Part of that transcendence in Shakespeare indeed comes from his origins. He was not a slick academician speaking to the elite, but was born a farmer’s son, and he spoke to the masses. He was probably born in the year 1564, which was the year on his record of baptism in Stratford-upon-Avon. This was only 6 years after the ascension of Queen Elizabeth I, and the reinstatement of Protestantism as the state religion. Within 20 years of Shakespeare’s birth, the state religion had changed 3 times. This means that both his mother and his father saw Henry VIII change from Defender of the Faith in the Catholic Church, to the head of a new religion independent of the Pope. They survived the radical Calvinism of Edward VI, and the bloody inquisitive Catholic resurgence of Mary I. Queen Elizabeth seemed to promise a religious synthesis of Tudor extremes to the nation. The police state of England was no longer breathing down the necks of most citizens. Most citizens, yes, but The Queen was no escape from Tudor violence for the Shakespeare’s (Greenblatt, Shakespeare's World) .
This was because of the loyalty of both Shakespeare’s paternal and maternal extended families to the old faith: Catholicism. The evidence for this is substantial. Let us begin with the evidence for Shakespeare’s maternal ancestors: the Ardens. His grandfather, Robert Arden, wrote his will in 1557, one year before the ascension of Queen Elizabeth. It opens with the testimony, “I, Robert Arden, sick in body, but good and perfect in remembrance, bequeath my soul to Almighty God and to our blessed lady St. Mary” (66) . To even write that with the Protestant forces on the rise and Mary I’s monarchy in jeopardy, was a brave profession of faith. The fact that the will stood without amendment in 1561, when Arden died and Protestantism was the state religion, was bold approaching reckless. That recklessness and firm Catholicism was the norm for the Ardens. Particularly this was so for Edward Arden, Shakespeare’s first cousin, who was sentenced to death for his supposed association with a Catholic plot to assassinate The Queen (Kishlansky, Geary and O'Brien 420-426)
Shakespeare’s paternal relatives may have been more careful, but were likely not less devout. As Michael Wood, Oxford trained historian and documentarian points out, his father, John Shakespeare, was town Alderman for Stratford-upon-Avon. As such, and because of his position on the town council, he was responsible for selecting the school teachers for the local grammar school. Simon Hunt and John Cottum, both of whom taught William Shakespeare personally, were loyal to Catholicism. Hunt would eventually become a Jesuit priest dedicated to converting England back to the old faith. The hardest evidence for John Shakespeare’s Catholicism is a document discovered in April 1787 in the roof of the Shakespeare’s home. In it John named his patron saint as Winnefred of Holywell, and quoted extensively from an anti-Protestant tract known to be delivered by the Catholic spy Edward Campion and his fellow Jesuit missionaries (Wood, In Search of Shakespeare: The Lost Years) . This is especially persuasive since John Shakespeare was indicted, albeit acquitted, for participating in the pilgrimage on 22 June 1580 to St. Winnefred of Holywell in the “Sureties Case” (103) . There can be little doubt that William Shakespeare was raised with a sensitivity toward the Catholic Faith, but there can be no doubt at all that religious concerns were powerfully instilled into his psyche.
These religious concerns inform many of the most emotionally powerful moments in Hamlet. Before Hamlet discovers the murder of his father, we find him already melancholy. His first complaint is not against Claudius, but against his mother’s, “wicked speed, to post/With such dexterity to incestuous sheets” (1.2.156-157) . He is referring to the Biblical proscription against uncovering, “the nakedness of thy brother’s wife: it is thy brother’s nakedness” (Leviticus 18:16) . This concern is belittled often in critical literature by those like Isaac Asimov and Sigmund Freud who see the religious sentiment to be an excuse for Hamlet’s real objections: for Asimov it is that Gertrude has impeded Hamlet’s succession to the throne of Denmark, and for Freud it is that Gertrude has chosen Claudius instead of himself as a sexual partner. These are extra-textual interpolations, however, and Shakespeare gives us no reason to doubt Hamlet’s sincerity.
In fact a further exploration of the religious issue provides context enough for his depression. The law in Leviticus about copulation with one’s brother’s wife has an exception in Deuteronomy, which says, “If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: her husband’s brother shall go in unto her” (25:5-10) . Think for a moment what this would mean to a son who had devout respect for these laws. What was his mother doing? It could only have been one of two things: disowning her son, or disobeying God’s law. So two months after his father’s death, for which he was not present, being away at school, he has come home to a court in which he either does not matter, or his religious faith does not matter. It effects Hamlet so profoundly that he wishes to die, or to kill himself. It is a sentiment that he conveys in purely religious terms, “O that this too too solid flesh would melt,/Or that the Everlasting had not fixed/His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter” (1.2.129-131) .
