Abstract
While much of recent Hamlet criticism is heavily invested in foregrounding Catholic-nostalgic aspects in the play, I argue that the purgatorial Ghost can also be read as a caricature. Comedic and parodic depictions of Roman Catholic doctrine and beliefs were fairly common in the popular writings of Shakespeare’s age. I situate Shakespeare’s Hamlet within contemporary Protestant culture and its literary aesthetics as well as populist appeal. Finally, I read Hamlet’s mocking of the Ghost at the end of Scene 1.5 along with a popular pamphlet, Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie (1590). Both, I argue, caricature Purgatory to induce community reinforcing Protestant laughter.
Against an overwhelming tide of Catholic-elegiac resonances in recent Shakespeare criticism, this essay shows how anti-Catholic reformed polemic is dramatized in Hamlet in a way that resembles popular caricatures of the doctrine of Purgatory. The essay is roughly divided into two parts; first, I note the significance of the sixteenth-century England’s literary anti-Catholicism and locate the same in Hamlet. Lastly, I analyse Act 1 Scene 5 by comparing it with Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie (1590). The ghost in Tarltons Newes is introduced as foreboding, it explains Purgatory to the Protestant (‘Calvinist’) narrator, but eventually the pamphlet trivializes the purgatorial pains and existence in a comical and sceptical manner. I argue that it is a similar literary subversion of the purgatorial Ghost that is effected by the end of 1.5. This essay foregrounds Hamlet’s mocking of the ‘fellow in the cellarage’ in ways that emphasize Protestant England’s wariness and scepticism concerning the doctrine of Purgatory.
In his exhaustive literature review in Hamlet in Purgatory (2002), Stephen Greenblatt admits that Elizabethan writers often mocked Purgatory – he cites Tarltons Newes and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus as examples – but concludes that in Hamlet ‘it comes close to a frightening reality’ (234). Surprisingly, Greenblatt does not engage with the burlesque comedy at the end of 1.5 or with Emilia’s bawdy joke in Othello that makes light of Purgatory. It is quite usual for recent scholarship to ignore subversions of Roman Catholic beliefs in Shakespeare’s plays. Consider, for example, Indira Ghose’s Shakespeare and Laughter (2008) in which she notes Feste’s ‘brilliant exchange with Olivia’ and how he wins the argument about Olivia’s brother’s posthumous residence in heaven or hell. 1 But she overlooks that in Feste’s expert catechism Shakespeare embeds a Protestant critique of prolonged mourning (associated with Catholics) as well as Purgatory that persuasively argues that deceased peoples’ souls go directly to heaven or hell. Rather, Ghose is more interested in revisiting the well-established narrative of English literary criticism that Shakespeare’s plays mock ‘Puritans’ who ‘were parodied as hypocritical windbags’ in early modern drama (5). Eventually, through my reading of Hamlet’s taunting lines, it is this critical refrain about Shakespeare’s religious depictions that I aim to challenge.
It is fruitful to compare Hamlet’s representation of Purgatory at the end of 1.5 with Tarltons Newes for a number of reasons. Tarltons Newes was first printed in 1590, and in the same year a companion pamphlet The Cobler of Caunterbourie appeared. 2 In Greenes Vision (1592), Robert Greene copies the comical style of these two pamphlets and calls Cobler ‘a merrie worke’. 3 Tarltons Newes parodies and dismisses the doctrine and beliefs concerning Purgatory. This pamphlet appears to have a close relationship with the writers of Elizabethan drama as everyone suspected of writing it was working in the theatre industry: Robert Greene, Robert Armin (who worked in Shakespeare’s Chamberlain’s Men), Thomas Nashe, and Shakespeare. 4 Stuart Gillespie notes that Tarltons Newes engages with Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone, which also served as a source for Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. 5 More specifically, both ghosts (in Hamlet and Tarltons) appear as real and sincere at first, but the encounters end in farce, and eventually both ghosts are either forgotten or prove to be mere illusions. Tarltons Newes was popular among readers as well as playwrights, and its anti-Catholic humour was a very familiar comic trope in Protestant polemic and popular writings. Shakespeare appears to have been well acquainted with this pamphlet as there are various similarities between Tarltons Newes’s ‘The tale of the two lovers of Pisa’ and The Merry Wives of Windsor. 6 Jane Belfield notes that the anti-Catholicism of Tarltons Newes is neither ‘excessively strong’ nor it is offensive politically, like the Martin Marprelate tracts. 7 The main purpose of the pamphlet appears to have been to entertain and seek wider readership. This should serve as a good reminder that literary anti-Catholicism, as it often occurs in Shakespeare’s plays, did not have to be menacing or oppressive. Rather, we need to focus on its entertaining, laughter-inducing and community reinforcing aspects.
