraser, Young Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) and Shakespeare, the Later Years (New York:

Columbia University Press,1992), Park Honan, Shakespeare : A Life (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), Dennis Kay, Shakespeare : His Life, Work and

Era (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1992), Irvin Leigh Matus, Shakespeare, in Fact (New York: Continuum, 1994), Joseph Papp and Elizabeth Kirkland. Shakespeare

Alive! (Toronto and New York: Bantam Books, 1988), Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare, Records and Images (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), William Shakespeare : A Compact Documentary Life . Rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1987), William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), Shakespeare: His Life, His English, His Theater (New York: Signet Classic, 1990), Shakespeare's Lives . New ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991),

Shakespeare, the Globe & the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), and Stanley W. Wells, Shakespeare : A Life in Drama (New York: Norton, 1995).

8

Shakespeare’s life. Perhaps, when the new book is finally

published, it will indeed signal the death of the New

Historicism, or at least its founding father’s declaration of

independence from an overgrown child’s constricting embrace. We

shall see.

If Greenblatt’s nostalgic joyride proves to be more a more

enduring excursion, then his latest book, Hamlet in Purgatory , may

prove to be the last proper example of the New Historicism, at

least as the person who coined the phrase practised it.9 And

there’s the rub. For the book is in many ways atypical of

Greenblatt’s work. It abandons the essay for the more extended

argument of the monograph; it is curiously deficient in

anecdotes; and it is remarkably restrained in its concern with

the omnipresent workings of power. This is not to say that Hamlet

in Purgatory is totally different in style, method, and focus from

Greenblatt’s other work; merely that it marks a subtle shift of

emphasis, a bringing into stronger relief of elements that have

tended to be been submerged in both his own sense and that of

others of what he has been trying to do over the past two decades.

Greenblatt—and by extension, the New Historicism in general—has

been accused of three excesses or deficiencies, depending on

which way one looks at them. Strongly theoretical critics, while

acknowledging Greenblatt’s general indebtedness to

9 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory . Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2001.

9

poststructuralist and postmodern theory, especially that of

Michel Foucault, have accused him of being insufficiently

theoretical: of failing to subject his methods to theoretical

self-reflection and to offer rigorously and coherently

theorised accounts of the relationship between history and text.

This general charge is related to a more specific accusation:

that the use of analogy and the anecdote has produced a form of

historical criticism that is, paradoxically, both ahistorical

and unsystematic. The use of the anecdote betrays a perverse

indulgence in “arbitrary connections” and consequent aversion

to the relation of cause and effect. Rather than explaining the

relationship between A and B generically, by which B is shown to

be the effect of A, the charge goes, the New Historicism merely

yokes disparate things by violence together. Despite its name, it

is thus incurably synchronic rather than diachronic. And such

synchronism is in fact a debilitating form of presentism.

Historical phenomena are viewed entirely through the lens of

present obsessions and concerns—the unfettered imperialism of

capital under Ronald Reagan—which, coupled to a particular

reading of the Foucault of Discipline and Punish , leads to a deep

political pessimism or quietism. The New Historicism is charged

with reading all opposition to state or corporate power as a

containing affirmation and entrenchment of such power. This

accusation was levelled especially at what has probably become

Greenblatt’s most widely disseminated essay, “Invisible

10

Bullets”, which closes with the now notorious declaration:

“There is subversion, endless subversion—only not for us.”10

There is no doubt that there are instances of Greenblatt’s work

that do display such obsession with the impervious nature of

power. But there are issues in Greenblatt’s work—philosophical

concerns about the nature of theory and practice, system and use,

literature and ideology, representation and society, and the

power of the literary—that have been obscured by the obsessive

focus on his connection with Foucault. These other issues are

especially discernible in Hamlet in Purgatory . But before we look at

that book, let us reopen the question of the philosophical

contexts of the New Historicism, at least as Greenblatt practices

it.

Practising New Historicism , the book by Greenblatt and Catherine

Gallagher immediately preceding Hamlet in Purgatory , opens with an

essay, entitled “The Touch of the Real”.11 Here Greenblatt traces

the origins of his critical work not to Foucault, but to the

American Anthropologist, Clifford Geertz. Registering his deep

discontent with the way in which the sense of a “lived life” “had

10 . “Invisible Bullets”, in Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 21-65 (65). This essay has appeared in three other

guises: in Glyph 8 (1981), 40-61; Political Shakespeare: New Essays in CulturalMaterialism , ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1985), 18-47; and Shakespeare’s “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C.L. Barber , ed. Peter Erickson and Coppelia Kahn (Newark: University of

Delaware Press, 1985), 276-302.11 . Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism

(Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2000).

11

been progressively refined out of the most sophisticated

literary studies” (20), Greenblatt claims that, although Geertz

did not provide “the radical politics for which I was longing”, he

did something that seemed still more important. He argues that our interpretive strategies provided key means for

understanding the complex symbolic systems and life patterns that anthropologists studied. The effect was like touching one wire to another: literary criticism made

contact with reality. (“The Touch of the Real”, 20-1)

Making sense of Greenblatt’s indebtedness to Geertz rather than to Foucault reveals things that have been overlooked in both the

reception and propagation of his work. First, it makes explicit a theoretical tension that the founder of the New Historicism (or

the instigator of “cultural poetics”, a term much closer to Geertz and one which Greenblatt himself prefers) never resolves.

