checking out the library book / Love - massively OT, mostly

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

Kneasy wrote in 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_old_crowd/message/1868 :

<< A nunnery could be much more useful than just as a religious House.
Hence Hamlet's "Get thee to a nunnery."  >>

My friend the ABD in English Literature (from UCLA) told me that the
'nunnery' Hamlet meant was a slang term for whorehouse, especially
since Shakespeare wrote Hamlet under Elizabeth I, when the monasteries
and convents had all been disbanded and being Catholic cast doubt on
one's loyalty to the monarch. 

IIRC she said it was a cliche in Eng Lit departments that Hamlet is
the story of a Protestant son and a Catholic father -- her example was
that Hamlet's father's ghost said he was speaking from Purgatory, but
the Church of England didn't believe in Purgatory, thus giving Hamlet
good reason to doubt that it was really his father's ghost speaking.

(Mind you, she was in grad school in the 1960s and everything believed
in those days might be different now.) 

(See, I've made the subject line 'checking out the library book'
relevant again in a whole new way!)