essays on the ghost in hamlet

William Shakespeare

Everything you need for every book you read., the ghost quotes in hamlet.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Hamlet’s Ghost: A Review Article Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory . Princeton UP, 2001.

Peter goldman, department of english westminster college salt lake city, utah 84105 www.wcslc.edu [email protected].

“Remember me.” Hamlet’s Ghost calls out to us across the space of four hundred years, and by all evidence we are in no danger of forgetting him. Scholars have tended to focus their attention on the character of young Hamlet, but the Ghost of King Hamlet is arguably the interpretive crux of Shakespeare’s play. We must decide, along with young Hamlet, whether the Ghost is “a spirit of health or goblin damned.” In this paradigmatically modern play, the Ghost hearkens back to the late medieval world of magic and superstition, the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory–as well as the generic conventions of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy. In a crucial way the whole plot of Hamlet depends upon the Ghost. Yet some critics have questioned the reality claim of the Ghost within the world of the play, along with the ethics of his call for revenge–just as, indeed, young Hamlet himself feels compelled to test the truth of the Ghost’s accusation through “The Mousetrap,” the play within the play. The Ghost also raises larger questions about the role of the supernatural within early modern culture. For all these reasons, Stephen Greenblatt’s new book Hamlet in Purgatory is especially welcome.

“I began with a desire to speak with the dead.” One of the most striking openings of any book of literary criticism, Greenblatt introduces thus his book Shakespearean Negotiations (1988). In his more recent work on Hamlet, Greenblatt examines that same desire to speak with the dead in Shakespeare and his audience, a desire, he argues, in which we ourselves, as fans of Hamlet, participate. Not only do we desire to speak with the dead, but the dead also desire to speak with us; or, more precisely, they seem to fear the oblivion of forgetfulness. Significantly, Hamlet’s Ghost asks for remembrance (1.5.92) as well as revenge. Although the term “Purgatory” is never mentioned in Hamlet (such a reference might well have run afoul of Elizabethan censors), the Ghost clearly implies that he has returned from Purgatory. He is “Doomed for a certain term to walk the night / And for the day confined to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in days of nature / Are burnt and purged away” (1.5.11-14).

In recent years New Historicists have been exploring the complex ways in which Renaissance drama appropriated the power of weakened or damaged traditional religious institutions. Purgatory, for example, was at the center of vast web of institutional rituals and customs, and these practices had been forcibly repressed by the Church of England for almost forty years when Shakespeare’s Hamlet was first performed. Leading Protestants in England sought to minimize the purely ceremonial dimensions of late medieval worship; in this effort many of the hallowed images, the statues, carvings, and the furniture of the parish churches were destroyed or defaced with ill-advised haste and violence. Reformers often rushed to discard age-old customs and practices that had acquired the familiarity and authority of ancient tradition. The iconoclasm of the Reformation left an enormous gap in the cultural and spiritual life of the English people, and Renaissance drama stepped in to help fill that gap. It is worthwhile noting in this regard that the rise of the Elizabethan theater followed immediately on the Protestant suppression of the annual mystery play cycles, a rich element of late medieval culture. The more tradition-minded laity found the bare austerities of the Protestant worship service, centered on preaching and biblical exegesis, dissatisfying and inaccessible. Protestant worship in its most rigorous forms was intellectually and morally strenuous. Shakespeare’s theater, according to New Historicists, was able to appropriate and transform the spiritual “energy” or charisma associated with forbidden Catholic practices such as exorcism or services for the dead. The attacks on Catholic ceremonies commonly associated them with both magic and theater. The repression of Purgatory was part of a larger attack on the belief in ghosts in general. Efforts to eliminate magic and superstition added to the cultural vacuum created by the forces of modernity.

Secularization, as Greenblatt recognizes, is not a process of evacuating religious beliefs and institutions of their sacred contents, leaving for modernity only the secular forms. It is precisely the ritual forms that are left behind; traditional ceremonies such as the Mass for the dead or ritual exorcism were abandoned, while the psychic energy invested therein continued in new forms, including art. The sacred does not simply evaporate in the modern era; it is rather integrated into the fabric of our culture, integrated so profoundly that we hardly recognize it as such any more.

This is not to elide the significant differences between art and religion, and before returning to Hamlet it will be worthwhile to dwell briefly on this important point. New Historicists commonly assert that the boundaries between art, religion, and other cultural practices are fluid. What counts for “literature,” for example, is a matter of historical convention. For this reason, New Historicists have participated in the widespread trend towards interdisciplinary research, examining the relationships between seemingly discrete discursive fields. This is undeniably a healthy trend, but this approach sometimes ignores the significant differences between fields such as art and religion. The strength of Greenblatt’s work is that he is very sensitive to the relevant distinctions between different cultural practices. For example, comparing the medieval mystery plays to Marlowe’s Faustus, Greenblatt writes,

there is, to be sure, fear and trembling in the mysteries and moralities of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but a dread bound up with the fate of particular situated individuals is largely absent, and the audience shares its grief and joy in a collective experience that serves either to ward off or to absorb private emotions. Marlowe’s Faustus , by contrast, though it appears conventional enough in its plot and overarching religious ideology, seems like a startling departure from everything that has preceded it precisely because the dramatist has heightened and individuated anxiety to an unprecedented degree and because he has contrived to implicate his audience as individuals in that anxiety. ( Shakespearean Negotiations 133)

The experience of the audience in an Elizabethan theater is not collective in quite the same sense as in a religious ritual, or even as in a quasi-ritual such as the mystery plays. An individual’s personal response to a religious ritual is often irrelevant–what validates the ritual is the institution itself and the participation of the community. Participation in an ecclesiastical ritual constitutes submission to the institutional authority of the church. And in early modern England, of course, church attendance was mandatory. The essence of the ritual is the individual’s submersion in the religious community as a whole. In a theater, by contrast, each individual is free to applaud or not. Watching a play seems to be a more passive experience than participating in a religious ceremony, and in one sense it is. But aesthetic response, in a secular context, is also more individuating, less constrained by institutional pressures, as Greenblatt recognizes. To put this point schematically, the modern theater creates a community of individuals, not a cosmic hierarchy. A certain freedom is gained, but the security of a stable cosmos is sacrificed.

In Greenblatt’s work, however, the distinction between theater and ritual remains without any theoretical grounding, anthropological or otherwise. New Historicism shares with Generative Anthropology the typically modern desire to minimize our theoretical presuppositions. But this healthy desire does not free us from the necessity of defining our object of study. Culture is defined by representation, as Greenblatt well knows. This, I take it, is the import of Clifford Geertz’s famous conception of culture as semiotic (Geertz 5), a conception which Greenblatt acknowledges as the basis for his practice ( Practicing New Historicism 20-31). But Geertz’s semiotic concept of culture remains at best a description of culture, not a rigorous definition. As a whole, New Historicism is severely limited by its lack of any solid theoretical foundation. Its anthropological insights can be articulated only on an ad hoc basis. Nonetheless, there is a powerful anthropological intuition at work in Greenblatt, despite the lack of theoretical support, and his recent book deserves our careful attention.

In Hamlet in Purgatory, Greenblatt argues that the Ghost of Hamlet is not simply a plot device, a generic convention of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy, as sometimes assumed. Its power, both for the audience and for young Hamlet, goes far beyond its function as a plot catalyst. Rather the figure of the Ghost expresses (1) a widespread fear among the living of being forgotten after death and (2) bereavement for those already dead. The Ghost, in brief, inhabits the imaginative space left open by the English Reformation’s banishment of Purgatory in 1563. The Ghost returns from Purgatory, and in effect brings Purgatory back with him, albeit in a fictionalized and thereby transformed shape. Shakespeare’s Hamlet , as Greenblatt puts it, participates in “a cult of the dead” (203, 257), and we as readers and viewers continue this cult–one with important social functions that he explores at length. Only on this cultic basis can we account for Hamlet ‘s powerful and continued fascination. The primary imperative of the Ghost is to “Remember,” not to “Revenge,” as commonly thought. In this sense, Greenblatt’s interpretation shares common concerns with the readings of René Girard and Eric Gans, for both of whom also revenge is secondary to the refusal or delay of revenge. In Greenblatt’s reading, the imperative for memory at the cost of revenge accounts for Hamlet’s delay that has so puzzled critics over the centuries, as indeed Hamlet himself (in his soliloquies) is puzzled and frustrated by his lack of ready action. In this reading of the play, the problem is not delay but rather revenge itself: the Ghost does call out for revenge, and Hamlet eventually fulfills that requirement, if not, perhaps, in exactly the way envisioned by King Hamlet. The problem for Greenblatt’s interpretation, as he puts it, is that “Sticking a sword into someone’s body turns out to be a very tricky way of remembering the dead” (225). If the play is primarily an expression of the “desire to speak with the dead,” and the fear, on the part of the living, of being forgotten after death, then how do we account for the elements of revenge at all? We cannot deny that the play, like all revenge tragedies, ends with a bloodbath. And at least part of the aesthetic experience of the play is the conventional anticipation of revenge. As Greenblatt observes, “Purgatory, along with theological language of communion (houseling), deathbed confession (appointment), and anointing (aneling), while compatible with a Christian (and, specifically, a Catholic) call for remembrance, is utterly incompatible with a Senecan call for vengeance” (237). Ghosts from Purgatory typically ask for prayers to hasten their way to Heaven. How, in other words, do we reconcile revenge and remembrance? In order to see how Greenblatt answers this question, we will need to review briefly the argument of his book.

