The contamination of the vision is carried by Horatio, a credible witness: ‘It beckons you to go away with it’ (I iv 58), but decays into ambiguity with his eye-witness diagnosis of Hamlet, ‘He waxes desperate with imagination’ (I iv 87). The ambiguity of the messenger Shakespeare reserves and revives as a revered theme:
The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath! The Merchant of Venice I iii 97-101, Antonio to Bassiano and Shylock
And Hamlet surprises, despite his initial readiness, with the resurrection of a rosy scepticism:
The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil. And the devil hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape. Hamlet soliloquy II ii 573-575
Our list of ambiguities swells like London smog along the battlements of the castle: the ambiguity of the sentinels in the opening scene; the ambiguity of Horatio as a witness; the ambiguity of validity of the vision; the ambiguity of the Ghost on a mission from God; the ambiguity of the message of revenge; the ambiguity of family incest; the ambiguity of a fear of Hell and a ‘fault to heaven’; and Hamlet’s ambiguous resolve to revenge the murder of a Hyperion father.
The critical element in this tragic structure is the notion that God is neither absent nor obviously present. If God is dead, or if God is clearly known, the tragedy (Goldman says) cannot exist. The special irony of the tragic hero’s position is that the difficulty of trying to live out what God wants is compounded by the difficulty of knowing what God wants, or even whether He exists. Philip Edwards, Tragic Balance in Hamlet
Hamlet is no knight of faith for he has communed with the dark side. Hamlet has in mind the evidence for action — the Ghost may be an unreliable witness — but Hamlet’s wavering resolve is too too human. Hamlet and the courtiers of Elsinore are victims of the Ghost of Death. We all are God’s victims condemned to death on a cold lonely planet — born sick, commanded to be sound. ‘Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect’ (Matthew 5:48). The quest to conquer the Meaning of Life is charged as an impossible mission. The consoling measure of success is confined to our preserving of sanity:
The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
Kierkegaard holds that we have an absolute duty to God. But the fault lies with God for imposing the duty, a duty to be. Or not to be. Hamlet can hardly be guilty of an absolute duty to the Ghost. Our first instinct, a Kierkegaardian leap of faith from a safe distance, calls on Hamlet to carry out the charge of revenge, but who are we to rise above the mass and impose a duty of violence? Let the devil do his damndest; let the Ghost wreak his own revenge. ‘There can be no question about the extent of Hamlet’s failure’ writes Philip Edwards. But despite Hamlet’s feigned madness, despite Hamlet’s havoc of his love for Ophelia and Gertrude, despite Hamlet’s wavering resolve, Hamlet wins by retaining his wits and reserving the last vestiges of humanity.
What should such fellows as I do, crawling between earth and heaven? (III i 128-129)
Hamlet fronts the Queen with highly human words he should have unleashed on the Ghost: ‘Dost thou come here to whine? To outface me with leaping in her grave? ... I’ll rant as well as thou’ (V i 258-259 & 264).
The lonely abandoned human is the victim of mighty opposites of Heaven and Hell and our only defence is the safeguarding of our fault-infested humanity. We lucky few. For Hamlet, ‘He was a man, take him for all in all’ (I ii 186). Kierkegaard is wrong — the highest passion in a human is not faith, but the determination of the human animal to rise above our inheritance as victims, and treasure our vulnerable free will, for all in all.
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‘That incestuous, that adulterous beast’ (Hamlet I v 42) Joseph Smith ‘waxes desperate with imagination’ (I iv 87) and with ‘a tale unfold, whose lightest word/ Would harrow up thy soul’ (I v 15-16) that is ‘a fault to heaven./ A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,/ To reason most absurd’ (I ii 101-103). ‘O, horrible! O, horrible! O, horrible!’ (I v 80) ‘What a falling-off was there!’ (I v 47) from the hallowed heights of English literature to the harrowing depths of Joseph Smith’s ‘foul crimes done in my days of nature’ (I v 12). Reader, ‘disjoint and out of frame’ (I ii 20), ‘something is rotten in the State of’ (I iv 90) Mormonism, ‘but bear me stiffly up’ (I v 95) for ‘I am sick at heart’ (I i 9) to reveal ‘in the gross and scope of my opinion’ (I i 68) the dreariest, demonic depths of imagination and penmanship that ‘’Tis an unweeded garden/ That grows to seed: things rank and gross in nature’ (I ii 135-136). ‘It is not nor it cannot come to good’ (I ii 158). ‘O most pernicious’ (I v 105) man!’ ‘That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain’ (I v 108).
If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure to get a surprise. If you go down to the woods today, don’t eat the mushrooms:
5. Some time in the second year after our removal to Manchester, there was in the place where we lived an unusual excitement on the subject of religion ...
13. At length I came to the conclusion that I must either remain in darkness and confusion, or else I must do as James directs, that is, ask of God. I at length came to the determination to ‘ask of God’, concluding that if he gave wisdom to them that lacked wisdom, and would give liberally, and not upbraid, I might venture.
14. So, in accordance with this, my determination to ask of God, I retired to the woods to make the attempt. It was on the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty. It was the first time in my life that I had made such an attempt, for amidst all my anxieties I had never as yet made the attempt to pray vocally.
15. After I had retired to the place where I had previously designed to go, having looked around me, and finding myself alone, I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. I had scarcely done so, when immediately I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.
16. But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction — not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being — just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.
17. It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound. When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other — ‘This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!’
18. My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join. No sooner, therefore, did I get possession of myself, so as to be able to speak, than I asked the Personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right (for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong) — and which I should join.
19. I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: ‘they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.’