This depression is noticeable to both Claudius and Gertrude who, cruelly it would seem, ask him to, “cast thy nightly color off,” and, “throw to earth this unprevailing woe” (1.2.68; 106-107) . Yet this melancholy is not of as much concern to them as the dramatic change that occurs after Hamlet is visited by The Ghost. Indeed at this point Claudius is still willing to say, “You are the most immediate to our throne,” and asks that Hamlet stay in Denmark and not return to Wittenberg (1.2.109) . While Hamlet’s distemper appears to be the result of, as Gertrude puts it, “His father’s death and our o’er hasty marriage,” Claudius is willing, if not eager, for Hamlet to stay in Elsinor (2.2.57) . It is when Hamlet hints, during the performance of “The Mousetrap,” that his behavior might be a reaction to Claudius’ murder that he sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to escort Hamlet out of Denmark to England (3.3.1-8) . Claudius now suspects that somehow Hamlet has discovered that he has murdered his father.
However Claudius reasons that Hamlet has found out, we as readers must find that answer also. What convinced Hamlet that Claudius had killed his father? The question takes us in an interesting direction. The moment that the idea is presented to him is when The Ghost tells him that, “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life/Now wears his crown” (1.5.39-40) . The Ghost therefore is quite clear in telling Hamlet precisely what has happened. It is no less clear in identifying itself: “I am thy father’s spirit,/Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,/And for the day confined to fast in fires/Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature/Are burnt and purged away” (1.4.9-13) . Thus The Ghost identifies itself as Hamlet’s father’s spirit, not in heaven, but not in hell either. He is doomed to walk on the earth and through fire to purge his sins away. This is a clear assertion that The Ghost is Hamlet’s father’s spirit, in purgatory. Of course this is quite a lot to swallow. The metaphysical implications are enormous. The situational prospect facing Hamlet, however, seems quite simple. Hamlet’s father has been murdered by his uncle, who now wears his crown, and his father is asking him to, “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” (1.4.25) . So the message is simple: Claudius killed me, please kill him.
At first Hamlet adopts just that simple disposition. He states that he suspected murder all along. Immediately after being told that Claudius murdered his father, Hamlet says, “O my prophetic soul!” (1.4.41) . After The Ghost has gone, in one of Hamlet’s famous soliloquys, he pledges certainty in The Ghost’s word, “So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word:/It is ‘Adieu, adieu, remember me’./I have sworn’t” (1.5.111-114) . It is clear that Hamlet has taken The Ghost’s word as true, but what about his identity? Here too Hamlet conveys his intention to believe every word of The Ghost, for he tells his most loyal friend Horatio, “Touching this vision here,/It is an honest ghost” (1.5.141-142) . Dangerous and dreadful Hamlet’s task may be, but within the text at this point, it is at least a simple task to which he is unquestionably committed.
The Ghost, however, remains one of the most controversial elements in Hamlet, both within the play and within academia. Stephen Greenblatt, chief editor of The Norton Shakespeare, and premier scholar of Shakespeare, has concluded in his essay “Hamlet,” after a lifetime of studying the play with “Mountains of feverish speculation,” that, “Hamlet is an enigma.” He identifies ten unanswerable questions about the plot within the text, especially the questions, “What exactly is the ghost, and where has it come from? Why is the ghost, visible to everyone in the first act (sic), visible only to Hamlet in Act 3?” (103) . These are textual issues, despite Hamlet’s immediate certainty about the identity of The Ghost, and his task for revenge. When Horatio first sees The Ghost, he asks it a strange question: “What art thou?” (1.1.57) . Notice that the question is not: Who art thou? For a religiously inclined person living in Elizabethan England, Horatio asks the right question.
The question of the identity of ghosts had become an important issue during the English Protestant Revolution. According to Greenblatt in his book length work on the subject of the identity of The Ghost, Hamlet in Purgatory, ghosts in England at this time were being, “consigned to oblivion by skeptics and reassigned to Hell in the writings of the triumphant Protestants” (153) . For Protestants ghosts as disembodied souls of men and women in neither hell nor heaven, was an extra-biblical fairy tale. The function of Purgatory in Catholic dogma, for Protestants, was to get more money out of the families of deceased persons. The sale of indulgences by the Catholic Church, by which those wealthy enough could purchase forgiveness for themselves and their loved ones for their sins, applied to souls in Purgatory also. One could get their family out of Purgatory, and into heaven, faster by purchasing indulgences for them from The Church. The Calvinist doctrine of Predestination, by which John Calvin concluded that God has already determined the eternal state of each man and each woman, meant that there would be no need for Purgatory in the afterlife. God knew from the beginning whether we would end up in hell or heaven, so God can simply place us where we belong without need of purgation.