The larger part of Greenblatt’s book is devoted to reconstructing two important contexts for Hamlet : the Renaissance controversies over the doctrine of Purgatory in the wake of the Reformation, and representations of Purgatory in paintings, manuscript illuminations, prints, and narratives–for example, the medieval legend of “St. Patrick’s Purgatory” in Ireland (73-101). We remember here Hamlet’s excited oath to Horatio early in the play, “by Saint Patrick” (1.5.42), and editors duly note that Saint Patrick is regarded as the keeper of Purgatory. In this popular legend, widely disseminated by vernacular translations and medieval sermons, Saint Patrick discovers a physical entrance into Purgatory in a cave at Lough Derg, Donegal, in Ireland, and then establishes an abbey on the site. An English knight, Owein, comes to the abbey desiring to repent his sins and avoid punishment in the afterlife. He enters physically into Purgatory, has various adventures there including conversations with the devils, suffers punishments appropriate to his sins, and finally, like Dante (two centuries later), achieves a vision of Paradise. He returns to earth to tell his story, giving Purgatory the authority of an eyewitness account, an authority Purgatory was much in need of, given its lack of any ancient authority. The abbey that was built around the entry to Purgatory in a cave was an important destination for late medieval pilgrimages until English Protestants dismantled the site in the 17th century. “St. Patrick’s Purgatory” is a significant, yet little known, chapter in the history of lay devotion during the medieval and Renaissance periods. Greenblatt’s account is enlightening, not least for the close reading skills he brings to this text, as well as his analysis of the social and institutional functions served by the legends surrounding Purgatory. To a large extent, this is the familiar story of how anxiety is aroused only to be channeled and allayed through appropriate institutional means, thus affirming a particular social hierarchy and cultural economy. Greenblatt’s larger purpose in this chapter is to establish the importance of Purgatory in the late medieval imagination, and hence the trauma surrounding its official elimination in 1563, a trauma which found expression through Shakespeare’s play.

Another fascinating piece of lay devotion examined at length by Greenblatt is the popular story of “The Gast [Ghost] of Gy,” about a widow in France during the 14th century who is haunted by the Ghost of her departed husband (105-133). A Dominican monk is called in to examine the Ghost in order to determine its nature and the reason for the haunting. What follows is a long dialogue, “which is in effect the transcript of a scholastic disputatio between the cleric and the specter” (105). The rhetorical effect of this dialogue is ambiguous, as Greenblatt notes. The figure of the Ghost himself is highly ambivalent; while he is destined for heaven, he says, “I am a wicked Ghost, as unto my wicked pain that I suffer” (112). The dialogue also attempts to resolve, not entirely satisfactorily, some of the theological difficulties surrounding Purgatory. And finally, the monk is presented as rather simple-minded and limited in comparison to the Ghost, so that the authority of the church in dealing with ghosts seems questionable. The story reveals that the main reason for the haunting is the Ghost’s attachment to his wife. The Ghost of Gy says, “I love more my wife / Than any other man alive, / And therefore first to her I went” (qtd. by Greenblatt 130). The haunting turns out to be a touching scene of domestic affection, not unlike the solicitude exhibited by King Hamlet’s Ghost for Gertrude, especially during the “closet scene” in the third act (scene four). Purgatory therefore is associated with the private and domestic, important indicators of modernity. Greenblatt’s discussion of Purgatory ghosts and monks parallels his account of “Shakespeare and the Exorcists” (in reference to King Lear ), the possessed and their demons, in Shakespearean Negotiations (94-128). In institutional terms, ghosts and demons are liminal phenomena; official doctrine sanctions them, and institutional means existed to deal with these spirits, but hauntings and possessions tended to arise outside of conventional ritual contexts, and they attracted charismatic figures (spiritual “experts”) who existed on the fringes of the official institutions. Hauntings and possessions also permitted active lay participation, with unpredictable results. For these reasons, Reformers seeking to consolidate the power of the church found them threatening. Ghosts were ambivalent and controversial, and they always threatened to escape the bounds of official control.

Given the importance of ghosts in the Renaissance imagination, we might well ask how and why credulous belief in ghosts came to such a sudden end in the seventeenth century. As Greenblatt puts it, “How did it all come to an end? How were the dead killed off? And did they go quietly?” (133). In Greenblatt’s account, the ghosts inhabiting Purgatory were forcibly evicted by zealous Protestant reformers, and they did not go quietly: conservatives, speaking on behalf of the dead, protested long and loud. In addition to Renaissance representations of Purgatory, Greenblatt also examines the controversies surrounding this Catholic institution during the English Reformation. For this purpose he examines closely Simon Fish’s attack on Purgatory in “A Supplication for the Beggars” (1529), a tract which argues that the vast resources spent on relieving souls in Purgatory would be better spent on relieving the living beggars of the realm. In response to Fish, Sir Thomas More wrote “The Supplication of Souls” (1529), framed as a plea from the dead to save them from the painful fires of Purgatory. For More and other conservatives, the devotional practices surrounding Purgatory were invaluable, not only for the aid of the suffering ghosts, but also as a means of creating a sense of community among the living, a community which included the dead who had not been forgotten. The dead lingered in the memories of the living, just as they lingered in the liminal space of Purgatory. These suffering souls still existed in a relationship of reciprocal exchange and occasional communication with the living. John Donne’s obsession with death and dying is examined to good effect in this light, notably his famous Meditation #17 from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” As Donne points out, “No man is an island.” We are part of vast community that includes both the living and the dead. Purgatory was a valuable means of maintaining this sense of continuity and community, and its elimination was a genuine loss to Renaissance culture. Greenblatt, agreeing with revisionist historians of the Reformation, points out rightly that late medieval devotional practices were not quite the dead letter that Protestant polemics portrayed. The traditions of Catholicism were still living and vital, and Protestant piety took root in the fertile ground prepared by late medieval developments such as Confession and Purgatory. An intellectual elite imposed many of the Protestant reforms from above; they did not always emerge spontaneously from below as a grass-roots movement, as sometimes claimed. (The question that revisionist historians beg, however, is why the reformers were so successful if they did not have substantial popular support. The sweeping changes inaugurated by the English Reformation required both an active faction of reformers and widespread popular support, even if that support was sometimes limited to popular resentment toward the corruption of the clergy. Contrary to the claims of Christopher Haigh [56-74], the importance of anticlericalism for the Reformation can hardly be overestimated.) Hamlet , according to Greenblatt, participates in the debate about Purgatory, although not in any simple fashion. The play in effect stages this debate without necessarily taking sides.

For a Renaissance audience, the dramatic representation of a ghost from Purgatory would evoke a rich context of legends and lore that have for the most part been lost to modern audiences. Ghost stories, for instance, were a frequent element of medieval sermons. Greenblatt does an admirable job of recreating that context and demonstrating the semantic richness of the Ghost for a Renaissance audience. In this he explains all the ways in which Hamlet’s Ghost exceeds the generic traditions of the revenge tragedy. Greenblatt also considers other representations of ghosts in Renaissance drama, including revenge tragedies, noting that Shakespeare’s use of ghosts is rather unique in the ways that he was able to effectively exploit the supernatural for dramatic purposes. In his valuable discussion of Shakespeare’s use of ghosts (in all his plays), Greenblatt charts “three fundamental perspectives to which Shakespeare repeatedly returns: the Ghost as a figure of false surmise, the Ghost as a figure of history’s nightmare, and the Ghost as a figure of deep psychic disturbance. Half-hidden is all of these is a fourth perspective: the Ghost as figure of theater” (157). Shakespeare’s use of the supernatural, Greenblatt points out, does not fall neatly into the categories of either skepticism or simple belief. He argues that Shakespeare took ghostly spirits quite seriously. Although Shakespeare’s attitude is educated and modern, his drama suggests that the claim of the supernatural upon us is real and substantial. To the extent that we take his drama seriously, we must also take the supernatural seriously. Shakespeare’s deployment of ghosts goes beyond “special effects” or theatrical entertainment. The moral universe inhabited by Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines suggests that the supernatural is part of the very warp and woof of the human cosmos. Ghostly spirits, in Shakespeare, tell us something valuable and irreplaceable about this world, if not the life after death. What that something is, however, remains considerably ambiguous.

This brings us back to Hamlet’s Ghost and the apparent contradiction between the call to revenge and the call to remembrance. Greenblatt attempts to finesse this contradiction by appealing to ambiguity itself. Shakespeare deliberately left the status of the Ghost ambiguous and open to interpretation, and this is in effect the meaning of the Ghost (239-40). Shakespeare, then, exploits to dramatic purpose the ongoing controversy and uncertainty about ghosts in Elizabethan society. The very ambiguity of the Ghost, according to Greenblatt, is the key to its dramatic power. The thesis of undecidability has much to recommend it. A case could be made that what constitutes a “classic” is that it draws on a large variety of rich semantic contexts. The dense ambiguity of a classic text allows for a variety of plausible interpretations, and thus for the formation of an ongoing interpretive community surrounding the text. As Greenblatt points out, the banishment of Purgatory left a vacuum in Renaissance culture which required the development of new cultural forms, including, for example, the interpretive community surrounding texts such as Hamlet , a community in which Greenblatt’s readers participate. The problem with this thesis is that it is too general to account for Hamlet ‘s specific role in Western culture. Ambiguity is one of those things such that if you are looking for it, you will find it. To the extent that Greenblatt attempts to resolve the contradiction between revenge and memory, he seems to come down on the side of memory, suggesting that vengeance is really secondary to the imperative for remembrance. Hamlet , Greenblatt suggests, is fundamentally conservative in its nostalgia for Purgatory. But then, we might ask, why is Hamlet often considered paradigmatically modern, and Hamlet a prototypical modern hero? If the play is backwards-looking, then why does it continue to hold the fascination that it does? Greenblatt overextends his thesis about the Ghost. Purgatory is never mentioned explicitly in the play, and it constitutes only a minor context that fails to account for the play’s immense cultural power. Young Hamlet does not seem especially concerned about the eternal destiny of his father. And at the end of the play, as Greenblatt notes, the Ghost is essentially forgotten (226). With considerable ingenuity, Greenblatt takes the forgetting of the Ghost as evidence for the play’s larger shift away from revenge. Yet according to Greenblatt, the shift away from revenge is motivated by the turn to memory, so it does not make sense that the Ghost’s emphasis on memory would result finally in his own forgetting. Greenblatt attempts to get around this problem by appealing to Hamlet’s request for Horatio to tell his story, another example of remembrance. But the absence of Hamlet’s Ghost from the end of the play seriously undermines Greenblatt’s main line of argument.

