Hamlet

Critical Essays

Arthur F. Kinney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136017346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the international contributors to Hamlet: New Critical Essays contribute major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of Hamlet. This book is the most up-to-date and comprehensive critical analysis available of one of Shakespeare's best-known and most engaging plays.

Part I

Tudor-Stuart Hamlet

Shakespeare at Work: The Invention of the Ghost

E. PEARLMAN

Any moderately knowledgeable Londoner who in 1599 or shortly thereafter had set out for the Globe to see a performance of the new and revised Hamlet could safely assume that the play would give prominence to its very famous ghost. While crossing the Thames by bridge or by wherry, he might anticipate that sometime early in the play the Ghost would let loose a high-pitched blood-curdling shriek, “Hamlet, revenge,” or perhaps, “Hamlet, revenge my griefs”¹—the celebrated (if even then some what dated) lament was so fabled a piece of theatrical extravagance that even a refurbished Hamlet would dispense with it only reluctantly. Such a playgoer might think himself aggrieved, at first, to discover that the re-imagined apparition failed to utter the outbursts of ghosts of Hamlets past. And although he might be temporarily solaced that the new Ghost retained some features that harked back to ancient Seneca, he would shortly come to realize that almost his every expectation about this new Ghost’s nature—when the phantom would appear or not appear, what he would say or not say (or shriek or not shriek), what he would look like, and even the very essence of his putative being—would defy both formula and precedent. Yet a playgoer might in the course of the afternoon come to acknowledge that although the Ghost declined to gratify old expectations, he pleased and startled the audience with newer and more sophisticated joys. A person who might have entered the Globe complacently would return home knowing full well that the Ghost had simultaneously shocked, teased, chastened, and befuddled him—exactly the same reaction, history shows, that the Ghost has provoked in strenuous critics for four hundred years.²

Shakespeare’s radical re-invention of the Ghost, and most specifically his staging of the first meeting between the Ghost and Hamlet, is one of the stellar triumphs of the Elizabethan theater. It is almost impossible to exaggerate how startling and original the Ghost must have seemed to its first audiences. Although over the course of the centuries the scene’s impact has been diluted by imitation and by familiarity, it still provokes a powerful response. In its own time, when ghosts were still ghosts and the play was newly mounted, it would have been a truly spectacular coup de théâre. Although there is no early account of the play in performance, the first encounter between Ghost and Hamlet continued to generate its extraordinary emotional force well into the eighteenth century, when it was still thought by some to be the greatest scene ever written. The tradition that had begun with Burbage playing Hamlet (Shakespeare himself personating the Ghost) and had been sustained by Taylor, Betterton, and Robert Wilks found its fruition in David Garrick’s playing (most familiar to moderns from Benjamin Wilson’s famous portrait of the horror-stricken actor). Lichtenberg’s detailed account of Garrick in action hints at the power that would have transfixed the very earliest audiences.

As Hamlet moves towards the back of the stage … Horatio starts, and saying: “Look, my lord, it comes,” points to the right, where the ghost has already appeared…. At these words Garrick turns sharply and at the same moment staggers back two or three paces with his knees giving way under him …; thus he stands rooted to the spot…. His whole demeanor is so expressive of terror that it made my flesh creep even before he began to speak … At last he speaks, not at the beginning, but at the end of a breath, with a trembling voice: “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” words which supply anything this scene may lack and make it one of the greatest and most terrible which will ever be played on any stage. (Lichtenberg, p. 15–16)

The emotion for which Garrick aimed is a “terror” so powerful that it made Lichtenberg’s “flesh creep.” It is the “most terrible” (terrifying, in contemporary idiom) scene that can possibly be played. While the Ghost who in the early 1590s shrieked “Hamlet, revenge” had already become just slightly ludicrous or a trifle campy, the new ghost, Shakespeare’s Ghost, could still a century and a half after its creation “chill … the blood with horror” (as Samuel Johnson feelingly observed [Johnson, p. 112]). The question, then: by what means did Shakespeare transform a somewhat old-fashioned shrieking ghost into a vision as haunting and fearful as Garrick (and Burbage, presumably even more so) managed to portray?

Shakespeare’s earlier forays into ghostmanship, it must be acknowledged, were not especially innovative and do not hint at the triumph he would achieve at the end of the century. In Richard III, George of Clarence describes his nightmare encounter with spirits. It is a detailed and leisurely narrative, gorgeous in its own terms, but nevertheless an elaboration of a technique that Shakespeare would soon overleap. Borrowing from the ancient epics, Clarence tells how the “sowre Ferry-man” helped him across the “Mellancholy Flood” where he entered “unto the Kingdome of perpetuall Night” (1.4.46–47; TLN 881–883).³ There he confronted the ghost of Henry VI’s son Edward, whose murder by the Yorkists (Clarence himself a willing co-conspirator) Shakespeare had dramatized in the antepenultimate scene of 3 Henry VI. Edward’s ghost, as Clarence says, was

A Shadow like an Angell, with bright hayre
Dabbel’d in blood, and he shriek’d out alowd
Clarence is come, false, fleeting, perjur’d Clarence,
That stabb’d me in the field by Tewkesbury,
Seize on him Furies, take him unto Torment.

