PROJECT-HAMLET.INFO: The Ghost

Thoth Tarot (Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris):
The Chariot
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Berlin, Germany)

Hamlet's Father, the Murdered King –
The Ghost – Jeremy Irons

[NOTE: If you haven't already read the disclaimer on this section's introductory page with regard to any and all actor names mentioned in this section of the website, please do so before proceeding here.]

Imagine you're a Sentinel, holding the watch in a pitch black, freezing cold midwinter night; patrolling the thickly-walled battlements, parapets and platforms of a 15th century castle. You are alone: there are other Sentinels patrolling other parts of the battlements, but they are so far away that you can't even hear, let alone see or talk to them. You know that a special watch has been ordered – otherwise you might not even be on duty – and there are rumours of an impending invasion from Norway. Moreover, your country is mourning a much-respected, recently- and suddenly-deceased King, whose very death might well have brought about the threat of invasion in the first place. It is dark, and there is danger in the air. You are apprehensive, to the point that you make even a fellow Sentinel coming to relieve you announce his name before you let him approach.

Then, out of nothing, a figure – a being – a something approaches that looks exactly like your dead King, and yet, by virtue of the sole fact that he is dead, cannot be him. You start to doubt your own senses. But your fellow Sentinel sees it too. So it is not merely a fit of your own fantasy. This is unnatural, cannot be. You are a soldier and have seen battle; you don't scare easily. But you are not an educated person. There is no way you can make sense of this, which is precisely what makes it so frightening.

The next night, the same thing happens again. Now truly scared, you seek out a scholar who, you know, has recently returned from a place of learning. He doesn't believe a word you are saying. Not knowing how else to convince him, you ask him to join you on your watch, together with another Sentinel who has also seen this thing. Even then, he still insists that there must be a rational explanation for what you have experienced ... until he, too, sees the apparition. Now there can no longer be any doubt that it is real. Now all three of you are scared through to your bones. You and your fellow Sentinel do what you would do when facing the divine and otherworldly in church (as well as when in the presence of royalty) – you kneel. The scholar who is with you, Horatio, is (momentarily at least) so struck that he can't even do that; just because he had so adamantly refused to believe in the apparition before. He just freezes ... completely. And he stares at the thing.

And yet, it seems that this apparition is seeking to communicate something. You yourself and your fellow Sentinel are profoundly out of your depth – you wouldn't even have known how to address your King when he was alive (other than bow, kneel and call him "Your Majesty"); how to communicate with his spirit, you can't begin to fathom. So you ask this scholar who is with you, Horatio, to speak to the dead King in your stead. But when Horatio at last collects enough of his wits to try, he seems to be saying something that offends the spirit. It vanishes. – And still, it does seem to have an urgent need to communicate. A short while later it reappears. This time Horatio does seem to find the right words. But now it is too late – the cock crows, and the apparition vanishes for good.

And now imagine you're King Hamlet, Denmark's rightful souvereign. Your kingdom is prosperous and at peace; and you are a well-respected ruler. Your son is away at university but seems to be having a good time there, although you'd rather not know in too great detail what student pranks his mischievous brain is up to. But by and large, he looks like a promising lad. You're sure he'll make a good King one day when you are dead – which won't be for a long time, though, because you yourself are not too far out of the prime of manhood yet. While young Hamlet is away, you're enjoying a rare period of harmony and togetherness with your loving wife, Queen Gertrude; something which, to your regret, hasn't been possible very often over the course of your reign. You even find enough leisure to resume your habit of spending an hour or so in your orchard after lunch, sleeping. It's autumn already, but the weather is still nice, and you enjoy being outside (besides, you're used to decidedly harsher conditions from your military campaigns anyway).

But one day, when again sleeping in your orchard, you are suddenly woken by a violent shiver going through your body, beginning with your ear; and you start to burn from the inside out, until rashes cover your entire skin. Maybe with your dying eyes, maybe with the senses of your already undead spirit you perceive how your brother Claudius steals away, a vial of hebona in his hand. You may have prayed the previous night before going to bed; but if so, it was your habitual short prayer – no general atonement or reckoning for your sins (and oh yes, righteous man that you are, you have nevertheless committed some sins, as all human beings do: Just think of Fortinbras, for example, the Norwegian King you killed in that territorial dispute thirty years ago ... did he really have to die?) – and there is no priest anywhere in sight who could give your dying self absolution. The next thing you know, you're burning in a purifying fire, every cell of your undead body exploding with pain. And there is no escape into fainting: the undead don't faint; otherwise, where would be the purpose in those purifying fires to begin with? – You're informed that this is how you will be spending all your days for the foreseeable future. Only time will tell how long it will take to whip, sting and burn the poison of your earthly sins out of you.

