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.
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