I
The Events Preceding the Play-Scene
It is necessary, in the first place, to get a clear idea of the situation up to the presentation of the play before the court in Act III. This situation is, in its larger outlines, familiar to everyone, but certain details must be particularly noted, while events of greater importance in other ways may, for the purposes of the present paper, be omitted.
The opening of the play shows us Hamlet profoundly shocked and bewildered by the sudden death of his father, and by the equally sudden marriage of his mother with his father's brother Claudius. This union was, according to the views of Shakspere's day, incestuous. Moreover, in disregard of the natural rights of Hamlet to the throne, Claudius has succeeded in getting himself proclaimed king of Denmark.[1] The ghost of Hamlet's father appears on the
- ↑ Various critics are still puzzled by this matter. Quiller-Couch (Shakespeare's Workmanship, N. Y., 1917, p. 151) quotes the King's speech from the throne in Act I, and continues, "what he (Claudius) does not explain, by the way and what commentators conspire with him and with Shakespeare to over-
King did not murder his brother by pouring poison into his ears, hence he can endure the dumb-show unmoved, and he breaks up the play because he is "convinced—not that his guilt has been discovered, but that Hamlet is a dangerous madman" (p. 406). "The immediate object of the dumb-show is to prove to a critical audience that it is Hamlet's behavior and not the King's that breaks up the court, while at the same time leaving Hamlet himself free to believe in the success of his plot" (p. 420 note).
The dumb-show and the play following are like the revelations attributed to the Ghost, like them even in detail. Hamlet was familiar with this piece "long before he commanded the production of the play at court," and its outlines thus already present in his mind "supplied the details of the Ghost's story" in Act. I (p. 416). "This simple assumption at once removes the difficulty of the coincidence, and explains the one obscure point regarding the Ghost's narrative. Our chain of evidence is complete."
So, to put the matter in a nutshell, there was no Ghost, only an hallucination, and the Ghost's long narrative in Act. I is only Hamlet's conception of the murder, influenced subconsciously by his knowledge of the play of the 'Murder of Gonzago.'—This theory represents the ne plus ultra of the tendency, observable in a good deal of modern criticism, to make Shakspere's ghosts purely subjective. It appears to me superfluous to attempt a refutation here, in view of Professor E. E. Stoll's discussion, 'The Objectivity of the Ghosts in Shakspere,' Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. XV, (New Series) June, 1907, pp. 201-233. A series of references on the treatment of the supernatural will be found in Schelling's 'Elizabethan Drama," Vol. II, p. 509.