In defending his thesis of ambiguity, Greenblatt discusses what might be called the Protestant elements of Hamlet (240-244), notably Hamlet’s skepticism about the Ghost that motivates the staging of the play within the play, “The Mousetrap.” Greenblatt calls our attention to Hamlet’s insistence on physical materiality, for example in his remark to Claudius that Polonius is “At supper . . . . Not where he eats but where ‘a is eaten” (4.3.17, 19). As Greenblatt insightfully notes, the supper where one does not eat but is eaten suggests the Lord’s Supper. In an outstanding feat of cultural poetics, Greenblatt compares the Reformation controversies over this sacrament with Hamlet’s discourse on the physical process of dying and death. The Catholics insisted that during the Mass the bread and wine were physically transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ, through the miracle of transubstantiation. Protestants, in contrast, argued that the Mass, which they preferred to call The Lord’s Supper, was merely symbolic and memorial in nature. No literal transformation took place. The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation made necessary elaborate ceremonial precautions to avoid profaning the body and blood of God. The laity, for example, were not given the Chalice during the late medieval period because they might spill some of the blood of God. Protestants delightedly pounced on the logical absurdities involved in transubstantiation, continually taunting the Catholics that the body of Christ must then be chewed, swallowed, and digested, making “a progress through the guts of a beggar.” Likewise, a mouse or rat might catch some leftover crumbs and feast on God’s body. Greenblatt points out that Hamlet’s language insistently recalls these Protestant polemics against the Mass. “A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him [Polonius],” Hamlet tells Claudius; “We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots” (4.3.19-23). Hamlet continues with the logic typical of Protestant polemics against the Catholic Mass: “A man may fish with a worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that had fed of that worm,” thus “a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” (4.3.27-32). By the same logic, Hamlet demonstrates to Horatio how “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away” (5.1.213-214). In a passage that deserves to be quoted at length, Greenblatt writes,

Hamlet is disgusted by the grossness whose emblem here [3.3.80] is the bread in his father’s stomach, a grossness figured as well by drinking, sleeping, sexual intercourse, and above all perhaps by woman’s flesh. The play enacts and reenacts queasy rituals of defilement and revulsion, an obsession with a corporeality that reduces everything to appetite and excretion. . . . . Here, as in the line about the king’s progress through the guts of a beggar, the revulsion is mingled with a sense of drastic leveling, the collapse of order and distinction into polymorphous, endlessly recycled materiality. Claudius, with his reechy kisses and paddling fingers, is a paddock, a bat, a gib, and this unclean beast, like the priapic priest of Protestant polemics, has poisoned the entire social and symbolic system. Hamlet’s response is not to attempt to shore it up but to draw it altogether into the writhing of maggots. . . .

The spirit can be healed only by refusing all compromise and by plunging the imagination unflinchingly into the rank corruption of the ulcerous place. Such a conviction led the Reformers to dwell on the progress of the Host through the guts of a mouse, and a comparable conviction, born of intertwining theological and psychological obsessions, leads Hamlet to the clay pit and the decayed leftovers that the gravediggers bring to light. . . . This is the primary and elemental nausea provoked by the vulnerability of matter . . . . This revulsion is not an end in itself; it is the spiritual precondition of a liberated spirit that finds a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, sacrificially fulfills the father’s design and declares that the readiness is all. (243-44)

This is a very insightful way of understanding Hamlet’s disgust with sex, drink, food, and physicality in general. For Greenblatt, however, this insight serves merely to support his thesis of ambiguity. He does not seem to notice how the Protestant elements of Hamlet’s character contradict his emphasis on Catholic remembrance. As David Bevington has demonstrated, Hamlet is iconoclastic in relation to traditional rituals (173-187). He does not seem inclined towards the public ceremonies surrounding death, rituals intended for devout recollection. Hamlet, we remember, has “that within which passes show” (1.2.85). Although he dresses in black, he despises the merely ceremonial “trappings and suits of woe,” the purely formal “shapes of grief”: “For they are actions that a man might play” (1.2.86, 82, 84). Many critics have noted the numerous “maimed rites” in Hamlet , from the opening ceremony at Claudius’ court to Ophelia’s funeral to the ostentatious staging of the final fencing match. The play’s antipathy towards ritual, ceremony, and hierarchy poses serious problems for Greenblatt’s argument about Purgatory, which was at the center of a vast network of rituals and ceremonies. Hamlet’s Protestant skepticism could very well put him at odds with the Ghost and the whole revenge plot in which Hamlet finds himself.

By drawing our attention away from revenge, Greenblatt’s interpretation shares some affinities with René Girard’s pioneering interpretation in A Theater of Envy (271-289). For Girard, the problem of the play is not Hamlet’s delay, but precisely the question of revenge. Whereas for most critics, Greenblatt included, revenge is an unaccountable holdover from the revenge tragedy tradition, Girard, from his anthropological perspective, sees revenge as another version of the sacrificial, the translation of resentment into action. While revenge might cloak itself within a façade of necessary justice, from an ethical point of view the need for violent personal retribution is banal and ultimately puerile.

Under this definition, revenge is in effect a universal problem for human culture, not simply a theme of Elizabethan drama. Girard’s “Fundamental Anthropology” is grounded in his theory of mimetic or conflictual desire. In this view, what distinguishes the human species are our mimetic tendencies. In evolutionary terms, mimesis or imitation is an adaptive learning behavior, a form of intelligence, but mimesis, when transferred to desire and the appropriation of desirable or “sacred” objects, leads to conflict–just as Hamlet, for example, comes into conflict with Laertes at the grave of Ophelia. Our mimetic heritage is distinctly ambivalent: it creates a temptation to violence, but it also serves as the basis for language or representation itself, the distinctly human form of mimesis or imitation.

In Girard’s view, Hamlet is modern because he understands revenge; he understands how “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable” it is. King Hamlet represents the ancient/medieval world of honor, pride, and heroic combat, while young Hamlet represents the Christian or modern skepticism towards mimetic rivalry in its various traditional forms. In Girard’s view, the violence of the ending is a concession to the requirements of a popular, bloodthirsty audience. Girard argues that Hamlet’s revenge is morally unjustifiable, as Hamlet in effect realizes, because the poisoned King is just as guilty of murder as Claudius. His purgatorial punishments, as well his slaying of King Fortinbras, demonstrate his guilt. A sophisticated audience, familiar with Shakespeare’s “theater of envy” (that is, his critique of mimetic desire), would see through the atavistic elements of the ending. Girard resolves the conflict between pagan revenge and Christian forgiveness by positing a dual audience for Shakespeare’s plays. Hamlet’s internal conflict, what Girard calls his “unnamable paralysis of the will, that ineffable corruption of the spirit” (284), can be healed only by a complete renunciation of violence.

The problem with Girard’s interpretation, however, as Eric Gans points out, is that the elimination of revenge is a utopian solution to the problem of conflictual desire, a solution inappropriate to a modern world which feeds on the social energies released by competition (rivalry) and desire ( Chronicles #141). Girard sees Christianity as a revelation of the victimary (and hence unjustifiable) basis of the sacrificial, both in ritual and classic tragedy, a moral revelation which demands the radical renunciation of revenge. But insofar as the structure of mimetic desire is inherently sacrificial (the satisfaction of triangular desire would mean the sacrificial destruction of the human obstacles to that desire), the apocalypse entailed by satisfied desire can be only deferred indefinitely. As the very basis of culture, desire, and hence the possibility of violence, cannot be coherently refused, only sublimated and thus deferred. Gans writes, “In the last analysis, Girard no more than the other critics can consonance Hamlet’s indefinite delay. The difference, and it is entirely to his credit, is that where our pseudo-Nietzscheans impatiently urge Hamlet to wreak vengeance on the patriarchy, Girard wants him to follow the Christian road of renunciation” ( Chronicles #141).

Gans is able to give a whole new interpretation of Hamlet’s delay as a function of his “delight in ‘words, words, words.'” Unlike Fortinbras or Laertes, the Danish prince is an “intellectual who glories in his mastery of language as a means to defer as long as possible the contact of ideas with practical reality” ( Chronicles #141). Hamlet is modern, in Gans’s view, because he would rather linger at the margins of the Danish court–making fun of the other characters, dramatizing his situation in soliloquies–than plunge straightforward towards revenge. Hamlet’s linguistic delaying tactics form a valuable, presciently modern alternative to the ancient/medieval world of revenge, embodied in the figure of the Ghost. “[T]he Ghost’s objective existence [is] dubious,” Gans writes, an illusion created by the mimetic rivalries of the play ( Chronicles #141).

Gans agrees with Girard that the problem of Hamlet is fundamentally ethical in nature, the integration of Christian moral values into classical tragedy, but he defines the problem of this combination in different terms ( Originary Thinking 156-160). His basic model of aesthetic analysis is the scene of representation, defined by a [sacred] center and [human] periphery. Centrality denotes significance, but this significance is vulnerable to resentment (hence sacrificial violence) and therefore stands always in need of justification. The classical aesthetic is distinguished by an agon between superhuman heroes whose significance was unquestioned. Christianity, however, reveals the humanity of the sacred center, that is, the essential equivalence of center and periphery. Christianity involves a leveling of the vertical hierarchy implied by classical art. The Neo-classical (early modern or Renaissance) aesthetic remains ambivalently attached to the classical scene of representation, just as Hamlet remains perversely attached to the ceremonial scene of the Danish court. Hamlet defines himself in opposition to the classical scene of representation, yet he is unable to find any coherent alternative. A romantic Hamlet might well elope with Ophelia to Paris or England. The romantic hero would transcend the classical agon by internalizing it within himself through a narrative of redemptive suffering. “Hamlet’s delight in righteous indignation prefigures the romantic heroes for whom he serves as the primary model” (Gans, Chronicles #141). Shakespeare’s play complicates, yet still participates in the classical, aristocratic conception of the tragic-heroic. Hamlet stages the classical scene of representation, demystifying it, opening it up to questioning and reciprocal exchange, but without creating an independent alternative.