Yet there is one small reprieve; or writhing in agony as you are, that's what it seems to you at the moment. You will be allowed – no, indeed compelled – to walk the earth at night. But soon enough you discover that there is as much torture in that as in the purifying fires to which you are subjected by day. Only this torture is mental, and oh yes, just as your undead body can still experience physical pain, your mind can still suffer, too.

In fact, there is boundless suffering in wandering through a world of which you are no longer a part. For you not only realise very quickly that you can no longer communicate with humans in the way that is so natural to all of us; you can't even show yourself to them without scaring them witless (maybe you tried once, initially, and it turned out absolutely disastrously). And then you have to watch how your own brother Claudius, the man who murdered you, goes about wooing your oh-so loving and virtuous wife. Probably rather by accident you discover that neither of those two can see you, which teaches you that you are visible only to the truly just and honest. You try to subject your undead brain to as little torture as possible, but you can't fail to notice how slickly and aggressively Claudius goes about his plan. You've probably always mistrusted him, but he was your brother after all, and you would never have believed that he would actually go after your own life and set his designs on Gertrude as quickly and efficiently. With pangs of guilt you remember all the military campaigns and all the visits of state when you had to leave her at home alone – at last even without your son, who for his part had left for Wittenberg. Gertrude was a beautiful young woman when you married her and she is still attractive, but oh how you now wish you had let her know that more often. Only now you realise how starved for attention you must have left her. No wonder that she is proving so receptive to Claudius's poisonous machinations. And since she doesn't see you, there is absolutely nothing whatsoever you can do about it.

Then the time comes for the funeral of your earthly remains, and your son Hamlet returns home. And you can tell how shocked and displeased he is with what he finds there. Yet, there is no immediate communication between the two of you – maybe because you are initially reluctant to burden your own son with the momentous task of revenging your murder and "setting right" the world and time so profoundly brought "out of joint" by that act; or maybe you just don't find an opportunity to catch Hamlet alone at night (and you most certainly will want to speak to him alone for obvious reasons). But when Claudius weds Gertrude and Hamlet, now on the pitch point of disgust, resolves to return to Wittenberg, you know that you must act. Now there's nothing for it – you must show yourself to someone, hoping that this person will eventually alert Hamlet and give you an opportunity to seek him out.

For lack of a feasible alternative, you pick the Sentinels holding the watch on your castle's battlements. Bad idea, it appears: all you do is scare them. You try again the next night, with the same result. Time is running out. But then, the third night there's someone else with them. Your son, maybe? No, wait ... it's that friend of his, this man Horatio. You don't know Horatio very well yourself – he's of too low birth for that – but when it turned out that Hamlet had begun to seek his friendship, you made inquiries about him and occasionally spent time with the two of them. You approve of the man; he's a scholar, very bright, rational, considerate, not easily swayed by impulse. He might do after all. But can you speak to him in front of the Sentinels – even if only to tell him to fetch Hamlet, or make sure he's available the next night? You're not sure.

You watch Horatio wrestle down his terror of your appearance and approach you. What should you do ... risk it and address him? Just give a signal? Vanish and try again the next night, hoping that then Hamlet will finally be there?

Now – now – wait a minute. What did the fellow just say? "Usurp'st?" You, the rightful King? You're not the one who has usurped anything; your brother has – that's the whole point of your appearance here. There is some of your son's occasional brusqueness in you (Hamlet had to get it from someone after all, and he didn't get it from his mother): impulsively you turn away and resolve to give the whole thing another try the next night after all.

But then you reconsider. Horatio probably didn't mean that word the way you heard it – he probably just meant to ask whether you are in fact what he thinks you are (even if, rational man that he is, he can hardly believe that this should be so), and why you are showing yourself to him and to those Sentinels. From a distance you listen to the man; hear him report, both reasonably and respectfully towards you, about that long-ago conflict with King Fortinbras of Norway and about the invasion now threatened by his son; hear his conclusion regarding the dreadful import of your appearance. You are drawn nearer again. Should you speak to him after all? Now he has seen you. He kneels. Yes, and now he definitely hits the right note in addressing you. "Privy to thy country's fate?" Oh, why, yes! So should you speak? Should you really? Those Sentinels ... how will they take it? Oh, forget the Sentinels. Who are they anyway? They're just lowly soldiers. – You'll speak to Horatio.

