5 - Preparing the Ground

Summary

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods or to reside

In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice,

To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendent world; or to be worse than worst

Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts

Imagine howling: ‘tis too horrible!

The weariest and most loathed wordly life

That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment

Can lay on nature is a paradise

To what we fear of death.

from Measure for Measure, Act 3, scene 1 William Shakespeare

From the vantage point of Protestant England in the early seventeenth century, when the doctrine of Purgatory would have been still fresh in the national memory, Shakespeare commented on death and thehereafter, which he presented as a place to be feared. The cornices of purgation, described by Dante in his Divine Comedy and illustrated in 1465 by Domenico di Michelino's fresco Dante e il suo Poema in Florence cathedral, recount vividly the trials of those trapped on Mount Purgatory; but although Purgatory, as an artistic subject, never achieved the same prominence as the Last Judgement, it was nevertheless interpreted by Shakespeare in Measure for Measure as physical discomforts stacked one above another, each torment to be endured and overcome before Paradise was reached. There is no doubt that the going would be tough and the use of the word Purgatory today is still synonymous with terror, bodily ordeals and indescribablediscomfort.Yet there is reason to believe that the doctrine of Purgatory was, in reality, one of hope rather than fear.

Purgatory was a belief which took the ablest minds in the Church many centuries to develop and refine, a doctrine which offered hope, not terror, after death. Its gestation and slow maturation has been described by Jacques Le Goff. It was originally a notion which emanated from two Greek theologians in the third century after Christ and it evolved slowly, acquiring a proud pedigree through the writings of St Augustine, Gregory the Great and St Bernard of Clairvaux.