Confession and Memory in Early Modern English Literature: Penitential Remains

While Stegner incorporates evidence from popular Protestant casuistry books, such as William Perkins' Golden Chain, there remains an opportunity for further work building on this valuable study to examine more closely the role of these manuals of cases of conscience, as well as the texts that circulated among Catholics guiding self-examination and contrition in the absence of priests. In Stegner's reading "the diversity of Spenser's engagements with traditional and Reformation belief. . . resists attempts to read the episode as a definitive shift from a ritual-based Catholicism to a faith-based Protestantism" (60). Grounded in a strong reading of Hamlet and audiences' shared inability to read Claudius' internal state in confession, Stegner argues that "the priestly authority over the spiritual states of others to which [Hamlet] lays claim throughout the play becomes radically literalized and destabilized when yoked into the service of revenge" (117).