Unctious Matter in Hamlet

            Though sometimes regarded as a sign of the play’s forward-looking modernism, Hamlet’s skeptical materialism (what Stephen Greenblatt calls the Dane’s “irreducible corporeality”) emerges from Reformation theological debates, especially theories of the eucharist.  Scholars such as Sarah Beckwtih and Katherine Eggert have shown how anxieties about the real presence of the body of Christ within the ritual of communion had broad cultural implications.  This essay examines the shaping influence of a different sacrament—extreme unction—on the play.  The administration of oil by a priest to the deathly ill was thought to be an extra-biblical invention of the church as early as the writings of John Wycliffe.  At the same time, unctuous oil was also a topic of natural philosophy since Aristotle, for whom it was the glue that allowed the four elements to join together and remain fixed.   Medieval and early modern medial writing drawing on this tradition recorded competing recipes for producing healing “unctions” derived from various plants.  Turning to the play, and especially Hamlet’s obsession with material processes of corruption, purgation, and reincarnation, I suggest that unction—a word that appears only twice in Shakespeare and both times in Hamlet—operates kind of enchanted matter that triggers catharsis or purgation in the witnessing audience.