Hamlet and Purgatory

Stephen Greenblatt's 2001 book arguing that Hamlet's ghost is Shakespeare's literary response to the Protestant abolition of Purgatory — the Catholic doctrine of a place between heaven and hell where the dead could be aided by the prayers of the living — which was abolished in England when Shakespeare was a child.

Argues that Shakespeare's Hamlet is partly a mourning ritual for the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory that England lost — making the play's obsession with a dead father haunting the living a displaced version of the Catholic practice of praying for the dead — and that Shakespeare's own father may have died a closet Catholic.