For the all-embracing concepts of power and discourse derived from Foucault are in direct tension with Geertz’s complete

opposition to the explanation of human symbolic practice as any kind of system to which people are subjected in order to make

sense of their lives, either linguistically or ideologically. That is to say, Geertz’s implacable opposition to Saussurean

accounts of language in their Structuralist and neo- Structuralist forms contradicts in the strongest possible way

Foucault’s peculiar form of Structuralism. While Foucault’s work retains the deeply anti-humanist conception of practice and

signification as the product of a determining structure, Geertz is fundamentally against this conception of the conditions of

cultural meaning. Meaning is to be found in the practices and their relationship to each other—not in any kind of system. If

essays like “Invisible Bullets” and “Martial Law in the Land of Cocaigne” seem to forget Geertz in favour of Foucault, others

like “Resonance and Wonder”, the “Touch of the Real”, and especially Hamlet in Purgatory , mark a return to a peculiarly

Geertzian conception of the relationship between practice and

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system, institution and idea, and—as Greenblatt pointedly states in the extract above—between literature and reality.

I have argued elsewhere that Greenblatt’s interest in Geertz puts him in touch with a philosophical tradition that has tended to be

ignored or disparaged in the great “theoretical turn” in literary studies of the last quarter of a century: the “analytical”

philosophy of especially Gilbert Ryle, J.L. Austin, and LudwigWittgenstein.12 Wittgenstein and Ryle exert as much influence on

Geertz as the anthropologist does on Greenblatt. The key notion of “thick description” was coined by Ryle, while throughout his

essays Geertz acknowledges Wittgenstein as having provided, as he puts it, “some of the most advanced . . . contextualist,

antiformalist, relativising tendencies” of “modern opinion”. Anthropologists who have taken note of such tendencies have, he

exclaims only half-ironically, “wonder of wonders, been speaking Wittgenstein all along".13 When Richard Wilson remarks,

disparagingly, that “history restored by the New Historicism was a history, then, oddly recalling that of modernism”,14 he is

mistaken only in thinking of the modernism of critics like G. Wilson Knight, and not casting his net further to those great modern modes of cultural and linguistic philosophy that laid down

the paths not taken by Saussure or Foucault: the modernism of the fragment and the collage, of the deep suspicion of systems and

explanations based on cause and effect, and the concern with the public nature of cultural practice. We therefore need to re-

examine the now automatic alignment of the New Historicism with

12 . See David Schalkwyk, “’Speaking Wittgenstein all along’: Stephen Greenblatt and the Philosophical Contexts of the New Historicism”, in Critical

Self-Fashioning: Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicism , ed. Jurgen Pieters (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999), 129-149 and Literature and the Touch of the Real

(Newark: University of Delaware Press, in press).13 . Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New

York: Basic Books, 1983), 4.14 Richard Wilson, “Introduction: Historicizing New Historicism,” in New

Historicism and Renaissance Drama , ed. Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton (London and New York: Longman, 1992), 9.

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Postmodernism and Poststructuralism, and the equally uncritical disparagement of Modernism as a moment of philosophical

revolution and critique.

In Greenblatt’s account of Geertz’s formative influence on him, the hermetic formalism of New Critic and Structuralist alike

could be ruptured by an anthropological philosophy that takes symbolic practice seriously as a fundamental condition of human

social life. That is to say, it neither confined such practice to a separate realm of art, nor read it off as an epiphenomenon of

something more important or fundamental: the material, the economic base, the linguistic system, or ideology. It rather

sees in the multiplicity of representation that constitutes human culture an irreducible, if problematically complex,

relation to the real. The anthropologist makes available instances of human behaviour that, given an appropriately thick

description, made sense within a variety of interconnecting symbolic practices of the society in its interaction with the

world. A “thick” description, as Ryle conceived of it, makes reference to the significance that an action bears within a set of

significant, signifying relationships in a culture. “He closed one eye” is thin; “He winked at me” is thick. For some cultures the second description would not exist, since there would be no

concept of winking—no meaningful practice of that sort—although people may well close their eyes, together or separately, often

enough.

Although Greenblatt acknowledges Geertz’s debt to Ryle with

regard to the concept of “thick description”, he nonetheless

insists on a decisive difference between the form it takes in the

work of the analytical philosopher and anthropologist,

respectively. Like many analytical philosophers, Ryle makes his

examples up; in accordance with the protocols of his discipline,

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on the other hand, Geertz’s takes his anecdotes from the real,

observed lives of his subjects: “The ‘raw’ excerpt from the field

notes makes a stronger claim to reference—it points more directly

to the world that has some solidity and resistance—than Ryle’s

invented example, but the former is no less a textual

construction than the latter” (“The Touch of the Real”, 23).

Furthermore, whereas the thickness of Ryle’s fictional examples

are a function of the description—of the point of view adopted

towards the actions—those that characterise Geertz’s tales

belong to the things described: they inhere in the actions

themselves.

I have argued elsewhere that these distinctions are problematic,

but for the moment we might merely ask why Greenblatt feels

compelled to make them.15 He wishes to open the fictional to what

he calls the “touch of the real”, but without reducing one to the

other. That is to say, while both a literary text and a

description of an observed cultural practice are “textual

constructions”, the “real” or the “raw” anecdote has a

referential dimension that connects it to “the lives of real men

and women actually live” (“The Touch of the Real”, 21). Fictional

texts lack this referential dimension. But that does not mean

that the symbolic forms or practices that they contain are

removed from the world: rather, the symbolic practices which make

up and make sense of the lives of real men and women are

15 See David Schalkwyk, Literature and the Touch of the Real , Chapter 5.

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continually circulated and recirculated within fictional texts.

That is why Geertz’s anthropological philosophy, which involves

itself with the interpretation of the former, could show how to

plug the circuit of the real into that of the fictional (“literary

criticism made contact with reality” (21)), but without making

the fictional a mere reflection of the real.

