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King Hamlet's Ambiguous Ghost

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert H. West
Robert H. West*
Affiliation:
University of Georgia, Athens
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Extract

A few years ago Roy W. Battenhouse published what is perhaps the most original and provoking theory of the nature of the ghost in Hamlet since the article by W. W. Greg which, with its contention that the apparition is to be understood as wholly subjective, prompted J. D. Wilson's study of Elizabethan spirit-lore. Battenhouse argues in essence that the ghost shows far too much vindictiveness (in the cellarage too much artfulness) to be a saved soul. It must therefore, he thinks, be out of some paganesque purgatory rather than the Catholic one, as Wilson had confidently asserted. Whether or not Battenhouse may be thought“ to have made his point, he has certainly raised some real difficulties for those who would regard the ghost as Catholic.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 70 , Issue 5 , December 1955 , pp. 1107 - 1117
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955

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References

page 1107 note 1 Roy W. Battenhouse, “The Ghost in Hamlet: a Catholic ‘Linchpin‘?” SP, xlviii (1951), 161–192. Greg's article is “Hamlet's Hallucination,” MLR, xii (1917), 393–421. Greg is, of course, the standard-bearer of those who hold the ghost hallucinatory. He was rather vaguely anticipated in this view by Heinrich von Struve and H. M. Doak in the last quarter of the 19th century. The fruits of Wilson's spirit-study appear in his What Happens in Hamlet, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 55 ff. and elsewhere.

page 1107 note 2 I. J. Semper, “The Ghost in Hamlet: Pagan or Christian,” The Month, cxcv (1953), 222–234.

page 1107 note 3 Semper does give one example of a ghost “acting … as a punitive agent” from The Golden Legend, but its action is no more than to warn the offender that he will that day be taken by hell. This certainly is no close parallel to the Hamlet ghost, which appears to the avenger and calls for bipod. I know of no Elizabethan ghost, in drama or out, that comes from purgatory and yet makes this blood demand. See my Invisible World: A Study of Pneumatology in Elizabethan Drama (Athens, Ga., 1939), Ch. ix, esp. p. 181 ff.

page 1107 note 4 A Treatise of Ghosts, trans. Montague Summers (London, n.d.), pp. 146–148. The Traité de l'Apparition was first published in Paris, 1588. See also Melchior de Flavin, De Vestât des antes après le trépas, comment elles vivent étant séparées du corps, et des purgatories qu'elles souffrent en ce monde et en l'autre … (Paris, 1581).

page 1107 note 5 “Of Specters (ca. 1593),” trans. Virgil B. Heltzel and Clyde Murley, HLQ, xi (1948), 423–424.

page 1107 note 6 Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Occult Philosophy, trans. J. F. (London, 1651), nr, xlii, 488.

page 1107 note 7 Sir Walter Greg's is a fourth possible view of the ghost, but it is not one that has any pneumatological support to speak of in the action. I have chosen to leave it out of consideration, partly because it has received little countenance from scholars and seems to me impossible to defend successfully, and partly because to treat it would have added greatly to the length and complexity of this paper.

page 1107 note 8 I am not, of course, the first to suggest this. See Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes (reprinted New York, 1952), pp. 127–128. John Erskine Hankins, The Character of Hamlet (Chapel Hill, 1941), in his valuable essay “On Ghosts” suggests by his survey of Renaissance opinion how difficult it may be to fix upon one pneumatological understanding of King Hamlet's ghost.

page 1107 note 9 T. A. Spalding, Elizabethan Demonology (London, 1880), pp. 99, 105, 106. See also Henry N. Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York, 1950), pp. 255 ff.

page 1107 note 10 Walter Clyde Curry, Shakespeare's Philosophical Patterns (Baton Rouge, 1937), Ch. in; Willard Farnham, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier (Berkeley, 1950), pp. 79–104.

page 1107 note 11 See The Invisible World, pp. 80, 81; Curry, Ch. ii.

page 1107 note 12 The “impassibility” of daemons is almost as much a commonplace of daemonology as their extraordinary powers in nature. See Curry, p. 176, and Kittredge's introduction to his ed. of The Tempest.

page 1107 note 13 The best Renaissance source on Ariel is Agrippa's Occult Philosophy, iii, xxviii, 436 and iii, xxiv, 416. The name Ariel appears as that of an angel in the Coptic Pistis Sophia, in The Testament of Solomon, and in various other ancient magical texts, such as that trans, by Moses Gaster as “The Wisdom of the Chaldeans,” Studies and Texts in Folklore, Magic, etc. (London, 1925–28), i, 348. It is also in the Renaissance manual of magic known as The Key of Solomon the King. Fludd, Kircher, Heywood, and many other Cabalists and expositors of Cabalism mention it as of the angel of earth. Eusebius and others mention it as of an evil angel, once a pagan god. See my article, “The Names of Milton's Angels,” SP, xlvii (1950), 214–215 and n. 18. W. Stacy Johnson has an article on the mixed back-ground of Shakespeare's spirit, “The Genesis of Ariel,” SQ, ii (1951), 205–211.

page 1107 note 14 The only ready-made demonstration I can offer that Dr. Faustus, The Devil's Charter, The Virgin Martyr, and The Atheist's Tragedy present nothing to match the basic pneuma-tological ambiguities of Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest will be found in the account given of those plays in my Invisible World. See, e.g., pp. 129–133,136–141 on Dr. Faustus, 122–128 on The Devil's Charter, and elsewhere as signified in the index. Obviously if Shakespeare had been similarly consistent it would have been, as I argue below, at the expense of leaving us quite other plays than those we have.

page 1107 note 15 See The Invisible World, pp. 185–188.

page 1107 note 16 F. W. Moorman, “The Pre-Shakespearian Ghost,” MLR, i (1906), 85–95, and “Shakespearian Ghosts,” MLR, i, (1906), 192–201; What Happens in Hamlet, pp. 55–60. See also Charles Edward Whitmore, The Supernatural in Tragedy (Cambridge, 1915), pp. 249–254, 279–288.

page 1107 note 17 On the détails of Shakespeare's management of the pace and language of his ghost scenes to achieve his dramatic purposes see T. Walter Herbert, “Shakespeare Announces a Ghost,” SQ, I (1950), 247–254.

page 1107 note 18 Charles Tyler Prouty, review of Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, in Renaissance News, vi (1953), 50.

page 1107 note 19 What Happens in Hamlet, p. 68.