This perception of bodily experience as corrupt and corrupting drives Hamlet into disdainful, alienated contempt: contempt for his own flesh, contempt for those parts of his experience that seem tainted by corporeality, contempt for people who threaten to harm or to compromise him by insinuating themselves into his thoughts. ibid.
All of Hamlet’s efforts to transcend corporeality have only implicated him amorally in its ruinous violence. Finally, he abandoned the fruitless attempt. ibid.
Shakespeare’s nihilist masterpiece composed with honeyed words of so sweet breath honed from the gods as made the world more rich is a dissection of the corporeal temple and the fruitless search for a Meaning of Life. Hamlet is confined by custom to the Castle of Elsinore and the claustrophobia of the court of Claudius, the usurping king by virtue of his poisoning Hamlet’s father, bedding and wedding Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, and snatching the crown of Denmark. Denmark’s a prison. The world’s a prison:
‘When the play opens Claudius has obtained the crown of Denmark by secretly poisoning the King his brother. One month after the funeral and coronation he has married Gertrude, the wife of his dead brother and the mother of Hamlet. A Ghost, in the shape of the dead King, appears on the battlements of the castle of Elsinore. It discloses the crimes of Claudius, and commands Hamlet to revenge his father’s murder. In the play Hamlet’s problems develop from the fact that he does not immediately obey this command by killing the King his uncle.’ Nigel Alexander, Poison, Play, and Duel
The play’s opening gambit — ‘Who’s there?’ — between two witching-hour guards on the battlements of Elsinore Castle sets a half-light semitone heart-twitch of uncertainty, and shoots straight to the heart of the Meaning of Life — who is there?
‘The first scene is insistently incoherent and just as insistently coherent. It frustrates and fulfils expectations simultaneously. The challenge and response in the first lines are perfectly predictable sentry-talk, but — as has been well and often observed — the challenger is the wrong man, the relieving sentry and not the one on duty ... The audience’s sensation of being unexpectedly and very slightly out of step is repeated regularly in Hamlet’. Stephen Booth, On the Value of Hamlet
Hamlet’s world, pointed out Maynard Mack, ‘is predominantly in the interrogative mood. It reverberates with questions, anguished, meditative, alarmed’ (Maynard Mack, The World of Hamlet). The prevailing emotion is doubt:
Bernardo: Who’s there? (I i 1)
Francisco: Who is there? (I i 14)
Marcellus: Who hath relieved you? (I i 17)
Bernardo: What, is Horatio there? (I i 19)
Marcellus’ question posed on behalf of the audience — ‘What, has this thing appeared again tonight?’ — is our first hint of an impending date with the dark side and throws a searchlight on who is there:
Bernardo: I have seen nothing.
Marcellus: Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy. (I i 22-23)
Bernardo’s nothing is the first parlay of Shakespeare’s answer to the play’s opening question of ‘Who’s there?’ Claudius utters to court attendants, ‘We doubt it nothing’ (I ii 41); emasculated Ophelia whimpers to Hamlet, ‘I think nothing, my lord’ (III ii 110); Gertrude is confronted by Hamlet but is not privy to the urgency of the vision: ‘Nothing at all yet all that is I see’ (III iv 133); the grave-digger down among the dead men, ‘For no man, sir’ (V i 118).
The miasma of dilemma swamping the battlements of the castle infects first Bernardo: ‘Is not this something more than fantasy?’ (I i 54), but contrasted with the healthy certainty of Hamlet whose even-handed assessment of the ghost — ‘a spirit of health, or goblin damned’ (I iv 40) — transmogrifies into a verdict flying in the face of evidence: ‘It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you’ (I v 138).
Horatio joins the sentinels all along the watchtower battlements of Elsinore Castle: ‘Tush, tush, ’twill not appear’ (I i 29). ‘The bell then beating one’ (I i 39) the Ghost invades the stage, the spitting image of the late King, but refuses to speak to the sentinels or Horatio: ‘Most like — It harrows me with fear and wonder’ (I i 44). Horatio confesses the heart-knocking news to Hamlet, who resolves to converse with the ‘spirit of health or goblin damned,/ Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,/ Be thy intents wicked or charitable’ (I iv 40-42).
