[Footnote: 1875]
‘Tis bitter cold,
And I am sick at heart.
The ghost in “Hamlet” is as faithfully treated as any character in the
play. Next to Hamlet himself, he is to me the most interesting person of
the drama. The rumour of his appearance is wrapped in the larger rumour
of war. Loud preparations for uncertain attack fill the ears of “the
subject of the land.” The state is troubled. The new king has hardly
compassed his election before his marriage with his brother’s widow
swathes the court in the dust-cloud of shame, which the merriment of its
forced revelry can do little to dispel. A feeling is in the moral air to
which the words of Francisco, the only words of significance he utters,
give the key: “‘Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.” Into the
frosty air, the pallid moonlight, the drunken shouts of Claudius and his
court, the bellowing of the cannon from the rampart for the enlargement
of the insane clamour that it may beat the drum of its own disgrace at
the portals of heaven, glides the silent prisoner of hell, no longer a
king of the day walking about his halls, “the observed of all
observers,” but a thrall of the night, wandering between the bell and
the cock, like a jailer on each side of him. A poet tells the tale of
the king who lost his garments and ceased to be a king: here is the king
who has lost his body, and in the eyes of his court has ceased to be a
man. Is the cold of the earth’s night pleasant to him after the purging
fire? What crimes had the honest ghost committed in his days of nature?
He calls them foul crimes! Could such be his? Only who can tell how a
ghost, with his doubled experience, may think of this thing or that? The
ghost and the fire may between them distinctly recognize that as a foul
crime which the man and the court regarded as a weakness at worst, and
indeed in a king laudable.
Alas, poor ghost! Around the house he flits, shifting and shadowy, over
the ground he once paced in ringing armour--armed still, but his very
armour a shadow! It cannot keep out the arrow of the cock’s cry, and the
heart that pierces is no shadow. Where now is the loaded axe with which,
in angry dispute, he smote the ice at his feet that cracked to the blow?
Where is the arm that heaved the axe? Wasting in the marble maw of the
sepulchre, and the arm he carries now--I know not what it can do, but it
cannot slay his murderer. For that he seeks his son’s. Doubtless his new
ethereal form has its capacities and privileges. It can shift its garb
at will; can appear in mail or night-gown, unaided of armourer or
tailor; can pass through Hades-gates or chamber-door with equal ease;
can work in the ground like mole or pioneer, and let its voice be heard
from the cellarage. But there is one to whom it cannot appear, one whom
the ghost can see, but to whom he cannot show himself. She has built a
doorless, windowless wall between them, and sees the husband of her
youth no more. Outside her heart--that is the night in which he wanders,
while the palace-windows are flaring, and the low wind throbs to the
wassail shouts: within, his murderer sits by the wife of his bosom, and
in the orchard the spilt poison is yet gnawing at the roots of the
daisies.
Twice has the ghost grown out of the night upon the eyes of the
sentinels. With solemn march, slow and stately, three times each night,
has he walked by them; they, jellied with fear, have uttered no
challenge. They seek Horatio, who the third night speaks to him as a
scholar can. To the first challenge he makes no answer, but stalks away;
to the second,
It lifted up its head, and did address
Itself to motion, like as it would speak;
but the gaoler cock calls him, and the kingly shape
started like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons;
and then
shrunk in haste away,
And vanished from our sight.
Ah, that summons! at which majesty welks and shrivels, the king and
soldier starts and cowers, and, armour and all, withers from the air!
But why has he not spoken before? why not now ere the cock could claim
him? He cannot trust the men. His court has forsaken his memory--crowds
with as eager discontent about the mildewed ear as ever about his
wholesome brother, and how should he trust mere sentinels? There is but
one who will heed his tale. A word to any other would but defeat his
intent. Out of the multitude of courtiers and subjects, in all the land
of Denmark, there is but one whom he can trust--his student-son. Him he
has not yet found--the condition of a ghost involving strange
difficulties.
Or did the horror of the men at the sight of him wound and repel him?
Does the sense of regal dignity, not yet exhausted for all the fasting
in fires, unite with that of grievous humiliation to make him shun their
speech?
But Horatio--why does the ghost not answer him ere the time of the cock
is come? Does he fold the cloak of indignation around him because his
son’s friend has addressed him as an intruder on the night, an usurper
of the form that is his own? The companions of the speaker take note
that he is offended and stalks away.
Much has the kingly ghost to endure in his attempt to re-open relations
with the world he has left: when he has overcome his wrath and returns,
that moment Horatio again insults him, calling him an illusion. But this
time he will bear it, and opens his mouth to speak. It is too late; the
cock is awake, and he must go. Then alas for the buried majesty of
Denmark! with upheaved halberts they strike at the shadow, and would
stop it if they might--usage so grossly unfitting that they are
instantly ashamed of it themselves, recognizing the offence in the
majesty of the offended. But he is already gone. The proud, angry king
has found himself but a thing of nothing to his body-guard--for he has
lost the body which was their guard. Still, not even yet has he learned
how little it lies in the power of an honest ghost to gain credit for
himself or his tale! His very privileges are against him.
