Loïc Corbery as Hamlet and Georgia Scalliet as Ophelia in a 2022 production. The play has a “preoccupation with death”, says Farah Karim-Cooper
Views of death were in flux at the time Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, around the turn of the 17th century. Beliefs of the Catholic medieval world had been thrown into chaos by the Reformation, and that in turn had inspired a culture of questioning and doubt typified in Martin Luther’s theses, to which Hamlet alludes.
In the Middle Ages, Catholics believed that, after death, you might go to purgatory, at which point surviving loved ones would have to pay the church for your pardon, or pray for your sins to be purged away. You might then make it to heaven, or go to what Hamlet calls “the other place”: hell.