In the early modern English theatre Greenblatt sees a “literary

institution” that did not merely draw the forms of representation

that informed the lives of real men and women into itself—its own

representational practices in turn produced effects upon those

lives and their representational practices. The social energy

(as Greenblatt calls it) that makes up the interaction of

symbolic practice and life patterns circulates in both fiction

and the real in ways that cannot be reduced or explained causally.

This is a crucial point. It is in the nature of Geertz’s whole

interpretive enterprise that it should be concerned with

description, not explanation—especially not causal or generic

explanation. Greenblatt shares that predilection.

In his influential essay, “Thick Description: Towards an

Interpretive Theory of Culture”, Geertz argues that ethnography

is primarily concerned with the interpretation of complex

conceptual structures rather than causal ones. Wittgenstein’s role

as the “patron saint”, as Geertz puts it, of his anthropological

work can be seen in the idea that the task of ethnographers is not

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to devise causal or abstract theoretical explanations of what the

subjects think they are doing, but to engage in a descriptive

mapping and understanding, the achievement of a “perspicuous

representation” (122), of the ways their concepts are related and

differentiated in a complex of essentially public practices

( Local Knowledge , 215). Geertz’s Wittgensteinian displacement of

inner spirit with public practice—of empathy with command of a

conceptual system—constitutes his major contribution to a

problem that faces not only ethnographers but also literary

critics and historians: that of rendering accessible the lives of

people removed from one’s own cultural or historical forms of

life. By conceiving the issue primarily in conceptual terms Geertz

confines himself to phenomena that are public and which are

therefore, in principle, shareable. To be interested primarily

in conceptual relations is, as Geertz puts it, not to be

interested in “what his informants perceive” but in “what they

perceive ‘with’—or ‘by means of,’ or ‘through’” (58). His notion

of cultural translation turns the popular saying (“lost in

translation”) on its head by claiming that it is through cultural

translation that we do not lose but rather find ourselves. Through

this kind of finding we lose our moral certainties and cultural

complacency: it is “the growth in range a powerful sensibility

gains from an encounter with another one, as powerful or more,

comes only at the expense of its inward ease” ( Local Knowledge , 45).

William H. Sewell has suggested that Geertz’s major contribution

to historical studies lies in two areas that are primarily

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Wittgensteinian: first, his “conceptualisation of culture as

made up of publicly available systems of symbols provided an

important epistemological guarantee to historians”; second,

this “vein of anthropological revelation opened up to

historians . . . was essentially synchronic in character” since

in the “synchronic description” which Geertz offers, “acts of

cultural signification” are not “linked by causal chains of

antecedent and consequence” but are rather “seen as components of

a mutually defined and mutually sustaining universe”.16 Sewell

argues that a “proper appreciation of synchrony is the secret

ingredient of effective diachronic history”. It is bad history

to avoid “conceptual problems by retreating to the obvious

archival sources and stringing together a narrative of ‘what

actually happened’” (42).

This Geertzian (and Wittgensteinian) conception of conceptual relations as amenable to description through the juxtaposition

of similarity and difference illuminates one of the most frequent charges made against Greenblatt by critics with a Materialist or Marxist bent: that, as the Marxist Shakespearean, Walter Cohen,

puts it, it indulges in a perverse “commitment to arbitrary connectedness” (Cohen, 34). This commitment “preclude[s] a

systematic survey of the available evidence” and renders impossible a “potentially Marxist concern with a hierarchy of

causes and effects within society” (38). The New Historicism thus “describes historical difference” but it cannot, or will not,

“explain historical change” (33). It is therefore no less than “an annexation of history by linguistics . . . The new history

would slice across time, keeping the past pure in its difference16 . William H. Sewell Jr., “Geertz, Cultural Systems, and History: From

Synchrony to Transformation”, Representations 59 (Summer 1997), 35-55 (39-40).

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from the present with methods as ahistorical as those of Saussurean linguistics” (Wilson, 9 & 6).

These charges are appropriate enough. But they make sense only in terms of a set of questions that are very different from those which impel Wittgenstein, Geertz and Greenblatt. Much has been

made in reviews of Greenblatt’s declaration in his new book that his desire to “bear witness to the intensity of Hamlet ”—“to

immerse [him]self in the tragedy’s magical intensity”—puts him at odds with his “profession”, which has “become so oddly

diffident and even phobic about literary power, so suspicious and tense, that it risks losing sight of . . . the whole reason anyone

bothers with the enterprise in the first place” (4). But few have asked what it means to take Greenblatt’s profession seriously.

Presumably, to bear witness to the intensity of a literary work does not involve a concern with “a hierarchy of causes and effects

within society”. It is a different kind of speech act; it involves a different language game—a different set of questions

altogether.

In “Resonance and Wonder”, Greenblatt explicitly states his aversion to “a disabling idea of causality that confines the

legitimate field of historical agency within absurdly restrictive boundaries”.17 He does so by contrasting two

different ways of seeing historical artifacts. “Resonance”, at first sight the predominant mode of the New Historicism, involves

the tracing of connections among objects so that their significance is shown to be relational, a product of a dense

network of symbolic relations and cultural practices. “Wonder”, on the other hand, focuses on the object itself in an intense

relation between viewer and that object: it attests to the “power of the object displayed to stop the viewer in his tracks, to

convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted

17 . Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder”, in Literary Theory Today , ed. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 74-90

(79).

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attention” (80). Materialist critics like Cohen take Greenblatt to task for the kinds of resonance that he evokes among literary

texts and their surrounding cultural artifacts. Being eccentric or arbitrary, such connections fail to explain the generic

production of the artifact. Instead, they merely set up random or whimsical resonances that are essentially undirected.

