Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

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, ...

If we take seriously that Hamlet, Horatio and the sentinels saw a ghost from purgatory, [1] then we have to consider this possibility: Hamlet is harsh with his mother and Ophelia because he thinks he has seen his father’s ghost from purgatory who claims to be there because he had sinned, committed foul crimes. Hamlet doesn’t want the two women he loves most to end up in purgatory like his father, or worse, in hell. He scolds Ophelia and tells her to get to a nunnery; he scolds his mother, tells her to repent of her incestuous marriage, a relationship that began, according to the ghost, with adultery when his father was still alive. Hamlet feels a duty to be harsh with them because he fears for their eternal fate. If one encountered a ghost from purgatory as Hamlet did, and loved his mother and Ophelia, it makes sense that one might want to warn them, to spare them such a fate. [2] To be clear, while many in Shakespeare’s time believed in ghosts [3], there were also those who did not,...

From the chapter, “On Ghosts” (131-171) from the book, The Character of Hamlet by John Erskine Hankins (1941), regarding 5 options for different beliefs regarding ghosts, represented by various characters in Hamlet. [1] [Upper left: Paapa Essiedu as Hamlet and Ewart James Walters as Ghost in 2018 RSC production of Hamlet, photo by Manuel Harlan via RSC, cropped . Fair use. Upper right: Illustration of the ghost by Thomas Ridgeway Gould from an 1890 printing of Hamlet, public domain, via Wikipedia . Lower right: Paul Scofield as the ghost in Hamlet, 1990, directed by Franco Zeffirelli. Photo via The Guardian . Fair use. Lower left: Engraving, "Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus, and the Ghost, on platform before the Palace of Elsinor," by Robert Thew (1758–1802) After Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), September 29, 1796, after a 1789 painting by Kaufmann. Public domain. Via Wikimedia and The Huntington Library and Museum (Huntington.org) .] 1. “All supernatural apparitions, includin...

This past week, three sources came together to nudge me toward thinking in new ways about the ghost in Hamlet . [Images: Left: Screen-shot of headline and Ian McKellen from Michael Billington article in The Guardian (see below). Fair use. Right: Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice , directed by Tim Burton, 1988, warner Brothers, image via IMDB . Fair use.] The first was an article in The Guardian by critic Michael Billington regarding a new film called The Hamlet Within . It mentioned productions of the play that portray the ghost as an inner voice of Hamlet rather than the manifestation witnessed by the sentinels and Horatio in the opening scene. The second was when Shobha Pawar sent a link to an excellent YouTube video by John Berger from the 1970s, about how our experience of art and of its meanings changes over time , especially after technological changes that allow mass replication of famous art images. The third was a “Speaking of Shakespeare” video on Shakespeare and th...