Posted on by Vincent Hanley

Ghosts and the Supernatural in Hamlet

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Elizabethan audiences would have been very receptive to the idea of ghosts. Right from the opening lines of Hamlet, the ghost is given a prominent role. In Act I Marcellus asks the question: “What, has this thing appear’d again tonight?” It is clear from the conversation that follows that “this thing” is something to be feared – a “dreaded sight”. It is this mention of the ghost that sets the atmosphere of foreboding for the play. There is a sense of disaster, and this is emphasised when Horatio points out that similar unnatural events preceded the assassination of the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar in ancient Rome:

“The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets:
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun”…

THE GHOST AS A SIGN OF DEEP DISTURBANCE IN THE KINGDOM
Horatio thinks that the appearance of the ghost is a sign that there is something seriously amiss in the state of Denmark. The audience would have believed that ghosts often returned to earth to complete some unfinished business, and would always come in the dark of night. The ghost in Hamlet appears on the stroke of midnight – an ominous hour. Once Hamlet is informed of the apparition of his dead father in the shape of a Ghost, nothing will dissuade him from being present at midnight to see if it will return. He suspects that something is rotten in the State of Denmark, and feels compelled to try to commune with this Ghost who is dressed in the armour of his dead father:

“I’ll speak to it, though hell itself should gape
And bid me hold my peace…..”

THE GHOST: A SOUL IN TORMENT
In Hamlet, the ghost is representative of a supernatural world where restless spirits are in torment because of something which happened when they lived on earth. The frightened talk about the Ghost right from the opening of the play, and then its appearance to the terrified night-watch soldiers, and later to Hamlet himself, establishes an atmosphere of evil beneath the surface. In Act I Scene iv, when the ghost appears to Hamlet, the cautious Horatio is frightened:

“What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o’er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness?”

But in Hamlet Shakespeare is deliberate in creating a ghost that is not really sinister at all, and so cannot easily be spurned. It would be easier for Hamlet if that were so. This ghost is a restless spirit who crosses the threshold between the physical and the supernatural worlds because it cannot rest in either. This ghost is compelling because it is gentle, even noble. It strikes a deep chord within Hamlet because it is pitiful and pleading. It reminds Hamlet that its murderer gave it no chance to repent for sins committed, and it had to enter the next world without forgiveness or the comfort of the last rites:

“Cut off even in the blossom of my sin,
Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head:”

THE GHOST’S REQUEST: AN IMPOSSIBLE DEMAND
Hamlet is truly shocked by the revelations, and sees his predicament immediately; to revenge his father’s murder – and lay his soul to rest – he must commit murder. This is an unbearable burden because in order to do his filial duty he must commit the very crime (murder) that he has found so repellent in Claudius. Horatio’s words about the danger of his going mad are prophetic. By the end of the fourth scene of Act I, we know that Marcellus is right: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Through no fault of her own, Ophelia is the innocent victim of Hamlet’s terrible predicament. He cannot deal with the burdens laid upon him, and his inner conflict is intense. Ophelia has no one to advise her in her own bewilderment about her lover. Polonius and Laertes have agendas of their own when giving her orders, and she is totally helpless when her beloved Hamlet turns on her and seems to have lost his mind.

Posted on by Vincent Hanley

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES…..

Out of the mouths of babes comes wisdom – of a sort!  For thirty years I spent my summers correcting Leaving Cert English scripts and it never failed to amaze me the chances chancers will take when rote learning hits the cold reality of the North face of The Eiger!  I began my work with the Department in June 1978 and I corrected Junior Cert Geography that year.  I learnt that  the name of the shipyard in Belfast was called Harland and Wolf Tone and that along with cheese and butter and yoghurt (which had just arrived on the shop shelves) milk of magnesia was also a dairy product!

