Chapter Fourteen
Seeing Ghosts
Hamlet and Modern Original Practices
Fiona Harris-Ramsby and
Kathryn R. McPherson
After an American Shakespeare Center production of Hamlet in October 2011, the following conversation occurred between a high school student and Patrick Midgely, the actor who played Horatio, during a talk back:
Student: Something’s been troubling me about Hamlet. Why can Horatio and the guards see the ghost but Gertrude cannot?
Patrick: Well, it seems to me that the ghost’s first appearance is in order to get Hamlet’s attention and to make a public proclamation and his later appearance is to impart a private message to Hamlet only.
Student: Okay, but the first message is meant for Hamlet, too, so why doesn’t the ghost just approach Hamlet directly in the first place?
All Actors: This sounds like an excellent topic for a term paper. This is something you should definitely look into further. What does the text say and what could different staging options indicate? You are definitely onto something.1
As this excerpt makes clear, the Ghost’s behavior troubles even novice viewers of Hamlet. Moreover, the student highlights, albeit indirectly, the Ghost’s capacity for invisibility, a puzzling characteristic in a character created for an early modern playhouse. It raises the question of how invisibility could have been staged for maximum theatrical effect and what those effects might have been in 1601 and what they might be now.
Consequently, drawing on aspects of the Ghost’s long, troubled history, this chapter explores the implications of the Ghost’s unpredictability and ways to stage invisibility in a modern original-practices production.
With this seeming divide between early modern theatrical practices and modern concepts of how to stage a ghost hovering in the background, actor Michael Pennington asks us to,
consider the unsettled circumstances of the first performances [of Hamlet]. For the Elizabethans, there was none of the orderly hush and sense of ceremony that attends darkened auditoria. The actors entered from opposite doors onto a stage open to the sky in the middle of a noisy city afternoon—an autumn afternoon in 1601, in the case of the first performance of Hamlet; later, in fashionable indoor playhouses like the Blackfriars, they had to pass among the various dandies sitting on stools on the stage itself. . . . through such the dead King of Denmark walked.2
Given these early modern conditions and the large body of research into “original practices,” what options exist to stage an invisible ghost in act 1, scene 1 of Hamlet?
The blocking detailed in the pages that follow, utilized during a staging session at the 2011 Blackfriars Conference, indicates one possible approach to cope with the elusive Ghost. Firstly, this staging relies on a preshow to heighten the anxiety an invisible ghost could foster in an unsuspecting audience; certainly, modern audiences have come to welcome onstage preshows, and using this technique draws the twenty-first-century audience into the world of the play in highly effective ways. Indeed, if Francisco is seen at his post for at least a full thirty seconds onstage alone, displaying paranoid alertness, the audience soon feels his anxiety:
Enter Francisco with lantern, upstage left, bearing arms, paranoid, active, alert, checks over each shoulder, and peers into the distance through the audience; he thinks he hears something and rushes downstage to the top of the stage right aisle steps, sets down the lantern, takes a knee, pointing his weapon out over and at the audience, looking through them.
Next, the audience encounters Bernardo, who enters noiselessly from the back of the house. He appears at the steps leading up to the stage, perhaps surprising the audience, who have been focused on Francisco’s patrols. As the bell begins to chime the midnight hour and initiates the auditory world of the play, the actors respond to its ominous toll, and the soldiers’ anxious attitudes continue to increase:
Francisco thinks he hears a noise to his left; a church bell in the distance begins striking twelve—not too loud—not too fast (approximately every 2 seconds), (BELL 1). Francisco quickly repositions his weapon at the front row, again, looking through them, then pointing the weapon heavenward and around towards the back of the house searchingly, (BELL 2). Sensing nothing, he arises and turns front again, holding the lantern high and the weapon ready in one hand, but consistently checks behind, up, and around, (BELL 3), moves slowly from the top of the stage right aisle steps towards the top of the stage left aisle steps.
Once the audience has recovered from registering Bernardo, they are offered a brief respite when
Francisco, seeing nothing, relaxes a little and sighs with relief. Suddenly, (BELL 4), hearing the sigh, an alarmed Bernardo scans the audience towards the top of the stage left aisle steps, holds his lantern high, (BELL 5), and continues more aggressively towards the stage right aisle stairs.
What these stage directions do is direct the audience’s gaze around the house to indicate that sounds may be emanating from multiple spots throughout the theater. The actors foreground Denmark’s eerie noises at this late hour—they hear noises coming from all around them and thus convey a world in which terror occurs in surround sound. Their fear gives rise to the famous first line of the play, “Who’s there?” (1.1.1). Knowing that unseen beings lurk in the midnight gloom, they need to confirm if a friend or an enemy approaches.
