Twice in the past week, I have been told that the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father is not who he claims to be but is a deceptive demon from hell. Last week, during a class on Shakespeare, one of my students at Thomas More College questioned my reading of the play on the assumption, learned from another class, that the Ghost was demonic; then, in a comment on the recent “Shakespeare and Sherlock” post on this site, another person makes the claim that the Ghost is a liar. This misunderstanding of the Ghost’s pivotal and crucial role in the play sucks the profoundly Christian lifeblood from Hamlet. If the Ghost is from hell, Hamlet is an idiot and the play’s conclusion an ultimately meaningless mess.
I deal with the Ghost’s role at considerable length in my book, Through Shakespeare’s Eyes. Here, however, is a brief summary of the evidence for the Ghost’s honesty:
1. The Ghost is real, and not a figment of the imagination, because Shakespeare goes to considerable lengths to show that it is seen by several people at once (and on more than one occasion) at the play’s outset.
2. The Ghost insists, with Hamlet, that the witnesses to the apparition swear upon the sword and not simply by faith, a clear reference to the Catholic position on faith and works and a criticism of the Protestant doctrine of sola fide. Samuel Johnson, amongst others, has pointed out that the sword symbolizes the cross in this scene. Christian knights and soldiers swore upon their swords, which were cruciform and often had a cross emblazoned on the hilt. The insistence that they swear upon the cross turns the play into a crusade for justice. Needless to say, it is somewhat unlikely that a demon would insist that people swear upon the cross.
3. Hamlet, with his customary deliberation (which is not synonymous with the false charge of procrastination that is oftened levelled against him), goes to great pains to ensure that the Ghost is indeed “honest” and not a lying demon from Hell. He is aware that he will be killing an innocent man if the Ghost is lying about Claudius. He devises the play within the play (a powerful metaphor for the role of art as a conveyer of truth) to test the innocence of the Ghost and the guilt of Claudius.
4. The Ghost does not demand vengeance but justice. Claudius is not only a murderer but a regicide and a fratricide. Furthermore, his crime would have gone unpunished without the timely intervention of the Ghost. Hamlet has no recourse to justice through conventional means because the King is the highest authority in the land. Do those who claim that the Ghost is demonic think that justice would have been served if Claudius had reigned happily, his heinous crime undiscovered and unpunished?
5. The Ghost shows remarkable mercy and forgiveness towards his wife, considering that she has married his murderer. Although Gertrude’s direct role in the murder is not clear, it is at least heavily implicit that she was being unfaithful to her husband prior to the the murder. The Ghost’s charitable disposition towards his unfaithful wife contrasts starkly with Hamlet’s venting of his spleen against his unfaithful mother.
6. The symbolism of the play’s climax in which poison is synonymous with sin and the sword is synonymous with the cross, ties in with the swearing upon the sword/cross at the play’s outset.
7. In a metadramatic sense, Shakespeare’s Catholicism is seen in the connection between Claudius and Elizabeth, the latter of whom was responsible for killing Mary, Queen of Scots, whom Catholics beleived to be the true queen (Elizabeth as the illegitimate child of Hnery VIII’s adulterous relationship with Ann Boleyn was seen as usurping the throne).
8. Continuing with the metadramatic background, St. Pius V had excommunicated Elizaebth I, declaring in a papal bull that “Elizabeth, the pretended queen of England and the servant of crime” was a heretic whom no Catholic should serve.
9. At the end of the play, Horatio praises Hamlet as a noble spirit and prays for him in the words of the Latin requiem Mass. Hamlet is the play’s hero, carrying out the will of God, which had been revealed to him by the heaven-sent Ghost.
To conclude, there is no way that any Catholic in Elizabethan England would have seen the Ghost as demanding anything but justice, a justice sanctioned by heaven itself in the sense that he had been sent from purgatory (heaven’s ante-chamber) to expose the crime of which he had been the victim.
Swearing on the cruciform sword puts an end to any speculation that the ghost is demonic.
I think we go astray a bit when we focus on punishment>justice instead of truth>justice. What MUST prevail is Truth, not punishment, per se. Once that happens, of course, punishment must necessarily follow, but the purpose of it all is truth, not punishment.
Hamlet’s agony and his martyrdom are not for the sake of justice in the sense of punishing the guilty as for justice in the sense of the reign of Truth.
(I personally see Shakespeare’s own agony mirrored in Hamlet’s in that way; a writer must be a truth-teller. That takes superhuman confidence, as Shakespeare/Hamlet would surely know.)
‘Swearing on the cruciform sword puts an end to any speculation that the ghost is demonic.’
The point though is that they swore on a sword, not on a crucifix. A sword is primarily a weapon for killing people. To swear on a sword means to commit oneself to violent deeds. The fact that the sword has something of the shape of a cross is entirely incidental.
‘I think we go astray a bit when we focus on punishment>justice instead of truth>justice. What MUST prevail is Truth, not punishment, per se. Once that happens, of course, punishment must necessarily follow, but the purpose of it all is truth, not punishment.’
But the point of the play is justice, founded on the truth. Hamlet’s whole problem in the play is what to do about his uncle once he learns he is a murderer. What is the right form of justice? Simply knowing the truth is not enough as the ghost himself makes emphatically clear.