While many critics note the Ghost’s questionable origins, none has adequately engaged with the comedic lines at the end of this scene or investigated their playful anti-Catholic transgressions. Greenblatt in his extensive exploration of Hamlet’s purgatorial ghost never addresses Hamlet’s scornful jibes at the Ghost. Jean-Christophe Mayer makes many insightful connections of the ‘News from Hell’ genre of writings – including Tarltons Newes – with Shakespeare’s Richard III and Hamlet but does not engage with Hamlet’s taunting of the Ghost. 8 In her non-partisan survey in Shakespeare and Religion (2010), Alison Shell discusses 1.5 and notes that ‘Shakespeare does elegize and exploit the supposed pastness of England’s old religion, in Hamlet and elsewhere’, 9 but she has nothing to say about the subversive comedy targeted at ‘the fellow in the cellarage’ trapped in theatrical hell under the stage. Eleanor Prosser concludes in Hamlet and Revenge (1967, 1971) that the Ghost is demonic. Susan Brigden situates the Ghost in the play’s cultural context: ‘for the reformed faith there is no purgatory, no spirits can appear, and ghosts can only be the Devil’s conjurations. Later, Hamlet acknowledges his own susceptibility’ when he considers the possibility that the Ghost could be the Devil who has come in the shape of his father’s spirit. 10 Prosser notes, with examples from Nashe’s Terrors of the Night and Puck’s speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that the Ghost shuns daylight in the manner of a damned spirit; the Ghost’s presence under the stage has similar implications. 11 But Prosser, too, overlooks the travesty of purgatorial existence and pains at the end of 1.5. In his informative handbook on Hamlet (2006), John Russell Brown concludes: ‘“Ha, ha, boy…truepenny…old mole”, is jocular, if not crazed’. 12 Brown admits that this sudden transition to the ‘cellarage’ after the moving encounter is puzzling and adds that in ‘Shakespeare’s time, the space under the stage was spoken of as “hell”, and demons were said to “work” underground and “shift” their location at will’ (54–5). In the Oxford edition of Hamlet (2008), G. R. Hibbard’s gloss to Hamlet’s use of the Latin phrase Hic et ubique notes, ‘The ability to be here and everywhere at once was confined to God and the devil’ (1.5.164).
England’s Catholic past and its material and psychological remnants certainly influenced the Church of England and ‘Protestant’ England, and we can note this influence in the Ghost’s Roman Catholic worldview (1.5.81–2). 13 Still, scholars have often struggled with the abrupt ending of 1.5, which undercuts the intensely mournful effect. More significantly, any admission of humour in this scene will inevitably frustrate the dominant pro-Catholic Shakespeare narratives. 14 There is a problematic overemphasis within ‘the turn to religion’ that juxtaposes a vacuous, persecutory and rigid ‘Protestantism’ with a richly imaginative, forgiving, contingent and inclusive Roman Catholicism. 15 According to Michael Davies, due to this scholarly bias ‘literary criticism…has never taken well to English Calvinism’. 16 As such, I aim to contest this monological scholarly discourse by emphasizing shared comedic resonances between Tarltons Newes and Hamlet’s mocking jibes at the Ghost at the end of 1.5.
