Optional Subject: Revenge Tragedy
Abstract
One of the most intriguing characters in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare is the Ghost, who does not simply frame the action of the play but propels it significantly. Though the audience encounters the ghost only in the first act and later in the closet scene of the third act, his presence is felt throughout. This presence is perceptible through the task of vengeance the Ghost has laid upon his son’s shoulders. The Ghost is the originator of the task and the cause of conflict in the revenge tragedy. This paper seeks to highlight the relationship of the Ghost’s desire for revenge with the ideologies regarding revenge in Elizabethan England. It also analyses the Ghost within a Christian context and relates this to the ethical dilemma of revenge and Hamlet’s delay in extracting vengeance for the murder of his father, the late King Hamlet.
The revenge tragedy of Hamlet which, according to Ashley H. Thorndike is “a tragedy whose leading motive is revenge and whose main action deals with the process of revenge leading to the death of the murderers and often the death of the avenger as well,” opens in a setting that is cold, dark, desolate and somewhat terrifying. Both the soldiers, Francisco and Bernardo, are on edge and alert as they keep watch. Horatio, a scholar, is accompanying them to witness the apparition which the soldiers claim to have already encountered. However, even before the ghost appears, “we are aware that the black night harbors something fearful, something portending evil,” says Eleanor Prosser in her book Hamlet and Revenge.
The Ghost enters and Horatio calls upon the Heavens and charges the Ghost to speak to which, it reacts with anger and leaves. It reappears after a while and is about to speak when it startles like “a guilty thing” (Hamlet 1.1.146) and vanishes. The Ghost reacts thus to a cock’s crowing at the brink of daylight. Eleanor Prosser goes on to say that the modern audience would already be suspicious of the Ghost as, apart from the ambience of the scene, the Ghost is referred to as a ‘dreadful sight’, ‘usurping apparition’ and a ‘thing’ associated with sickness, terror and midnight, who fears the mention of ‘Heaven’ and daylight.
When Horatio relates the events of the night to a grieving Hamlet, the Prince is eager to witness the Ghost for himself as his mind is at a state where it is susceptible to believe anything that could give him a sense of closure or perhaps override his grief. Until now, Hamlet was made made to believe that his father, King Hamlet, had died from a snake bite, rendering revenge useless and the play without conflict. It is the Ghost of King Hamlet, the apparition Horatio and the soldiers encountered in the first scene that instills in Hamlet the need for seeking revenge, thus introducing the main conflict in the plot of the tragedy.
The moment Hamlet encounters the Ghost, it ushers him away from his friends to the battlements of the Castle and asks Hamlet to lend it his undivided attention. Hamlet’s reply, “Speak, I am bound to hear,” (Hamlet 1.5.9) recalls and acknowledges Hamlet’s bond of filial loyalty to his dead father, the shape the Ghost is in. In the Ghost’s view, this loyalty entails the binding moral obligation of the son to avenge the father’s murder. The Ghost goes on to relate the “foul and most unnatural murder” (Hamlet 1.5.25) where the King had been asleep in his garden when a villain had poured poison into his ear- the very villain who now wears the crown and sleeps with Hamlet’s mother; a villain by the name of Claudius who had killed his own brother to usurp the throne and gone on to marry his wife. The Ghost exhorts Hamlet to revenge against “that incestuous, that adulterate beast” (Hamlet 1.5.41) that corrupted both Denmark and Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, through seduction and witchcraft.
It is interesting to note that the Ghost, as if omniscient, emphasises profusely on the issue that has been disturbing Hamlet the most- his mother remarrying his uncle. The Ghost expresses how he suffered when Gertrude tarnished the purity and vows of her first marriage to be lured by gifts, word and lust into an incestuous union with her brother-in-law. However, the Ghost forbids Hamlet from harming Gertrude and leaves it to Heaven to be her judge and her own conscience to prick her. Through this instruction, though the Ghost makes Hamlet hate his mother, he prevents him from acting on his hatred as this would go against his filial duties. The Ghost leaves Hamlet in a state of powerful excitation and frenetic mental activity. The Ghost’s exhortation for revenge asserts that a human being who is not in some way deformed in nature will instinctively feel the task of avenging a father’s murder to be a binding moral obligation.
As mentioned before, the Ghost’s demand for revenge against Claudius is pivotal to the play. It sets the plot of the play into motion and introduces the idea of retributive justice- a notion that sin must be punished to restore balance to the kingdom. The desire for revenge serves as a haunting motivator and invokes one of the central tensions in the play- Hamlet’s inability to act. This delay could have been cause by the difficulties involved in accepting the word of the Ghost and the moral dilemma associated with revenge.
There was an ambivalence regarding the principle of revenge- the act of taking law into one’s own hands to punish sinner. While in Renaissance England, the Elizabethan audience naturally accepted revenge as a form of justice on the stage and treated it as a morally appropriate obligation of the revenger, the conception of revenge was out of line with the dominant ethical system of Christianity. The nobility still believes in the ideological code of honour associated with revenge which was also connected to the essence of survival, but the existence of judicial institutions showed that revenge was regarded in law as a crime. A killing, says Graham Holderness in his book Hamlet: Open Guide to Literature, “motivated by revenge was under Elizabethan law, regarded as murder; it could be commuted to manslaughter only if the killing took place as a direct, unpremeditated reprisal against a serious personal injury.”
Francis Bacon, an author, philosopher and statesman of the Renaissance era in England writes in his essay, “Of Revenge” that revenge “is a kind of wild justice which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.” However, the ambivalence regarding revenge is brought out by the fact that Bacon says that there is a kind of revenge which is tolerable- revenge taken for sins where there is not law to remedy. Revenge, according to Bacon, should be a just punishment rather than a mere satisfaction of personal bloodlust.
