I'm not sure where you get that info. You certainly can close tags in hamlet. (I often do). You just do not have to.
"A tag name may not contain a slash. Perhaps you have a closing tag in your HTML."
Which you can find in the source for the parser as well: if '/' `elem` tn
then fail "A tag name may not contain a slash. Perhaps you have a closing tag in your HTML."
Maybe there's a way to work around this so you can use closed tags, but it sure wasn't obvious.