It is this finely nuanced sense of cultural history that distinguishes Gans’s analysis from Greenblatt’s. Greenblatt can be seen as broadly in line with Girard and Gans, in that the focus of his interpretation is on the mechanisms that bring about the delay of revenge rather than the imperative for revenge itself. Greenblatt adds to our understanding of Hamlet, but his reading by no means supplants Gans’s reading because it is not grounded in any coherent theory of human culture in its historical development. This limitation becomes evident when Greenblatt overemphasizes the importance of Purgatory and remembrance at the expense of Hamlet’s Protestant skepticism. Greenblatt does not have a clear sense of what makes Hamlet modern. The weakness of New Historicism, ironically, is that it lacks any strong sense of history. A more complete reading of Hamlet would further explore the ways in which the play works “against revenge.” Hamlet not only turns away from revenge, he also resists the rituals and hierarchy that legitimate revenge. The heart of Hamlet’s mystery remains to be explored as a process of iconoclastic skepticism.

Works Cited

Bevington, David. Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Gans, Eric. Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

——.”On Looking Into Branagh’s Hamlet .” Chronicles of Love and Resentment #141. Saturday, June 20th, 1998.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Girard, René. A Theater of Envy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

——. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Greenblatt, Stephen, and Catherine Gallagher. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Haigh, Christopher. “Anticlericalism and the English Reformation.” The English Reformation Revised. Ed. Christopher Haigh. Cambridge GB: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 56–74.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet . Ed. David Bevington. New York: Bantam, 1980.

More to Explore

Únete Ahora para Ver el Contenido Premium

GradeSaver provee acceso a 2359 PDF de guias de estudio y pruebas, 11005 ensayos literarios, 2763 ejemplos de ensayos de aplicaciones para la universidad, 926 planes de lecciones y navegación libre de anuncios en este contenido premium, sección “Solo Miembros” de el sitio! Membresía incluye un descuento del 10% en todos los pedidos de edición.

The Dishonest Ghost in "Hamlet" Marilyn Fu

Shakespeare has always been able to create characters richly dichotomous in nature. In "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," the portrayal of the ghost of Hamlet's father vacillates through the play from Hamlet's uncertainty of whether "it is an honest ghost" (144, l.5) or "a goblin damned" (40, l.4). In one sense, the ghost is honest in that he tells Hamlet the truth about his own murder?Claudius is truly guilty. On the other hand, while the ghost appeals to Hamlet on the seemingly rational grounds of avenging "murder most foul" (28, l.5) "if thou didst ever thy dear father love?" (24, l.5), it is arguable that the ghost manipulates Hamlet to continue spreading the rottenness and foul play already present in Denmark. Just as Hamlet later accuses other characters of "putting on" or "playing" to him, it is also very likely that the ghost "puts on" for Hamlet by playing on Hamlet's grief and love for his dead father, in order to get his revenge. The madness, destruction, and death which this leads Hamlet and almost every other character in the play to, suggests far from virtuous intentions on the ghost's part. In parallel to Elizabethan ideas...

Join Now to View Premium Content

GradeSaver provides access to 2312 study guide PDFs and quizzes, 10989 literature essays, 2751 sample college application essays, 911 lesson plans, and ad-free surfing in this premium content, “Members Only” section of the site! Membership includes a 10% discount on all editing orders.

Already a member? Log in

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

This Just In
Grateful Dead
Old Time Radio
78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
Audio Books & Poetry
Computers, Technology and Science
Music, Arts & Culture
News & Public Affairs
Spirituality & Religion
Radio News Archive

Flickr Commons
Occupy Wall Street Flickr
NASA Images
Solar System Collection
Ames Research Center

All Software
Old School Emulation
MS-DOS Games
Historical Software
Classic PC Games
Software Library
Kodi Archive and Support File
Vintage Software
CD-ROM Software
CD-ROM Software Library
Software Sites
Tucows Software Library
Shareware CD-ROMs
Software Capsules Compilation
CD-ROM Images
ZX Spectrum
DOOM Level CD

Smithsonian Libraries
FEDLINK (US)
Lincoln Collection
American Libraries
Canadian Libraries
Universal Library
Project Gutenberg
Children's Library
Biodiversity Heritage Library
Books by Language
Additional Collections

Prelinger Archives
Democracy Now!
Occupy Wall Street
TV NSA Clip Library
Animation & Cartoons
Arts & Music
Computers & Technology
Cultural & Academic Films
Ephemeral Films
Sports Videos
Videogame Videos
Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

Wayback Machine (iOS)
Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

Explore the Collections
Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

The ghost in Hamlet, and other essays in comparative literature

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

Graphic Violence
Explicit Sexual Content
Hate Speech
Misinformation/Disinformation
Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

Tight gutter

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

1,234 Views

2 Favorites

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

For users with print-disabilities

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by brianna-serrano on October 26, 2009

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Science & Math
Sociology & Philosophy
Law & Politics
Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Analysis

“Hamlet” is a play composed by William Shakespeare between 1599 and 1601 that was first published in 1603. The drama depicts astonishingly realistic periods of true and created insanity ranging from profound sorrow to rage while also dealing with problems such as betrayal, vengeance, incest, and moral decay.

Throughout the play, Hamlet philosophizes, speaks to himself, analyzes, establishes precise obligations, fails to perform them, criticizes himself for failing to act, and finally acts on temperament rather than reason. The role of the Ghost in Hamlet may be characterized in a variety of ways. The Ghost, for example, may be seen as Hamlet’s father attempting to reach him in order to wreak revenge on Claudius for his murder. It is also conceivable to see the Ghost as a malignant monster out to ruin Hamlet by giving him poor advice.

The Ghost’s intention is to save its spirit from Purgatory, which represents the interval between life and death, rather than to harm Hamlet. Its goal in the play is to enlighten Hamlet about how he died, and it is also crucial to several of the play’s themes, such as appearances against reality, action versus inaction, religion, honor, and revenge, and poison, death, and decay. The Ghost acts as a continual reminder of the force of death and the likelihood that the hereafter, to which all souls are going, will not be a pleasant place, regardless of one’s behavior while alive.

It informs Hamlet that Claudius, the king’s brother who succeeded to the throne and married Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, killed his father. The Ghost orders Hamlet to assassinate Claudius in order to avenge his father’s death. The task at hand weighs heavily on Hamlet’s mind. Is the Ghost wicked, enticing him into doing something that will condemn his soul to eternal damnation? Hamlet contests the veracity of the spectrum. Hamlet’s persona is authentic because of his doubt, anguish, and pain. He is, without a question, one of literature’s most psychologically complicated characters.

Shakespeare paints the look of the dead monarch in great detail. He was clad in armor, as he had been in the great battle against the Norwegian monarch. He was typically gloomy, armed from head to toe, and marched bravely toward the adversary, his vision sharpened. This is the unusual Ghost seen by numerous heroes all across the world, as well as the image in Prince Hamlet’s memoirs. It appears in Act I’s first, fourth, and fifth scenes, as well as Act III’s fourth scene.

Prince Hamlet’s feelings on his father’s spirit change during the play. He first accepts what it has to say since it matches with his own views about how his father died, and he is subsequently convinced of his own existence. The king accuses Claudius of murder and wooing the widow who is left alone, and simultaneously; he begins to encourage his son to seek vengeance.

The Ghost emerges for the first time in front of soldiers Bernardo and Marcellus, as well as Hamlet’s friend Horatio. They are horrified, pull their swords, and ask Horatio to confront the Ghost. He approaches him and invites him to speak with him, disclosing his secret, but he doesn’t have time to tell them all because the morning has arrived. The spirit in this scenario is described as the monarch, who is outfitted in his usual armor. Horatio also notices that the Ghost’s emergence must be tied to the state’s problems.

He convinces Hamlet to remain awake with the soldiers in order to observe if the Ghost would resurface. He returns and tells him about his sojourn in Purgatory after dying without undergoing the last rites: Confession, Communion, and Anointing. The presence of the Ghost at a particular juncture in the play adds drama to a debate that began two scenes earlier in Act 2, scene 2 when Hamlet became convinced of Claudius’ guilt. He realizes the Ghost was telling the truth when he accused Claudius of murdering him.

Shakespeare’s use of spirits adds to the dynamic psychological complexity of his works. The Ghost of Hamlet is the play’s most fully formed and completed character. The truth of Hamlet’s father’s absence would have been felt throughout the play if the Ghost had not been present.

The Spirit in Hamlet is central to the plot and has been interpreted in various ways. Greenblatt claims that the Ghost of Hamlet is more than a narrative device, a general standard of the Elizabethan vengeance play, as is frequently supposed. Its impact on both the public and young Hamlet extends far beyond its function as a storyline catalyst. [1] W. W. Greg, a Shakespeare expert, believed that the Ghost was a fiction of Hamlet’s overworked mind [2] . Shakespeare expert J. Dover Wilson and others have suggested that by having the Ghost come to others several times before appearing to Hamlet, Shakespeare demonstrates that the appearance is not a simple delusion. [3]

Shakespeare presents us with a young man plagued with existential uncertainties about punishment, death, and love, as well as a psychological and existential crisis. Shakespeare’s interpretative axis maybe The Ghost of King Hamlet. The Ghost, a paradigmatically present drama, harkens back to the late medieval area of enchantment and mysticism, the Catholic concept of Purgatory. “[T]he Ghost’s objective existence [is] dubious,” Gans writes, an illusion created by the mimetic rivalries of the play. [4]

[1] Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

[2] Greg, W.W., “Hamlet’s Hallucinations”, Modern Language Review, XII, 1917, 393–421

[3] Joseph, Miriam “Discerning the Ghost in Hamlet”. PMLA . 76 (5): 493–502

[4] Gans, Eric. Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

Ghost in Hamlet Commentary Analysis
Hamlet: Polonius Character Analysis
Hamlet: Horatio Character Analysis

Author: William Anderson (Schoolworkhelper Editorial Team)

Ghosts and Revenge in Shakespeare’s Hamlet Essay

Is the ghost legit or not.

