Today, part 2....
There is no ghost in the legendary source for Hamlet. Apparently one was first added to this material by the author of the no longer extant Ur-Hamlet, a play produced in or before 1589 that featured a "ghost which cried... miserably at the theater, like an oyster-wife, ‘Hamlet, revenge....’" Why was a ghost needed in this earlier Hamlet play, not to mention Hamlet? What problems could a ghost solve that no other theatrical device would solve as well? In Chapter 3, we discussed this question in terms of Hamlet's needs and desires. It is necessary now to see how this question can be answered for the culture at large and, as importantly, for popular public theaters. Two concerns claim our attention: how and why early modern English culture gradually derealized ghosts and spirits. Why it did so was because ghosts functioned, in the main, to prevent significant change; how it did so was to make ghosts more and more negative until they could be staged in theaters as embodiments of social formations emergent elements of English culture could no longer tolerate.
To organize this complex material--and introduce the numerous documents excerpted below--it is helpful to list the kinds of ghosts constructed and used by early modern (1) Catholics, (2) Protestants, (3) skeptics, and (4) theatres. The objective is not to answer the long-debated questions: "Is the ghost in Hamlet real or not?" or "Is it Catholic, pagan, or Protestant?"--questions that reduce Hamlet's ghost to one or another impossible and pointless unity. Rather, to borrow an insight from Mary Douglas, a famous anthropologist, the objective is to see that a ghost "is never a unique, isolated event.... For the only way in which ghosts make sense is in reference to a total structure of thought...."
A crucial thing to do when trying to understand early modern apparitions is not to collapse six of their kinds into one; moreover, it is the last of these six, stage ghosts, that gets the most overlooked but is, for our purposes, finally the most important. For early modern Catholics, five kinds of apparitions operated in the everyday world on virtually a daily basis: (1) angels from heaven, (2) ghosts of the dead temporarily returned from purgatory, (3) demons from hell disguised as ghosts of dead persons, (4) ghost-hallucinations in the minds of the mad, and (5) ghost-frauds perpetuated by criminals. Protestants reduced this Catholic array to the last three, deciding in the first place that God no longer needed to use angels to send messages from heaven since he communicated with his true believers directly through the medium of the Holy Ghost, and, in the second, that since purgatory does not exist, neither do purgatorial ghosts. Skeptics further reduced this array to the last two on the ground that, as hell also does not exist, neither do demonic apparitions. For skeptics convinced, in Francis Bacon's terms, that ghosts are "idols imposed by words...names of things which do not exist," ghosts became nothing but hallucinations or frauds. In other words, "preternatural phenomena were demonized" by Protestant doctrine, and then, and in the minds of the skeptics, "the demons were deleted, leaving only the natural causes" with the result that a ghost became "a new kind of fact" that signified nothing more than what it tells us about the contents of some person's head. The point of these reductions is clear: the more a culture desires to maintain the status quo, the more likely it is to construct ghosts as real, whereas the more it wants to embrace significant change the more it will derealize ghostly remnants of its past and the social formations these ghosts helped construct.
Stage Ghosts
Up to this point we have been discussing ghosts as everyday people thought of them. If we turn now to the theaters, it is clear that these venues borrowed the ghosts of everyday life, imitating all five categories on their stages. However, in addition to functioning for characters on stage as ghosts did in everyday life--narrating events in the past, enforcing church authority, demanding revenge, say goodbye to a loved one, among other things--stage ghosts also perform functions (modeled on the use of stage ghosts in the classical plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Seneca) specific to playwrights and theater audiences. Of several, one is particularly crucial for Hamlet, namely the use of a stage ghost, patterned after the ghost of Achilles mentioned in Euripides and Seneca, to epitomize a soulful formation, Hamlet's father's world, that insists on lifting its head in Denmark's present as a way of refusing to die. In contrast then to the ghost Hamlet constructs to serve his purposes, Shakespeare's play uses Hamlet's ghost, and as Hamlet also does, to embody the patriarchal past undermining Gertrude's new Denmark. But where Hamlet assigns positive value to this ghostly embodiment of Denmark's past, Shakespeare's Hamlet negates it.
Group Sightings
What if eleven sightings of the ghost are experienced by four different people in Hamlet? The paradoxical answer that follows is that a person may see a ghost, but that a person never sees one solely by him/herself, since anyone who sees a ghost is always already part of a culture or subculture that sees/needs/constructs ghosts and teaches their members to do likewise. So, for four people to see the same ghost means that four people share the same cultural codes, need the same problem (or a similar one) solved, and conspire, however unwittingly, to solve it with a tried-and-true technology: Enter Ghost! From the emergent perspective, then, it is no more difficult to explain group hallucinations and individual ones. In fact, group hallucinations are the best evidence that ghosts are structural elements of specific cultures. In other words, every ghost sighting is always already a group sighting, a group hallucination (whether the group is physically present or not). More to the point, patriarchal cultures of the past not only encouraged but required collective sightings: all early modern Catholics must see ghosts, all Protestants must deny purgatorial ghosts. This is why the number of persons viewing a ghost is irrelevant in terms of evidence: for those who need ghosts (who believe in them), one witness is as good as a thousand, just as for those who do not, a thousand witnesses are no more convincing than one.
But how is it that two soldiers see the ghost of Hamlet's father before Horatio or Hamlet do? Three scenarios follow:
- A small group of disillusioned soldiers suffering stress and anxieties after the death of their leader needing what Hamlet needs--an image of their past heroic leader--read Hamlet's mind and give him what he desires, the spirit of "the king [his] father" (1.2.191).
- Having tried other ways of getting Hamlet to act in phallic fashion like his father, and convinced they have to turn Hamlet into a warlord so as not to have to depend (in their minds) on an effeminized Claudius to deal with Fortinbras, a splinter group in the Army conspires to put Hamlet in a situation where it can say, "We saw ‘a figure like your father,/Armed at point exactly, cap a pe’" [from head to foot] (1.2.199-200).
- Having read Machiavelli, and needing a ghost for the reasons cited in Chapter 3, Hamlet tells Marcellus, his most loyal soldier: you saw a ghost the last two nights, didn't you, soldier? And you will see it again tonight, and you will convince the share of your watch that he saw it too (you’ll know the best man to employ), and the two of you will band Horatio to your view, and then the three of you will come and tell me about the ghost you saw, won't you, soldier?
All of these scenarios happen unconsciously and simultaneously without anyone in this military subculture needing to say anything to anyone else, since in a culture war a situation arises in which a ghost needs to appear, it appears, the stage having been set for its entrance long before it hears itself repeating the lines it is needed to say!
It would not have been a problem for skeptical and/or emergent thinkers in early modern England to hear Hamlet's father's ghost speak. Reginald Scot was not the only Elizabethan who was convinced that ghostspeak was ventriloquized speech....
[Taken from Understanding Hamlet by R. Corum, Greenwood Press, 1998]