The Undiscovered Country: an analysis of the supernatural in "Hamlet"

why the ghost matters

I want you to imagine that you are the only child of a mighty father, a man who is the epitome of ideal masculinity, he is determined, a conqueror, and he is everything that you want to be, but are not quite sure you’ll be able to. You are his sole heir, and there are heavy expectations on your shoulders. However, you are not like him, are you? No. You are sensitive, you intellectualise your emotions, you went to college and he didn’t (he thinks it’s a waste of time), and you are afraid of the immense shadow he projects. 

Suddenly, you receive news of his death. You come back home to your mother and the responsibilities you most definitely are not ready for - all while grieving your father's death. Then, the strangest of things happens: your mother married your father’s younger brother, incredibly fast you might add, and now your uncle is the head of the family. He took your place. You didn’t even have time to digest the loss, and now it seems everybody has forgotten your father. They are celebrating a wedding for god's sake! And you are still wearing black. It’s like Taylor said, “everybody moved on and I stayed there”.

Confused, frustrated, resentful, alone in mourning: this is what Hamlet feels when the play starts. I may have filled some gaps with a dramatization inspired by Kendall Roy, but this is what Shakespeare’s all about, he gives his readers room to fill in with their interpretation. After this empathic exercise, I hope you can see Hamlet’s dreadful mental state, and you might even think “if it was me, I’d be losing my mind”. Well, that’s just the point innit? 

 Hamlet is an infinite story with countless layers, every time I reread it I come across something new, some scene that appears to me differently, and therefore gives the actions new meanings. Because Shakespeare did not include didascaly (instructions on the gestures and manners of speech), anyone can uniquely stage the play, in the theatre of one’s mind. This is where lies its brilliance and also its endless dispute among scholars, but more on that later. 

As with any other piece written in a time and place different from ours, we must try to approach it with the view of the audience it was meant for, and as for Shakespeare’s plays, this rule must be applied to its extent. Since Hamlet was written five centuries ago, there are some tacit understandings between the Bard and his audience that we can’t quite grasp, but after a decent amount of readings and research, here is my humble attempt to enlighten some perspectives that one should have in mind while reading this play. 

The Elizabethan society was deeply connected with the supernatural world. Heaven, Hell, Satan, witches, curses, demons, ghosts, these were all facts to the majority of the people at the Globe Theatre. King James I himself wrote a treaty on demonology. Therefore, the sight of Hamlet’s father's ghost has a much more appalling effect on the original spectators than it has on a modern viewer. The 16th-century Englishman knew how high the stakes were the minute the ghost demanded revenge, not only because it was an unholy apparition, but because it is asking the Prince to perform the most horrible sin conceivable: the murder of the king. 

It is almost certain that Shakespeare attended school, something that was meant for the few. The education provided by the Anglican Church at the time was based on The Books of Homilies, formed by thirty-three sermons developing the reformed doctrines of the Church of England, also containing the explanation of the “divine right” of a king, namely, that a king is a king because he is chosen personally by God to rule. However, in those days, you didn’t have to be formally educated to know that, you just had to attend church - and everybody went to church. 

Another thing worth mentioning even though it’s obvious is that now Claudius is Hamlet’s stepfather. In the culture of the 16th century, this role is as solemn and sacred as if he was Hamlet’s biological dad. So not only is the ghost asking Hamlet to do the ultimate treason -  the assassination of the King - but also asking him to commit parricide, the next worst sin on the list. On top of that, if Hamlet doesn’t do it, he is sentencing the ghost to eternity in hell. This is so because, if King Hamlet died poisoned in his sleep, he did not have the chance to confess his sins and receive absolution, hence,  his soul wasn’t saved, which is why he’s still kicking about in Elsinore.

The problem is that the ghost cannot prove that Claudius murdered him, he can’t even prove he’s not Satan in disguise! If Hamlet does not believe the ghost, he may condemn his own father to damnation. And if he believes, he may condemn himself. Let’s get back to the empathic exercise: can you imagine being in this situation? Oh, and one more thing: maybe there is no ghost or Satan, and you just went mad (honestly as you should). 