“Resonance” is produced out of the perception of relations, but they are not causal relations.

If Marxists treat even “resonance” with suspicion, they would blench at the concept of “wonder”, which looks like a

suspiciously mystifying, individualist and idealist approach to literary texts. But Greenblatt insists that wonder is the more

fundamental response: it is an openness to the power of the literary, to which he bears witness in the Prologue of Hamlet in

Purgatory , and from which, he laments, his profession has now withdrawn. It is the reason for the whole “enterprise” of

literary study “in the first place” (4). It is easier to move from wonder to resonance, he claims, than from resonance to wonder

(“Resonance and Wonder”, 89), while nonetheless asserting that it is “the function of the New Historicism continually to renew

the marvellous at the heart of the resonant” (ibid.). This concern with wonder as the primary response to the literary has

been all but ignored in most accounts, critical or supportive, of the New Historicism. I shall argue that it is decisive, and that

it is nowhere more evident than in Greenblatt’s latest monograph.

It should be apparent that, far from being a merely softer version

of Cultural Materialism as it is practised by critics and

theorists like Walter Cohen and Jonathan Dollimore,

Greenblatt’s cultural poetics sets out to ask very different

questions of a literary text—questions that not only

deliberately avoid causal explanation, but are positively

antithetical to it. We may see this by tracing more

20

systematically Wittgenstein’s influence on Geertz’s “cultural

poetics” and the philosopher’s own meditations on the nature of

anthropological explanation.

In his “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough ”, Wittgenstein takes

Frazer to task for offering causal or generic accounts of

primitive practices as primitive or failed hypotheses about the

nature of the physical world. In his explanation of the tragedy of

the King of the Wood of Nemi, Wittgenstein observes, Frazer’s

tone betrays the fact that “he feels, and wants us to feel, that

something strange and dreadful is happening”. But his

hypothetical explanation does no justice to this feeling since,

“compared with the impression which the thing described makes on

us, the explanation is still too uncertain” (121-3).18 Giving a

hypothetical explanation of the genesis of a practice does not

touch the tone or meaning or horror of that practice, the very

thing for which an account is needed. We need an account of the

relationship between the phenomenon that makes an impression on

us and an array of concepts that play a part in both our lives and

those of the participants in the practice. As Frank Cioffi puts

it: “What Wittgenstein denies is not the possibility of

historical explanation but its appropriateness where what is at

issue is the ‘inner nature of the practice’—the expressive

significance a ritual’s practices have for them”.19 The18 . Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough”, in Philosophical

Occasions 1912-1951 , ed. James C. Klage and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1993), 119-155.

19 . Frank Cioffi, “Wittgenstein and the Fire-festivals”, in Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein , ed. Irving Bock (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 212-237

21

importance of such conceptual is brought out by the fact that, in

explaining the superstitions of more primitive people, Frazer

resorts to his own, nineteenth-century vocabulary:

nothing shows our kinship with those savages better than the fact that Frazer has on hand a word as familiar to himself

and to us as “ghost” or “shade” to describe the views of these people . . . . Indeed, this peculiarity relates not

only to the expressions “ghost” and “shade”, and much too little is made of the fact that we count the words “soul” and

“spirit” as part of our educated vocabulary. Compared with this, the fact that we do not believe that our soul eats and

drinks is a trifling matter. An entire mythology is stored within our language. (133).

This argument is related to Geertz’s point that the ethnologist

cannot, and should not, attempt to recreate the experience of

another culture by seeing what it sees or feeling what it feels,

but should rather attempt to grasp what it sees or feels “through”

or “by” or “with” via the mapping of its conceptual system. We can

thus see why Wittgenstein should emphasize the process of seeing

conceptual connections through a “‘perspicuous ’ representation”,

through “finding connecting links ”. Such a connecting link should

do nothing but direct the attention to the similarity, the relatedness, of the facts . As one might illustrate an

internal relation of a circle to an ellipse by gradually converting an ellipse into a circle; but not in order to assert

that a certain ellipse actually historically, had originated from a circle (evolutionary hypothesis), but only in order to sharpen our

eye for a formal connection. (133)

Wittgenstein adds that many apparently evolutionary hypotheses

(215).

22

commit a kind of category mistake: they offer a causal

explanation as the mere “clothing of a formal connection”, which

in effect subtends the explanation. In other words, this

attention to similarity or relatedness (but also to difference)

is neither causal nor an explanation. At best it is a

description; but it is also more than that, for it involves the

active placing of different things in relation to each other in

order to “sharpen our eye for a formal connection”. Such

connections, in the case of anthropology and literary criticism,

are essentially connections between concepts: what any culture

sees or feels “through” or “by means of”.

The reason why only such a form of non-causal “resonance” will

suffice may be seen in Greenblatt’s other notion: “wonder”. For

Wittgenstein argues that what intrigues or arrests us about

certain practices historically and culturally removed from our

own is their “depth”. This notion of depth is akin to

Greenblatt’s wonder: it is what is arresting, what demands our

attention, what troubles or excites us. It is “the speculative

wonder which colours our impression of such things . . . which is

not concerned with the origin of the festival, but with its

expressive significance” (Cioffi, 215). To understand the

meaning of a practice we need to connect it with the surroundings

in the actual culture that give it life and its relations to our

own forms of life and response. In Geertz’s view, “the passage

is . . . from the immediacies of one form of life to the metaphors

23

of another” via the “practical contexts that give them life”

( Local Knowledge , 48). Furthermore, our relation to “any

imaginative construction powerful enough to interest anyone

beyond its immediate audience” (44) lies in the power of such

constructions to demand from us “the expense of [an] inward ease”

(45). This expense cannot be afforded by the assuredness

involved in establishing the “hierarchy of causes and effects in

society” (Cohen, 38).