If there is no such thing as Purgatory, how then could Hamlet interpret the identity of The Ghost? For Protestants it is simple: The Ghost is not a ghost, but a demon. The reality of the visitation of this ghost forces Hamlet to make more decisions than whether or not his father has been murdered. If The Ghost is honest about its identity, Catholic dogma about ghosts is true. If The Ghost is dishonest about its identity, Protestant dogma is true. One must resist the temptation to dismiss these implications as not having been intended by Shakespeare.
Shakespeare makes many hints about, as well as explicit allusions to the controversy. First there is Hamlet’s school: Wittenberg. Claudius informs us that it is from this school that Hamlet has returned in Act I, Scene II. Wittenberg can be seen as the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation. It is where Martin Luther taught, and where he nailed his 95 theses to the door of the local cathedral. It is quite anachronistic since, according to Isaac Asimov, the events of Hamlet are set around 600 CE, and The University of Wittenberg was not founded until 1502 (92) . Shakespeare seems to be deliberately associating the events of the legend he is rebooting (the basic plot of Hamlet is an ancient story, which Shakespeare adapted for stage) with the events of recent history which has so dramatically effected the religious lives of his audience. If that is not convincing enough, one might consider again Horatio’s question, “What art thou?” (1.1.57). Horatio obviously had doubts about the nature of ghosts, or he would have asked: Who art thou.
Another way to approach the problem is to consider Hamlet’s own attitude toward The Ghost both before and after his encounter with it. When Horatio informs Hamlet that he has seen The Ghost, Hamlet asks him a series of very pointed questions about it. Through this questioning Hamlet attempts to sift through the three possibilities about the identity of The Ghost: Is it my father’s spirit in Purgatory? Is it a demon from Hell? Or is it some person attempting to trick him? This last possibility is asserted based on the question, “Hold you the watch tonight? . . . Armed you say?” (1.2.224-226) . Why is Hamlet concerned that the soldiers be armed against The Ghost? One of the soldiers, Marcellus, has already stated that The Ghost is, “as the air invulnerable,/And our vain blows malicious mockery” (1.1.124-127). So Hamlet must suspect a more material being, like a spy, against whom arms would be of use. The following questions seem to be to discover whether The Ghost was a ghost or a demon. To determine if The Ghost came from a place of sorrow like Purgatory, or anger like hell, he asks, “What looked he? Frowningly?” to which Horatio responds, “A countenance more in sorrow than in anger” (1.2.228-230) .
As the interrogation proceeds, Hamlet keeps the focus on whether it seemed like The Ghost came from a place of eternal damnation, or temporary sorrow. He is eager to learn if The Ghost is, “pale or red,” and whether his, “beard was grizzly” (1.2.230; 239). Finally unable to make a solid determination until he sees The Ghost, Hamlet decides, “I’ll speak to it though hell itself should gape/and bid me hold my peace” (1.1.243-245). As an absolute proof that Shakespeare was concerned, through Hamlet with a discussion about whether the Catholics or Protestants were right about ghosts, he has Hamlet explain why the plot to discover Claudius’ guilt through the play is necessary, “The spirit that I have seen/May be the devil, and the devil hath power/T’assume a pleasing shape” (2.2.575-577).
There is another important point to make about the controversy about the person of The Ghost. John Donne, a cleric of the Protestant Church of England, and a contemporary of William Shakespeare made an argument about ghosts that complicates the discussion about the identity of The Ghost, and makes Hamlet’s belief about The Ghost, and about religion, more explicit at the end of the play. Donne was contending in his Devotions on Emergent Occasions that Purgatory was invented, outside of scripture, and not even by a Pope. He claimed that the imagination of Dante Alighieri invented purgatory with his epic poem The Divine Comedy. Donne states that Edward Campion had challenged him, stating that the story of Samuel being summoned by a, “ghostwife who with truth informed Saul he was God’s enemy,” after he was dead, proves the existence of Purgatory (Donne 556) . Donne went on to claim that the figure summoned by the ghostwife, or “woman that hath a familiar spirit,” in the King James Version, is a special case as a work of necromancy. Whatever figure is summoned by such an act, according to Donne, cannot be a being from Purgatory, since no such place is mentioned in The Bible. This argument is important to the interpretation of Hamlet, because it was published in 1596, only four years before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet.