In a religious context, revenge was considered a sin according to Christian doctrines. Biblically, in Matthew 18:21-35, “The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant,” it is explicitly written that vengeance is for God to take. “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.”
The highest virtue was considered forgiveness and this virtue showed a spiritual nature. God could redress private wrongs but the revenger was a blasphemer who imperiled his own soul. The dominant ethical system of the time opposed revenge and recommended in its place the virtues of forgiveness, patience, obedience, submission to the law and to God’s will.
Hamlet himself is not unaware of a revenger’s soul being damned and suspects the Ghost which by encouraging revenge is instigating blasphemy. The following lines which Hamlet says express his suspicion. “The spirit that I have seen May be the devil, and the devil hath power T’ assume a pleasing shape. Yea, and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me.” (Hamlet 2.2.561-565)
The very first scene of Hamlet puts the Ghost into a Christian perspective as the Ghost seems to fear Heaven and the crow’s call. “Marcellus’s speech on the cock and the Advent of our Saviour’s birth,” says Elenor Prosser “makes the play’s Christian context unmistakable.” She goes on to relate the controversy between Catholics and Protestants regarding ghosts and says that, “The visitation of a dead soul would require a miracle but the Catholics believed that ‘on extraordinary occasions’ such a miracle might be granted. Miracles however were considered extremely rare and Catholics were warned that in most cases, spirits professing to be dead souls were actually devils.” The Protestant view was virtually unanimous: any ghost that was not a hallucination of a sick mind was a demon masquerading as the spirit of a dead man in order to tempt the living so they may have their souls damned.
The first scene establishes a number of points. Firstly, the Ghost was not a hallucination as many had seen it. It also establishes that the eerie ambiance, a sense of foreboding and the Ghost’s fear of God indicate that the Ghost is not a benign character. The fact that the Ghost is in fact a creature from hell is also established later in the Act by the Ghost’s own description of it where he suffers in the “sulfurous and tormenting flames.” (Hamlet 1.5.5) it goes on to say that it is doomed to wall the earth at night and suffer the fires of hell at day.
The spirit choses Hamlet to extract revenge and we understand that this is primarily because Hamlet is his son. However, Hamlet, in his current state of mind was especially subject to the abuse of demons. Hamlet had just lost his father who he knew was poisoned by a snake but still suspected his uncle, Claudius. What was more, Claudius had usurped the throne and married Hamlet’s mother within two months from the King’s demise. Hamlet’s grief for his father, suspicion towards his uncle, loathing towards his mother, together with his desire for suicide made him the type of melancholic demons exploited to damn their soul as their will power was weak.
By the end of the encounter between Hamlet and the Ghost, Hamlet is fixated on revenge. The Ghost had exploited a son’s love and filial duties for the father to bring about this thirst for vengeance. If Hamlet ever loved his father, he would avenge his murder, challenged the Ghost. It also successfully fills Hamlet with a deep sense of hatred and sexual nausea towards his mother who according to the Ghost had, with the help of Claudius, made the “royal bed of Denmark a couch for luxury and damned incest.” (Hamlet 1.5.82-83) All of Hamlet’s senses are overpowered. Every instinct he has tells him to act. However, Hamlet is unable to do so. Not only is he suspicious of Ghost, he feels that he must prove Claudius’s guilt before extracting revenge on him. Hamlet goes on to act mad to disguise the storm waging in his mind. Hamlet believes that thought before action prevents a man from being rash and following instincts without the use of rational might lead him to commit an act he may regret in the future.
Hamlet is an intellectual (eager to return to the University of Wittenberg), philosophical and contemplative. He acts like a foil to Laertes who is passionate and quick to act and seek revenge. Hamlet, on the other hand, understands that it is the instinctive nature of man to want to act. It is however, reason that restrains him. Hamlet is obsessed with proving Claudius’s guilt before killing him Hamlet also is not keen on merely murdering Claudius but also wants to make sure that Claudius’s soul will be damned in hell. He is not satisfied by extracting revenge himself but wants God to claim his own vengeance on Claudius and punish him for his sins.
However, the Ghost’s challenge that is Hamlet was his natural son, he would extract revenge, had not fallen on deaf ears. Hamlet rejects his conscience after the Play Scene and his actions after that indicate that he has accepted the Ghost’s challenge, malignant or otherwise, and has decided to act for he himself is sure, through Claudius’s guilty reaction at the play, that he has the moral right to extract revenge. Unfortunately, this decision, spurred on by the Ghost’s words, leads to the Hamlet murdering Polonius and Claudius, Iphigenia’s alleged suicide, Gertrude’s accidental death and Hamlet death in duel with Laertes, where Laertes too dies. Other minor characters like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Horacio is the only one standing after the gruesome final scene of violence and deaths, who goes on to relate Hamlet’s tragic story of revenge.
Bibliography
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Tudor Edition. London. The English Language Book Society and Collins. 1964. Print.
Holderness, Graham. Hamlet: Open Guide to Literature. Kolkata. Viva Books Private Limited. 2003. Print.
Prosser, Eleanor. Hamlet and Revenge. Stanford. Stanford University Press. 1967. Print.
Thorndike, A. H. “The Relations of Hamlet to Contemporary Revenge Plays.” Modern Language Association. 1902. Print.
“Revenge Tragedy.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Web. 5 May 2016.
“Hamlet.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Web. 5 May 2016.
Campbell, B. Lily. “Theories of Revenge in Renaissance England.” Modern Philology, Vol. 28, No. 3. February 1931. Web. 5 May 2016. pp. 281-296
Gajdošíková, Jana. “Seeing and Interpreting the Ghosts in Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy.” Masaryk University. 2006. Web. 5 May 2016.
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