(1.4. 53–56; TLN 889–893)

The Vergilian setting, together with the ghost’s normative and inherited properties (his bloody appearance, his high-pitched noise, his league with other spirits, and most particularly his slightly hysterical diction), offer a nice epitome of the characteristics that audiences had every reason to expect of such spirits (and, it may be supposed, of the older Hamlet’s ur-ghost), but it is far wide of the Ghost with whom Shakespeare would in a few years thrill his audience.

There are other noteworthy old-style ghosts in Richard III. In restless sleep during the night before the climactic battle at Bosworth, Richard of Gloucester finds himself stalked by an almost endless parade of wraiths. First the spirit of Prince Edward (he of the bloody bright hair), then Edward’s father the pious and feckless King Henry VI, then drowned Clarence, followed by Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, Hastings, and the famous tower princes, then Richard’s wife Anne, and last of all Gloucester’s noble henchman Buckingham one after another arise from death to praise Richmond and to heap their curses upon Richard. Each of the ghosts in turn directs the same formulaic malediction at the usurper: “despair and die.” It is a long and consequently predictable series that makes use of reiteration and ritual rather than novelty or surprise for its dramatic power. For Shakespeare, the ghosts in Richard III were both a precedent to be honored and a noose to be slipped. A trace of Buckingham’s stylized repetitions (“Dreame on, dreame on, of bloody deeds and death;/ Fainting dispaire; dispairing yeeld thy breath” [5.3.72–73; TLN 3631–32]) survives in the later Ghost’s melodramatic refrains (both “Adue, Adue, Hamlet: remember me” [1.5.91; TLN 777]) and the slightly antique “Oh horrible, Oh horrible, most horrible” [1.5.80; TLN 765]). Yet even though the Ghost in Hamlet utters an occasional atavistic line, his impact is far greater and he himself more immediate and engaging than his counterparts in Richard III, for the ghosts who haunt Gloucester are not much to be distinguished from the familiar creatures of Elizabethan convention. Shakespeare, it is clear, still had a good deal of thinking and rethinking ahead of him.

The great emancipating moment in the re-invention of the Ghost in Hamlet seems to have occurred, surprisingly enough, while Shakespeare was engaged in writing Julius Caesar—a play that, it has been well established, is very closely linked to Hamlet in chronology and design. How many years (or months) intervened after Shakespeare had done with Julius Caesar and before he turned his now-accomplished hand to his next tragedy cannot be established with certainty, but it could not have been many. Julius Caesar was in performance in September, 1599, when Thomas Platter heard it at the Globe, and Hamlet was by most reckonings composed during 1600 and 1601 and perhaps even earlier (it is possible that the great revision might have been in an early phase of composition even before Shakespeare brought Julius Caesar to completion)⁴ However long (or short) the interval between the two works, the Roman play did not slip easefully from Shakespeare’s consciousness, but continued to reverberate while he composed the Danish tragedy. Perhaps Julius Caesar remained in suspension in the playwright’s faculties because of the very general similarity of the plots of the two plays: the assassinated Julius, the assassinated King Hamlet; the long travail of Anthony the protegé and young Hamlet the son to make amends for their “fathers’” deaths; the rivalry of Brutus and Cassius in the one play and the rivalry of Hamlet and Laertes in the other. And then there are additional links between the two plays, the oddest of which is Polonius’s (or John Hemmings’s) curious intimacy that he himself acted the part of Julius Caesar once, and that “Brutus kill’d me” (3.2.100; TLN 1959). Even more pertinent is the parallel between the brooding Hamlet and the brooding Brutus (both proper names, curiously enough, translate as “stupid”). There is a sense that the whole burden of Hamlet is to explore what Brutus terms the interval between “the first motion” and the “acting of a dreadfull thing” when “the state of a man … suffers then / The nature of an Insurrection” (2.1.63–64, 67–69; TLN 683–4; 688–690).

Just as Hamlet is visited by a wraith, so too is Brutus. But the ghost in Julius Caesar is unlike any whom Elizabethan playgoers had yet encountered. To create this revolutionary specter, Shakespeare rejected the long theatrical tradition that governed the ghosts who bedeviled Richard, and turned instead to a distinctly separate literary legacy. He imitated a passage in which the historian Plutarch, attempting to demonstrate that the gods were offended by Caesar’s assassination, paused in his narrative to spin a truly fabulous yarn.