English, however, was the gift that kept on giving!  Shakespeare usually threw up numerous gems of lucidity and erudition.  I learnt, for the first time, that  Othello, ‘although his exterior may be black he is pure and good on the inside’.  Desdemona is very forgiving also, to the point where ‘she shows great love for Othello even after he has suffocated her’.  King Lear suffered because, ‘he wanted to keep his revenue and all his followers’.   Also, ‘in those days you didn’t divide your kingdom – you left a will’.  In a moment of weakness Lear is overheard talking to The Fool on the Heath: ‘Go in man you’ll catch your death out here’.  Whereas Hamlet, ‘is the victim of exaggerated procrastination complex’ and as well as that he suffered from ‘an anti disposition’ and then later ‘an antique disposition’.  I can visualise vividly  in my mind’s eye harried teachers on cold winter’s mornings explaining what an arras was only for that information to be completely corrupted by June: ‘He killed Polonius through the arse’ and in another script sponsored by Toyota, ‘Hamlet stabbed Polonius behind the Yaris’.  Also Hamlet was only mad North North West so therefore according to the mathematicians, he ‘was only one sixteenth mad’.

Yeats always yielded up a great variety of hoary old chestnuts.  Indeed I was reliably informed that in that great poem Among School Children, ‘the chestnut tree may not be called the bole, blossom or the branch – it is all three.’  Everybody also seemed to know that, ‘he stalked Maud Gonne, proposing to her many times’.  Elsewhere in a rather revealing Freudian (or Faustian) slip Maud Gonne is referred to as, ‘Mad Gun McBride’.   The poem Sailing to Byzantium can apparently, ‘be summed up in four words: ‘perne in a gyre’.  The poem The Fisherman is about, ‘a man in Connemara clothes living in a shed on the top of a hill’.  In this great poem Yeats apparently is struggling to reconcile the opposing images, trying to describe, ‘the ideal man versus the reel man’.  One candidate suggested that Yeats was a sad case because, ‘he was plagued with immortality and involved in politics.’

O’Casey’s plays also provided rich seams of unintended humour, double entendres and other heaven sent certainties. One candidate mentioned the fact that, ‘Johnny is no longer able to work because of an accident where he lost an arm and now he walks with a limp’ and continued to dig a deep hole by saying, ‘a job on a building site wouldn’t strain his arms because it’s not his legs he’s mixing it with.’  Captain Boyle was not understood at all, ‘there is nothing attractive or endearing about Captain Boyle, he is literally a boyle on the butt of humanity’.  It is also suggested that, ‘he attends drinking seminars in a local pub’.   Summing up Juno and the Paycock one candidate suggests that, ‘Joxer is the parasite and Boyle is the dope (sic)’.  Bessy Burgess in The Plough and the Stars is described as, ‘a pearl containing oyster of a woman’!   She has a sharp tongue in her head and she says, ‘that Mrs. Gogan’s wedding vowels are not valid’.  Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World is beautifully described as having. ‘small feet which is a sign of great breathing’.  These candidates may not have gone down in English – most of them anyway! – but they will definitely go down in history!

Lord of the Flies by William Golding always gave rise to unexpected surprises.  The boys, ‘find they are on an island inhabited by pigs and bugs’  and, ‘they have to defend for themselves’ and then we discover that, ‘any pigment of control is lost when Piggy dies’.

Personal essays also provided an amazing array of views on the vagaries of teenage life: the following are some of the many gems which brought a smile to my face.

  • Summer holidays from school are great – your only worry is have you put enough sun screen on your nose.
  • Life is like meeting the man of your dreams and then meeting his beautiful wife!
  • It was a buzzing party so there were no straight people there…..
  • In Second Year there were thirty-one of us in our class – I was the one!!
  • Waiting for the school bus is a mating ritual…..
  • The mood is electrical…..
  • There was a climatic moment as the aria was played……..
  • Dreaming is actually one of the things I’m good at…..
  • The internet is a gateway to child pornography and a perverse culture used by losers and sad cases….

I could go on and on but suffice it to say that all these slips of the pen brightened up my hazy July days and needless to say they were all – well nearly all! – rewarded accordingly!  I will give the final word to one young statistician who summed up our national predicament quite succinctly: ‘We are a 100 per cent white, 95 per cent Catholic and 110 per cent naïve country’.  Out of the mouths of babes…….

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Posted on by Vincent Hanley

Speechless Without the Bard

 

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The English language may have ‘seen better days’ but ‘for better or for worse’, even ‘blinking idiots’ still quote Shakespeare liberally, albeit without knowing it. Indeed, if it were not for these bon mots we’d be nearly speechless.