Soon, of course, Marcellus calls attention to the ghostly presences lurking in Elsinore. He asks, “What, has this thing appear’d again to-night?” (1.1.19). If the actors allow for a slight but distinctly pregnant pause before the word “thing,” they communicate that both men are trying to avoid speaking the word “ghost.” They do not know what to call the “thing” that has bedeviled their watch. Given these hesitations, Bernardo can utter “I have seen nothing” (1.1.20) with a strong emphasis on “seen,” an emphasis made plausible by the line’s truncated, five-syllable status. Bernardo has not seen the Ghost, but he—and everyone else in the theater—has felt it. Marcellus reemphasizes the ghost’s invisibility when he says,
Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of him
Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us:
Therefore I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night;
That if again this apparition come,
He may approve our eyes and speak to it. (1.1.21–27)
In the early modern period, an “apparition” referred to the visible appearance of a supernatural, invisible being,3 so the audience can infer the Ghost’s prior invisibility from this label. The play leads audiences to surmise that this ghost has the power to remain unseen when he pleases and to whom he pleases.
Few would debate the Ghost’s centrality to the play as a whole. Dover Wilson’s early-twentieth-century commentary observes that the hero of the first act is the Ghost and that “550 out of 850 lines are concerned with him.”4 Wilson also reveals that the Ghost of King Hamlet represented a theatrical innovation of its own. Whereas past stage ghosts from the 1580s onwards were Senecan, “lapt in a foul sheet or a leather pilch and howling ‘Vindicta! Revenge,’”5 Shakespeare gives his audience a complex Ghost, humanized and even sympathetic at times, but also armed, as the guards echo repeatedly in the play’s first scene.
The Folio text indicates that the actors onstage in 1.1 see the ghost as Bernardo begins narrating his previous encounter with it. However, the text also depicts how the Ghost, towards the end of the scene, splits into three separate apparitions and makes his second exit as the men flail helplessly in response. This split, this separation, is characteristic of an early modern ghost—at least those revealed in early modern ghost stories. According to Catherine Belsey, “there are indications that early audiences saw Hamlet as a ghost story,” as she reminds us that the Ghost is “now insubstantial, now corporeal.”6 The Ghost is, after all, “as the air, invulnerable” (1.1.126), a “spirit” (repeatedly) but also a “dead corse” (1.4.33) “come from the grave” (1.5.129), released by his tomb to walk the night (1.4.27–32). The text thus supports the idea of a shape-shifting ghost: visible and invisible at various times and to various characters. In fact, according to Robert Hapgood, a number of late-nineteenth-century productions of Hamlet, including Henry Irving’s 1874 production, employed multiple ghosts as a way to both substantiate the watchmen’s cries as the ghost disappears and also to emphasize the play’s supernatural nature.7
The staging detailed above uses the concept of a ghost story as a central component of Hamlet. Francisco’s preshow actions, the sentinels’ time at watch, and the scene’s remaining focus on a terrifying and insubstantial entity that triggers neurotic and choppy responses to its presence set the tone of the show as terrifying and paranoid. Certainly, as Belsey reminds us, when Bernardo invites his fellows to “sit down awhile,” audiences recall those tales that begin “‘it was a dark winter’s night.’”8 As Bernardo says,
Sit down awhile;
And let us once again assail your ears
That are so fortified against our story,
What we have two nights seen. (1.1.28–31)
Belsey notes that “In the long, cold evenings, when the soil had been tilled to the extent that climatic conditions permitted, the still predominantly agricultural community of early modern England would sit and while away the hours of darkness with fireside pastimes, among them old wives’ tales designed to enthrall young and old alike.”9 Thus, what this staging concept demonstrates is how a ghost unseen to the audience in a modern original practices production of Hamlet heightens the paranoia that Belsey refers to and establishes a key to the atmosphere for the rest of the play.
In particular, this staging explores how using no special lighting or sound effects beyond those normally available in an early modern playhouse can actually convey the “fear and wonder” of which Horatio speaks. David G. Brailow recounts the 1996 Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s production of Hamlet, which suggested a multiple-entity ghost—a reading that is supported by folkloric tales of shape-shifting invisible spirits and, of course, the embedded textual cues. Brailow argues that multiple ghosts demand “an optical effect of great complexity, given the possibilities of modern stage lighting.”10 Yet a Hamlet rife with supernatural apparitions does not require complex theatrical lighting effects, nor does lighting represent the only way to stage multiple ghosts effectively. Instead, original practices offers a way to reconceive special effects with an invisible spirit that shape-shifts according to the ghost stories of the early modern period.
While Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory discusses the religious implications of the purgatorial ghost in Shakespeare’s era, popular narratives of the time offer another perspective from which to examine Hamlet’s Ghost, a ghost who could do all kinds of parlor tricks. Belsey relates one tale recorded by a monk of Byland Abbey, who wrote of “Snowball the tailor, who was riding the two miles or so home to Ampleforth from Gilling by night, when he encountered a shape-shifting figure that knocked him violently to the ground.” Belsey implies that it was at first nothing more than an apparition. Yet, Snowball encounters the ghost in two more incarnations: a goat and then a man. Only when the ghost is embodied can it speak (or bleat, perhaps).11 Nevertheless, this ghost is “protean,”12 at times visible, so thus surely at times, even fleetingly, not. The following section from 1.1.38–49, with stage directions included, illustrates such shape-shifting:
Enter Ghost—unseen by the audience but seen by the actors. Bernardo and Marcellus react according to their training as professional soldiers: Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo must affix their gaze on the same spot (down center stage) and move together (though not in step), toward center stage, facing the audience front row center, to make the audience believe they SEE the ghost right in front of them.
Marcellus [attempting to calm his comrades down]
Peace, break thee off; look, where it comes again!
They ‘watch’ it move towards the upstage left door. They might move towards it.
Bernardo
In the same figure, like the king that’s dead.
Marcellus
Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.
Looks it not like the king? Mark it, Horatio.
Horatio
Most like: it harrows me with fear and wonder.13
Marcellus
Horatio [desperately?]
What art thou that usurp’st this time of night,
Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march? by heaven I charge thee, speak!
The three follow “it” slowly (and with their eyes and weapons trained) as “it” moves towards the stage right aisle steps and down into the aisle; the soldiers and the scholar now have their wits about them. Marcellus follows it down.
Marcellus [from the house]
See, it stalks away!
They follow the unseen ghost with their eyes, back through the audience from the stage right aisle into the house and then to the upstage left exit. So this indicates what they see BEFORE “it” exits upstage left. In other words, it has circled the theatre-starting from stage right aisle, into the house and then towards the upstage left door.]
Horatio
Stay! speak, speak! I charge thee, speak! [following the unseen ghost towards upstage left door]
Exit Ghost [A loud slam of the left rear door makes the actors all jump]
Of course, embedded stage directions indicate that Bernardo, Marcellus, and Horatio do perceive the apparition in act 1, scene 1. Robert Hapgood’s history of Hamlet in production comments that at Shakespeare’s Globe, with its natural light, the silent Ghost’s power at its first appearance may have come chiefly through the reactions of the guards and especially by the conversion of Horatio.”14 Certainly, the play demonstrates that The Ghost can appear to whom he pleases, when he pleases (witness the closet scene, which the student mentioned at this chapter’s opening so perceptively noticed) and so his initial invisibility enhances the sense of uncertainty, dread, and contagion that permeates the play.
Universal lighting, as well as the use of multiple entrances and exits in a space designed to mimic early modern playing conditions, ensures that the terror of the Ghost’s presence spreads unimpeded. To clarify, if an unseen ghost had been unseen in the dark of a typical twenty-first-century theater, audiences would perceive the Ghost’s invisibility in the relative isolation that a dark house and a proscenium stage afford them. But consider its next entrance at 1.1.107, as staged at the Blackfriars conference in 2011:
Horatio
But soft, behold! lo, where it comes again!
The “invisible” (to the audience) ghost reenters from upstage left (he had just departed from the upstage left door right). Horatio leaps to his feet and moves towards it. Marcellus moves to just right of center stage and a little upstage as Bernardo, with Marcellus, takes up a wide defensive position behind and flanking Horatio and just right of center stage; the guards use their weapons to point at it—indicating its progress as it enters stage left and moves at Horatio (center stage). Summoning courage, Horatio determinedly, commandingly speaks his line.
I’ll cross it, though it blast me.
The ghost appears to walk through Horatio as he stands on the diagonal—he indicates this with something like his mouth gaping open and a brief convulsion as the guards train their weapons on the Ghost during the approach, then at him as it moves through, and behind him after it passes through. After the Ghost passes through Horatio, the three mortals only stay synchronized on the Ghost’s position momentarily. Following his paranormal experience, Horatio recovers, and follows it back down the right aisle steps, assuming the guards follow him; however, Marcellus tracks the Ghost towards upstage right while Bernardo tracks it towards the top of the stage left aisle steps.
Horatio
Stay, illusion!
[He] spreads his arms15
If thou hast any sound, or use of voice,
Speak to me. (1.1.107–110)
Again, a truncated line of verse occurs when the shaken characters consider the terrifying Ghost: Horatio implores the Ghost to “Speak to me,” but no speech follows his appeal. As the stage directions indicate, the cock crows just after 1.1.119 to summon the Ghost back to the underworld, and Horatio urges the other two to stop it from leaving. Yet in this staging, not one of them know where to go to attempt to stop it:
Horatio
Speak of it: stay, and speak! Stop it, Marcellus.