Rainer Pineas writes in his slender book Tudor and Early Stuart Anti-Catholic Drama (1972) that ‘Tudor and Stuart religious polemical drama has in the past been dismissed as regrettable and lacking in literary interest’. 17 This dated comment rings truer today, as scholars have overwhelmingly ignored vital literary and dramatic sites of anti-Catholic polemic in Shakespeare’s works. Brian Cummings reminds us, ‘The polite forms of modern academic criticism’ shuns coarse oppositional religious polemic and even makes it a target of ‘sanctimonious rebuke, in oblivious disregard for the linguistic ultimatum always at stake’. 18 We can find abundant culturally significant anti-Catholic humour in Shakespeare’s plays if we are not hesitant in paying attention to seemingly prurient literary matters and, as Anne Lake Prescott writes, ‘the morally dubious pleasure in the creation of this [exclusionary] public’. 19 Exclusionary polemic by its very nature is often ‘slimy’, that is, ignoble, cruel and vulgar. That is precisely why Prescott uses the term ‘slime’ and justifies a scholarly exploration with this humorous appeal: ‘Let me be disreputable’. 20 Much of the reformed anti-Catholic polemic – whether in overtly religious writings or entertainments – is jocular, scatological and bawdy, from the writings of Martin Luther to William Tyndale, John Bale, ‘Martin Marprelate’ and beyond. As Patrick Collinson has noted: ‘The literary confutation of Catholicism became a major industry in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the life work of such academics as John Reinolds in Oxford and William Fulke and William Whitacre in Cambridge’. 21 But literary anti-Catholicism was in no way constrained to scholars and theologians: ‘what the [Marprelate] tracts tell us about is the interaction of print with the living street culture of Elizabethan England’. 22 Martin’s reformed theology and mocking of Catholic remnants in the Church of England’s doctrine and liturgy also aimed to please its audience. Recent Shakespeare criticism has neglected this tremendously important anti-papist feature of reformed England’s literary and popular culture that Shakespeare often appropriates for comedic effects.
Greenblatt has made a very judicious observation regarding the play’s Protestantism (represented by Hamlet) and Catholicism (represented by the Ghost): they do not so much engage with each other as they violently clash. Greenblatt writes: ‘What is at stake is more than a multiplicity of answers. The opposing positions challenge each other, clashing and sending shock waves through the play’ (240). Greenblatt adds that the clash’s overall effect is of ‘tragic potential’ (240). While I am in agreement with Greenblatt, I would add that at the end of 1.5 this Catholic–Protestant clash does not produce tragedy but travesty. At the end of this scene, the Ghost is not an emblem of Catholic nostalgia but a caricature that suddenly releases the psychological and emotional trauma built-up earlier in this scene by foregrounding Protestant scepticism towards purgatorial beliefs.
Scholarly overinvestment in Catholic resistance and nostalgia in Hamlet
Graham Holderness underlines Greenblatt’s strong reliance – in Purgatory (2002) and Will in the World (2004) – on revisionist historical works that have assessed ‘the impact of the Reformation on the relationship between the living and the dead’. 23 However, Timothy Rosendale observes that ‘scholars like Judith Maltby have…pointed out the biases and distortions that revisionism has introduced into our understanding of this era’. 24 Scholars such as Rosendale, Carol Z. Weiner, Diarmaid MacCulloch, David Womersley, Daniel Swift and Paul J. Voss have shown that by Queen Elizabeth’s death anti-Catholicism had become an integral part of English identity. Although Protestant factions bitterly fought over matters of doctrine, they were all united by their anti-Catholicism. 25 The Geneva Bible was possibly the most distributed book in the English Renaissance and sold about half a million copies by the end of sixteenth century, drawing ‘a readership that spanned the social hierarchy, as well as the spectrum of Protestant zeal’. 26 It is also useful to remember that the Book of Common Prayer, which also included the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles, was essentially an exclusionist text that defined itself against key Roman Catholic doctrines. It is these communitarian aspects that are reflected in contemporary drama’s comedic exclusions.
Keeping up the dominant critical narrative of elegiac Catholic depictions in Shakespeare’s work, Shell writes that Hamlet does the work of ‘consigning it [Catholicism] to another time, then bringing it back as a way of making his audience beautifully sad’. 27 This affecting sentence, however, betrays Shell’s interest in Shakespeare’s Catholic-nostalgic effects and raises significant questions. Is this the only effect the play’s Catholic allusions create? Are there ways of reading the play where Catholic references may not be making readers or audience ‘beautifully sad’? Who are ‘his audience’ and why must we assume that the play was written only for a segment of the audience who would be moved by such an effect? For a great many reformed audiences, Catholic evocations, especially of a purgatorial ghost, would not necessarily make them beautifully sad, rather such evocation could make them deeply fearful, an effect Shakespeare creates brilliantly in all the scenes where the Ghost appears. Despite my focus on the jocular ending of Scene 1.5, I agree with Greenblatt that the Ghost is indeed very frightening for all the characters in the play. Hamlet is terrified on both occasions he sees the Ghost and prays for divine protection (1.4.20; 3.4.106–7). It is very likely that the frightening aspect of the Ghost is due to the characters’ reformed disposition. 1 Samuel 28.11–14 was often cited by the Catholic Church as a justification for Purgatory. 28 Here we read about the witch of Endor conjuring the spirit of Samuel for Saul who bows before it. The Geneva Bible gloss 29 instructs that it was merely Saul’s ‘gross ignorance’ and ‘imagination’ that makes him believe in the conjuration and warns that the spirit was Satan disguised as Samuel, ‘as he can do of an Angel of Light’. Hamlet’s own words echo this understanding: ‘and the devil hath power / T’ assume a pleasing shape’ (2.2.611–12). Shakespeare creates disturbing effects of Hamlet’s confusion about the Ghost’s identity.