Brutus … thought he heard a noise at his tent-door, and looking towards the light of the lamp that waxed very dim, he saw a horrible vision of a man, of a wonderful greatness and dreadful look, which at the first made him marvelously afraid. But when he saw that it did him no hurt, but stood by his bedside and said nothing; at length he asked him what he was. The image answered him: “I am thy ill angel, Brutus, and thou shalt see me by the city of Philippes.” Then Brutus replied again, and said: “Well I shall see thee then.” Therewithal the spirit presently vanished from him. (Julius Caesar, ed. Dorsen, Appendix A, p. 157)

This gem of a story set Shakespeare’s imagination ablaze and freed him to set aside views about ghosts that had hitherto been held sacrosanct. Plutarch’s spirit may have had a “dreadful look,” but he is not cloaked in supernatural trappings. On the contrary, he possesses an appealing, matter-of-fact, almost ghost-next-door quality. He is not bloody, he does not shriek, he does not deal in hyperbole or injunction (no “Despair and die”), and he speaks in relaxed tones and in quotidian language. And yet, Shakespeare certainly noticed, he makes his point without recourse to the gadgetry of stage ghosts, for even the stoical Brutus was (at least at first) “marvelously afraid.”

Shakespeare was clearly dazzled by the novelty of Plutarch’s spirit, for while it was not his habit to re-use dialogue that he encountered in his reading, he took the unusual step of incorporating the anecdote with only minor alterations into Julius Caesar:

Brutus. Art thou any thing?
Art thou some God, some Angell, or some Devill,
That mak’st my blood cold, and my haire to stare?
Ghost. Thy euil spirit Brutus.
Bru. Why com’st thou?
Ghost. To tell thee thou shalt see me at Philippi.
Brut. Well: then I shall see thee againe?
Ghost. I, at Philippi.
Brut. Why I will see thee at Phillipi then.

(4.3.278–86; TLN 2292–2300)

In the process of transforming Plutarch’s “horrible vision” into a wraith of his own, Shakespeare learned many valuable lessons. Among the most obvious (though not the most important) was the realization that to smuggle a ghost onto the stage could be more startling than to contrive a spectacular entrance. Brutus’s ghost appears silently, without drums and trumpets: in just the same way, it will be remembered, the ghost who terrified Garrick had made his entrance in advance of the moment that the actor first noticed him.

Shakespeare also appropriated some of the language he invented in Julius Caesar for re-use in Hamlet. In the Roman play, the specter (it is only in a Folio stage direction that he is identified as “the Ghost of Caesar”) caused Brutus’s “blood [to become] cold, and [his] haire to stare.” Shakespeare expanded Brutus’s confession into the Ghost’s brag that if he chose, he could “freeze [Hamlet’s] young blood … / And [make] each particular haire to stand on end,/ Like Quilles upon the fretfull Porpentine” (1.5.16, 19–20; TLN 701; 703–4) Brutus’s “cold” transmutes into Hamlet’s more frigid “freeze,” and “start” reappears as “stand on end,” while the homely simile about the porcupine adds a touch drawn not from supernatural but, most suitably, from natural history.

Shakespeare also took careful note of the fact that Brutus’s ghost not only shuns oratory, but is in fact hesitant to speak at all: in Plutarch’s story, he “stood by [Brutus’s] bedside and said nothing” until Brutus “asked him what he was.” In Julius Caesar, the specter is granted only two short sentences and a sum of twelve words. From this close-mouthedness, Shakespeare learned that it was utterly superfluous for the Ghost to produce the hitherto mandatory myth-encrusted narrative about life in the underworld. Here it should be recalled that when the ghost of Don Andrea (who is thought to be the nearest surviving cousin to the old Hamlet’s ghost) launched The Spanish Tragedy, he embarked on a stupendous monologue about existence on the other side. After he was killed, Don Andrea’s spirit proclaims to the audience, his “soule descended straight / To passe the flowing streame of Acheron” (Induction 18–19); once there, the audience is informed, the “Feriman of Hell” took him to “fell Avernus’ ougly waves” (29) where after lengthy consultation the judges Minos, Acacus, and Rhadamanth sent him on to “Pluto’s Court / Through dreadfull shades of ever glooming night” (55–56). Like an eager tourist, Don Andrea returned with tall (but hallowed) tales of “the deepest hell … Where bloudie Furies shakes their whips of steele …/ Where usurers are choakt with melting golde” (Kyd, Works 64–67). It is a great set piece of a speech, an epic and spacious unfolding of classical motifs. Shakespeare might have taken the challenge and attempted to surpass kyd—for to do so was entirely within his capabilities—but instead he chose to follow Plutarch and to build upon the innovations that he had himself pioneered in Julius Caesar. It is therefore entirely purposeful that the Ghost in Hamlet specifically repudiates a confirmed practice of Kyd and other Elizabethan playwrights:

But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my Prison-House,
I could a Tale unfold, whose lightest word
Wou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• General Editor's Introduction
• Introduction
• Part I: Tudor-Stuart Hamlet
• Part II: Subsequent Hamlets
• Part III: Hamlet after Theory
• Contributors
• Index