Here’s my problem with Hamlet, and it feels like a big one: I don’t believe in ghosts.
(I also don’t understand why anyone believes in ghosts, but that’s another problem entirely.)
See, if Hamlet was the only one who saw the ghost (as with the sighting of Banquo in Macbeth), I could treat it as a metaphor: he’s haunted psychologically. But he’s not the only one who sees it. Hell, we even see it, sitting in the audience. We hear it, for that matter. It’s treated like a real thing.
That really bums me out. Because I can’t seem to get past it. It flits into my peripheral vision for the next two acts, minimum, every time I see the play. It feels as if the whole great castle of a story was built on a cloud: there’s no firm foundation holding it up. I keep waiting for its huge, heavy beautiful edifice to collapse, which in turn makes it impossible for me to fully enter the story.
I wonder whether any other rationally-minded, evidence-based theater practitioners have struggled with the same thing. How do you reconcile it? Or do you?
Have you ever seen Slings and Arrows? They treat the ghosts like a psychological issue … there’s a section where Banquo’s not on stage but Hamlet keeps talking to him … depends on how you want to play it.
I have indeed, and yes, the ghost in Macbeth is MUCH easier for me to incorporate.
I think the problem may be, as Tony Adams has suggested just now on Twitter, that I’m trying to read Hamlet as realism: that’s no more intended to represent a realistic world than Ghostbusters, and I should stop trying to make it real.
But I’ve never in my life seen a production of Hamlet that treated it in any way other than realism. I’ve always been asked to consider everything I see credible and real.
I think the problem is that modernity has outpaced the play.
Oops. Meant to say MacBeth of course. Sorry about that. Scorpions was his mind and all that. You know, I’ve never seen Hamlet – only read it. I’ve seen all the crazy adaptations/spinoffs/etc and I think they’re excellent at going off the realism rails … Fortinbras, Rosencratz and Guildenstern, 12 Ophelias, etc.
🙂
I think I may just need someone to give me a reading of the play that doesn’t require me to believe that Hamlet, the other characters, or WS actually want me to treat the ghosts as real. Something like “It’s all happening in Hamlet’s head. It’s some kind of strange fever dream — the whole story.” That would help me.
But the play may just not be my cup of tea, and I’d be okay with that. I can and do certainly still admire it and appreciate it’s genuine, mammoth importance and brilliance.
What do you make of the witches in Macbeth?
I consider them metaphors; an externalizatin of Macbeth’s internal state. That one’s easy for me, for some reason.
I consider them metaphors; an externalizatin of Macbeth’s internal state. That one’s easy for me, for some reason.
After a semester class on Hamlet, I still don’t know what I think of the ghost. To your point, though, I do wonder if the ghost could be in Hamlet’s head, BUT we also see him. We see his hallucination; it could be sort of an audience-actor empathy.
The ghost in Hamlet has never bothered me: I accept it as part of the circumstances of the play.
But here’s an alternate interpretation.
When someone’s been up late, standing watch over a misty landscape, physical phenomena can be interpreted in curious ways. This is something that was demonstrated around the USA in some of the mass UFO sightings in the mid-twentieth century: there were, in some cases, simple natural phenomena that were interpreted as something other by groups of people.
So, in Hamlet: something strange is going on in Denmark. Old Hamlet has died mysteriously, and the wedding of Gertrude and Claudius followed hard upon. There’s a sense of uneasiness among the guards, among all those in the castle.
Perhaps late one night Marcellus sees a shape in the mist (fox fire, will o’ the wisp, iridescent swamp gas) and says to Bernardo, “Ho! Does that not look like the shape of the King?” And Bernardo says “OMG, that’s totally the King.” Then when Horatio comes, he’s already been primed to expect that the “apparition” he sees will look like the King. All the while, we must remember that even if we as an audience don’t believe in ghosts, these characters certainly do. They may be very willing to put a human form on a vague shadow seen in the distance.