While Hamlet criticism heightens the Ghost’s pain and Hamlet’s trauma, many prominent movie adaptations either quickly gloss over Hamlet’s comical addresses to the Ghost or they insistently blur the comedy by showing Hamlet to have lost his mind so that his words’ comical meaning and intention is lost. A very good example of such an erasure is Derek Jacobi’s thrilling performance in the BBC adaptation (1980), directed by Rodney Bennett. 30 Jacobi engages deeply with Hamlet’s mocking lines but performs them with a mix of sad laughter and weeping to create a tragic–hysterical effect. Most adaptations follow Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948). Olivier’s erasure of the scene’s burlesque comedy is most problematic. In Scene 1.5, when Olivier asks the men to swear on the sword, ominous sound effects and music begin to play and we hear the Ghost’s first call (fourth in Shakespeare’s text), ‘Swear’ (1.5.198). At this stage, Olivier’s Hamlet looks grim and says sombrely, ‘Rest, perturbed spirit’ (1.5.199). The comic lines are omitted – as they are in most prominent movie adaptations of the play, for example, Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996).
One of the rarest enactments of the scene that retains its comedic intent comes from Richard Burton’s 1964 stage performance (directed by John Gielgud) that was also filmed. Fortunately for us, although the footage was never meant for wider commercial distribution, it was saved by Burton and is now available as a DVD. 31 In this performance, at the first call to swear, Burton looks surprised and alarmed. He looks up and around, and then points his finger to the floor and under the stage, and begins the first comical comment ‘Aha!’, which generates audience laughter. He speaks the next lines, ‘Sayt thou so? Art thou there truepenny?’ (1.5.167). At the second call to swear, Burton again acts surprised and alarmed but soon giggles and in comical tone speaks, ‘hec et ubique’, and quickly makes the sign of the cross. At the third and final call to swear, he giggles hysterically (but not evoking grimness or tragedy like Jacobi) and then stops for a beat and says with mock seriousness ‘Well said, old mole’, and the audience erupts into laughter (1.5.180). This brilliant performance takes us quite close to the scene’s original comic intent of trivializing the purgatorial pains and showing the Ghost to be merely an actor under the stage, crawling like a demonic spirit. We should remain open to the possibility that in the play’s earliest performances, after a frightening encounter with the Ghost, these mocking jibes could produce a community-reinforcing Protestant laughter, or at least comic relief, through a farcical implosion of a purgatorial elegy.
Before I argue for anti-Catholic exclusionary polemic in Hamlet, I would reiterate that it is not my intention to assess Shakespeare’s personal religious and ethical beliefs. Rather I focus on how the printed playtexts appropriate and echo the popular exclusionary polemic of their time with remarkable vibrancy that has been generally ignored by recent criticism of Hamlet.
