The Elder Hamlet

[Footnote: 1875]

The ghost in “Hamlet” is as faithfully drawn as any character in the play, and after Hamlet himself interests me most. The rumour of his appearance is wrapped in a larger rumour of war: loud preparations for an uncertain attack fill the ears of “the subject of the land.” The new king has hardly been elected before his marriage to his brother’s widow shrouds the court in shame that forced revelry cannot dispel. Francisco’s one significant utterance gives the key to the mood: “’Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.” Into frost, moonlight, drunken shouting and bellowing cannon glides the silent prisoner of hell—no longer a king walking his halls by day, “the observed of all observers,” but a thrall of the night, wandering between the bell and the cock with a jailer on either side. A poet tells of a king who lost his garments and ceased to be a king; here is one who has lost his body and, to his court, ceased to be a man. Is earth’s night-cold pleasant to him after the purging fire? What crimes had he committed? He calls them foul crimes! Could they be his? But who can tell how a ghost, with his doubled experience, may judge? He and the fire together may see as a foul crime what the man and court counted a weakness at worst, and in a king laudable.

Alas, poor ghost! He flits, shifting and shadowy, over the ground he once paced in ringing armour—armed still, but his armour is a shadow. It cannot keep out the arrow of the cock’s cry, and the heart it pierces is no shadow. Where is the axe with which, in angry dispute, he smote the ice till it cracked, and the arm that swung it? Wasting in the tomb; the arm he carries now cannot slay his murderer—for that he needs his son’s. His new form has its privileges: it can change its dress at will, pass through gates or doors, work in the ground like a mole, and speak from the cellarage. But there is one to whom he cannot show himself, though he sees her: she has built a doorless, windowless wall between them, and no longer sees the husband of her youth. Outside her heart is the night he wanders while the palace windows flare; inside, his murderer sits by the wife of his bosom, and in the orchard the spilt poison still gnaws the roots of the daisies.

Twice the ghost has appeared to the sentinels, walking past three times each night while they, jellied with fear, said nothing. They seek Horatio, who on the third night speaks to him as a scholar can. To the first challenge he makes no answer and stalks away; to the second,

but the gaoler cock calls him, and the kingly shape

and then

Ah, that summons! At which majesty welks and shrivels, and king and soldier start and cower and, armour and all, wither from the air!

But why has he not spoken before? Why not now, before the cock could claim him? He cannot trust the men. His court has forsaken his memory, crowding as eagerly about the mildewed ear as ever about his wholesome brother; how should he trust mere sentinels? A word to anyone else would defeat his purpose. In all Denmark there is only one he can trust—his student-son—and him he has not yet found, a ghost’s condition having its strange difficulties.

Or did the men’s horror at the sight of him wound and repel him? Does his regal dignity, unexhausted by fasting in fires, join with deep humiliation to make him shun their speech?

And Horatio—why does the ghost not answer him before the cock’s time? Is it indignation, because his son’s friend addressed him as an intruder on the night, a usurper of his own form? The speaker’s companions see that he is offended and stalks away.

Much has the kingly ghost to endure in reopening relations with the world he left. Having mastered his wrath, he returns, and Horatio insults him again by calling him an illusion. This time he will bear it, and opens his mouth; but the cock is awake and he must go. The guards strike at the shadow with upraised halberds, and would stop it if they could—conduct so unfitting that they are at once ashamed, seeing the offence in the offended majesty. But he is gone. The proud king has found himself a thing of nothing to his body-guard, having lost the body that was their guard. He has yet to learn how little an honest ghost can do to gain credit for himself or his tale; his very privileges are against him.

Meanwhile his son is consuming his heart over a mother who could so soon forget such a husband, and in pity for the dead father who had such a wife. He is thirty, an obedient, honourable son, a man of thought, faith and aspiration. The ghost seeks him, burning with unendurable wrong, for the one cooling drop—his boy’s sympathy, his answering rage and grief. But when he finds him, the loving father must watch his son tremble like an aspen-leaf in his doubtful presence. He has exposed himself to shame and the indignities of dullness to pour out his wrongs, but his disfranchisement from the flesh tells against him even with his son: Hamlet doubts that the apparition is his father. For all its burning words, the spirit may be a devil, who can take a pleasing shape and perhaps exploits his melancholy to damn him.

He comes armed in the full steel the sentinels know—visionary none the less, a useless truncheon in hand, with quiet countenance, more in sorrow than in anger. What troubles him is not the hell-day to which he must return sleepless, but the ache that draws him back to the scene of his wrongs whenever he is let out into the cooler air—where, asleep in his orchard in sacred security, he was flung by cruel assault into Hades, to horror upon horror, worst of all the knowledge of his wife. Yet he seeks no pity from his son: he can endure. There is no weakness in the ghost; he is shadowy only to imperfect human sense. He knows his doom is his deliverance: the hell he is in will last only until it has burnt up the hell he found within him, until the evil he was and could be has dropped from him into the lake of fire; he nerves himself to bear it. His cry of revenge is a king’s and a Dane’s rather than a wronged man’s: he asks public justice, not vengeance. He cannot bear that the royal bed of Denmark should be a couch of luxury and damned incest, and would bring the murderer to justice to stop it. For the worse wrong, which involves his wife, he seeks no revenge; there love enters, and love knows no amends but amendment, seeking only the repentance the wronger needs tenfold more than the wronged. A father’s care for his son and a husband’s tenderness for her who once lay in his bosom both warn him to take no measures against his mother. The murdered brother, dethroned king, dishonoured husband and tormented sinner is yet a gentle ghost. Has suffering begun to make him, like Prometheus, wise?

