mapping purgatory

Desdemona's deathbed, as I discussed in the previous chapter, stages a form of double vision, as an audience is drawn to perceive the bed as both an earthly and an eschatological space. I turn now from the enclosed, domestic location of the bed to consider a similar dynamic on a much wider geographic scale. This chapter will explore the “undiscovered country” of the afterlife (to borrow Hamlet's familiar phrase), examining how beliefs about the supernatural interacted with a cartographic epistemology. Specifically, I turn to the status of purgatory in Hamlet. For many in the field of early modern studies, this might seem to be well-worn terrain, the site of contests over religious beliefs, theologies, and ideologies within the period itself, and the site of scholarly struggles to interpret these contests within our own time. While purgatory certainly became a flashpoint for competing politico-theologies from the earliest days of the Reformation, it was not only the source of abstract beliefs or the impetus for religious practices. It was also a point of geographical speculation. An integral part of the debates, discussions, and general curiosity about purgatory was its actual location. This focus on geographical specificity has gone virtually unexamined, and it is what I will consider here. One of the places most frequently identified as the site of purgatory was the Icelandic volcano Mount Hecla. As I will argue, while this volcano is never mentioned by name, it is Mount Hecla that shimmers throughout Hamlet as the geographical locus of purgatory, the prison of Hamlet's father's ghost.