An Allusion to Purgatory in Hamlet

Extract

AN apparently overlooked allusion to Purgatory is found in the fourth act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hamlet is brought before Claudius to divulge where he has hidden the body of the slain Polonius (IV.iii.16–36).¹ ‘Now Hamlet, where’s Polonius’, the king demands. The situation of being summoned for interrogation before a king bears a definite and thus possibly deliberate similarity to Martin Luther’s before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the 1521 Diet of Worms, to which Hamlet proceeds to allude in his bewildering reply to the king’s question.² The allusion is clearly anti-Catholic in import, implicitly denouncing the Diet as a ‘convocation of politic worms’, presided over by the worm who is the ‘only emperor for diet’. At the same time, Hamlet’s words seem to reflect Protestant satire of the Catholic Eucharist, in which the ‘king’ was liable to undergo precisely such ‘progress through the guts of a beggar’ as that of which the prince speaks, or worse.³ Claudius—much to the amusement, one presumes, of the wiser sort—gets none of it: ‘Alas, alas’, ‘What dost thou mean by this?’ He repeats the question: ‘Where’s Polonius?’ ‘In heaven’, answers Hamlet: ‘send thither to see. If your messenger find him not there, seek him i’th’other place yourself. But if indeed you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby’. The literal meaning is perfectly clear, but surely here also more is meant than meets the king’s ear: if Polonius is neither in Heaven nor in Hell, there is still, in Catholic doctrine, one remaining option—the ‘lobby’ of Purgatory.