It starts on the castle battlements in Denmark , where
the guards see the dead kings ghost, Hamlet's father. They bring Hamlet to the
ghost the next night.
The Ghost tells Hamlet that he was murdered by
Hamlet's uncle, Claudius, who is now the king because he married Hamlet's
mother, Gertrude, who is still living.
Hamlet meets a group of actors and tells them
to do a recreation of the killing of Hamlet's father. In the middle of the play
Hamlet's uncle, Claudius, goes crazy and it's proven that the new king is
guilty of murder.
Later, Hamlet is talking with his mother and
Ophelia's (Hamlet's girlfriend) father, Polonius, is behind the curtain. Hamlet
thinks it's Claudius and stabs the curtain and kills Polonius.
Ophelia goes crazy and drowns in a
river. Ophelia's brother, Laertes, is mad at Hamlet so he challenges him
to a sword fight. King Claudius gets in on it too and he poisons Hamlet's wine.
Just to make sure Hamlet dies Laertes puts poison on the tip of his
sword.
During the duel, Laertes scratches Hamlet with
the poison sword. Hamlet picks up the poison sward and stabs Laertes. The queen
gets thirsty and drinks the poison wine that Hamlet was going to drink. Hamlet
gets up and stabs the new king. The only one who survived was Horatio, Hamlet's
best friend.
The ghost in Hamlet is as faithfully
treated as any character in the play. Next to Hamlet himself, he is to me the
most interesting person of the drama.
The rumor of his appearance is wrapped in the
larger rumour of war. Loud preparations for uncertain attack fill the ears of
"the subject of the land." The state is troubled. The new king has
hardly compassed his election before his marriage with his brother's widow
swathes the court in the dust-cloud of shame, which the merriment of its forced
revelry can do little to dispel. A feeling is in the moral air to which the
words of Francisco, the only words of significance he utters, give the key:
"'Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart." Into the frosty air, the
pallid moonlight, the drunken shouts of Claudius and his court, the bellowing
of the cannon from the rampart for the enlargement of the insane clamour that
it may beat the drum of its own disgrace at the portals of heaven, glides the
silent prisoner of hell, no longer a king of the day walking about his halls,
"the observed of all observers," but a thrall of the night, wandering
between the bell and the cock, like a jailer on each side of him. A poet tells
the tale of the king who lost his garments and ceased to be a king: here is the
king who has lost his body, and in the eyes of his court has ceased to be a
man. Is the cold of the earth's night pleaseant to him after the purging fire?
What crimes had the honest ghost committed in his days of nature? He calls them
foul crimes! Could such be his? Only who can tell how a ghost, with his doubled
experience, may think of this thing or that? The ghost and the fire may between
them distinctly recognize that as a foul crime which the man and the court
regarded as a weakness at worst, and indeed in a king laudable.
Alas, poor ghost! Around the house he flits,
shifting and shadowy, over the ground he once paced in ringing armour--armed
still, but his very armour a shadow! It cannot keep out the arrow of the cock's
cry, and the heart that pierces is no shadow. Where now is the loaded axe with
which, in angry dispute, he smote the ice at his feet that cracked to the blow?
Where is the arm that heaved the axe? Wasting in the marble maw of the
sepulchre, and the arm he carries now--I know not what it can do, but it cannot
slay his murderer. For that he seeks his son's. Doubtless his new ethereal form
has its capacities and privileges. It can shift its garb at will; can appear in
mail or night-gown, unaided of armourer or tailer; can pass through Hades-gates
or chamber-door with equal ease; can work in the ground like mole or pioneer,
and let its voice be heard from the cellarage. But there is one to whom it
cannot appear, one whom the ghost can see, but to whom he cannot show himself.
She has built a doorless, windowless wall between them, and sees the husband of
her youth no more. Outside her heart--that is the night in which he wanders,
while the palace-windows are flaring, and the low wind throbs to the wassail
shouts: within, his murderer sits by the wife of his bosom, and in the orchard
the spilt poison is yet gnawing at the roots of the daisies.