Protestant and Catholic depictions in Hamlet
Shakespeare is very careful to give a particularly reformed disposition to Hamlet, which makes his encounter with the purgatorial ghost full of dramatic tension. Let us briefly consider how Shakespeare makes dramatic use of Hamlet’s at times hard-line Protestantism. At the beginning of 3.2, Hamlet gives advice to the players about how they should act. A player addresses Hamlet: ‘I hope we have reformed that indifferently with us, sir’ (3.2.25). Hamlet responds: ‘O, reform it altogether’ (3.2.26). This short exchange, seemingly concerned with the business of playing, can also be read as indicating Hamlet’s identification with Protestants who demanded further reformation of the Church of England. Huston Diehl reads these lines as the play’s Protestant aesthetics, as expressing ‘early Protestant concerns about the imagination, its excesses and dangers’. 32 Dramatically, it makes sense to highlight Hamlet’s doctrinal shift towards a fervid Protestantism that is unforgiving of any laxity and often becomes condemnatory. In the previous scene, after suspecting that Ophelia is conniving with Polonius, Hamlet accuses her of sexual immorality and tells her to enter ‘a nunnery’ (3.1.147). 33 If we consider that Hamlet is speaking from the position of a declamatory Protestant and incorporates unyielding Protestant rhetoric into his ‘antic disposition’, the word ‘nunnery’ works in both of its senses: as a brothel and as a Catholic convent. Bernadette Andrea has noted that the euphemisms such as ‘abbess’ for a brothel keeper and ‘nuns’ for prostitutes were common by the 1590s. 34 Hamlet’s judgemental shift towards hard-line Protestantism continues to achieve the same effect in the closet scene (3.4) in which he condemns Gertrude’s sexuality in a very similar manner and asks her to confess her sins directly to ‘heaven’ without priestly mediation.
When the Ghost appears in the closet scene, Hamlet is terrified and prays for divine protection (3.4.106–7). He realizes that the Ghost’s command to commit a cold-blooded murder and seek private revenge is demonic. Even a cursory attention to purgatorial suffering should make us realize that the Ghost’s purgatorial pains cannot be alleviated through a call for revenge. As Roy Battenhouse has noted: ‘The Ghost does not come to ask help for his own soul. He has no present desire for intercessory prayer or ecclesiastical works in his behalf. On the contrary, almost his first words are: ‘Pity me not’. 35 Peter Lake and Michael Questier have claimed that the Ghost’s purgatorial beliefs, at least in 1.5, surely merit more attention and that these Catholic beliefs ‘might have been expected to arouse the skepticism of the more protestant of the viewers regarding the ghost’s claims’. 36 But such doubts are allayed by the end when the Ghost appears not really as ‘a demonic illusion’ but ‘precisely as it would have been in a murder pamphlet, as a teller of truth and an agent of providential judgment’. 37 Even if we do not consider the play’s resemblance to the crime pamphlets, the Ghost’s ‘Catholicism’ does not play an important role in the rest of the play, and he is never mentioned in the fifth act of the play. On the other hand, I agree with Lake that the Ghost’s initial sacramental and purgatorial allusions are significant and would be instantly recognized by Shakespeare’s audience. In fact, I argue that the comic implosion at the end of 1.5 very much depends on the intense evocation of Catholic sacramental beliefs and Purgatory. As such, 1.5 has its own plot design and thematic preoccupation. The scene brings a purgatorial Ghost face-to-face with the audience and shows us Hamlet’s emotional encounter with it; after revealing Claudius’s crime, the Ghost binds Hamlet with a damnable duty to take private revenge. But quite unexpectedly, Shakespeare dissolves the mystique of the purgatorial Ghost, reduces it to a demonic place under the stage and at least momentarily liberates the character of Hamlet from the heavy burden where he is able to mock and taunt the ghost claiming to be his father’s spirit.
Michael Davies offers a useful way of thinking about Shakespeare’s religious representations: we cannot know about Shakespeare’s personal confessional views, but it could be argued that he sometimes wrote like a Calvinist, ‘that is, as a dramatist attuned to the language, grammar and syntax of early modern Protestant ways of thinking, reading, and living’. 38 To imagine such a discursive Protestant culture, it is also useful to consider the ‘theatre-going Protestants who must also have attended the sermons of Protestant ministers and bought the Calvinist tracts and pamphlets that were being published alongside (and vastly outnumbered) printed plays’. 39 Within English literary criticism’s habitual disdain for dour Calvinism and Protestantism, it is easily forgotten that Protestant mirth with its comedic exclusions of Roman Catholic doctrine was an integral part of popular culture and its literature.
