the scene a feeling of “total love and belief in the father.” Warner “reacted quite violently to the Ghost’s request for revenge even to shouting ‘WHAT!’ (not in text) and then sobbing throughout the Ghost’s long speech.” 60
For the revenge [Hamlet] really wishes, and achieves, is on himself for not being the great Hamlet his father was.… As the hollow voice beneath the stage cries “Swear!,” his son lovinglymeasures his length on the ground, as if on a grave; but the voice moves, he cannot cover it. Clutching violently at his mother on her bed he looks up to find the huge presence of his father towering between them. 61
Obviously, Hamlet’s sense of intense grief plays a large part in the way he perceives the world. Grief can often bring with it an exaggeration of the senses, a cruel self-awareness and feelings of isolation. As Stanley Wells points out, Shakespeare’s central concern in writing Hamlet was “Reactions to death.” 62 For Hamlet, actor Michael Pennington believed,
Grief seems to have sharpened his sense of falsehood in the world around him, but in other ways the immeasurable shock he has received has sent him to sleep. The torpor is deep and disturbing to watch, lifting in utterances—“My father, methinks I see my father”—which are more hallucinatory than sentimental. Anybody familiar with bereavement can recognise the symptoms. In dramatic terms, until the news of the Ghost’s appearance animates him, gives him something to believe in he is a dramatic hero of whom nothing much can be expected. 63
In the production starring Pennington, the Ghost sat on a bench and quietly told Hamlet what had happened. Director John Barton’s highlighting of theatricality also informed his Hamlet’s reaction to the Ghost:
From Hamlet’s viewpoint, perhaps even the Ghost is a Satanic actor, until the closet scene when Hamlet gently presses his mother’s face round and, in a shared moment of stunned disbelief, she too sees the Ghost. 64
Hamlet’s grief stems from an acute awareness of the importance, the preciousness of human life. Anger at his mother’s inability to see, to be aware, of the truth of her situation, prompts one of the most potent dramatic scenes ever written. In this production, Gertrude not only saw into her own soul, but in witnessing the Ghost becamefully aware of what Hamlet saw and felt. The effect was so powerful that she fainted.
Michael Boyd’s 2004 staging of the supernatural was striking and imaginative. The Ghost appeared with slow progression through the audience to the stage, skeleton-like with his mouth contorted into a silent scream. With its truly frightening visage, this nightmarish apparition was one of the few modern stagings of the Ghost to truly unsettle the audience:
Instead of the usual stern but fatherly figure, in the “fair and warlike form” of his living self, old Hamlet here hauls himself into the play as a bowed, deathly-white, half-naked spook, with hollow red sockets for eyes, scraping his broadsword along the ground to nerve-shatteringly ominous effect. He hawks up his speeches in an agonised vomit of vengefulness. That he seems to hail from an alien belief system as well as from another world is entirely deliberate.… Boyd has been inspired by Stephen Greenblatt’s recent book
Hamlet in Purgatory
, which highlights the tragedy’s unsettling premise: “A young man from Wittenberg, with a distinctly Protestant temperament, is haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost.” Or, as the director puts it, “There has been a political and intellectual revolution, and then Hamlet re-encounters the past in the shape of his father’s spirit and has to negotiate with it.” 65
If we were in any doubt that this Ghost had suffered the terrors of hell, we had none by the end of the scene when a trapdoor opened to reveal intense red light, the fires of Purgatory. The Ghost fell forward, face first, into the awaiting pit.
From the first
For the revenge [Hamlet] really wishes, and achieves, is on himself for not being the great Hamlet his father was.… As the hollow voice beneath the stage cries “Swear!,” his son lovinglymeasures his length on the ground, as if on a grave; but the voice moves, he cannot cover it. Clutching violently at his mother on her bed he looks up to find the huge presence of his father towering between them. 61
Obviously, Hamlet’s sense of intense grief plays a large part in the way he perceives the world. Grief can often bring with it an exaggeration of the senses, a cruel self-awareness and feelings of isolation. As Stanley Wells points out, Shakespeare’s central concern in writing Hamlet was “Reactions to death.” 62 For Hamlet, actor Michael Pennington believed,
Grief seems to have sharpened his sense of falsehood in the world around him, but in other ways the immeasurable shock he has received has sent him to sleep. The torpor is deep and disturbing to watch, lifting in utterances—“My father, methinks I see my father”—which are more hallucinatory than sentimental. Anybody familiar with bereavement can recognise the symptoms. In dramatic terms, until the news of the Ghost’s appearance animates him, gives him something to believe in he is a dramatic hero of whom nothing much can be expected. 63
In the production starring Pennington, the Ghost sat on a bench and quietly told Hamlet what had happened. Director John Barton’s highlighting of theatricality also informed his Hamlet’s reaction to the Ghost:
From Hamlet’s viewpoint, perhaps even the Ghost is a Satanic actor, until the closet scene when Hamlet gently presses his mother’s face round and, in a shared moment of stunned disbelief, she too sees the Ghost. 64
Hamlet’s grief stems from an acute awareness of the importance, the preciousness of human life. Anger at his mother’s inability to see, to be aware, of the truth of her situation, prompts one of the most potent dramatic scenes ever written. In this production, Gertrude not only saw into her own soul, but in witnessing the Ghost becamefully aware of what Hamlet saw and felt. The effect was so powerful that she fainted.
Michael Boyd’s 2004 staging of the supernatural was striking and imaginative. The Ghost appeared with slow progression through the audience to the stage, skeleton-like with his mouth contorted into a silent scream. With its truly frightening visage, this nightmarish apparition was one of the few modern stagings of the Ghost to truly unsettle the audience:
Instead of the usual stern but fatherly figure, in the “fair and warlike form” of his living self, old Hamlet here hauls himself into the play as a bowed, deathly-white, half-naked spook, with hollow red sockets for eyes, scraping his broadsword along the ground to nerve-shatteringly ominous effect. He hawks up his speeches in an agonised vomit of vengefulness. That he seems to hail from an alien belief system as well as from another world is entirely deliberate.… Boyd has been inspired by Stephen Greenblatt’s recent book
Hamlet in Purgatory
, which highlights the tragedy’s unsettling premise: “A young man from Wittenberg, with a distinctly Protestant temperament, is haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost.” Or, as the director puts it, “There has been a political and intellectual revolution, and then Hamlet re-encounters the past in the shape of his father’s spirit and has to negotiate with it.” 65
If we were in any doubt that this Ghost had suffered the terrors of hell, we had none by the end of the scene when a trapdoor opened to reveal intense red light, the fires of Purgatory. The Ghost fell forward, face first, into the awaiting pit.
From the first
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