Brendan King has sent me this amusing skit in which Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery of Hamlet. Elementary, my dear Horatio …
http://www.mileskington.com/More%20Miles/ARTICLES/SherlockHolmesMag.html
If Shakespeare Knew Sherlock
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About the Author: Joseph Pearce
Joseph Pearce is a Catholic author and biographer who has written about subjects as various as GK Chesterton, economics, and Shakespeare.
Very ckever, if a little punful!
First rate. Has anyone else worked out that the ghost of Hamlet’s father is not Hamlet’s father? Here’s the reasoning:
Major: The Ghost claims he is in purgatory and tells Hamlet to kill his uncle in revenge for his own death.
Minor: But no redeemed soul, whether in heaven or purgatory, could tell someone on earth to commit murder.
Conclusion: Therefore the ghost cannot be the soul of Hamlet’s father.
As a follow-on conclusion, the soul must be a devil, unless it is a shared hallucination by the guards and Hamlet himself, which is very unlikely.
Justin, I beg to differ. The ghost is an “honest ghost”, as Hamlet proves by the staging of the play within the play. The ghost is not demanding murder but justice. Claudius is a regicide and a murderer who would have got away with his hellish crime if the purgatorical soul had not appeared to expose the crime and pave the way for the play’s denouement.
I take the point about justice, but I see a small problem with it.
Justice could only fairly be done by Hamlet proving conclusively that Claudius murdered his brother. The problem is that he has no proof, and would never succeed in convincing the kingdom that Claudius is a regicide. The only way he can effectuate any sort of ‘justice’ is by killing Claudius himself, which means taking the law into his own hands. He hesitates to do this, going so far as to test the ghost’s story by the play within a play. When he is finally driven to do it, it spells ruin for the kingdom inasmuch as the entire royal family dies and Denmark is taken over by Fortinbras.
Nothing good can and does come from the ghost’s intervention. Sometimes crime in high places must be left for God to judge in His own good time.