Volume 49, Number 6 · April 11, 2002
Ghosts
By Peter Holland
Hamlet in Purgatory
by Stephen Greenblatt
Princeton University Press, 322 pp., $29.95
Describing his new book, Stephen Greenblatt writes that it is 'about the afterlife of Purgatory, the echoes of its dead name. Specifically, it is about the traces of Purgatory in Hamlet.' Central to the book is Hamlet's most famous speech, the one that actors playing the role dread above all since they know some of the audience will be audibly repeating it along with them. This meditation, on the choice between being and not being, leads him to contemplate the afterlife and mankind's terrified ignorance of what might follow death, the terror that leads us to put up with the ordeal of living:
Review, 4284 words
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