Hamlet both demands and represents that expense of inward ease.

Its “magical intensity” is especially embodied (if that is the

right word) in its ghost—the very thing, as Wittgenstein points

out, that betrays Frazer’s cultural and human complicity in the

phenomena that he attempts to explain. The Ghost is an object of

wonder, both in the world of the play and to the spectators of its

spectral relation to he play’s protagonist. In his first version

of “The Touch of the Real” Greenblatt uses an account of a ghostly

sighting recorded in York in 1668 to exemplify what he means by

his desire to bring the literary into contact with the real.20

This is an unusual, if not a provocative, move, but it exemplifies

Greenblatt’s conception of the circulation of the real and the

fictional or literary in early modern texts. First, it indicates

that Greenblatt’s notion of the real is not limited to the

physical. Second, it emphasizes the New Historicism’s

resolutely non-causal or anti-generic view of that

20 . Stephen Greenblatt, “The Touch of the Real”, Representations 59 (Summer 1997), 14-28.

24

relationship. The record of a purported sighting of a ghost more

than sixty years after the first production of Shakespeare’s play

precluded any kind of linear “influence” on the play. For

Greenblatt, the controversy over the sighting is part of a set of

cultural, theological and political anxieties that is not

confined to linear, causal chain. The York deposition registers

concern over the status and meaning of ghosts that may be traced

in different forms in Hamlet , written some four decades earlier.

“Ghostly apparitions,” Greenblatt informs us, “were not

obsolescent or merely ‘literary’ in Shakespeare’s time and in the

generations that followed: they . . . continued to occur in the

real lives of men and women and to arouse the interest of the state

and church. That interest was in part at least the consequence of

a prolonged and often murderous conflict about the nature of

spiritual experience, a conflict that in turn pressed certain

cultural forms, such as ghosts, to operate in highly unusual

ways” (“The Touch of the Real”, Representations , 28). When I first

read the essay, was exasperated at Greenblatt’s coyness here, in

omitting or refusing to explain what he meant by this

infuriatingly teasing suggestion. Hamlet in Purgatory makes good

that earlier promise. It spells out not only the nature of that

“murderous conflict” and its relation to Hamlet, but also takes

further Greenblatt’s initial views of the touch of the real and

the touch of history upon literary texts.

The existence of ghosts, and their theological status, the new

25

book tells us, was central to the idea of Purgatory: the Roman

Catholic doctrine which posited a place or condition between

Heaven and Hell, where souls not altogether beyond redemption

were required to suffer in intense pain for as long as their sins

needed to be purged, before they could progress to paradise.

Ghosts from either Purgatory or Hell might appear to the living,

and it was crucial to determine a ghost’s provenance: to decide

whether it is “a spirit of health or goblin damned” (Hamlet ,

1.4.21), in Hamlet’s words to his father’s ghost. A ghost from

Hell held mortal dangers to the soul of the haunted person, while

a visitation from Purgatory, while still frightening, held less

spiritual danger. Such an apparition might be a warning to a

loved one, but more often than not it was a call to remembrance: a

reminder by the suffering, Purgatorial soul to be remembered in

the prayers of the living, so that the length of its suffering may

be reduced. A purgatorial ghost is thus a call to remembrance

—“Remember me!” the Ghost calls to Hamlet as it disappears in Act

1 Scene Five—a compelling reminder of the links between the dead

and the living, and the obligation of memory placed upon the

living.

Greenblatt is not the first critic to point out the interpretive

crux in Hamlet concerning the provenance of the ghost. The

implications for Hamlet’s course of action or inaction have long

been pondered by scholars alive to the Ghost’s hints at its

purgatorial suffering, which suggest both a father less pure than

26

his son imagines and remembers him, and one who is distinctly

Catholic.21 Greenblatt makes more of this issue than his

predecessors do, but it is also important to note what he does not

do with it. The purgatorial call to remembrance, he argues,

splits the play, creating its constitutive contradiction:

between a Senecan call to vengeance, and a purgatorial call to

memory. In an astute bit of conceptual analysis, he points out

that “the metaphors Hamlet uses have the strange effect of

inadvertently introducing some subjective resistance into the

desired immediacy [of revenge], since meditation and love are

experiences that are inward, extended, and prolonged,

experiences at a far remove from the sudden, decisive, murderous

action that he wishes to invoke” ( Hamlet in Purgatory , 208). The

Ghost thus marks much more than a personal crisis for the play’s

protagonist. It indicates a clash of two different conceptions

of tragedy and two different conceptions of personal suffering

and social responsibility, a split that goes a long way towards

explaining Hamlet ’s peculiar, puzzling doubleness or

contradiction. Greenblatt all but ignores the Senecan call for

vengeance in favour of the Purgatorial burden of memory. This is

fair enough, since the former has received far more critical

attention than the latter. But what does it mean to emphasise the

role of Purgatory in Hamlet?

21 I am thy father’s spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,

And for the day confined to fast in fires Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away. (1.5.9-13)

27

In answer to this question, Greenblatt takes us on a long,

detailed historical tour in which what Wittgenstein calls human

“needs and interests of the greatest variety” are imbricated with

issues of religion and power, politics and revolution. The

history of Purgatory in England in the sixteenth century involved

a fierce political debate between Catholics and Protestants

about what we would now call “ideology” or “false consciousness”.