‘Hamlet’s agony and his martyrdom are not for the sake of justice in the sense of punishing the guilty as for justice in the sense of the reign of Truth.’
I’m sounding very Mary Mary quite contrary, but I always saw Hamlet’s troubles as a perplexity on to how to ACT. What is the right course of action for him to follow, which adds up to what is the right form of justice?
‘(I personally see Shakespeare’s own agony mirrored in Hamlet’s in that way; a writer must be a truth-teller. That takes superhuman confidence, as Shakespeare/Hamlet would surely know.)’
Shakespeare had Hamlet’s own dilemma in the sense that the English monarchy was set on destroying his religion, and there was nothing he could really do about it unless, like the radical Catholics of his time, he try to kill the Monarch. Which would not have been the answer.
As I said in in reply to an earlier post, there is a problem with the nature of the justice required by the ghost.
To obtain real justice, Hamlet had to denounce the king to his courtiers and subjects in such a manner that Claudius would have been removed from power. A king’s subjects can be released from obedience to him if his evil conduct is sufficiently grave to warrant it. Does this apply to Claudius? No, for two reasons:
Firstly, Hamlet cannot prove that Claudius is a murderer. The word of a ghost does not constitute evidence.
Secondly, Claudius’s crime, grave as it is, does not add up to an oppression of his subjects sufficient to justify their revolting against him. King David committed adultery and murder and remained king.
This kind of justice being evidently impossible for Hamlet, the only course of action he has – and which the ghost knows he has – is to take the law into his own hands and kill Claudius.
Throughout the play he hesitates to do this, and is only forced to it in the end. The ultimate result of the ghost’s intervention is the killing of the entire royal family and a good few others besides, and the subjugation of Denmark to Fortinbras.
Hopefully Fortinbras will be a good ruler, but that was not the ‘justice’ the ghost was looking for.
Justin,
The apparition of the Ghost, who is clearly shown and proved to be “honest”, is nothing short of a divine revelation bringing a hideous crime to light, and ultimately to a satisfactory conclusion. It is no coincidence that Shakespeare has Hamlet quote scripture immediately prior to the final denouement, nor that the scripture he quotes alludes to God’s providence.
From a Catholic perspective every character dies in a state of grace, having repented, with the exception of Claudius. As such, they are heaven-bound, perhaps via purgatory, whereas Claudius is presumably damned. With this in mind, your claim that this is not the justice for which the Ghost was looking is a little presumptuous.
As for Fortinbras, his few words show him to be a just ruler and he is clearly welcomed with open arms by the noble Horatio. Is this a more just resolution to the problem that the play posits than a murderer, regicide and fratricide remianing on the throne, enjoying the spoils of his sin? Emphatically yes!
Dear Justin,
According to Catholic teaching, there is a difference between tyrannicide and murder. Tyrannicide is not considered sinful.
What little we are able to discern from Shakespeare’s biography tells us that he was Catholic. Living where and when he did, doing what he did, would have caused him constant and very intense internal conflict, exactly like that of his character Hamlet. The compulsion to speak truth, which, one may theorize, is greater in proportion to the degree of creative power in his endowment, would have brutalized his psyche, exactly like Hamlet.
This is a strange play, a strange story. To read it with Shakespeare’s own non-fictional dilemma in mind clarifies too much (for me) to be ignored. How often must he have wondered “whether ’tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune….” etc., how often must he have looked at England much as Hamlet looked at his own mother, with love and sorrow, unable to condemn.
I think Hamlet is Shakespeare’s attempt to exorcise his own tormented conscience, and I see allegory in all the major characters, including his Ophelia-wife, foreign-savior Fortinbras (Philip II of Spain?), and others. The evil poison of the “father of all Lies” victimizes the innocent, the credulous along with the culpable, in a finale that could only be apocalyptic.
His “play within the play” may have been the play Hamlet itself, within the greater play of history, wherein he hoped to “catch the conscience of the king,” a naive hope, as he realizes. Ultimately, I think “The play’s the thing” is an autobiographical statement–the only one he ever dared to utter.
For me the whole question of the ghost resolves itself into one question: Is Hamlet justified in taking the law into his own hands and killing his uncle? What does Catholic Moral Theology say? If it says yes then, fine, the ghost is honest. If it says no, then how can the ghost be honest in urging Hamlet to murder?
It is understood that denouncing Claudius to the court on the word of a ghost will not work, and nothing in the play suggests that the ghost or Hamlet ever conceived of that course of action.
Hamlet cannot kill his uncle in cold blood. Only when the queen is dead and he himself has been given a mortal wound can he in a pitch of fury bring himself to do it, which I suppose substantially excuses him from the charge of premeditated murder.
Fortinbras taking over the throne was entirely fortuitous – he happened to be around when the royal family destroyed itself. I don’t think one can affirm that the ghost planned it that way. What the ghost wanted was for Hamlet to go, kill his uncle immediately, and seize the throne (presuming he wasn’t killed himself). Would we have admired Hamlet if he had done that?
‘Dear Justin,
According to Catholic teaching, there is a difference between tyrannicide and murder. Tyrannicide is not considered sinful.’
True, Brendan, but there must be very grave justifying reasons for tyrannicide, which, if I am not mistaken, add up to nothing less than unbearable oppression of the people as a whole by the monarch. A single crime does not justify tyrannicide. If it did then King David should have been removed from power.