We have all come across Shakespeare in school, we may even have seen one of his plays on television or in the cinema, yet there are few of us – even those of few words – who don’t quote Shakespeare almost every day. Once in a while we know we’re doing so, but most of the time we use his words to season our speech without knowing the source. Some of his expressions have changed a little with 400 years of everyday use, though even these can easily be traced to him.

If this doesn’t make sense to you and you say, it’s Greek to me, you are quoting Shakespeare. If you think my point is without rhyme or reason and you say I’m a laughing stock or a blinking idiot or bloody minded or a rotten apple or a stony-hearted villain or even the devil incarnate, you are also quoting him. And if you bid me good riddance or send me packing or wish I was hoist with his own petard or dead as a doornail – at one fell swoop – you are still quoting him.

When we say that it’s a mad world or not in my book or neither here nor there or last but not least, these phrases – and all the others in bold print here – are Shakespeare’s. And when we use such expressions such as poor but honest or as luck would have it or what’s done is done, we’re equally indebted to him. Whether you are holding your tongue or simply tongue-tied, you just can’t get away from the fact (the more fool you are) that you are quoting Shakespeare. But maybe that was the unkindest cut of all. And if you think this remark smells to heaven, you’re at it once more.

Be that as it may – and though you still insist that I’m living in a fool’s paradise – we can have too much of a good thing. And there we go quoting him again. For the long and the short of it is that we’d be nearly speechless without Shakespeare.

When we talk of someone showing his heels or having no stomach for a fight or leading a charmed life; when we speak of cold comfort or grim necessity or bag and baggage or the mind’s eye, we’re quoting him. When we refer to our salad days or our heart of hearts or our heart’s desire; when we deplore the beginning of the end we’re doing the same.

If we claim to be more sinned against than sinning; if we act more in sorrow than in anger; if our wish is father to the thought; if something we’ve lost has vanished into thin air, we’re borrowing from the Bard. If we refuse to budge an inch or suffer from green-eyed jealousy; if we’ve played fast and loose; if we’ve been a tower of strength or hoodwinked or in a pickle, we’re still doing so.

If you have knitted your brows or stood on ceremony or made a virtue of necessity or danced attendance on or laughed yourself into stitches or had short shrift, you’re using Shakespeare’s words. If you say you haven’t slept a wink or are as sound as a bell or can only die once or that your family is eating you out of house and home, you’re not being very original.

When you state that love is blind or there is method in his madness (or someone has made you mad) or the truth will come to light or the world is my oyster, you are also borrowing your bon mots from the Bard. If you have seen better days or think it is early days yet or high time; if you lie low till the crack of doom, because you suspect foul play; if you tell the truth and shame the devil, even if it involves your own flesh and blood and you believe the game is up, you are at the same game as before!

If you have your teeth set on edge or have a tongue in your head, then by Jove or Tut, tut or for goodness sake or what the dickens or but me no buts – it’s all one to me, for you are simply quoting Shakespeare.

Besides these and many more of our everyday phrases, we are also indebted to him for a host of words. Accommodation, assassination, dexterously, obscene, premeditated, reliance, allurement, alliance, antipathy, critical, armada, demonstrate, dire, emphasis, emulate, horrid, initiate, mediate, modest, vast and submerged are only a few that made their first appearance in his plays.

Indeed, it is obvious that Shakespeare was a man who loved to experiment with words. Most of all he had an extraordinary ability to write memorable combinations of words. Scores of his phrases, as we have seen, have entered the English language and some have even become clichés. One play alone, Hamlet, is a treasure house of ‘quotable quotes’ or, as someone once said, it is ‘full of quotations’! Among them are the following: Frailty thy name is woman!…..The primrose path of dalliance… Something is rotten in the state of Denmark  … Brevity is the soul of wit…… I must be cruel, only to be kind …  The rest is silence.

The English-speaking world is indeed indebted to William Shakespeare more than to any writer in any language who ever lived. “He was not of an age,” said his contemporary Ben Jonson, “but for all time”.

–Adapted from an article by Paul Hurley in The Irish Times

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