SARAH:  When we read, or see, this scene in Hamlet today, it’s perhaps difficult to gauge how truly innovative and even shocking this scene would have been for Shakespeare’s first audiences.

RALPH:  What do you mean, Sarah?

SARAH:  Well, try to imagine the following: you’ve never seen a film, TV show, or play that had zombies, vampires, aliens, time travelers — no supernatural beings whatsoever…

RALPH:  Ah, I see, you mean the ghost — but you’re not saying that Shakespeare’s audience had never seen a ghost on stage before.

SARAH:  No, there was a tradition of ghosts in theatre, particularly in the recently popular genre of revenge tragedy, of which Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an excellent an example.

RALPH:  Typically, in these revenge tragedies, the ghost of the murdered victim makes an appearance to demand revenge for his death, and then he reappears at the end of the play to express his satisfaction with the avenger. The ghost would typically be dressed in white burial shrouds and accompanied by smoke and flames, and its voice would be altered to distinguish it from the living characters.

SARAH:  Shakespeare’s clearly aware of this tradition, but he’s not following it.  In fact, the realism of Shakespeare’s ghost would have been a startling contrast with its predecessors in typical revenge tragedies; the ghost behaves here just as we might expect the old king to behave: authoritative toward his son, tender toward his wife, Gertrude, and emotionally crushed by the events surrounding his death.

RALPH:  So, we can see from this example that one way to understand Shakespeare’s genius is to try and imagine ourselves as members of an Elizabethan audience, watching the initial performance of Hamlet. The more we learn about that audience — the more we try to put ourselves into their shoes — the more impressive Shakespeare’s work becomes.

SARAH:  Yes, Ralph, that’s one of the aims of New Historicism, a kind of literary criticism. Equally important to New Historicism is the complementary idea that it is through artistic works like Shakespeare’s plays that we are able to put together this larger cultural or intellectual history of the period.

RALPH:  But New Historicist critics are also skeptical of our ability to fully access the world of the past, noting that we can only do so through the lens of our own contemporary culture and concerns.  Lisa Jardine, a professor at the University of London, and a renowned critic of Elizabethan culture and literature, writes that “our access to the past is through ‘textual remains’ in which the traces of the past are to be found,” — and then she adds “what the cultural historian can retrieve and reconstruct of the past will of necessity be incomplete and indeterminate.”

SARAH:  We need to try and access the past in order to appreciate Shakespeare’s plays, and yet the plays help us to reconstruct and enrich that same history, even if only partially.  What’s more, these partial attempts at understanding history may also help us understand our own culture and our own time.

RALPH:  As Jardine puts it:  “to read Shakespeare historically is to undertake a dialogue with these culturally freighted residues of our own past in order more clearly to illuminate the culture we currently inhabit.”

SARAH:  Yet other critics differ with this approach, maintaining that what’s most important about Shakespeare is that he speaks directly to us in spite of his different age and culture, that his plays voice universal concerns that can be understood even if we don’t understand much about Elizabethan England at all. These critics admire the quote of Ben Johnson, one of Shakespeare’s colleagues, “He was not of an age, but for all time."

RALPH:  A modern critic who shares Johnson’s view is Harold Bloom, a professor at Yale University and the author of Shakespeare:  The Invention of the Human.  Bloom has written that Shakespeare:  “… has been universally judged to be a more adequate representer of the universe of facts than anyone else, before him or since…We keep returning to Shakespeare because we need him, no one else gives us so much of the world most of us take to be fact.”

SARAH:  Whatever you think about these different approaches, we hope you’ll agree that understanding what was going on in the world around Shakespeare, as well as in his personal life, can add a great deal to our appreciation of this play.

RALPH:  Let’s return now to our ghost.  What’s attracted the most critical attention about the ghost is not its realism, however novel this must have been, but the problem of its very nature.  What is a ghost anyway?

SARAH:  Here is how the ghost introduces itself to Hamlet, “I am thy father's spirit, Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away.”

RALPH:  One question that critics of Hamlet ask is the following:  why does Shakespeare have the ghost claim to be a soul returning from Purgatory, when Protestants, who probably made up the majority of his audience, did not even believe in the existence of Purgatory?

SARAH:  Did Shakespeare perhaps intend his audience to view the ghost instead as an evil spirit, or a devil?  After all, the ghost appears exactly at midnight, and must depart before the coming of daylight.

RALPH:  Earlier in the play, Horatio puts the ghost to a typical test for an evil spirit:  he challenges it in the name of God to speak.  Instead of responding, the ghost disappears. These clues would suggest that the ghost was an evil spirit of some kind.

SARAH:  Hamlet’s friends certainly seem to presume the ghost is a devil. Horatio first warns Hamlet, "What if it tempt you toward the flood ... and there assume some other horrible form ... and draw you into madness."  He then tries to hold Hamlet back, when Hamlet begins to follow the ghost at the start of this scene.

RALPH:  Even Hamlet seems to think that it’s likely that the ghost only looks like his father, but is in fact an evil spirit. When Horatio first tells him about the ghost’s appearance, Hamlet says, " If it assume my noble father's person, I'll speak to it though hell itself should gape."

SARAH:  It’s also odd that Hamlet would believe that this ghost is from Purgatory.  You’ll remember that Purgatory was one of the aspects of Roman Catholicism that Protestants despised the most — and Shakespeare has made Hamlet a student at Wittenberg University, home to Martin Luther, and, in a way, the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation.

RALPH:  A renowned Shakespeare scholar, Stephen Greenblatt, thinks that part of the answer lies in a few words that Horatio says about Hamlet.

SARAH:  Greenblatt is a Harvard professor of literature and an important figure in New Historicism.  He’s also one of the most renowned Shakespeare critics in the United States, and he wrote a book called Hamlet in Purgatory, so we know this is a favorite scene for him.

RALPH:  Just before Hamlet rushes off with the ghost, Horatio says that Hamlet is growing “desperate with imagination.” This means that Hamlet desperately wants to believe, against all reasonable judgment, that the ghost is indeed the soul of his beloved father, with whom he will once again be able to communicate.  One of the appeals of Purgatory is that it allowed for some kind of contact or influence between our world and the world of the dead — especially of our dead loved ones.

SARAH:  And this appeal might hold more sway for Hamlet than any religious doctrine, from Wittenberg or anywhere else. As Greenblatt puts it:

“Hamlet does not know that Purgatory is a fiction, as the state-sanctioned church of Shakespeare’s time had declared it to be. On the contrary, he is desperate to establish the veracity of the ghost’s tale and hence to establish that the ghost is in reality his father’s spirit and not the devil. But this reality is theatrical, not theological.”

RALPH:  This, then, is part of the brilliance of the ghost in Hamlet.  It’s an amazing theatrical cocktail, that combines, on the one hand, an exciting plot element taken from the genre of revenge tragedy, with an expression of our human desire to remain in contact with those we’ve lost.