Alas, it is too late. The cock crows. That means fires once more, all day long until the next night. Oh, those innocent fools, look how they're trying to detain you with their earthly weapons; as if those could do anything to you anymore. – You vanish.

I am not a particular fan of horror and sci-fi stories, but I can think of few figures in literary history that are simultaneously more haunting and haunted than the Ghost of Hamlet's father. Besides Hamlet himself and Ophelia, to me it's the single most complex role of the play; a role that requires extreme sensitivity and the ability to tell an entire story – the Ghost's whole back story, such as outlined above – with only a few looks and gestures. For if done right, I think there is much to learn from him (and from the Sentinels' and Horatio's reactions to him) even in that first scene, where he doesn't utter a single word; much that can later be built on in his encounters with Hamlet and Gertrude (more on those elsewhere). For this reason, I would absolutely love to see Jeremy Irons in that role. Not only do Shakespearean pentameters roll off his tongue with a truly extraordinary and admirable grace whenever he does get to pronounce them – for proof, you don't have to look any further than his Antonio in Michael Radford's recent "Merchant of Venice" – and the Ghost does, after all, have plenty of pretty harrowing things to impart to Prince Hamlet eventually. But Mr. Irons is also one of the very few contemporary actors who, like the great stars of the silent era, could probably tell the Prince of Denmark's entire four hour-long tragedy without once opening his mouth to speak at all.

The Ghost, more directly than anything and anybody else in the play, represents the element of inverted nature brought about by Claudius's act. Sure, he also charges Hamlet with revenge, which invokes Old-Testamentary images of archangels and maybe even a vengeful God, and which in my view is also the most tangible instance of the Ghost's operating as the voice of Hamlet's conscience (more on that elsewhere). Yet, I think that all too often he is played way too sternly, an effect even underscored by the fact that his first two appearances are in armour – which is, however, how I believe we must see him on those occasions. Much as I admire Paul Scofield's very, very sensitive and indeed profoundly harrowed approach in the Franco Zeffirelli movie, I think that portrayal takes "humanising" just a tad too far by already having him appear in his nightgown on these early occasions, instead of later, during his visit to Gertrude's bedchamber. (And although I heartily applaud Mr. Zeffirelli for the clever way he found to scratch and replace the opening scene in the first place, I myself wouldn't want to drop it for anything in the world.)

Should the Ghost then be superhumanly tall, as he is in the movies by Sir Kenneth Branagh and Grigori Kosintzev? Should his face remain hidden from us for the better part of his appearance(s), as in Sir Laurence Olivier's and, again, Master Kosintzev's adaptations? Or should he even be a spectral figure? Neither, methinks – the appearance of a ghost should be terrifying enough in and of itself even if he isn't any taller than you and me (besides, I have a feeling that size would get in the way of his harrowed appearance as I imagine it; as would, for obvious reasons, our inability to see his face), and as for the spectral bit, I fear that such a device would lessen the impact of his appearance even further ... in fact, I'm not at all sure whether such portrayals aren't a bit too strongly influenced by the horror and sci-fi tradition (and its B-movie outgrowths at that). It seems to me that there are more subtle ways to get across the Ghost's otherworldliness – Shakespeare himself, for example, often uses descriptions of animal reactions to unnatural phenomenons (such as horses shying), and Kosintzev in particular draws on this to great effect in his adaptation. As far as the actors themselves are concerned, this aspect is yet another reason why I'd particularly like to see Mr. Irons in the role of the Ghost: here, too, I think his instincts, tuned to the pitch of ultrasound as they are, would pay off boundlessly.

On a tangentially related point, I also think that in the first scene, more than almost in the entire rest of the play/movie, the score is of critical importance (and I am not at all surprised that Henry Irving, that great expert on all things [melo]dramatic, even came up with a special "ghost music" for his stage versions). Like the scene itself, the score here should be haunting; frightening; pointedly accentuated; but not overwrought with drama and emotion – somewhere between the classic Hitchcock and noir scores on the one hand and Jean Sibelius (Seventh Symphony, "En Saga") on the other hand, with a bit of Eliot Goldenthal's soundtrack for Neil Jordan's dramatisation of Anne Rice's "Interview With the Vampire" thrown in for good measure. Given that Grigori Kosintsev's movie was scored by Dmitri Shostakovich, and listening to those whiplash-strings he used in the context of Hamlet's encounter with the Ghost of his father, I cannot help but wonder what Shostakovich would have done with Act One, Scene One, had he been given the chance ...

Hamlet's Father, the Murdered King – The Ghost – Jeremy Irons

Hamlet's Father, the Murdered King –
The Ghost – Jeremy Irons