Hamlet: A New Historicist's View Term Paper

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..render up myself...Doom'd 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." (I.5). At first, Hamlet believes the ghost is from Purgatory because of the vividness of these images. Then Hamlet constructs a test for the ghost as he worries: "the devil hath power/to assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps/Out of my weakness and my melancholy, / as he is very potent with such spirits" (2.2). In short, Hamlet begins to doubt the doctrine because the ghost ostensibly from Purgatory has asked him to commit a murder, to kill a king.

Hamlet seldom displays a consistent attitude to Purgatory in the play. In his most famous soliloquy, Hamlet says that death is a place from which "no traveler returns" indicating he doubts the ghost (III.1). Hamlet wrestles with the nature of Purgatory when hesitating about taking his revenge because he wishes to obey the rules doctrine: "A villain kills my father; and for that, / I, his sole son, do this same villain send/He took my father grossly, full of bread; / With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May; / and how his audit stands who knows save heaven?" (III.3). But in the graveyard he shows disrespect for the physical bones and relics of the dead, noting that even great men turn to dust: "The very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box; and must the inheritor himself have no more, ha?" (V.1). This disrespect for relics is Protestant, not Catholic in spirit. It is Laertes who is upset that Ophelia (a possible suicide) will not be buried with full Catholic rituals, not Hamlet.

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But despite these apparent denials of the reality of Purgatory, Claudius is a murderer, and the ghost's word is thus true.

Hamlet's internal debate over the responsibilities of the living to the dead, even if these responsibilities entail murder and the death of the king mimics the debate of England itself, as it moved from a new religious conception of the world and a new religious attitude towards the dead. The new, more austere English Protestant ethos denied the value of ritual and showing physical acts of respect for the dead. As a play, "Hamlet" seems so contradictory because it is a product of an age of a cultural anxiety of how to maintain a connection with loved ones who had died, now that Purgatory was officially prohibited.

The literary criticism movement of New Historicism founded by Greenblatt suggests that there is no single answer to Hamlet's indecision. However, Greenblatt believes that understanding the historical context of the play, the supposed inexplicable mystery of how and why Hamlet can alternately deny and accept the ghost and the existence of an afterlife from scene to scene during the play, is easier to understand with proper historical knowledge. The play becomes more comprehensible when one understands that England had undergone similar historical shifts in its own consciousness.

New Historicism is alert to "the contradictions of any historical moment" (Greenblatt, cited by Felluga, 2002). Hamlet is above all a character of contradictions, of false starts and indecision. Likewise, the play "Hamlet" mirrors the recent religious climate and contradictions of Shakespeare's own day and to understand Hamlet we must understand the past, not simply look at the character with the eyes of the present.

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