Towards the end of the sixteenth century, Catholic beliefs are frequently mocked as absurd in Protestant discourses and entertainments. Reginald Scot calls Catholic accounts of St. Margaret’s encounter with the devil ‘a fable’ because of ‘the incredible, impossible, foolish, impious, and blasphemous matters contained therein, and by the ridiculous circumstance thereof’. 40 Adam Kitzes notes that anti-Catholic polemic was often presented as Protestant entertainment; for example, a key ‘Reformist strategy [was] to dismiss Purgatory as something that did not warrant a serious response’. 41 Barnabe Riche’s pamphlet The True Report (1584) in its long title promises to give a true report ‘of a late practise enterprised by a papist with a yong maiden in Wales’ and claims that having read the sordid details of priestly lust and seduction ‘the reformed Protestaunte shall finde cause worhtie to laugh at’. 42 Anti-Catholicism was not limited to the staunch nationalism or sombre ‘Calvinistic’ doctrinal positions of the Church of England, but rather it formed a very vibrant form of entertainment delivered through sermons, books, pamphlets and plays.
Whenever Scot discusses a Catholic belief or doctrine in Discoverie, he assumes a mocking tone. Here is how he engages with Purgatory: Where are the soules that swarmed in times past? Where are the spirits? Who heareth their noises? Who seeth their visions? Where are the soules that made such mone for trentals, whereby to be eased of the paines in purgatorie? Are they all gone into Italie, bicause masses are growne deere here in England. Marke well this illusion, and see how contrarie it is unto the word of God.
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An anti-Catholic farce: Richard Tarlton and King Hamlet in Purgatory
Tarltons Newes begins with the narrator wanting some solitary time away from a great crowd of people who have come to see a play in a theatre. The narrator rests in the cool shade of a tree on a hot day and falls asleep. Soon, a ghostly figure dressed as a clown appears, resembling the comic actor Richard Tarlton (d.1588). The narrator’s reaction is very much like the characters in Hamlet: ‘I that knewe him to be deade at this sodaine sight fell into a great feare, in somuch that I swet in my sleepe’.
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But the ghost treats the narrator very genially and says, ‘sith my resemblance to thee is in resemblance of a spirite, thinke that I am as pleasant a goblin as the rest, and I will make thee as merry before I part’ (145–6). When the apparition confirms that it is the ghost of ‘Dick Tarlton’, the narrator immediately refutes him, and, at the same time, the readers are given a concise reformed debunking of Purgatory:
In nomine Iesu, avoid Sathan for ghost thou art none, but a very divel (for the soules of them which are departed) if the sacred principles of Theologie be true, never returne into the world againe till the generall resurrection: for either are they placst in Heaven, from whence they come not to intangle themselves with other cares, but sit continually before the seate of the Lambe singing Alleluia to the highest, or else they are in Hell. (144)
In Tarltons Newes, when the narrator shows scepticism, Tarlton’s supposed ghost is quick to issue his counter-refutation: ‘and as soone as I heare the principles of your religion, I can say, Oh there is a Calvinist’ (146). The ghost engages the narrator in a friendly debate and makes a case for ‘a third place that all our great grandmothers have talkt of, that Dant hath so learnedly writ of, and that is Purgatorie’ (146). Next, the ghost makes a connection with Roman Catholicism. Purgatory must exist ‘or else was there much land and annuall pensions given in vaine to morrowmasse priests for dirges, trentals, and such like decretals of devotion…how many Popes and holy Bishops of Rome, whose Cannons cannot erre, have taught us what this Purgatorie is?’(146). This impassioned fictional case for purgatory achieves two effects: first, it establishes that pre-Reformation England’s Christians could sincerely hold purgatorial beliefs, much like King Hamlet. Tarlton’s ghost mentions that even learned men like Dante could be inspired by the doctrine of purgatory to write epic poems. Second, and more important, the only foundation of purgatory is ‘many Popes and holy Bishops of Rome, whose cannons cannot erre’; this is a justification with – for reformed Christians – an inherent fallacy, that is, it has unbiblical foundations. 48 The narrator informs his readers, ‘I coulde not but smile at the madde merry doctrine of my friend, Richard’ (147). It is notable that Richard Tarlton’s ghost is depicted as a good person who holds erroneous papist views and thus deserves sympathy and reformed enlightenment. The pamphlet’s target is Catholic doctrine, not English Catholics. The ghost continues to give a description of his journey to Purgatory – which includes a ‘faire meadow’ that is ‘overgrowne with Ave maries and creedes’ – and then checks himself from describing ‘many moe of other miseries, which I am by the law forbidden to utter’ (147). This constraint is also shown by King Hamlet’s Ghost: ‘But that I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison-house’ (1.5.17–8). The Ghost never explains in detail what kind of tortures souls in this ‘prison-house’ suffer but mentions, rather bombastically, the effect it could have on Hamlet:
Tarlton’s ghost, however, goes on to describe the details that begin with mocking headlines such as ‘The tale of Friar Onyon, why in purgatorie he was tormented with waspes’, and ‘The tale of the Vickar of Bergamo, and why he sits with a coale in his mouth in purgatorie’ (153, 166). As Belfield reminds us, Tarltons Newes ‘with its mild, slightly ridiculous [purgatorial] punishments is partly a burlesque on the physical details of Purgatory as well as an attack on the doctrines concerning it’.
