Hamlet, reconciliation, and the just state.(Critical essay)

Publication: Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature

Publication Date: 22-DEC-05

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HAMLET'S personae proceed in pairs. Scholars have long noted that in Hamlet Shakespeare gives us not only braces of siblings and lovers but nearly interchangeable "doubles" (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Cornelius and Voltemand), as well as pairs of characters whose situations are oddly analogous, like Hamlet and Laertes. (1) However, sparse critical attention has been paid to the resemblances between the play's two kings, Claudius and the Ghost. (2) In fact, Handel's commentators tend, like Hamlet himself, to describe the royal brothers as rank opposites. Like the prince, who sees his lather as "Hyperion" to Claudius's "satyr" (1.2.140), (3) John Dover Wilson finds Old Hamlet "a 'majestical' king and a great soldier" and Claudius "a smiling, creeping, serpent" (58, 44). More recently Bert O. States has contrasted Old Hamlet's "wisdom and human understanding" with the clear vices of Claudius, "murderer and usurper" (94, 98). The differences between Old Hamlet and Claudius are indeed profound, and yet the two are alike in ways which, carefully studied, illuminate Hamlet's participation not only in general Reformation disputes about salvation (4) but in specific late-Elizabethan arguments regarding the importance of public counsel to issues of warfare, inheritance, and royal succession. Specifically, by emphasizing the old and new kings' similar sins and deeds of misgovernance, the play comments not only on the monarchs' shared need to close the gap between their souls and God, but on Hamlet's obligation to publicly fix their civic mistakes: to restore justice to Denmark and Norway in the eyes and with the consent of a noble and international audience. Hamlet, in the end. must prove a better public servant than his uncle or his father has been.

That both Claudius and Old Hamlet have done wrong becomes evident when we note the likeness of their punishments. Each begins the play trapped as a result of prior misdeeds. The Ghost inhabits an otherworldly "prison-house" wherein he endures the painful purgation of his own past "crimes," done in his "days of nature" (1.5.12, 14). Claudius, caught between his desire to repent and his will to retain the fruits of regicide, is a "limed soul, that struggling to be free" is "the more engag'd" (3.4.68-69). Some actors and directors have noted the similarity of the brothers" torments. An inmate who played the Ghost in a 2004 Missouri prison production of Hamlet chose the role because the Ghost's "words jumped out at [him]"; they were the voice of a man he had killed "want[ing him] to know what [he] put him through." (5) Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 film Hamlet links the Ghost's and Claudius's suffering in its Mousetrap scene, wherein Claudius grasps his own ear as the play-murderer pours poison into the ear of the Player King, as though he himself feels the effects of the "cursed hebona" with which he has killed his sleeping brother (1.5.62). Indeed, as this actor and director have noticed, the dead and the living kings' predicaments are connected and similar. Claudius's murder of his brother has directly caused both their souls'

present alienation from God, and has intensified the need of each soul for reconciliation with its Creator. While the unexpiated murder and its hoarded fruits now stand between Claudius and God, having been killed as Claudius killed him likewise separates the Ghost from heaven. Claudius is hellbound for having sent the Ghost into (apparently) Purgatory "in the blossoms of [his] sin ... / With all [his] imperfections on his head. / O, horrible, O, horrible, most horrible!" (1.5.77, 79-80).

This similarity between the Ghost's and Claudius's situations is subtly evoked by the likeness of their behavior and language. When the cock crows and the day dawns, the Ghost "start[s] like a guilty thing" (1.1.148); likewise, Claudius (whether or not he grasps his ear) "rises" in guilty startlement at The Mousetrap's revelations (3.2.265). The Ghost's and Claudius's descriptions of being poisoned and being chastised for having poisoned are also similar. The Ghost recalls how Claudius's "cursed hebona" "course[d] through" his "wholesome blood" with "sudden vigor" (1.5.62, 66, 70, 68). Claudius, rebuked by what Hamlet calls The Mousetrap's "wormwood"--like hebona, a bitter herb (6)--feels Hamlet "rag[ing]" "like the hectic in [his] blood" (4.2.66). Further, Bert O. States has also noted that the Ghost and his brother are "anamorphically linked," joined by their mutual use of oxymorons (95, 97). The Ghost speaks of Claudius's "wicked wit" and "traitorous gifts" (1.5.43-44); Claudius of "defeated joy," "mirth in funeral," and "dirge in marriage" (1.2.10, 12). It is notable that the explicit or veiled subject of all these oxymorons--the tragic act to which the terms refer or that has produced the occasion they remark--is, again, the murder, which haunts the thoughts of each man. Yet the Ghost's spectacular description of that murder--the pouring of the poison in his ear, the "vile and loathsome crust" it produced on his sleeping body (1.5.63-73)--distracts many scholars from a fact a Missouri jail inmate instantly saw: that to the Ghost, among the worst aspects of his brother's sin is the way it has prevented him from confessing and atoning for his own.