While referring to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a number of contradictions occur concerning the legitimacy and reliability of the ghost noticed by Horatio in the first scene. Despite the common beliefs concerning the existence of ghosts, it seems that the ghost’s presence is still supported by the testimonies of all characters in the story, including Horatio, Francisco, and the protagonist himself. Nevertheless, Hamlet hesitates whether his father’s ghost is “…spirit of health, or goblin damn’d…” (Shakespeare 14). Doubts expressed by Hamlet, therefore, uncover his emotional state that seems to be unstable.

Are ghosts real? What happens in afterlife? Is there an order that “shapes our ends”? Does that punish the guilty?

Despite the fact that human soul was symbolically represented in different cultures, there is still a common assumption that the soul is a precise reproduction of the human body. Numerous books and artifacts provide evidence for deceased people appeared in the afterlife in the way they looked before they died, including clothes. In Hamlet , however, the king’s shade seems to deviate from the commonly established outlooks on spirits due to the emerged inconsistencies. In particular, purgatorial spirits striving reconciliation are not supposed to incite living people to crimes or revenge, as it can be seen in the play.

Is revenge correct or not?

Hamlet’s inability to take control of his emotions and anger leads to many deaths in the play, which makes the revenge ineffectual. Judging from the events, the protagonist is unable to take resolute actions and take revenge on Claudius and, as a result, the action delays until the end of the tragedy. More importantly, the presented action differs significantly from the Elizabethan revenge plays. The delay in action makes the revenge untypical and incorrect and, therefore, Shakespeare’s play is a remarkable piece providing a unique vision on the concept of revenge itself. In particular, the playwright intends to emphasize the importance of the revenge for the hero because the main idea of the plot centers on this particular event.

Does Hamlet revenge because of cowardice when Claudius prays?

The delay of the revenge is explained by Hamlet’s willingness to take vengeance on Claudius properly. Therefore, the hero changes his mind to kill Claudius because of the fear of Claudius going up to Heaven while praying. Psychological and emotional aspects can also be involved into the explanation for Hamlet’s actions. Specifically, the protagonist seems to be not ready for committing a crime because there is a rigid confrontation between the reality and the spiritual world. Hamlet cannot understand whether his visions are true.

Did Gertrude know Claudius killed old Hamlet?

While analyzing the tragedy, certain misconceptions allow to believe that Gertrude can be considered an accomplice of her husband’s murder. Hamlet finds out about his father’s murder from the ghost who states, “…the serpent, that did sting thy father’s life now wears his crown” (Shakespeare 17). Thought the spirit does not implicate his wife into the crime and, therefore, Hamlet is not told to take revenge on his mother. In fact, there is no evidence concerning Gertrude’s ignorance of the murder. Second, the play does not introduce any Gertrude’s soliloquies concerning her guilt and suffering. Her behavior and words also stipulate her indifference to her husband’s death.

Is Hamlet mad or only apparently so?

The problem of recognizing whether Hamlet was crazy is explained by the fact that the hero decides to take a crazy action, but on purpose. He hacks his uncle and mother by trying to prove Claudius’s guilt for his father’s death. At the same time, Hamlet’s actions are still emotionally unstable judging from his behavior. Hence, the hero becomes the reason for his friends being dead; he is also responsible for the death of his beloved Ophelia, as well as Polonius’ murder. Finally, Hamlet commits suicide at the end of the tragedy.

What the speech in III, iv, 183 to Gertrude mean with its crazy double negatives?

In Act III Scene 4, Hamlet confronts his mother and criticizes her for the indifference to his father’s death. Hamlet goes on answering back to Gertrude’s acquittals, by saying, “you are the queen, you husband’s brother’s wife” (Shakespeare 15). The phrase implies criticism of Gertrude; Hamlet does not want the queen who betrayed her husband to be his mother. In response, Gertrude believes that her son has forgotten that she is his mother. Nevertheless, Hamlet continues to reject to Gertrude’s status by telling her to look at the mirror of her soul. He wants her to reveal the truth and her actual feelings concerning his father’s death.

Can we “get” Hamlet, the play and the character, by tracing the five soliloquies?

Hamlet’s soliloquies unveil depression concerning his father’s death, as well as his indignation pertaining his mother’s quick recovery from his husband’s murder. The monologues also express the protagonist’s intention to commit suicide.

At this point, the first monologue presented in Act I scene ii reveals Hamlet’s grief as per his father’s death. The second one provided in Act II scene ii, exposes dual nature of the character because the author reveals Hamlet’s both fear and passion for taking revenge. The remaining soliloquies, along with the most famous one, disclose Hamlet’s searching for the self and his disappointment with the corruption existing in his country. All people are deceptive and it is difficult to find the truth.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet: A Tragedy . US: Publishers for the Proprietors. 1818, Print.

Summary & Analysis
Genre & Literary Analysis
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Essay Samples
Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, August 31). Ghosts and Revenge in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. https://ivypanda.com/essays/ghosts-and-revenge-in-shakespeares-hamlet/

"Ghosts and Revenge in Shakespeare’s Hamlet." IvyPanda , 31 Aug. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/ghosts-and-revenge-in-shakespeares-hamlet/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Ghosts and Revenge in Shakespeare’s Hamlet'. 31 August.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Ghosts and Revenge in Shakespeare’s Hamlet." August 31, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/ghosts-and-revenge-in-shakespeares-hamlet/.

1. IvyPanda . "Ghosts and Revenge in Shakespeare’s Hamlet." August 31, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/ghosts-and-revenge-in-shakespeares-hamlet/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Ghosts and Revenge in Shakespeare’s Hamlet." August 31, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/ghosts-and-revenge-in-shakespeares-hamlet/.

Horatio (Hamlet): Character Analysis
The Function of the Soliloquies in Hamlet
Hamlet: The Circumstances That Lead Hamlet to Soliloquy
Gertrude's Character in "Hamlet" by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”: Hamlet as a Masculine Character
The Role of Queen Gertrude in Play "Hamlet"
Hamlet: Gertrude’s Complicit Character
Shakespeare's Hamlet's Behavior in Act III
William Shakespeare: Hamlet's Actions and Inactions
Consideration of the Ghost in "Hamlet" by Shakespeare
Shakespeare's "The Tempest" Play Scene by Scene
Characters in "Faust" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Rules in Moliere’s “Tartuffe” and Racine’s “Phaedra”
Dramatic Elements and Innovations in Theater History
“Henry V” by Shakespeare and American Society

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Hamlet — The Dishonesty of the Ghost in Hamlet

The Dishonesty of The Ghost in Hamlet

Categories: Hamlet

About this sample

Words: 1570 |

Pages: 3.5 |

Published: Jun 29, 2018

Words: 1570 | Pages: 3.5 | 8 min read

Works Cited

Bloom, H. (Ed.). (2003). Hamlet: Comprehensive research and study guide. Infobase Publishing.
Coyle, M. (2005). Shakespeare and the power of performance: Stage and page in the Elizabethan theatre. University of Iowa Press.
Greenblatt, S. (2004). Hamlet in purgatory. Princeton University Press.
Hart, J. (Ed.). (2012). The Cambridge companion to Shakespeare's poetry. Cambridge University Press.
Hattaway, M. (Ed.). (2009). The Cambridge companion to Shakespeare's history plays. Cambridge University Press.
Hodgdon, B., & Worthen, W. B. (Eds.). (2004). A companion to Shakespeare and performance. John Wiley & Sons.
Holland, P. (2003). The ghost of Richard III: Performing history in Shakespeare's Henriad. University of Iowa Press.
Howard, J. E. (2003). Hamlet and the concept of character. University of Nebraska Press.
Thompson, A., & Taylor, N. (2006). Hamlet: The texts of 1603 and 1623. Arden Shakespeare.
Wells, S., & Orlin, L. C. (Eds.). (2003). Shakespeare: An Oxford guide. Oxford University Press.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Verified writer

Expert in: Literature

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

The Dishonesty of The Ghost in Hamlet Essay

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays

The Role of The Ghost in “Hamlet” by Shakespeare

Shakespeare never allows the supernatural to take the upper hand in the dramatic action of his tragedies.

Shakespeare’s tragic world is essentially the human world in which man initiates actions and pursues them to their proper end; they suffer for their deed that issues out of their characters.

Nonetheless, Shakespeare thus makes efficient use of the supernatural to add extra significance to the meaning of his plays.

The appearance of the three witches in Macbeth and of the ghost of Hamlet’s father in Hamlet are two brilliant examples of the use of the supernatural in his plays.

These supernatural elements add an extra dimension of mystery and fear. The world we live in is not wholly intelligible to us.

The Ghost’s First Appearance Warns about The Shaping of Destiny

Mysterious forces are working and shaping our destiny when the ghost arrives from the other world. He comes bursting the frame of mortal understanding; he comes as a traveler from that country “from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

The knowledge, the secret that the ghost brings with it, not only puts Hamlet into a whirlwind of emotional response, it also denotes that something is rotten behind the happy and prosperous facade of the Danish Court. How to murder has been committed, and a betrayal of the worst kind has taken place.

The ghost is also structurally significant in the play because actual actions start with the ghost’s revelation of the secret to Hamlet. The commandment of the ghost to take revenge against Claudius makes Hamlet put on an ‘antique disposition’ to plan the play within the play and seek an opportunity to execute his task of revenge.

The Ghost Reappears to Remind Hamlet of Revenge

The ghost reappears in the scene with Hamlet’s mother. Hamlet has delayed taking his revenge, and the ghost reappears to remind him of his neglected duty.

The Elizabethan audience had a mixed attitude towards ghosts. They neither disbelieved their existence nor did they take them as a reality. The opening scene of Hamlet is one of the most striking openings in Shakespeare’s dramas.

The whole world is asleep at midnight; only three watchmen are keeping watch in darkness and awaiting the arrival of a ghost with frightened hearts. The sense is a mystery, and ominous overtakes the characters on the stage.

The audience critics are almost unanimous in praising the creation of the atmosphere of uncertainty, suspense, mystery, and fear in the opening scene.