Twice has the ghost grown out of the night upon
the eyes of the sentinels. With solemn march, slow and stately, three times
each night, has he walked by them; they, jellied with fear, have uttered no
challenge. They seek Horatio, who the third night speaks to him as a scholar
can. To the first challenge he makes no answer, but stalks away; to the second,
It lifted up its head, and did address
Itself to motion, like as it would speak;
but the gaoler cock calls him, and the kingly shape
started like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons;
and then
shrunk in haste away,
And vanished from our sight.
Ah, that summons! at which majesty welks and
shrivels, the king and soldier starts and cowers, and, armour and all, withers
from the air!
But why has he not spoken before? why not now ere
the cock could claim him? He cannot trust the men. His court has forsaken his
memory--crowds with as eager discontent about the mildewed ear as ever about
his wholesome brother, and how should he trust mere sentinels? There is but one
who will heed his tale. A word to any other would but defeat his intent. Out of
the multitude of courtiers and subjects, in all the land of Denmark , there
is but one whom he can trust--his student-son. Him he has not yet found--the
condition of a ghost involving strange difficulties.
Or did the horror of the men at the sight of him
wound and repel him? Does the sense of regal dignity, not yet exhausted for all
the fasting in fires, unite with that of grievous humiliation to make him shun
their speech?
But Horatio--why does the ghost not answer him
ere the time of the cock is come? Does he fold the cloak of indignation around
him because his son's friend has addressed him as an intruder in the night, an
usurper of the form that is his own? The companions of the speaker take note
that he is offended and stalks away.
Much has the kingly ghost to endure in his
attempt to re-open relations with the world he has left: when he has overcome
his wrath and returns, that moment Horatio again insults him, callin him an
illusion. But this time he will bear it, and opens his mouth to speak. It is
too late; the cock is awake, and he must go. Then alas for the buried majesty
of Denmark !
with upheaved halberts they strike at the shadow, and would stop it if they
might--usage so grossly unfitting that they are instantly ashamed of it
themselves, recognizing the offence in the majest of the offended. But he is
already gone. The proud, angry king has found himself but a thing of nothing to
his body-guard--for he has lost the body which was their guard. Still, not even
yet has he learned how little it lies in the power of an honest ghost to gain
credit for himself or his tale! His very privileges are against him.
All this time his son is consuming his heart in
the knowledge of a mother capable of so soon and so utterly forgetting such a
husband, and in pity and sorrow for the dead father who has had such a wife. He
is thirty years of age, an obedient, honourable son--a man of thought, of
faith, of aspiration. Him now the ghost seeks, his heart burning like a coal
with the sense of unendurable wrong. He is seeking the one drop that can fall
cooling on that heart--the sympathy, the answering rage and grief of his boy.
But when at length he finds him, the generous, loving father has to see that
son tremble like an aspen-leaf in his doubtful presence. He has exposed himself
to the shame of eyes and the indignities of dullness, that he may pour the pent
torrent of his wrongs into his ears, but his disfranchisement from the flesh
tells against him even with his son: the young Hamlet is doubtful of the
identity of the apparition with his father. After all the burning words of the
phantom, the spirit he has seen may yet be a devil; the devil has power to
assume a pleasing shape, and is perhaps taking advantage of his melancholy to
damn him.
