ABSTRACT

In recent William Shakespeare studies, ‘presentism’, a deliberate strategy of interpreting texts in relation to current affairs, has emerged to challenge the dominant fashion of reading Shakespeare historically. Presentism relinquishes the fantasy of restoring ‘Shakespeare’s artistry to the earliest conditions of its realisation’ in favour of embracing its true historicity as something irreversibly changing in time. This chapter analyses the strange spirituality of the last act of Hamlet as a striking epitome of literary difference that speaks powerfully and provocatively in favour of a complete commitment to the present. It explores the surprising scope for reading Shakespeare spiritually in the present in Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory and Jacques Derrida’s Hamlet-inspired Specters of Marx. Suspended between this world and the next, Purgatory facilitates but also defers final judgement. In its comparable deferral of the ethics and politics of spirituality, Hamlet in Purgatory affords a troubling image of our own seminal Shakespeare critic himself languishing there.