To measure the ghost’s gentleness and forgiveness, we must understand his wrongs. The murder is plain, but what went before is worse, and less plain to every reader. Without it there would have been no murder; it is a cause of all the wrong. Listen to what the ghost reveals when he has drawn his son aside to speak alone, and Hamlet has anticipated the naming of the murderer:

Reading this, can anyone doubt that the ghost charges his late wife with adultery as the root of all his woes? Hamlet, obeying the ghost and his own filial instincts, accuses his mother of no more than all the world could see; but unless the ghost was misinformed, we must accept the charge. Had Gertrude not yielded to the witchcraft of Claudius’ wit, he would never have murdered Hamlet. Through her his life was dishonoured and his death violent and premature: unhuzled, disappointed, unaneled, he woke not to the air of his orchard-blossoms but to a prison-house whose lightest terror would freeze a listener’s blood. He could say what few men can—that his love for his wife kept even step with his marriage vow; and his son says of him—

and this was her return! Yet is it thus he charges his son concerning her:

May we not suppose it is partly for her sake that the ghost insists, four times over, on a sword-sworn oath of silence from Horatio and Marcellus?

He shows himself only once more—not now in armour on the walls, but in his gown, in his wife’s closet.

From his first appearance, through the interval between the first and second acts, we may presume he has haunted the palace unseen, waiting for his son to act. But the task has been harder than either supposed. The ambassadors have gone to Norway and returned, and Hamlet has done nothing—probably for want of opportunity; certainly for want of a clear vision of duty. Now, in the second and third acts, which take only one day, something seems imminent. The play has been acted and Hamlet has gained some assurance, yet he has refused the one chance of killing the king—at prayer. Now he is in his mother’s closet, and the ghost appears again, come, he says, to whet his son’s almost blunted purpose. But he does not know the disadvantages of one who has left the world yet has business there to persuade others to. He does not know how hard it is to believe in a ghost, how well justified Hamlet is in delaying and demanding better proof, or how much natural and righteous doubt lies behind what the ghost takes for blunted purpose; nor how much more tender Hamlet’s conscience is than his own. Nor perhaps does he understand how hateful the task is to Hamlet: to kill one wretched villain in a corrupt and contemptible court, in a world whose women his mother may typify!

Whatever the main purpose of the ghost’s appearance, he says only a few words about it before turning abruptly to plead with his son for his wife. He sees the terror in her looks and mistakes it: he thinks that, from some sense of his presence or the power of Hamlet’s words, her conscience is roused and her vision of the facts is more than she can bear. He fears the consequences; he would not have her go mad, or die yet. Even while ready to start at the summons of the hell to which she sold him, he forgets his vengeance on her seducer in his wish to comfort her. He dares not, even if he could, show himself to her: what consolation could she hear from his lips, when the thought of him is her one despair? He turns to his son: his son must take his place. Alas, even now he thinks better of her than she deserves; it is only the fancy of her son’s madness that terrifies her—Hamlet gazes at an apparition she cannot see, and she fears an outbreak.

The call to his son to soothe his wicked mother is the ghost’s last utterance. For a few moments he stands sadly regarding the two while his son tries in vain to make his mother aware of him—moments that all but ruin Hamlet’s remaining self-possession, the ghost’s whole concern being his wife’s distress, not his own doom or his son’s duty. Then, despairing at the gulf her inability even to imagine him reveals, he steals out at the portal. Or perhaps he has heard the black cock crow: his turn has come.

Will the fires ever cleanse her? Will his love ever lift him above the pain of its loss, and eternity ever be endurable to poor King Hamlet?

Alas, even the poor ghost’s memory is insulted. Night after night his effigy appears on the stage cadaverous and sepulchral—not as Shakspere must have shown him, aerial, shadowy, gracious, the thin husk of an eternal sorrow. No hollow monotone can carry his words. They need a sound mingled of distance and wind in the pine-tops, of agony, love, horror, hope, loss and judgment—a voice of endless inflection, with a shuddering echo as from the caves of memory. A spirit that can assume form at will must be able to bend it to the most delicate expression, and the ghost’s part offers work worthy of the highest artist. The would-be actor takes from it vitality and motion and gives it the rigidity of death, as if the soul had put on again its cast-off garment, the stiffened and mouldy corpse, whose frozen deadness could ill obey its lively will!