 It’s impossible to claim what Shakespeare believed or not, but it’s not impossible to imagine that he could’ve believed in supernatural beings, just as most people did. What we can claim is that Shakespeare knew a ghost was a potent dramatic device, therefore, the audience must believe in it for the sake of the plot. Likewise, the modern reader has to take the ghost seriously, since his apparition is what sets the play in motion. Traditionally, most scholars disregard the role of King Hamlet’s ghost. My intent here is to show you its importance. 

A factor that contributes to my argument is that Shakespeare introduced a technical innovation in Hamlet. In Elizabethan theatre, ghosts were historically portrayed by a sort of puppet - a Senecan heritage - but in this play, the Bard decided to make the phantom human. In fact, reports show that he himself played King Hamlet’s ghost. Clearly, Shakespeare wanted us to be convinced of and appalled by the actuality of the supernatural. According to scholar John Dover Wilson, “The Ghost in Hamlet comes, not from a mythical Tartarus, but from the place of departed spirits in which post-medieval England, despite a veneer of Protestantism, still believed at the end of the 16th century”.  

 Alongside Catholicism and Protestantism, there was a third line of thought on the subject of apparitions, which instead of questioning the nature of spirits, questions the possibility of their assuming material form without denying their existence. This view was represented by Reginald Scott and his Discourse upon Diuels and Spirits which is recognised as one of the Bard’s source books. Regardless of the perspective, it was a common belief at the time that anyone prone to melancholy - such as Hamlet - was susceptible to attracting spectres. Shakespeare, with his cleverness, probably left these three distinct views as interpretative possibilities of the supernatural, aiming to have an effect on all viewers.

The study of the paranormal, known as “demonology”, was an important and serious field of investigation at the time, since concerns regarding the after-life were a hot topic due to the conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism, humanism and medieval thought. As we can see, spiritualism was an interest very present in the 16th-century mind. One french demonologist, Pierre Le Loyer, encapsulates the atmosphere of the period:

“Of all the common and familiar subjects of conversation that are entered upon in company of things remote from nature and cut off from the senses, there is none so ready to hand, none so usual, as that of visions of Spirits, and whether what is said of them is true. It is the topic that people most readily discuss and on which they linger the longest because of the abundance of examples, the subject being fine and pleasing and the discussion the least tedious that can be found”

Whereas Hamlet has his wits questioned, Horatio is our reference of temperance and rationality, and not only he never doubts the ghost, but he is the one that gives Hamlet the account of the sighting. Horatio is not some superstitious peasant, he’s as educated as Hamlet, and his situation speaks on his behalf, namely, he has no reason to be mentally upset, unlike the Prince. Against his own intellectual judgement and renaissance thinking, Horatio certifies us of the supernatural element in the play.

Contemporary to Hamlet we have the plays The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd and Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, both possessing supernatural elements as a trigger for the action. Kyd’s play is the essential Elizabethan revenge tragedy and is believed to have influenced Hamlet. Art and Life are intertwined in a cycle of mutual inspiration: just as a play is a product of its time and space, the spectator leaves the theatre influenced by what they have seen and carries part of the play into their life even if unconsciously. Thus, the relationship between Theatre and the paranormal can be interpreted through this logic.

The difference between Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights is that he takes a step further by transforming the supernatural element into a moral problem, such as the dilemma Hamlet faces with his revenge, with the possibility of condemning his dead father or himself to damnation, as I mentioned before, and the dubious existence of the ghost who can be a product of Hamlet’s troubled mind, thus, Hamlet is always doubting himself. It’s such a dismal situation that the Prince even contemplates suicide, but he gives up by choosing the horrors he already knows rather than “the undiscovered country”. 

For the Elizabethans, the dramatic power of the ghost was more overwhelming than we, post-modern individuals, can conceive. It is not Shakespeare’s fault that we completely banished the fantastical from our daily life and forgot the symbolisms that he presents. To the 16th-century folk, as to my dear Dr Samuel Johnson, the after-life was a real place and a dreadful concern, as Johnson said “the apparition in the first act chills the blood with terror”. I don’t wish to impose my interpretation upon the reader, because the beauty of a Shakespearean work is the enormous interpretative amplitude, which gives room to endless - but exciting - discussions. Ultimately, the point is not if the ghost is real or a product of Hamlet’s imagination, but how important he is to the play and to a true understanding of Shakespeare’s message to us.