Purgatory, Greenblatt tells us, has no basis in scripture and was

a twelfth-century invention. Reviewers with a greater knowledge

of Catholic doctrine than mine have disputed the second point,

but this does not affect the broad contours of Greenblatt’s

argument. The Protestant rejection of Purgatory was more than a

merely doctrinal matter: it lay at the heart of the Protestant

accusation that the idea was cynically used by the Catholic

Church to keep its subjects in awe and to maintain its own

essentially material power and wealth. Along with the idea that

souls that do not go either to Heaven or Hell spend a requisite

time in a middle place, where their sins are purged through

tortures identical in kind but not in duration to those in Hell,

there developed a whole system of practices and institutions

through which the living could intercede on behalf of the dead,

thereby reducing the period of their suffering. What is more, the

soon-to-be dead could leave money for prayers to be said in their

memory and on their behalf: the “suffrages” that could be

purchased on behalf of one’s soul. “The whole social and economic

28

importance of Purgatory in Catholic Europe”, Greenblatt writes,

“rested on the belief that prayers, fasts, almsgivings, and

masses constituted a valuable commodity . . . that could be

purchased, directly or indirectly, on behalf of the specific dead

person” ( Hamlet in Purgatory , 19). These prayers, fasts,

almsgivings, and masses took palpable and incalculable material

forms. William Camden estimated in 1607 that there were “2,374

chantries and free chapels, 110 hospitals, and 90 nonuniversity

colleges” as a direct consequence of purgatorial doctrine, and

Greenblatt adds that modern scholars regard this estimate as “a

substantial underestimation.” Despite the Protestant desire to

destroy the material accretions of Catholic heresy, “it would

have been a social catastrophe simply to shut down all

institutions that had been created in an attempt to provide

prayers for the dead” (39).

The idea of Purgatory thus had immense material consequences.

And the two early modern polemicists that Greenblatt uses to

exemplify the ideological battle pro and contra Purgatory engage

with each other on the grounds of two utterly different

conceptions of community, responsibility, and society. Simon

Fish’s tract, A Supplication for the Beggars (1629), argues that the

Catholic Church and its clergy are a parasitical blight on the

health of the commonwealth: sucking the people dry, they grow

fat, wealthy and powerful while the populace grows ever poorer

and more miserable. Thomas More responds, in The Supplication of

29

Souls , that Fish threatens to reduce human existence to

selfishness and greed, destroying the intimate connection

between the dead and the living in a “perfect community of mutual

charity and interest” (Purgatory , 144). Purgatory and the possible

passage of ghosts to call upon the living promise to maintain this

contact between generations. But to Fish and his fellow

Protestants this argument is no more than a sly political

subterfuge. By instilling in its parishioners a sense of deep

anxiety about their possible purgatorial suffering, and then

holding out the promise that such suffering may be shortened by

giving money for suffrages, the Church could maintain both its

material wealth and extend its ideological hold over a fearful,

and gullible, population. The poor grow poorer to enrich a Church

that fed them fictions. Purgatory, its Protestant opponents

held, is a piece of poetry, a figment of the imagination, used to

further a corrupt institution’s will to wealth and power.

The brilliance of Greenblatt’s book lies in its adroit

transformation of this sixteenth-century polemic into an

account of the continued power or intensity of what is probably

the most celebrated text in the Western literary tradition. For

Greenblatt resists the temptation to endorse the Protestant

charge. To have done so, showing how the idea of Purgatory was no

more than an instance of false consciousness through which

material power was instrumentally extended and maintained,

would have followed now well-established arguments within

30

Cultural Materialism. One of that movement’s seminal texts in

early modern studies, Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy , argued

that the modern, demystifying analyses of the workings of power

and ideology characteristic of Foucault and Althusser was in fact

already present in writers like Montaigne, Bacon, Machiavelli

and, indeed, in the drama of the period.22 That is to say,

Dollimore’s materialist argument would lead him to side with and

endorse Simon Fish as a radical predecessor of the later masters

of suspicion.

While there are moments in which Greenblatt is tempted to see the

idea of Purgatory as a merely ideological instrument—seeking

control through the provocation of anxiety— Hamlet in Purgatory

generally acknowledges the fact that, however it may have been

used, the idea served (and continues to serve) a deep human need.

“Through its teaching about Purgatory,” Greenblatt writes, “the

church mobilized an impulse of charity toward the dead that could

be deployed throughout the lives of the living.” He recognizes

the fact that a powerful political institution like the Catholic

Church could and did appropriate such an impulse for its own ends,

but he is careful not to obliterate that need by seeing it as a

mere instrument of institutional manipulation and false

consciousness: “The doctrine of suffrages confirmed the power of

the Mass and of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but it also

22 . Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries , 2nd . Edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).

31

stressed communal solidarity, kindness, love, and solicitous

concern for the weak and wretched” (59).

Greenblatt signals this general trans-historical need in a

characteristic way in the opening of his new book which begins,

with a personal anecdote that signals both his cultural and

religious distance from the idea of Purgatory and its closeness

to him. His father, he tells us, had left money to an organization

to say the Jewish prayer for the dead—the Kaddish —for him after his

demise. “Evidently, my father did not trust either my older

brother or me to recite the prayer for him. The effect the bequest

had on me, perhaps perversely, was to impel me to do so, as if in a

blend of love and spite” (7). Whatever its material and political

effects or causes, then, the idea of Purgatory spoke to the

deepest human needs of love, remembrance, community, kindness,

solace, charity—even spite—that Greenblatt feels on his own,

Jewish pulse. Hamlet , written decades after the idea of purgatory

had been expunged from Church doctrine as a piece of “mere

poetry”, attests, as poetry, to the afterlife of the idea: to the

fact that it continued to haunt the consciousness of

Shakespeare’s times and that it continues to haunt ours.