The next night, in a ‘nipping and an eager air’ (I iv 2) Prince Hamlet the Dane w-w-w-wrapped in the language of dilemma — ‘Say, why is this? wherefore? what should we do?’ (I iv 57) — braves the battlements to confront the Ghost: ‘Where wilt thou lead me?’ (I v I):
‘What is frightening about a ghost is not its unearthliness, but its earthliness: its semblance of reality divorced from existence.’ Charles Marowitz, College Hamlet, Introduction
So does the Ghost ‘Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell’?
‘My hour is almost come,
When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself ...
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.’ (I v 2-4 & 12-13)
The Ghost we suspect is not Heaven-sent with uplifting news and racing tips from the verdant pastures of Elysian Fields:
‘I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres.’ (I v 15-17)
The Ghost repeatedly harrows Hamlet to revenge ‘Murder most foul’ (I v 27) topped unseemly by, ‘that incestuous, that adulterate beast ... Won to his shameful lust/ The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen’ (I v 41 & 45-46). The corporeal, spitting venomous disgust of the Ghost overspills when directed to the lusty loins of King Claudius — ‘Let not the royal bed of Denmark be/ A couch for luxury and damned incest’ (I v 82-83).
‘It cannot be an entirely innocent and heavenly spirit that would wander on earth to demand a son to avenge his death’. Hermann Ulrici, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art, 1876
Coleridge’s cold psychological deconstruction of Hamlet condemns with faint praise, ‘Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve’. G Wilson Knight’s landmark essay of 1930 contrasts Claudius as a cool, contented competent community controller with Hamlet who is condemned as inhuman and:
‘... a poison in the midst of the healthy bustle of the court. He is a superman among men. And he is a superman because he has walked and held converse with death ... Thus Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark. The poison of his mental existence spreads outwards among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal’. G Wilson Knight, The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet in The Wheel of Fire, 1930
G Wilson Knight wrote, ‘The ghost may or may not have been a “goblin damned”; it certainly was no “spirit of health”’. But to C S Lewis in 1942, ‘The appearance of the spectre means a breaking down of the walls of the world’ (C S Lewis, Hamlet: The Prince of the Poem). The demonic die-hard God of the Old Testament demands a decent killing spree and claims a patent to the dispensing of revenge — so is the reformed, reshaped cuddly Christian God of C S Lewis likely to sanction instantaneous revenge for a former King found guilty of ‘foul crimes done in my days of nature’? ‘And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light’ (2 Corinthians 11:14).
‘The Ghosts in revenge plays consistently resist unequivocal identifications, are always ‘questionable’ in one of the senses of that word. Dead and yet living, visitants at midnight (the marginal hour) from a prison-house which is neither heaven nor hell, visible to some figures on the stage but not to others, and so neither real nor unreal, they inaugurate a course of action which is both mad and sane, correct and criminal. To uphold the law revengers are compelled to break it.’ Catherine Belsey, Revenge in Hamlet
C S Lewis’s assessment of the evolution of Hamlet-criticism delivers like a sermon through Christian-clouded spectacles: ‘Their error, in my view, was to put the mystery in the wrong place — in Hamlet’s motives rather than in the darkness which enwraps Hamlet and the whole tragedy’ (C S Lewis ibid.).
‘The ambiguity of the Ghost is of fundamental importance’ writes Professor Philip Edwards in Tragic Balance in Hamlet. ‘Hamlet, by contrast is a figure of nihilism and death’. And Hamlet’s soul threatens to cleft in twain from mighty opposites — ‘Is Hamlet’s sense of mission divine or demonic?’ Edwards explains the evolved differences in literary criticism: ‘It is the common currency of Hamlet criticism to deplore, not Hamlet’s failure to carry out his mission, but the mission itself’.
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 & 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.