Where Does Hamlet Meet The Ghost at First?

Hamlet first meets the ghost of his dead father in Act-1, scene IV, and scene V. The ghost reveals a terrible secret that his uncle Claudius murdered his father by pouring poison into his ear when the king had died of a serpent’s sting. But the ghost says to Hamlet-

“The serpent that stung thy father’s life now wears his crown” The Ghost, Hamlet, Shakespeare

Although now only a ghost, the ghost retains some of the human feelings and emotions; it talks about the queen’s fickleness and shows his grief over her hasty remarriage. He also speaks in very harsh words of the murderer who has usurped the throne of Denmark and won the queen to his shameful lust.

The ghost lays the duty of revenge on Hamlet:-

“If thou hart nature in thee, Bear it not, Let not the royal bed of Denmark A couch for luxury and damned incest” The Ghost, Hamlet, Shakespeare

But even in his indignation, the ghost shows excellent chivalry towards the erring queen. The ghost forbids Hamlet to do anything against his mother and—

“To leave to happen And to those thorns that in her bosom badge To prick and sting her.” The Ghost, Hamlet, Shakespeare

The ghost is thus an integral part of the structural design of the play. It provides the hero with revenge and thus initiates the tragic action. The ghost is indispensable from the plot’s viewpoint, which hinges on the secret revealed by it to Hamlet.

How The Ghost’s Appearance Impacted Hamlet’s Mind

The impact of the ghost’s appearance on Hamlet’s mind is tremendous. The mysterious world of the dead certainly usurps hamlet’s known world. Hamlet immediately resolves to carry out the ghost’s order. However, as the days pass, we find Hamlet in a despondent mood, as he finds this task of killing a murderer irksome.

The second appearance of the ghost takes place in Act-III, Scene- IV, when Hamlet is talking to his mother in her chamber. This time the ghost is visible only to Hamlet, while Hamlet’s mother feels surprised to see Hamlet gazing at nothing.

The first appearance was visible to Marcellus, Bernardo, Horatio, and Hamlet. So the ghost had an objective existence; it was not just a figment of Hamlet’s imagination.

But in the second appearance, the ghost seems to hallucinate his guilty conscience. His conscience comes in the form of the ghost urging and spurring him to take revenge.

Shakespeare makes the ghost plausible to the audience by humanizing it. Significantly, the ghost does not appear again after the closet scene.

By this time, Hamlet has got complete proof of Claudius’s guilt, this problem of “to be or not to be” is resolved. The ghost as an initiator and supporter of action becomes redundant.

Jeffrey R. Wilson

Essays on hamlet.

Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love.

Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences.

At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium.

Publications

Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide?

These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all.

These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical.

Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem.

The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]).

Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live.

That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar.

In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.

Chapter One How Hamlet Works

Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).

Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics

King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.

Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy

This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.

Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College

What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.

Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius

Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.

Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.

Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism

This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.

Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students

Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.

Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet

Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?

Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One

Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.

Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido

Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.

Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet

According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.

Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy

This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.

Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet

As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?

Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias

Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.

Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing

Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.

Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost

Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .

Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet

The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.

Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet

This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?

Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet

Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”

Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism

In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .

Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet

There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.

Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet

Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.

Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.

Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet

In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .

Bibliography

Anand, Manpreet Kaur. An Overview of Hamlet Studies . Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2019.

Anglin, Emily. “‘Something in me dangerous’: Hamlet, Melancholy, and the Early Modern Scholar.” Shakespeare 13.1 (2017): 15-29.

Baker, Christopher. “Hamlet and the Kairos.” Ben Jonson Journal 26.1 (2019): 62-77.

Baker, Naomi. “‘Sore Distraction’: Hamlet, Augustine and Time.” Literature and Theology 32.4 (2018): 381-96.

Belsey, Catherine. “The Question of Hamlet.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016:

Bevington, David, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hamlet: A Collection of Critical Essays . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968.

Bevington, David. Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Interpretations: Hamlet . New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.

Booth, Stephen. “On the Value of Hamlet.” Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama. Ed. By Norman Rabkin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. 137-76.

Bowers, Fredson. Hamlet as Minister and Scourge and Other Studies in Shakespeare and Milton. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989.

Brancher, Dominique. “Universals in the Bush: The Case of Hamlet.” Shakespeare and Space: Theatrical Explorations of the Spatial Paradigm , ed. Ina Habermann and Michelle Witen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 143-62.

Bourus, Terri. Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet: Print, Piracy, and Performance . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Bourus, Terri. Canonizing Q1 Hamlet . Special issue of Critical Survey 31.1-2 (2019).

Burnett, Mark Thornton. ‘Hamlet' and World Cinema . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Calderwood, James L. To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet . New York: Columbia, 1983.

Carlson, Marvin. Shattering Hamlet's Mirror: Theatre and Reality . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016.

Cavell, Stanley. “Hamlet’s Burden of Proof.” Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 179–91.

Chamberlain, Richard. “What's Happiness in Hamlet?” The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries , ed. Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017): 153-74.

Cormack, Bradin. “Paper Justice, Parchment Justice: Shakespeare, Hamlet, and the Life of Legal Documents.” Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature , ed. Donald Beecher, Travis Decook, and Andrew Wallace (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015): 44-70.

Craig, Leon Harold. Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet: A Study of Shakespeare's Method . London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Critchley, Simon; Webster, Jamieson. Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine . New York: Pantheon Books, 2013.

Curran, John E., Jr. Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency: Not to Be . Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006.

Cutrofello, Andrew. All for Nothing: Hamlet's Negativity . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014.

Dawson, Anthony B. Hamlet: Shakespeare in Performance . Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1995.

Desmet, Christy. “Text, Style, and Author in Hamlet Q1.” Journal of Early Modern Studies 5 (2016): 135-156

Dodsworth, Martin. Hamlet Closely Observed . London: Athlone, 1985.

De Grazia, Margreta. Hamlet without Hamlet . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Dromgoole, Dominic. Hamlet: Globe to Globe : 193,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play . Edinburgh: Canongate, 2018.

Dunne, Derek. “Decentring the Law in Hamlet .” Law and Humanities 9.1 (2015): 55-77.

Eliot, T. S. “Hamlet and His Problems.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism . London: Methuen, 1920. 87–94.

Evans, Robert C., ed. Critical Insights: Hamlet . Amenia: Grey House Publishing, 2019.

Farley-Hills, David, ed. Critical Responses to Hamlet, 1600-1900 . 5 vols. New York: AMS Press, 1996.

Foakes, R.A. Hamlet Versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Frank, Arthur W. “‘Who’s There?’: A Vulnerable Reading of Hamlet,” Literaature and Medicine 37.2 (2019): 396-419.

Frye, Roland Mushat. The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.

Josipovici, Gabriel. Hamlet: Fold on Fold . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

Kastan, David Scott, ed. Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet . New York: G. K. Hall, 1995.

Khan, Amir. “My Kingdom for a Ghost: Counterfactual Thinking and Hamlet.” Shakespeare Quarerly 66.1 (2015): 29-46.

Keener, Joe. “Evolving Hamlet: Brains, Behavior, and the Bard.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 14.2 (2012): 150-163

Kott, Jan. “Hamlet of the Mid-Century.” Shakespeare, Our Contemporary . Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. Garden City: Doubleday, 1964.

Lake, Peter. Hamlet’s Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare's Revenge Tragedies . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.

Lerer, Seth. “Hamlet’s Boyhood.” Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England , ed. Richard Preiss and Deanne Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017):17-36.

Levy, Eric P. Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man . Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008.

Lewis, C.S. “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?” (1942). Studies in Shakespeare , ed. Peter Alexander (1964): 201-18.

Loftis, Sonya Freeman; Allison Kellar; and Lisa Ulevich, ed. Shakespeare's Hamlet in an Era of Textual Exhaustion . New York, NY: Routledge, 2018.

Luke, Jillian. “What If the Play Were Called Ophelia ? Gender and Genre in Hamlet .” Cambridge Quarterly 49.1 (2020): 1-18.

Gates, Sarah. “Assembling the Ophelia Fragments: Gender, Genre, and Revenge in Hamlet.” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 34.2 (2008): 229-47.

Gottschalk, Paul. The Meanings of Hamlet: Modes of Literary Interpretation Since Bradley . Albequerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory . Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Hunt, Marvin W. Looking for Hamlet . New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.

Iyengar, Sujata. "Gertrude/Ophelia: Feminist Intermediality, Ekphrasis, and Tenderness in Hamlet," in Loomba, Rethinking Feminism In Early Modern Studies: Race, Gender, and Sexuality (2016), 165-84.

Iyengar, Sujata; Feracho, Lesley. “Hamlet (RSC, 2016) and Representations of Diasporic Blackness,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 99, no. 1 (2019): 147-60.

Johnson, Laurie. The Tain of Hamlet . Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013.

Jolly, Margrethe. The First Two Quartos of Hamlet: A New View of the Origins and Relationship of the Texts . Jefferson: McFarland, 2014.

Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus . Garden City: Doubleday, 1949.

Keegan, Daniel L. “Indigested in the Scenes: Hamlet's Dramatic Theory and Ours.” PMLA 133.1 (2018): 71-87.

Kinney, Arthur F., ed. Hamlet: Critical Essays . New York: Routledge, 2002.

Kiséry, András. Hamlet's Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Kottman, Paul A. “Why Think About Shakespearean Tragedy Today?” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy , ed. Claire McEachern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 240-61.

Langis, Unhae. “Virtue, Justice and Moral Action in Shakespeare’s Hamlet .” Literature and Ethics: From the Green Knight to the Dark Knight , ed. Steve Brie and William T. Rossiter (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010): 53-74.

Lawrence, Sean. "'As a stranger, bid it welcome': Alterity and Ethics in Hamlet and the New Historicism," European Journal of English Studies 4 (2000): 155-69.

Lesser, Zachary. Hamlet after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Levin, Harry. The Question of Hamlet . New York: Oxford UP, 1959.

Lewis, Rhodri. Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Litvin, Margaret. Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Loftis, Sonya Freeman, and Lisa Ulevich. “Obsession/Rationality/Agency: Autistic Shakespeare.” Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body , edited by Sujata Iyengar. Routledge, 2015, pp. 58-75.