Half of Hamlet in Purgatory is devoted to a scholarly account of the

rise and fall of the doctrine of Purgatory: its role in Church

doctrine, its material effects, the polemic that it engendered,

and its final abolition by the Protestant Church. Greenblatt

32

illustrates his narrative with an acute analysis of the

iconography of Purgatory, a moving account of the way in the

purgatorial is converted to the conditions of present life in the

work of John Donne, and a fascinating description of the way in

which Purgatory was given a “local habitation and a name” by

locating its entrance at a place of pilgrimage in Lough Derg in

Northern Ulster. Despite the fact that the supposed purgatorial

cave in Ireland was the butt of Protestant jokes and ridicule, its

existence was considered a serious enough threat for the Bishop

of Clogher to have demolished it with a party of twenty men on

October 25, 1632. In the Bishop’s words, “this cave was but a poor

beggarly hole, made with some stones, laid together with men’s

hands without any great Art: and after covered with Earth, such as

husbandmen make to keep a few Hogs from the rain” (quoted in

Greenblatt, 100). He destroyed it.

This is, as Greenblatt notes, an acute act of disenchantment. The

sacred space of Purgatory is exposed as sorry human construction

forged “without any great Art”: “a mute heap of stones and dirt”

(100). Hamlet in Purgatory , demonstrates, however, the continued

power of the idea, even if that afterlife had to be sustained

after Protestantism became the state religion, on the stages of

the theatre or in the pages of fiction. The book’s most

intriguing analysis concerns a semi-fictional text, a poetic re-

inscription of an actual record of a ghost story. The Gast of Gy is

an English version of the haunting of his widow by Gui de Corvo

33

after his death in December 1323. As Greenblatt reads the text,

it combines an extensive and intricate debate about the

problematic nature of Purgatory with a consistent, if implicit,

challenge to the authority of the Prior who interrogates the

ghost. While accepting the authority of the Prior and the public

nature of his interrogation, the ghost finally sets limits to the

extent of the Prior’s authority. Like the Ghost in Hamlet, this

ghost visits a close family member from Purgatory in order to re-

establish and underline an intensely intimate relationship. He

attributes his purgatorial suffering to the deepest and most

intimate relations with and feelings for his surviving wife—to

something that he and his wife did while he was alive—and for

which he has returned to urge her repentance so that she may avoid

the intensity of his torment. The interrogation explicitly

raises questions and doubts about Purgatory, addressing “with

subtle indirection, the lingering skeptical doubts that

laymen . . . must have had about the whole elaborate business”

(117). But it does so without endorsing the Prior’s supposed

authority to determine either the nature of the ghost or the

existence and significance of Purgatory: “There turns out to be

nothing in the prior’s imposing institutional position that

gives him a privileged insight into the afterlife” (119).

The English poetic text thus both imposes limits on the

institutional authority of church figures like the Prior to

determine the meaning of Purgatory and the nature of the

34

haunting, and gives cogent sense to a tangle of emotions and

attitudes surrounding the dead and the living. “The doctrine of

Purgatory in this account,” Greenblatt concludes, “is a way of

organizing, articulating, and making sense of a tangle of

intense, intimate feelings in the wake of a loved one’s death:

longing, regret, guilt, fear, anger, and grief” (132). A form of

discourse that was at the center of sectional, institutional

interests is thus deployed to challenge the authority of that

appropriation, but without imposing an absolute split between

the personal and the public. Purgatory remains a central concept

within an immensely powerful institution in the Gast of Gy , but the

ghost’s refusal to divulge the secret reason for his purgatorial

suffering to the Prior—keeping it between himself, his wife and

God—“turns the work’s attention away from the public, visible

institution and directs it instead at the intimate bond between

the deceased husband and his grieving widow” (129).

Some reviewers of Hamlet in Purgatory have been disappointed in the

relatively scant attention that Greenblatt gives to

Shakespeare’s play as a whole. Expecting an interpretation or

reading of Hamlet to emerge from the scholarship, they feel let

down by the lack of a coherent reconsideration or clarification

of this most enigmatic of literary texts. But Greenblatt does not

intend to offer such a reading. He aims to bring into focus

aspects of the play that are puzzling or gripping by placing them

alongside new historical or conceptual facts. He is not saying

35

that the Ghost in Hamlet shows that Shakespeare was in fact a

recusant Catholic, nor that the battle over Purgatory is the

cause of Hamlet’s condition, nor that it promises to resolve the

play’s contradictions. He is saying that there is a depth to

Hamlet —a tragic intensity, as he calls it—that we can begin to

come to terms with by paying attention to the ways in which

rituals of remembrance and mourning are systematically thwarted

or corrupted by the society represented in the play.

This seems to me to be absolutely right. The problem with the

Danish Prince does not lie within his inscrutable interiority: it

resides in absence of public conditions and rituals for

expressing emotion, showing grief, forging personal

relationships. Claudius has from the very beginning usurped to

merely the throne, but also the language and rituals of mourning,

which are severely Protestant:

King Claudius ’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature,

Hamlet,

To give these mourning duties to your father;

But you must know your father lost a father;

That father lost, lost his; and the survivor bound

In filial obligation for some term

To do obsequious sorrow. But to persever

In obstinate condolement is a course

Of impious stubbornness, ’tis unmanly grief,

It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,

36

A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,

An understanding simple and unschooled;

For what we know must be, and is as common

As any the most vulgar thing to sense,

Why should we in our peevish opposition

Take it to heart? Fie, ’tis a fault to heaven,

A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,

To reason most absurd, whose common theme

Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried

From the first corpse till he that died today,

“This must be so”.

