Shakespeare's "Hamlet" is perhaps one of the most famous and hotly debated literary artifacts ever written. However, because literary critics and historians have discussed the work so often, it is easy to forget that Shakespeare wrote his tragedy as a play to be performed in the context of an Elizabethan production, to an Elizabethan audience. It is a refreshing antidote to some of more modern textual analysis of this performed text, which views the central character as a kind of an early existentialist, to consider "Hamlet" in light of its original audience.

Stephen Greenblatt's book Hamlet in Purgatory attempts to accomplish this. Greenblatt advances the theory that Hamlet, rather than simply being a tragedy about a man who could not make up his mind, is really about a man wrestling with the shifting religious climate of early Protestant England, a country still in great religious flux. Greenblatt states that for...
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