what were...?

Question

elizabethan veiws on purgatory?

sorry it's such a rubbish question, i need the info for a hamlet essay i'm writing. i've been searching on google for half an hour and can't find anything. i was just wondering if anyone on here knew

anything that you know will help, thanks
:)

Answer 1

As I understand it in Elizabethan times if someone committed murder or any other sin as serious they believed they would go to Hell.
Any lesser sin merited an indefinite period in Purgatory but eventually they would be allowed to enter Heaven.
A simplistic answer, I am sure someone else can express it in a more theological manner.

Answer 2

Oh what a tangled web we weave. Purgatory is a Catholic (the Church of Rome) concept. It's a place where people who haven't been all that bad in life, go to purge their sins. Having done this they might just be allowed into the Kingdom of Heaven.
Elizabeth I was forced to accept the split with Rome, instigated by her father, since otherwise she would have been considered to be illegitimate and therefore barred from the throne of England. It is unlikely that the idea of purgatory was part of the fledgling Anglo-Catholic church.
I seem to remember reading the following: 'Queen Elizabeth sat on the fence and slowly fell off on the Protestant side.'

Answer 3

Well, I think you should check outthis website first to get your answer. what was elizabethan veiws on purgatory?
this website will really help you. http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/renaissance.htm

however, The strength of this argument lies in its proximity to an Elizabethan mindset. Fernie begins, for example, by tracing shame in literature up to the late Renaissance. His overview is divided into two categories: Classical and Christian. Classical (Graeco-Roman) shame is primarily masculine and secular; Christian (Medieval) shame is feminized and sacred. Classical tragic heroes (Herakles, Ajax, Oedipus) are enervated by self-consciousness upon realizing their tragic errors (sexual and/or violent): seeing themselves as others see them they become degraded and distracted. Where, though, Classical shame is something to be overcome or pitied, saintly Christian figures are exponents (as it were) of shame as a cosmically empowering purgative. Crucially, Fernie sees the crucifixion (as he later sees Shakespearean tragedy) as a spectacle of emasculating shame rather than of heroic death; it is in taking part in this unifying spectacle that Christians gain salvation. The lines are drawn rather too neatly here between the dichotomy of Classical and Christian. But we discover why when the author moves on to portray Renaissance shame in terms of a struggle between these two opposing forces. This makes internal sense. An acutely reductive account of the history of shame is quite persuasively revealed, with some sensitive close reading, to be precisely how figures like Spenser (more Medievally) and Marlowe (more Classically) thought of it.

Answer 4

Try these.

www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu
/ap0701/hamlet.htm

renaissance.duelingmodems.
com/compendium/11.html