All this time his son is consuming his heart in the knowledge of a
mother capable of so soon and so utterly forgetting such a husband, and
in pity and sorrow for the dead father who has had such a wife. He is
thirty years of age, an obedient, honourable son--a man of thought, of
faith, of aspiration. Him now the ghost seeks, his heart burning like a
coal with the sense of unendurable wrong. He is seeking the one drop
that can fall cooling on that heart--the sympathy, the answering rage
and grief of his boy. But when at length he finds him, the generous,
loving father has to see that son tremble like an aspen-leaf in his
doubtful presence. He has exposed himself to the shame of eyes and the
indignities of dullness, that he may pour the pent torrent of his wrongs
into his ears, but his disfranchisement from the flesh tells against him
even with his son: the young Hamlet is doubtful of the identity of the
apparition with his father. After all the burning words of the phantom,
the spirit he has seen may yet be a devil; the devil has power to assume
a pleasing shape, and is perhaps taking advantage of his melancholy to
damn him.
Armed in the complete steel of a suit well known to the eyes of the
sentinels, visionary none the less, with useless truncheon in hand,
resuming the memory of old martial habits, but with quiet countenance,
more in sorrow than in anger, troubled--not now with the thought of the
hell-day to which he must sleepless return, but with that unceasing ache
at the heart, which ever, as often as he is released into the cooling
air of the upper world, draws him back to the region of his
wrongs--where having fallen asleep in his orchard, in sacred security
and old custom, suddenly, by cruel assault, he was flung into Hades,
where horror upon horror awaited him--worst horror of all, the knowledge
of his wife!--armed he comes, in shadowy armour but how real sorrow!
Still it is not pity he seeks from his son: he needs it not--he can
endure. There is no weakness in the ghost. It is but to the imperfect
human sense that he is shadowy. To himself he knows his doom his
deliverance; that the hell in which he finds himself shall endure but
until it has burnt up the hell he has found within him--until the evil
he was and is capable of shall have dropped from him into the lake of
fire; he nerves himself to bear. And the cry of revenge that comes from
the sorrowful lips is the cry of a king and a Dane rather than of a
wronged man. It is for public justice and not individual vengeance he
calls. He cannot endure that the royal bed of Denmark should be a couch
for luxury and damned incest. To stay this he would bring the murderer
to justice. There is a worse wrong, for which he seeks no revenge: it
involves his wife; and there comes in love, and love knows no amends but
amendment, seeks only the repentance tenfold more needful to the wronger
than the wronged. It is not alone the father’s care for the human nature
of his son that warns him to take no measures against his mother; it is
the husband’s tenderness also for her who once lay in his bosom. The
murdered brother, the dethroned king, the dishonoured husband, the
tormented sinner, is yet a gentle ghost. Has suffering already begun to
make him, like Prometheus, wise?
But to measure the gentleness, the forgiveness, the tenderness of the
ghost, we must well understand his wrongs. The murder is plain; but
there is that which went before and is worse, yet is not so plain to
every eye that reads the story. There is that without which the murder
had never been, and which, therefore, is a cause of all the wrong. For
listen to what the ghost reveals when at length he has withdrawn his son
that he may speak with him alone, and Hamlet has forestalled the
disclosure of the murderer:
“Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts,
(O wicked wit and gifts that have the power
So to seduce!) won to his shameful lust
The will of my most seeming virtuous queen:
Oh, Hamlet, what a falling off was there!
From me, whose love was of that dignity
That it went hand in hand even with the vow
I made to her in marriage, and to decline
Upon a wretch, whose natural gifts were poor
To those of mine!
But virtue--as it never will be moved
Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven,
So lust, though to a radiant angel linked,
Will sate itself in a celestial bed,
And prey on garbage.”
Reading this passage, can any one doubt that the ghost charges his late
wife with adultery, as the root of all his woes? It is true that,
obedient to the ghost’s injunctions, as well as his own filial
instincts, Hamlet accuses his mother of no more than was patent to all
the world; but unless we suppose the ghost misinformed or mistaken, we
must accept this charge. And had Gertrude not yielded to the witchcraft
of Claudius’ wit, Claudius would never have murdered Hamlet. Through her
his life was dishonoured, and his death violent and premature: unhuzled,
disappointed, unaneled, he woke to the air--not of his orchard-blossoms,
but of a prison-house, the lightest word of whose terrors would freeze
the blood of the listener. What few men can say, he could--that his love
to his wife had kept even step with the vow he made to her in marriage;
and his son says of him--
“so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly;”
and this was her return! Yet is it thus he charges his son concerning
her:
“But howsoever thou pursu’st this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven,
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,
To prick and sting her.”