What are the Ghost's sins? By his own description "foul crimes" (1.5.12), like the "rank" "offense" done by Claudius (3.3.36), they are yet not, like his brother's, obvious to us. The Ghost tells Hamlet and us what Claudius did, and in soliloquy Claudius confirms what that was: a "foul murther" prompted by greed for a crown, political ambition, and adulterous passion for the queen (3.3.52, 55). The Ghost's misdeeds are, in comparison, obscure. Are they of special value to our understanding of the play, or are they merely the garden-variety sins of any Christian in a Catholic or Catholic-esque world (7) who has been sent into death "unanel'd"--that is, without the benefit of extreme unction?

In what follows I will ultimately argue that the Ghost's past sins are indeed particular rather than general, and important to the play, and that what they or some of them are is deducible from a close examination of the script. But here I want first to suggest that the Ghost's plea that his death be avenged is intended--by Providence, if not by the Ghost himself--to achieve or to speed both his own and his brother's atonement for sins and reconciliation to heaven.

Though this claim is not only unusual but counter-intuitive, in its defense, I invite readers to consider that the Ghost's plea for vengeance nearly results in Claudius's Christian repentance. After all, the Ghost's description of the murder leads to Hamlet's staging of a play re-enacting that crime which exacerbates Claudius's remorse and results in his third-act prayer. Thus the Ghost's first speech to Hamlet at least leads to Claudius's opportunity to achieve a Cainlike reconciliation with God (Cainlike because Cain, to whom Claudius implicitly likens himself in his soliloquy [3.2.37-38], was protected by God from his enemies' vengeance, and thus apparently forgiven [Gen. 4:15]). Could it be, then, that although vengeance belongs exclusively to the Lord according to a scriptural lesson Elizabethans knew well (Lev. 19:18, Deut. 32:35, Rom. 12:19), (8) the Ghost's request for revenge is the play's greatest oxymoron--a virtuous sin? In its potential though unrealized effect--the repentance of Claudius--is it a purgatorial exercise strangely reversed, wherein, rather than be moved toward heaven by the prayers of the living, the soul in Purgatory works to guide a living man heavenward by prompting his penitence? Such an action would be apt for the Ghost's own spiritual journey, since, as Shakespeare's audience knew, Christians are told not to kill sinners but to "rebuke" and "exhort" them (2 Ti. 4:2), and salvation depends not on one's redress of injuries but on one's ability to forgive others their trespasses. In the gospels Christ says, "[B]e reconciled to thy brother" (Mt. 5:24), and warns that like the harsh servant jailed by his master, an unforgiving person will be jailed by God "till he should pay all that was due" (Mt. 18:34-35). Must the Ghost in his "prison house" pay a debt of forgiveness to his brother, Claudius, in order to get out of jail? Would it not make more sense for a spirit in Purgatory so to forgive his debtors than to commission a killing? Is Hamlet thus a play of brotherly forgiveness and redemption gone awry? "Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest" (1.5.82-83), the Ghost tells his son, but leaves the details of Denmark's salvation vague: "howsomever thou pursues this act," begins the next line (1.5.84, my emphasis). When the Ghost appears again to Hamlet in act three, his look is "piteous," dangerously capable, Hamlet fears, of "convert[ing]" Hamlet's "stern effects" to charity and replacing "blood" with "tears" (3.4.127-130). Has the Ghost's intention been that rather than destroy Claudius, Hamlet should nudge him toward repentance and the voluntary forswearing of the incestuous bed?

There are, of course, problems with a thesis that ascribes such generosity to the Ghost. First, the word "revenge." The Ghost tells Hamlet he will be "bound" to "revenge" after he hears the tale of the murder, and before telling that tale he repeats that Hamlet must "Revenge his foul and most unnatural murther" (1.5.6-7, 25). That the Ghost never actually says "Kill Claudius" as clearly as a blunter character might say, for example, "Kill Claudio" does not change the fact that for Elizabethans, by the conventions of revenge...

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