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It is likely that the Ghost’s lurid language about purgatorial suffering is alluding to some of those comic tropes concerning the embellishment of purgatorial pains. Moreover, Hamlet’s 1.5 ends in a similar fashion by making light of anecdotal and, for reformed Christians, fabricated purgatorial pains. We can also draw comparisons between the Ghost’s physical description of Purgatory and Tarltons Newes. A ‘prison-house’ brings to mind a physical building, something that is man-made. Here is how Tarlton’s ghost describes his purgatorial building: In this hall shall you see an infinite number of seates, formed and seated like an Amphitheater: wherein are roially, nay more than royally placed all the Popes, except the first thirty after Christ, and they went presentlie to heaven: and the reason was, because Purgatorie was then but a building, and not fully finished. (147–8)
But more importantly, the end of 1.5 effectively turns the purgatorial Ghost into a caricature. Hamlet’s trivial comments addressed to the Ghost in front of his friends are markedly inconsistent with the intense grief he has expressed earlier for his father’s tormented spirit. Hamlet’s playful taunting works to reduce the Ghost to a man-made theatrical prop, an analogy often used in reformed anti-Catholic polemic. In effect, the earlier pathos and emotional tension of the scene gives way to a comedic climax at the expense of Catholic beliefs. After the first call to swear an oath Hamlet comments: ‘Ha, ha, boy! Sayst thou so? Art thou there, truepenny? / Come on, you hear this fellow in the cellarage: / Consent to swear’ (1.5.167–9). Against the Ghost’s heart-rending allusions to purgatorial torments, Hamlet’s comment has reduced him to a ‘fellow in the cellarage’. At the Ghost’s third call to swear, Hamlet carries on addressing the stage actor: ‘Well said, old mole! Canst work I’th’ ground so fast?’ (1.5.180). Hamlet’s trivialising of the Ghost and its moving under the stage highlight a much larger point. Shakespeare does not want his audience (and readers) to take the tangential mention of Purgatory as an act of Catholic doctrinal advocacy. Instead, the seemingly purgatorial Ghost who also, tentatively, evokes nostalgia for England’s old Roman Catholicism has been reduced to a stock character that evokes a burlesque. Like Tarltons Newes and other reformed polemical works, here too, Purgatory has become a ‘madde merry doctrine’ that does not deserve a serious response. As the purgatorial Ghost is comically excluded by Hamlet’s lines and Shakespeare’s stage directions, the audience is intended to be brought together by anticlimactic farce that foregrounds Protestant scepticism towards the Roman Catholic doctrine of Purgatory.
It is true that Shakespeare’s depiction of the Ghost is quite ambiguous and frightening at the beginning, but it is certainly unmasked and mocked from a reformed perspective at the end of scene 1.5. As Battenhouse and Lake have argued, the Ghost’s purgatorial origins or Catholicism are scarcely the focus of the play and it is quite forgotten in the significant final act. Still, within the thematic design of 1.5, the evocation of sacramental and purgatorial details matter, and the scene’s eventual travesty works to undercut and demystify them in the manner of popular reformed polemic that generates anti-Catholic glee and entertainment. In the play the Ghost’s call for remembrance is an emotionally manipulative demand for a damnable private revenge: a subtle equivocation that a demon in an angelic and pitiable disguise could practice.
As I have shown in this essay, it is at the end of 1.5, after the pathos of Hamlet’s first encounter with the Ghost, that Shakespeare dissolves the purgatorial phantasm, and has Hamlet mock ‘the fellow in the cellarage’ playing the demonic spirit shifting under the stage in a theatrical hell. This comedic depiction of the purgatorial ghost is quite lost in most modern Hamlet criticism as well as stage and movie adaptations.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program scholarship.