And may we not suppose it to be for her sake in part that the ghost
insists, with fourfold repetition, upon a sword-sworn oath to silence
from Horatio and Marcellus?
Only once again does he show himself--not now in armour upon the walls,
but in his gown and in his wife’s closet.
Ever since his first appearance, that is, all the time filling the
interval between the first and second acts, we may presume him to have
haunted the palace unseen, waiting what his son would do. But the task
has been more difficult than either had supposed. The ambassadors have
gone to Norway and returned; but Hamlet has done nothing. Probably he
has had no opportunity; certainly he has had no clear vision of duty.
But now all through the second and third acts, together occupying, it
must be remembered, only one day, something seems imminent. The play has
been acted, and Hamlet has gained some assurance, yet the one chance
presented of killing the king--at his prayers--he has refused. He is now
in his mother’s closet, whose eyes he has turned into her very soul.
There, and then, the ghost once more appears--come, he says, to whet his
son’s almost blunted purpose. But, as I have said, he does not know all
the disadvantages of one who, having forsaken the world, has yet
business therein to which he would persuade; he does not know how hard
it is for a man to give credence to a ghost; how thoroughly he is
justified in delay, and the demand for more perfect proof. He does not
know what good reasons his son has had for uncertainty, or how much
natural and righteous doubt has had to do with what he takes for the
blunting of his purpose. Neither does he know how much more tender his
son’s conscience is than his own, or how necessary it is to him to be
sure before he acts. As little perhaps does he understand how hateful to
Hamlet is the task laid upon him--the killing of one wretched villain in
the midst of a corrupt and contemptible court, one of a world of whose
women his mother may be the type!
Whatever the main object of the ghost’s appearance, he has spoken but a
few words concerning the matter between him and Hamlet, when he turns
abruptly from it to plead with his son for his wife. The ghost sees and
mistakes the terror of her looks; imagines that, either from some
feeling of his presence, or from the power of Hamlet’s words, her
conscience is thoroughly roused, and that her vision, her conception of
the facts, is now more than she can bear. She and her fighting soul are
at odds. She is a kingdom divided against itself. He fears the
consequences. He would not have her go mad. He would not have her die
yet. Even while ready to start at the summons of that hell to which she
has sold him, he forgets his vengeance on her seducer in his desire to
comfort her. He dares not, if he could, manifest himself to her: what
word of consolation could she hear from his lips? Is not the thought of
him her one despair? He turns to his son for help: he cannot console his
wife; his son must take his place. Alas! even now he thinks better of
her than she deserves; for it is only the fancy of her son’s madness
that is terrifying her: he gazes on the apparition of which she sees
nothing, and from his looks she anticipates an ungovernable outbreak.
“But look; amazement on thy mother sits!
Oh; step between her and her fighting soul
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.
Speak to her, Hamlet.”
The call to his son to soothe his wicked mother is the ghost’s last
utterance. For a few moments, sadly regardful of the two, he
stands--while his son seeks in vain to reveal to his mother the presence
of his father--a few moments of piteous action, all but ruining the
remnant of his son’s sorely-harassed self-possession--his whole concern
his wife’s distress, and neither his own doom nor his son’s duty; then,
as if lost in despair at the impassable gulf betwixt them, revealed by
her utter incapacity for even the imagination of his proximity, he turns
away, and steals out at the portal. Or perhaps he has heard the black
cock crow, and is wanted beneath: his turn has come.
Will the fires ever cleanse _her_? Will his love ever lift him above the
pain of its loss? Will eternity ever be bliss, ever be endurable to poor
_King Hamlet?_
Alas! even the memory of the poor ghost is insulted. Night after night
on the stage his effigy appears--cadaverous, sepulchral--no longer as
Shakspere must have represented him, aerial, shadowy, gracious, the thin
corporeal husk of an eternal--shall I say ineffaceable?--sorrow! It is
no hollow monotone that can rightly upbear such words as his, but a
sound mingled of distance and wind in the pine-tops, of agony and love,
of horror and hope and loss and judgment--a voice of endless and
sweetest inflection, yet with a shuddering echo in it as from the caves
of memory, on whose walls, are written the eternal blazon that must not
be to ears of flesh and blood. The spirit that can assume form at will
must surely be able to bend that form to completest and most delicate
expression, and the part of the ghost in the play offers work worthy of
the highest artist. The would-be actor takes from it vitality and
motion, endowing it instead with the rigidity of death, as if the soul
had resumed its cast-off garment, the stiffened and mouldy corpse--whose
frozen deadness it could ill model to the utterance of its lively will!