Armed in the complete steel of a suit well known
to the eyes of the sentinels, visionary none the less, with useless truncheon
in hand, resuming the memory of old martial habits, but with a quiet
countenance, more in sorrow than in anger, troubled--not now with the thought
of the hell-day to which he must sleepless return, but with that unceasing ache
at the heart, which ever, so often as he is released into the cooling air of the
upper world, draws him back to the region of his wrongs--where having fallen
asleep in his orchard, in sacred security and old custom, suddenly, by cruel
assault, he was flung into Hades, where horror upon horror awaited him--worst
horror of all, the knowledge of his wife!--armed he comes, in shadowy armour
but how real sorrow! Still it is not pity he seeks from his son: he needs it
not--he can endure. There is no weakness in the ghost. It is but the imperfect
human sense that he is shadowy. To himself he knows his doom his deliverance;
that the hell in which he finds himself shall endure but until it has burnt up
the hell he has found within him--until the evil he was and is capable of shall
have dropped from him into the lake of fire; he nerves himself to bear. And the
cry of revenge that comes from the sorrowful lips is the cry of a king and a
Dane rather than of a wronged man. It is for public justice and not individual
vengeance he calls. He cannot endure that the royal bed of Denmark should
be a couch for luxury and damned incest. To stay this he would bring the
murderer to justice. There is a worse wrong, for which he seeks no revenge: it
involves his wife; and there comes in love, and love knows no amends but
amendment, seeks only the repentance tenfold more needful to the wronger than
the wronged. It is not alone the father's care for the human nature of his son
that warns him to take no measures against his mother; it is the husband's
tenderness also for her who once lay in his bosom. The murdered brother, the
dethroned king, the dishonoured husband, the tormented sinner, is yet a gentle
ghost. Has suffering already begun to make him, like Prometheus, wise?
But to measure the gentleness, the forgiveness,
the tenderness of the ghost, we must well understand his wrongs. The murder is
plain; but there is that which went before and is worse, yet is not so plain to
every eye that reads the story. There is that without which the murder had never
been, and which, therefore, is a cause of all the wrong. For listen to what the
ghost reveals when at length he has withdrawn his son that he may speak with
him alone, and Hamlet has forestalled the disclosure of the murderer:
Ay, that incestuous, that adulderate
beast,
With witchcraft of his wit, with
traitorous gifts,
(O wicked wit and gifts that have the
power
So to seduce!) won to his shameful lust
The will of my most seeming virtuous
queen:
Oh, Hamlet, what a falling off was there!
From me, whose love was of that dignity
That it went hand in hand even with the
vow
I made to her in marriage, and to decline
Upon a wretch, whose natural gifts were
poor
To those of mine!
But virtue--as it never will be moved
Though lewdness court it in a shape of
heaven,
So lust, though to a radiant angel
linked,
Will sate itself in a celestial bed,
And prey on garbage.
Reading this passage, can anyone doubt that the
ghost charges his late wife with adultery, as the root of all his woes? It is
true that, obedient to the ghost's injunctions, as well as his own filial
instincts, Hamlet accuses his mother of no more than was patent to all the
world; but unless we suppose the ghost misinformed or mistaken, we must accept
this charge. And had Gertrude not yielded to the witchcraft of Claudius' wit,
Claudius would never have murdered Hamlet. Through her his life was
dishonoured, and his death violent and premature: unhuzled, disappointed,
unaneled, he woke to the air--not of his orchard-blossoms, but of a prison-house,
the lightest word of whose terrors would freeze the blood of the listener. What
few men can say, he could--that his love to his wife had kept even step with
the vow he made to her in marriage; and his son says of him--
so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of
heaven
Visit her face too roughly;
and this was her return! Yet is it thus he
charges his son concerning her:
But howsoever thou pursu'st this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let they soul
contrive
Against thy mother aught; leave her to
heaven,
And to those thorns that in her bosom
lodge,
To prick and sting her.
And may we not suppose it to be for her sake in
part that the ghost insists, with fourfold repetition, upon a sword-sworn oath
to silence from Horatio and Marcellus?
Only once again does he show himself--not now in
armour upon the walls, but in his gown and in his wife's closet.