(Hamlet , 1.2.84-106)

The curious, histrionic moment when Hamlet flings himself into

Ophelia’s grave to outface her brother’s expression of grief

underscores this “disruption or poisoning of virtually all

rituals for managing grief” and “allaying personal and

collective anxiety” (247). And in another brilliant

disquisition on the conflicts between Catholic and Protestant

doctrine, Greenblatt argues that Hamlet’s disturbing nausea at

the materiality of the flesh (expressed most forcefully in his

revulsion from his mother’s sexuality), may be illuminated by

debates about the process of transubstantiation: the Catholic

belief that the host is actually turned into the flesh of God.

Protestants ridiculed this belief by insisting on its literal,

material consequences: what happens to Christ’s body if a mouse

37

were to eat some of the bread dropped on the floor during Mass? By

dwelling on the question of waste, Greenblatt argues,

Protestants wished to save the spirit from the terrible

materiality of the body, insisting that the Host is no more than a

symbol, the sacred or the spiritual could be entirely divorced

from the material: “If Christ’s Glorified Body, or, rather,

Christian faith in that Body, is to be saved from the material

contamination, it must be pried loose from the visible church,

separated off from the grossly physical bread and wine, reserved

entirely from the realm of the spirit” (242).

Striking about Greenblatt’s argument is the fact that he is not

seeking to attribute to any character, or even to the dramatist, a

set of Catholic or Protestant beliefs. Hamlet, for example,

expresses a Protestant denigration of the flesh while yearning

for a Catholic means of dealing with the dead. The debates and

concepts that Greenblatt places beside Shakespeare’s play are

what we might, following Raymond Williams, call a struggle

between the “dominant” and the “residual” modes of seeing and

feeling.23 Moreover, as in Hamlet , this struggle need not be

explicit: it may permeate the language of a literary work without

being explicitly talked about; it may even be felt as an absence

or a call, an uncanny sense that something lost will not go away,

like a ghost’s call to remembrance. Greenblatt suggests that

Shakespeare was especially canny at recirculating “weakened or

23 . Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory”, in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1980).

38

damaged institutional structures” (253-4) in his work. It is

Greenblatt’s singular achievement not only to have revealed the

historical nature of those structures, but also to have shown how

they continue to speak to present needs and interests.

I began this essay with a reconsideration of Greenblatt’s New

Historicism and its often-antagonistic relation to Materialist

criticism. I suggested that the New Historicism may be regarded

as having been in Purgatory for some time now: the Materialist

attack on its supposed ahistoricism and its aversion to causal

explanation is a kind of desire for a purging of those elements

that prevent it, in Walter Cohen’s words, from showing a properly

“Marxist concern with a hierarchy of causes and effects within

society”. Hamlet in Purgatory , taken seriously for its theoretical

implications as much as it historical scholarship, seems to me to

turn the tables. In a generally positive, if quirkily ironical

review, of Greenblatt’s book, Terry Eagleton comments of

Purgatory, “rarely has an extravagant fiction supported so

material an edifice”.24 The phenomenon may be rare, but it strikes

at the heart of the most fundamental of Materialist dogmas: that

it is material practice that determines ideas, not ideas that

determine the material. For it is clear that the immense

superstructure of chantries, chapels, masses, and bequests were

the consequence of an idea: a peculiarly powerful idea, but an

idea nevertheless. Furthermore, if we take its Protestant

24 . Terry Eagleton, “Return of the worthy pioneer: Review of Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt”, The Guardian , Saturday June 9, 2001.

39

critics at their word, the idea is itself a fiction, a bit of

poetry, nothing. Hamlet in Purgatory demonstrates the depth of that

idea, while tracing its embodiment in a variety of forms,

material and textual, real and imaginary. By doing so it

questions at least implicitly the Materialist valorization of

the material as a prime cause. Furthermore, from the

insubstantiality of the idea of Purgatory and its institutional

manifestations flows a further set of theoretical consequences.

For running through Greenblatt’s account of the power of ghosts

and that haunting of both texts like Hamlet and also our own,

twenty-first century lives by the needs and concerns that

Purgatory as idea attempted to address, is the notion that there

are certain fundamental needs, anxieties, and feelings that are

not simply the peculiar products of a specific age. Greenblatt

seeks, as he has from the moment he expressed the wish to “speak

with the dead”, to give an account of the continued power of a text

like Hamlet or the Gast of Gy to speak to our present concerns: to

haunt us as his father’s ghost haunts Hamlet.

One does not have to return to an uncritical form of Idealism or

Humanism to take these consequences of Greenblatt’s New-

Historicist enterprise seriously. One does, however, have to

abandon certain shibboleths at the heart of Materialism: the

primacy of the material, the antipathy to transhistorical or

transcultural needs and interests, and the valorisation of

causal or generic explanation, and the denigration of aesthetic

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power. It is especially apt that a book of historical scholarship

should have revealed so acutely the blindness of such dogmas at

the heart of a method that claims history as its own. Cohen and

Wilson are right: Greenblatt’s is deeply antithetical to a

“Marxist concern with a hierarchy of causes and effects within

society”. But he is in good company. Cohen’s mistake lies in

believing that the method of offering a perspicuous

representation of phenomena by placing them side by side is

merely arbitrary. It seeks, as Wittgenstein argued against

Frazer’s causal accounts of primitive rituals, to ask different

questions and satisfy other needs. Ghosts are an especially apt

way of exploring the nature of the depth that we feel about

practices that are both uncannily similar and strangely

different from our own. The encounter, like that with an

imaginative artifact such as Hamlet , is always made, as Geertz

insisted all good anthropological work should be, at the expense

of our “inward ease”.

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