Marino, James J. “Ophelia’s Desire.” ELH 84.4 (2017): 817-39.

Massai, Sonia, and Lucy Munro. Hamlet: The State of Play . London: Bloomsbury, 2021.

McGee, Arthur. The Elizabethan Hamlet . New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.

Megna, Paul, Bríd Phillips, and R.S. White, ed. Hamlet and Emotion . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Menzer, Paul. The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts . Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008.

Mercer, Peter. Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987.

Oldham, Thomas A. “Unhouseled, Disappointed, Unaneled”: Catholicism, Transubstantiation, and Hamlet .” Ecumenica 8.1 (Spring 2015): 39-51.

Owen, Ruth J. The Hamlet Zone: Reworking Hamlet for European Cultures . Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012.

Price, Joeseph G., ed. Hamlet: Critical Essays . New York: Routledge, 1986.

Prosser, Eleanor. Hamlet and Revenge . 2nd ed. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1971.

Rosenberg, Marvin. The Masks of Hamlet . Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992.

Row-Heyveld, Lindsey. “Antic Dispositions: Mental and Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern Revenge Tragedy.” Recovering Disability in Early Modern England , ed. Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood. Ohio State University Press, 2013, pp. 73-87.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet . Ed. Neil Taylor and Ann Thompson. Revised Ed. London: Arden Third Series, 2006.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet . Ed. Robert S. Miola. New York: Norton, 2010.

Stritmatter, Roger. "Two More Censored Passages from Q2 Hamlet." Cahiers Élisabéthains 91.1 (2016): 88-95.

Thompson, Ann. “Hamlet 3.1: 'To be or not to be’.” The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare: The World's Shakespeare, 1660-Present, ed. Bruce R. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016): 1144-50.

Seibers, Tobin. “Shakespeare Differently Disabled.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiement: Gender, Sexuality, and Race , ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): 435-54.

Skinner, Quentin. “Confirmation: The Conjectural Issue.” Forensic Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 226-68.

Slater, Michael. “The Ghost in the Machine: Emotion and Mind–Body Union in Hamlet and Descartes," Criticism 58 (2016).

Thompson, Ann, and Neil Taylor, eds. Hamlet: A Critical Reader . London: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Weiss, Larry. “The Branches of an Act: Shakespeare's Hamlet Explains his Inaction.” Shakespeare 16.2 (2020): 117-27.

Wells, Stanley, ed. Hamlet and Its Afterlife . Special edition of Shakespeare Survey 45 (1992).

Williams, Deanne. “Enter Ofelia playing on a Lute.” Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 73-91

Williamson, Claude C.H., ed. Readings on the Character of Hamlet: Compiled from Over Three Hundred Sources .

White, R.S. Avant-Garde Hamlet: Text, Stage, Screen . Lanham: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015.

Wiles, David. “Hamlet’s Advice to the Players.” The Players’ Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020): 10-38

Wilson, J. Dover. What Happens in Hamlet . 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1951.

Zamir, Tzachi, ed. Shakespeare's Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Share full article

Supported by

Critic’s Notebook

Two Shakespearean Triumphs in Paris, or a Plague on Both Their Houses?

New productions of “Macbeth” and “Hamlet” follow a French tradition of adapting familiar works. The results are innovative, and sometimes cryptic.

An actor in a long white garment points his finger at the forehead of another actor dressed in red and black.

By Laura Cappelle

The critic Laura Cappelle saw the shows in Paris.

Two Paris playhouses, both alike in dignity, putting on rival new Shakespeare productions.

Thus expectations were high for a springtime face-off — with contemporary stagings of “Macbeth” and “Hamlet” — between the Comédie-Française, France’s top permanent company, and the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, the Left Bank’s most venerable theater.

The results certainly felt French. The country has long been a haven for concept-driven theater-makers, and the two directors involved, Silvia Costa and Christiane Jatahy, have no qualms about cutting and splicing the Bard’s plays in experimental, sometimes cryptic ways.

At the Comédie-Française, Costa’s “Macbeth” edits the two dozen named characters down to only eight actors and leans heavily into religious symbolism. In “Hamlet,” Jatahy goes so far as to keep Ophelia alive. Far from going mad, Ophelia climbs down from the stage and exits through the auditorium after declaring: “I died all these years. This year, I won’t die.”

Jatahy, a Brazilian director who has a significant following in France, has performed this sort of bait-and-switch with classics before. Her adaptations of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (“What If They Went to Moscow?”) and Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” (“Julia”) reworked the plays’ story lines and characters from a feminist perspective, lending greater weight to female roles.

At the Odéon, Jatahy also cast a woman, the outstanding Clotilde Hesme, as Hamlet, explaining in a playbill interview that her goal was to refocus the story on three female characters: Hamlet, Ophelia and Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. And while a female Hamlet is hardly news — the French star Sarah Bernhardt performed the role back in 1886 — Jatahy’s premise looks promising for the first few scenes.

Slouching on a couch, Hesme cuts a grave figure as she rewinds a video: the message Hamlet receives from her murdered father, here projected on a large scrim. After the ghost blames his brother, Claudius, the scene transitions seamlessly into a wedding — that of Claudius and the widowed Gertrude, who seals her new life with a karaoke rendition of Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.”

Servane Ducorps plays Gertrude with a chirpy energy that contrasts nicely with Hesme’s coolness. Yet as Jatahy’s “Hamlet” progresses, their interactions rarely ring true, in no small part because the characters have all been transplanted into a humdrum contemporary interior. There, Gertrude and Claudius (a quasi-affable Matthieu Sampeur) try to play happy blended family. They sing sweet nothings to each other over the kitchen table, while Hamlet sulks in the corner.

It’s “Hamlet” as a 21st-century parent-child drama, with the odd interjection from Ophelia and her father, Polonius, who speak Portuguese — an attempt to signal their foreignness that instead makes them look like visitors from another play. Similarly, while Isabel Abreu brings an earnest intensity to the role of Ophelia, her relationship with Hesme’s Hamlet never settles into familiarity.

Her lucky escape is equally contrived. In the playbill, Jatahy says that in choosing not to die, Ophelia “refuses to be a toy in the face of patriarchal violence.” Although Abreu delivers the inserted text bravely, it is such a jarring volte-face for her character.

According to the Odéon’s publicity material, 85 percent of the text in this version is from Shakespeare’s original “Hamlet.” Yet it rarely feels as if Jatahy trusts the Bard. Instead, she wills the characters to escape his world, in an act of feminist defiance without a clear target.

Across the Seine, Costa also follows her singular vision for “Macbeth” — her second production for the Comédie-Française after an adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s “A Girl’s Story” — to the bitter end.

Her staging of the Scottish play opens with an arresting tableau. Lady Macbeth sits hunched over, her face hidden under a disheveled mane. As she rips out clumps of her hair, a portrait of Macbeth, her husband, starts spinning on a wall behind her — until an invisible knife seems to cut into the painting.

It’s an ominous way to position Lady Macbeth, as a shadow addition to the three witches who prophesy that Macbeth will be king. When the trio appears shortly afterward to deliver their message, a giant ring materializes above the empty stage. In true “Lord of the Rings” fashion, it then descends upon Macbeth (Noam Morgensztern), metaphorically anointing him even as recorded whispers of “murder” fill the Comédie-Française’s auditorium.

So far, so impressive. But Costa, an Italian native who has collaborated with the provocative director Romeo Castellucci and shares his taste for visual symbolism, is so focused on the imagery that “Macbeth” loses dramatic steam.

Compressing all of the named characters into just eight roles is a dubious choice given the resources of the Comédie-Française’s permanent ensemble, and it leads to a sense of monotony. The three witches (Suliane Brahim, Jennifer Decker and Birane Ba) occasionally — and confusingly — double as random soldiers and messengers, and when the Macbeths go on their murderous spree, there is no one around to react to the destabilization of the kingdom.

Perplexingly, heavy-handed Roman Catholic allegories also seep into this “Macbeth” midway through, paralyzing the action. The second half of the production takes place in front of a bulky backdrop showing a winged altarpiece that is entirely blacked out. The banquet scene, in which Macbeth is haunted by his victims’ ghosts, is confined to a small confessional.

In that scene, King Duncan, whose death paves the way for Macbeth’s ascension, hovers like God surrounded by angels and martyrs. Macduff, who eventually restores order by killing Macbeth, is costumed to look every inch like Jesus, down to a wound in his side that he reveals theatrically by opening his white robe.

There are Christian themes in “Macbeth,” but Costa takes them so far that the characters disappear behind them. One of the last scenes shows Jesus-Macduff overcoming Macbeth simply by pointing a finger to his forehead, as if performing a miracle.

As a result, the production also undercuts Julie Sicard’s eerily shameless performance as Lady Macbeth. There is no doubt throughout that she has the upper hand: In fact, one scene even makes that point a little too forcefully, when she pretends to breastfeed a childlike Macbeth and hands him a pacifier.

The moment is effective in telegraphing a message, yet so dramatically improbable that the characters start to feel like pawns in the director’s game. “Macbeth,” like “Hamlet” at the Odéon, is too multilayered to be subsumed into a single grand idea. In Paris, at least, it wasn’t to be.

An earlier version of this article misidentified Ophelia’s father. He is Polonius, not Claudius.

How we handle corrections

Arts and Culture Across Europe

When activists urged Tate Britain in London to take an offensive artwork off its walls, the institution commissioned Keith Piper to create a response instead. The result recently went on display.

The new National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam has been in the works for almost 20 years. It is the first institution to tell the full story of the persecution of Dutch Jews during World War II.

At a retrospective of John Singer Sargent’s portraits in London, where the American expatriate fled after creating a scandal in Paris, clothes offer both armor and self-expression .

The street artist Frank “Frankey” de Ruwe has been delighting Amsterdam with his whimsical, witty pieces .

A major Yoko Ono retrospective at Tate Modern in London instructs visitors to draw their own shadows , shake hands through a canvas and imagine paintings in their heads.