Ever since his first appearance, that is, all the
time filling the interval between the first and second acts, we may presume him
to have haunted the palace unseen, waiting what his son would do. But the task
has been more difficult than either had supposed. The ambassadors have gone to Norway and
returned; but Hamlet has done nothing. Probably he has had no opportunity;
certainly he has had no clear vision of duty. But now all through the second
and third acts, together occupying, it must be remembered, only one day,
something seems imminent. The play has been acted, and Hamlet has gained some
assurance, yet the one chance presented of killing the king--at his prayers--he
has refused. He is now in his mother's closet, whose eyes he has turned into
her very soul. There, and then, the ghost once more appears--come, he says, to
whet his son's almost blunted purpose. But, as I have said, he does not know
all the disadvantages of one who, having forsaken the world, has yet business
therein to which he would persuade; he does not know how hard it is for a man
to give credence to a ghost; how thoroughly he is justified in delay, and the
demand for more perfect proof. He does not know what good reasons his son has
had for uncertainty, or how much natural and righteous doubt has had to do with
what he takes for the blunting of his purpose. Neither does he know how much
more tender his son's conscience is than his own, or how necessary it is to him
to be sure before he acts. As little perhaps does he understand how hateful to
Hamlet is the task laid upon him--the killing of one wretched villain in the
midst of a corrupt and contemptible court, one of a world of whose women his
mother may be the type!
Whatever the main object of the ghost's
appearance, he has spoken but a few words concerning the matter between him and
Hamlet, when he turns abruptly from it to plead with his son for his wife. The
ghost sees and mistakes the terror of her looks; imagines that, either from
some feeling of his presence, or from the power of Hamlet's words, her
conscience is thoroughly roused, and that her vision, her conception of the
facts, is now more than she can bear. She and her fighting soul are at odds.
She is a kingdom divided against itself. He fears the consequences. He would
not have her go mad. He would not have her die yet. Even while ready to start
at the summons of that hell to which she has sold him, he forgets his vengeance
on her seducer in his desire to comfort her. He dares not, if he could,
manifest himself to her: what word of consolation could she hear from his
lips? Is not the thought of him her one despair? He turns to his son for help:
he cannot console his wife; his son must take his place. Alas! even now he
thinks better of her than she deserves; for it is only the fancy of her son's
madness that is terrifying her: he gazes on the apparition of which she sees
nothing, and from his looks she anticipates an ungovernable outbreak.
But look; amazement on thy mother sits!
Oh; step between her and her fighting
soul
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest
works.
Speak to her, Hamlet.
The call to his son to soothe his wicked mother
is the ghost's last utterance. For a few moments, sadly regardful of the two,
he stands--while his son seeks in vain to reveal to his mother the presence of
his father--a few moments of piteous action, all but ruining the remnant of his
son's sorely-harassed self-possession--his whole concern his wife's distress,
and neither his own doom nor his son's duty; then, as if lost in despair at the
impassable gulf betwixt them, revealed by her utter incapacity for even the
imagination of his proximity, he turns away, and steals out at the portal. Or
perhaps he has heard the black cock crow, and is wanted beneath: his turn has
come.
Will the fires ever cleanse her? Will his
love ever lift him above the pain of its loss? Will eternity ever be bliss,
ever be endurable to poor King Hamlet?
Alas! even the memory of the poor ghost is
insulted. Night after night on the stage his effigy appears--cadaverous,
sepulchral--no longer as Shakespeare must have represented him, aërial, shadowy,
gracious, the thin corporeal husk of an eternal--shall I say
ineffaceable?--sorrow! It is no hollow monotone that can rightly upbear such
words as his, but a sound mingled of distance and wind in the pine-tops, of
agony and love, of horror and hope and loss and judgment--a voice of endless
and sweetest inflection, yet with a shuddering echo in it as from the caves of
memory, on whose walls are written the eternal blazon that must not be to ears
of flesh and blood. The spirit that can assume form at will must surely be able
to bend that form to completest and most delicate expression, and the part of
the ghost in the play offers work worthy of the highest artist. The would-be
actor takes from it vitality and motion, endowing it instead with the rigidity
of death, as if the soul had resumed its cast-off garment, the stiffened and
mouldy corpse--whose frozen deadness it could ill model to the utterance of its
lively will!
