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IN CONSIDERING HOW Hamlet stages a turn from a ritualized medieval past to a disenchanted modernity, Stephen Greenblatt and Sarah Beckwith both suggest that the play anticipates-or even, perhaps, attempts to engineer-the mind-body split of modern skepticism.Their emphasis is on different halves of that split, to be sure. Greenblatt, arguing that the play traces the bumpy road from a Roman Catholic emphasis on the material sacrament to a Protestant emphasis on the transcendent sign, takes the side of the body, calling attention to Hamlet's "insistence on irreducible corporeality."Beckwith,more interested in the riftbetween Hamlet's spiritual anguish and the inadequate religious ritual he witnesses, takes the side of the mind, noting Hamlet's "distrust in appearances." 1 But Greenblatt and Beckwith concur on one major reason for skepticism's arrival. Modern skepticism is born when Christians begin to question Roman Catholic ritual, particularly the sacraments,whose authenticity depends on an unstable pairing of outer and inner, physical and transcendent. Although Beckwith quarrels with Greenblatt on whether a distrust of physical reality ought to be assigned to Catholics or Protestants, she recapitulates Greenblatt's focus on "the persistence and what we might call the embarrassments of matter" involved in the sacrament of the Eucharist.2 If a sacrament is, as in Richard Hooker's familiar formulation, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, then it structurally poses the skeptical dilemma of trusting the evidence of one's eyes. How can water confer salvation, or a piece of bread Christ's sacrifice?
Underlying both Greenblatt's and Beckwith's analysis is a narrative of a fall from grace that is the fall from unconditional belief to conditional belief. Once skepticism is a possible response to the sacrament, even those who believe in a sacrament's efficacy can engage a skeptical dynamic as long as they notice the nagging split between the sacrament's materiality and the spiritual change it is supposed to effect.What makes skepticism possible-even if it does not make disbelief inevitable-is the believer's awareness of and propensity to dwell upon the inevitable disjunction between the material sacrament and the immaterial spirit. Implicit in such a formulation is a temporal shift. Before I was aware of the split between my inner state and my external perceptions, I could not but believe; after I was aware, I...