When Hamlet comes to the battlements, he’s been primed by several reports to expect to see the ghost of his father. He sees the “ghost” and gives chase. It’s only when he and the ghost are alone that the ghost speaks. And I think that this is an important point in justifying a natural rather than supernatural explanation for this: several characters see the ghost, but only Hamlet hears it speak. Perhaps the speech of the ghost is a manifestation of Hamlet’s subconscious suspicions. It’s not possible for him to openly contemplate that his uncle has killed his father, and so he links it with this apparently supernatural (but actually quite natural) phenomenon.
That’s pretty much how I’ve imagined it. Well put, sir!
I don’t even know where to begin in saying how awesome this is.
You have given me the closest thing to the answer I was looking for, and I’m very thankful.
I’m curious (and I’m not being deliberately narky, I swear), why a belief in ghosts is required to present ghosts on stage. Do you avoid stage depictions of aliens because you don’t believe they exist? Or magic?
I wouldn’t paint my struggles (and they are mine, really — not anything I would turn into a Theory of How Theater Should Be, at least not consciously, or at least not yet) with such a broad brush.
First, I wouldn’t equate aliens and ghosts. Aliens might actually exist. There’s not a lot of evidence for their presence on earth yet, but it’s reasonable to speculate that they exist somewhere. There’s sound science behind them; they’re (potentially) natural. Ghosts and magic, on the other hand… purely supernatural.
Does that mean I don’t think anything supernatural should be depicted on stage, either by me or by anyone else? Of course not, for several reasons:
1) Just because I don’t think they’re real doesn’t mean others have to think the same thing. (I know, duh, right?) Theater isn’t all for me. (Double duh.) So of course there should be theater for the people who do believe in ghosts and magic. Now… I’m not likely to be *making* any of that theater, and I have little interest in watching it, but people should be happy. The heart wants what it wants.
2) I am able to appreciate (though still perhaps unlikely to make) theater and film that treat ghosts and magic as cartoons. The example several people have suggested is Ghostbusters. I loved that movie with all my heart when it came out, and I still give it a few minutes of attention every time I stumble across it. Because it’s effectively a cartoon, though — even the human characters are caricatures — it’s like the film is winking at me the whole time, saying “You and I know none of this is real, so let’s have fun with it.” Supremely easy for me to wink back and say “Sure thing! Let’s do it.”
3) In a similar (but not exactly the same) vein, I have no problem with Macbeth spying Banquo’s ghost… because none of us. It’s quite clearly in his head. The ghost is a psychological artifact; we are never meant to treat it as a real thing. The sorcery in The Tempest, likewise, is easy for me to read symbolically, rather than literally. Again, the play doesn’t require me to abandon reason and sanity to accept its worldview… which is exactly what Hamlet seems to do to me.
Thankfully, Andrew Hungerford (see below) has given me a way to view the ghost in Hamlet in a rational way (though it is still a bit of a stretch). Because (as I’ve said elsewhere) the play is of course immensely important, and I’d rather not throw it out with the ghostly bathwater.
Sorry for jumping on late. Totally missed this when you posted it. I actually have a problem wrapping my head around your problem with Hamlet’s ghost. This is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone bring it up.
I’ve always thought of each play as a world unto itself. It has its own rules, its own environment, its own laws of physics. And its those laws that a play has to adhere to. Not the laws of the real world. In Euryidice, there is a River Lethe, and it washes away memories. In Oedipus, prophecy and fate exist. And in Hamlet, ghosts are real.
Thinking metatextually, all of these things are metaphors. But within the world of the play–the world the characters inhabit–they are taken as concrete reality.
Though Lord knows I’d love to see Hamlet done in something other than realism.
My kids, when we were discussing the role of the characters at the end, thought that perhaps the reason no one can see the ghost besides Horatio and Hamlet is that no one else has language or eyes or ears for the truth, even Claudius because he is so deceitful.
I suppose that interpretation works… if you believe in ghosts. 🙂