The British Museum recovered hundreds of engraved gems and other items of jewelry that museum officials say a former curator stole. Now the institution is putting some on show .

IMAGES

Ghost in Shakespeare's "Hamlet" Play
Ghost Appears To Hamlet
≫ The Ghost and Revenge Plot in Hamlet Free Essay Sample on Samploon.com
Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The Ghost
The Significance of the Ghost in Hamlet
Introduction to the Themes of "Hamlet"

VIDEO

HAMLET EP.1: The ghost/Stikbot version/Stikbot Hamlet #stikbot #hamlet
The Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson (FULL Audiobook)
Hamlet and the Ghost #dance #ballet #beautifully #classic #classical #hamlet #theatre
Ghost Anatomy: Debunking the Myth of Ghostly Limitations
What is the secret of the ghost of the haunted hotel?
Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen Summary in English

COMMENTS

The Ghost Character Analysis in Hamlet
True to Horatio's account of the King's personality, the Ghost is pragmatic and specific about how he delivers his message of revenge. He speaks only to Hamlet and makes sure to get his son alone before they converse. He begins by asking Hamlet to pay careful attention to his message and confirm his identity as the spirit of Hamlet's father.
Consideration of the Ghost in "Hamlet" by Shakespeare Essay
Although the Ghost causes tragedy, its role is very important because it tells the truth, motivates Hamlet, and makes Hamlet overcome his sorrow. The story of Hamlet proceeds with Hamlet's revenge and ends with a bloodbath because Hamlet hurries the revenge and acts hastily. The Ghost did the right thing in pointing Hamlet to the truth about ...
Hamlet's Relationship with the Ghost
Hamlet's Relationship with the Ghost From Hamlet, an ideal prince, and other essays in Shakesperean interpretation: Hamlet; Merchant of Venice; Othello; King Lear by Alexander W. Crawford. Boston R.G. Badger. The ghost in Hamlet no doubt performs an important dramatic function. Whatever may have been Shakespeare's belief about ghosts he utilizes the popular conception to render objective what ...
The Ghost Character Analysis in Hamlet
An otherworldly presence that visits Hamlet early on in the play. The ghost appears to Hamlet as his father, though alternate readings of the play allow for the possibilities that the ghost may be a figment of Hamlet's imagination, a malevolent demon seeking to derail Hamlet's life, or even an actor working on Claudius 's behalf in an attempt to drive Hamlet mad and exclude him from the ...
Hamlet's Ghost: A Review Article Greenblatt, Stephen
Hamlet's Ghost calls out to us across the space of four hundred years, and by all evidence we are in no danger of forgetting him. Scholars have tended to focus their attention on the character of young Hamlet, but the Ghost of King Hamlet is arguably the interpretive crux of Shakespeare's play. We must decide, along with young Hamlet ...
Shakespeare's Hamlet
An examination of why the Ghost appears in full armor. The Significance of the Ghost in Armor From Hamlet, an ideal prince, and other essays in Shakesperean interpretation: Hamlet; Merchant of Venice; Othello; King Lear by Alexander W. Crawford. So much is said in the play about the ghost's warlike form that great significance must be attached to that fact.
Hamlet Essay
The Dishonest Ghost in "Hamlet". Shakespeare has always been able to create characters richly dichotomous in nature. In "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," the portrayal of the ghost of Hamlet's father vacillates through the play from Hamlet's uncertainty of whether "it is an honest ghost" (144, l.5) or "a goblin damned" (40, l.4).
What is the Ghost's role in Hamlet?
Shakespeare uses the ghost to introduce the supernatural into the play. It is through the ghost that information from beyond the grave comes to Hamlet and the audience. The second purpose for the ...
The problem of the Ghost Moral dilemma Hamlet: Advanced
Although it rejects Hamlet's pity, the Ghost's first move is to stir it up by describing his purgatorial suffering. In Act I Scene 5 , lines 13-20, the Ghost terrifies Hamlet with the prospect of divine wrath but then calls upon Hamlet's sense of filial duty to commit a deed that will condemn him to it. The Ghost describes murder as most foul ...
The ghost in Hamlet, and other essays in comparative literature
The ghost in Hamlet.--Some phases of Shakespearean interpretation.--Some pedagogical uses of Shakespeare.--Lyrism in Shakespeare's comedies.--The puzzle of Hamlet.--The greatest of Shakespeare's contemporaries.--Imitators of Shakespeare.--The comparative method in literature.--A definition of literature.--The ebb and flow of romance
Ghost in Shakespeare's Hamlet: Analysis
English. Ghost in Shakespeare's Hamlet: Analysis. "Hamlet" is a play composed by William Shakespeare between 1599 and 1601 that was first published in 1603. The drama depicts astonishingly realistic periods of true and created insanity ranging from profound sorrow to rage while also dealing with problems such as betrayal, vengeance ...
Ghosts and Revenge in Shakespeare's Hamlet Essay
In Act III Scene 4, Hamlet confronts his mother and criticizes her for the indifference to his father's death. Hamlet goes on answering back to Gertrude's acquittals, by saying, "you are the queen, you husband's brother's wife" (Shakespeare 15). The phrase implies criticism of Gertrude; Hamlet does not want the queen who betrayed ...
The Role of The Ghost in Hamlet: Unveiling The Mysteries
William Shakespeare's iconic play "Hamlet" intricately intertwines the physical and the supernatural to delve deep into the human psyche, the dynamics of complex familial relationships, and the intricacies of morality.Central to this narrative is "the role of the ghost in Hamlet," a manifestation that arguably sets the trajectory of the events that unfold in this tragic story.
The Dishonesty of The Ghost in Hamlet
In "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," the portrayal of the ghost of Hamlet's father vacillates through the play from Hamlet's uncertainty of whether "it is an honest ghost" (144, l.5) or "a goblin damned" (40, l.4). In one sense, the ghost is honest in that he tells Hamlet the truth about his own murder Claudius is truly guilty.
Hamlet Ghost Essay
Essay On Ghost In Hamlet. The play Hamlet is considered a tragedy, in which William Shakespeare is known for writing. Throughout Hamlet numerous evens occur that leads to the determining factor of Hamlet being a tragedy. However, the main event to occur would be the death of King Hamlet, Hamlet's father. It is indicated periodically that ...
Free Essay: The Ghost in Hamlet
The Ghost in Hamlet. In every rendition of "Hamlet", Hamlet's father the "Ghost, has played a key role to the downfall of Hamlet's character. He's introduced in the beginning of 'Hamlet', triggering the up roar of the kingdom. Due to his sudden death, the kingdom is supposedly to be in distress but Claudius reassured everyone ...
The Role Of The Ghost In Shakespeare's Hamlet
The ghost in "Hamlet" is a catholic element because it is a dead man spirit that comes from purgatory. Purgatory in the catholic religion is a space between heaven and hell. Purgatory is a waiting area for the dead people to be called on the day of judgement. In the catholic belief if somebody died unexpectedly by murder this dead person ...
The Ghost in Hamlet: And Other Essays in Comparative Literature
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
The ghost in Hamlet, and other essays in comparative literature
Contents. The ghost in Hamlet.--Some phases of Shakespearean interpretation.--Some pedagogical uses of Shakespeare.--Lyrism in Shakespeare's comedies.--The puzzle of Hamlet.--The greatest of Shakespeare's contemporaries.--Imitators of Shakespeare.--The comparative method in literature.--A definition of literature.--The ebb and flow of romance.
In Hamlet, was the ghost real or a figment of Hamlet's imagination
But by the time Hamlet meets his father's ghost in Act 1, Scene 4, he and the entire audience are thoroughly apprised and convinced that this is indeed the ghost of the dead King Hamlet.
The Role of The Ghost in "Hamlet" by Shakespeare
The Ghost, Hamlet, Shakespeare. The ghost is thus an integral part of the structural design of the play. It provides the hero with revenge and thus initiates the tragic action. The ghost is indispensable from the plot's viewpoint, which hinges on the secret revealed by it to Hamlet. How The Ghost's Appearance Impacted Hamlet's Mind
Essays on Hamlet
Essays on Hamlet. Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from ...
Two Shakespearean Triumphs in Paris, or a Plague on Both Their Houses?
At the Odéon, Jatahy also cast a woman, the outstanding Clotilde Hesme, as Hamlet, explaining in a playbill interview that her goal was to refocus the story on three female characters: Hamlet ...

William Shakespeare

Hamlet’s Ghost: A Review Article Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory . Princeton UP, 2001.

Works Cited

More to Explore

Únete Ahora para Ver el Contenido Premium

The Dishonest Ghost in "Hamlet" Marilyn Fu

Join Now to View Premium Content

Internet Archive Audio

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Save Page Now

The ghost in Hamlet, and other essays in comparative literature

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

IN COLLECTIONS

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Related Posts

Author: William Anderson (Schoolworkhelper Editorial Team)

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Ghosts and Revenge in Shakespeare’s Hamlet Essay

Are ghosts real? What happens in afterlife? Is there an order that “shapes our ends”? Does that punish the guilty?

Is revenge correct or not?

Does Hamlet revenge because of cowardice when Claudius prays?

Did Gertrude know Claudius killed old Hamlet?

Is Hamlet mad or only apparently so?

What the speech in III, iv, 183 to Gertrude mean with its crazy double negatives?

Can we “get” Hamlet, the play and the character, by tracing the five soliloquies?

Works Cited

The Dishonesty of The Ghost in Hamlet

Works Cited

Cite this Essay

Still can’t find what you need?

Related Essays

The Role of The Ghost in “Hamlet” by Shakespeare

The Ghost’s First Appearance Warns about The Shaping of Destiny

The Ghost Reappears to Remind Hamlet of Revenge

Where Does Hamlet Meet The Ghost at First?

How The Ghost’s Appearance Impacted Hamlet’s Mind

Share this:

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Jeffrey R. Wilson

Bibliography

Two Shakespearean Triumphs in Paris, or a Plague on Both Their Houses?

Arts and Culture Across Europe

IMAGES

VIDEO

COMMENTS