With that argument fresh in Shakespeare’s and his audience’s mind, one might ask how it would impact Hamlet’s interpretation of the identity of The Ghost. Let us suppose that Hamlet adopted the Protestant interpretation that The Ghost was some being summoned by a necromancer. In 1 Samuel 28, which is the account of the ghostwife conjuring the figure of Samuel, the figure who is summoned provides Saul with accurate information, even a legitimate prophecy that was fulfilled: “the Lord also shall deliver the host of Israel into the hand of the Philistines” (7-19) . So even if this ghost Hamlet has seen, whatever it was, and from wherever it came, is an evil conjured by a necromancer, he could accept its word as trustworthy, since such was the case with Samuel and Saul. The problem with that, however, is an earlier scripture in Deuteronomy 18, specifically prohibits the use of any “enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer” (10-11) . Thus by going with Horatio to see and get information from The Ghost, Hamlet was violating God’s word just as much as Gertrude and Claudius were in their marriage. This leads more toward a conclusion that Hamlet preferred the Catholic dogma that The Ghost was in fact his father in Purgatory.
That preference toward Catholicism seems to align with the evidence that Shakespeare himself was Catholic loyal. In addition to the evidence that both his mother and his father were true to the old faith, there is substantial evidence that Shakespeare himself remained loyally Catholic. When he married Anne Hathaway, the ceremony was performed by John Fricke at Temple Grafton, who was known to be devoutly Catholic. Michael Wood explains that after writing The Tempest and apparently retiring home to Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare purchased an enormous house in London that is now known to have been a safe-haven for the Catholic underground (In Search of Shakespeare: For all Time) . Through studying the contemporary controversy about the identity of ghosts, and the biography of William Shakespeare it seems that we can settle on of Greenblatt’s ten unanswered questions, the one about who The Ghost was, and if it was trustworthy. It seems to be the case that at least for Shakespeare, and for Hamlet, The Ghost is really Hamlet Senior, Hamlet’s disembodied father in Purgatory.
Works Cited
Alighieri, Dante. "The Divine Comedy Inferno." The Norton Anthology Western Literature. Ed. Sarah Lawall. Trans. Mark Musa. Eighth. Vol. I. New York: W W Norton & Company, Inc, 2006. II vols. 1456-1597. Print.
Arden, Robert. "The Last Will and Testament of Robert Arden (1557)." Wood, Michael S. In Search of Shakespeare. London: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. 65-66. Print.
Asimov, Isaac. Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare. New York: Doubleday, 1970. Print. 9 April 2013.
Donne, John. "Devotions on Emergent Occasions." Death's Duel. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959. 18. Print.
Freud, Sigmund and James Strachey. The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete Text. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Web.
Greenblatt, Stephen. "Hamlet." The Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Stanley Wells, et al. Second. Vol. II. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008. II vols. 103-110. Print.
—. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Nook Book.
Greenblatt, Stephen. "Shakespeare's World." The Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. Second. Vol. II. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2008. II vols. 1-67. Print.
Hammond, Gerald and Austin Busch, The English Bible King James Version. Norton Critical. Vol. II: The New Testament and The Apocrypha. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2012. II vols. Print.
In Search of Shakespeare: A Time of Revolution. Dir. Michael S Wood. Perf. Michael S Wood. PBS. 2004. DVD.
In Search of Shakespeare: For all Time. Dir. Michael S Wood. Perf. Michael S Wood. PBS. 2004. DVD.
In Search of Shakespeare: The Lost Years. Dir. Michael S Wood. Perf. Michael S Wood. PBS. 2004. DVD.
Jonson, Ben. "On the Tempest (and Titus Andronicus) (1614)." The Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. Second. Vol. II: Later Plays. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2008. II vols. 1577. Print.
Kishlansky, Mark, Patrick Geary and Patricia O'Brien. Civilization in the West. Instructor Review Copy Seventh. Vol. I and II. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008. II vols. Print.
Marks, Herbert, ed. The English Bible King James Version. Norton Critical. Vol. I: The Old Testament. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2012. II vols. Print.
Shakespeare, William. "The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark." The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. Second. Vol. II: Later Plays. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2008. II vols. 103-374. Print.
"Sureties Case (22 June 1580)." Wood, Michael S. In Search of Shakespeare. London: Houghton Miffline, 2008. 103. Print.
Comments