Horatio & Hamlet on How to Speak to Ghosts (Halloween post)

For Halloween, what can we learn from Shakespeare’s Hamlet on how to speak to ghosts?

First Horatio, and later, Hamlet, both try.

HORATIO
What art thou that usurp’st this time of night,
Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march? By heaven, I charge thee,
Speak.
(1.1.54-58)

Horatio calls the ghost a usurper of the night and of the appearance of the dead king. Marcellus thinks Horatio has offended the ghost (perhaps true, especially since Claudius, brother to the king, was the usurper).

Soon the ghost appears again. This time Horatio’s attempts seem informed by his university learning, questioning the ghost, asking if can foresee Denmark’s future, or knows of buried treasure:

HORATIO:
Stay, illusion!
[...]
If thou hast any sound or use of voice,
Speak to me.
If there be any good thing to be done
That may to thee do ease and grace to me,
Speak to me.
If thou art privy to thy country’s fate,
Which happily foreknowing may avoid,
O, speak!
Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life
Extorted treasure in the womb of earth,
For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death,
Speak of it.
(1.1.138-151)

Horatio knows that the ghost may not have a voice (140);
he considers: if he does a favor for the ghost it may “ease” the ghost and bring Horatio grace, a kind of transaction (142-3).  


He considers that the ghost may know of some danger in Denmark’s future that might be avoided (145-6), or that the ghost (like a hoarding rich man) may have buried treasure in the “womb” of the earth, an interesting possibility given the ghost’s later reference to how his skin became leprous like that of the beggar Lazarus who was neglected by the selfish rich man.

But Horatio’s efforts don’t work: This ghost won’t speak to those who are not its intended audience. (Only Hamlet.)

Later, in 1.4:

HAMLET:
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,[1]
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou com’st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee. I’ll call thee “Hamlet,”
“King,” “Father,” “Royal Dane.”[2] O, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell
Why thy canonized bones,[3] hearsèd in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulcher,
Wherein we saw thee quietly interred,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws
To cast thee up again.[4] What may this mean
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel,
Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous, and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?[5]
(1.4.44-62)

The ghost beckons. Hamlet follows. They speak. The rest is… well, not history, but drama (and tragedy).

It may prove instructive on Halloween, should you see a ghost…. 

NOTES: All quotes are from the Folger Shakespeare Library online version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/

[1] Hamlet doesn’t know whether the ghost is from heaven or hell (or purgatory, as the ghost later claims).

[2] Hamlet doesn’t know what or who the ghost is, but because it *looks* like his father, and because he would like to *believe* it is his father, he addresses it that way: ‘I’ll call thee “Hamlet,”
“King,” “Father,” “Royal Dane.”’

[3] Prince Hamlet calls his father’s bones “canonized,” implying that his father was saintly: This is an early indication that he thinks too highly of his father, given that the ghost claims he is from purgatory and guilty of “foul crimes” (1.5.17) in need of being “purged away” (18).

[4] Nothing in the play indicates that “the sepulcher” in which the dead king was buried had been broken open before the appearances of the ghost, but Prince Hamlet imagines it must have.

[5] With these last three questions that Hamlet asks the ghost, it is clear that Hamlet trusts the ghost implicitly, and has forgotten his earlier awareness that the ghost may come from hell.

Takeaway: DON'T TRUST A GHOST that much if you see and speak with one.
You don’t know for sure where it’s from, or where it’s going.
You may end up killing your true love's dad,
driving your true love crazy,
ordering the beheading of two school-friends,
and having your mom drink poison that your uncle intended for YOU.

IMAGES:
LEFT: Henry Fuseli, Hamlet and his father's Ghost (1780-1785). Deutsch: Johann Heinrich Füssli. Edited. Public domain via https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_Fuseli_rendering_of_Hamlet_and_his_father%27s_Ghost.JPG

RIGHT: The Ghost in Hamlet (1880), by Thomas Gould (American, 1818–1881), Worcester Art Museum. Edited. Public domain via https://worcester.emuseum.com/objects/786/the-ghost-in-hamlet

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Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages or mention religion in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over another, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to explore how the Bible and religion influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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