Marcellus
Shall I strike at it with my partisan?
Horatio
Bernardo [aggressively, each man when he speaks indicating different parts of the stage]
’Tis gone! (1.1.120–123)
Exit Ghost [doors slam from the three different positions—house right, house left, and upstage right]
Marcellus’s final cry “’Tis gone,” like numerous other lines regarding the Ghost, appears as a fragment of a verse line in the play. These verbal fragments echo the visual splitting so symptomatic of this Ghost. In this staging, the ghost splits and vanishes through three exits. With special effects and a corporeal ghost, this scene would certainly be scary enough. However, in universal lighting, as the actors gesture and shout their alarm from all over the theater, across and among an audience, the uneasiness those gestures evoke, along with the fast-paced action that a supernatural encounter might produce, spread this fear through the audience as they visibly perceive one another’s reactions.
The effect of an invisible ghost hangs on these gestures. It also hangs on an audience’s willingness to succumb to the urgency cultivated by uncertainty and fear, something much more feasible in the universal lighting of an original practices theater. Thus, it encourages audience participation in a visceral experience in ways that contemporary theater does not. As Baz Kershaw argues, twentieth- (and twenty-first)-century audiences must “overcome the protocols of audience membership . . . [that] have undermined participation in performance.” In other words, contemporary audiences have been discouraged from actively taking part in a production in what Kershaw calls a “taming” of audiences whose only responsibility is to applaud.16
Contemporary productions that utilize early modern original practices resist audience taming and thus free the audience to enjoy a performance both viscerally and kinetically; that is, the visceral reaction of heightened anxiety that an invisible ghost—given our staging—may evoke fosters a collective and dynamic reaction from audience member to audience member. But this takes a relinquishing of the distanced audience mindset that the proscenium theater has nurtured, and requires that the audience engage in what Lian Loke, George Khut, and Ahmet Kocaballi call “embodied imagination.”17 Indeed, embodied imagination refers to the intertwining of an audience’s imaginative capacities and the felt experience of the body. But as Loke et al. point out, the experience of embodied imagination relies on participatory practices whereby the work is brought into being by the audiences’ willingness to engage in its creation. Thus, the invisible ghost’s successful transmission of terror in Hamlet 1.1 banks on what Victor Turner calls “flow.”
Building on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concepts of flow in the 1975 book Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, Turner describes flow “as an inner logic which seems to need no conscious intervention on our part.” Most importantly, flow demands “little distinction between self and environment.”18 Furthermore “attention is centered on a limited stimulus field” whereby the participant in an event that fosters flow, such as the stage drama, experiences a “loss of ego: the ‘self’ which is ordinarily the broker between one person’s actions and another simply becomes irrelevant.”19 In short, “flow” results from an abandonment of the affective filters that prevent audiences from succumbing to the stimuli in their immediate environment. An invisible ghost should surely capitalize on this inherent human capacity to experience the stage drama in uninhibited ways. Clearly, original practices fosters this sort of stimulus, and this is precisely why original practices offer an ideal environment for the stimulus of terror in the first act and scene of Hamlet.
Furthermore, changes in acting styles during the early modern period also offer a rationale for exploring the effects or even the feasibility of an invisible ghost in a modern original-practices production. We are not proposing that Elizabethan or Jacobean companies took this approach. But modern audiences’ fascination with “paranormal activities” means that they expect realistic fear when characters come face to face with ghosts, but that they, too want to be unsettled. And thankfully the text of Hamlet, even with an invisible ghost, allows this fear ample scope. Hapgood notes that Elizabethan acting styles had moved from impersonation to “person-ation”;20 perhaps not coincidentally, Andrew Gurr observes that the word “personation” came into currency just at the time Hamlet was first played. Further, Gurr notes that a new art of individual characterization had developed,21 which Bernardo, Marcellus, and Horatio reflect in their responses to the Ghost.
Of course these reactions are thoroughly dictated by what the actors can do to incite the fear aroused by a ghost that they can see but an audience cannot. Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa remind us that gestures on the Elizabethan stage were used to direct the audience “to imagine something that was not there. . . . Audiences had to work at visualizing the spectacles the words described.” As Gurr and Ichikawa further explain, “Hamlet is largely about the concept of acting deception, its narrative is a pretend performance of an ‘act’ of revenge, in which a play-actor enacts actions that a man might play.”22 More than any other rhetorical project, then, Hamlet demands of its audience an active and intensive imagination. Therefore, an invisible ghost—a figure audiences cannot be sure they quite believe in even though it inspires their terror—adds another dimension to the play’s theatricality about deception; it not only asks audiences to augment the dread the ghost inspires with their imaginations, but also amplifies the unease and dishonesty that Prince Hamlet experiences. Indeed, the ghost’s unstable and unpredictable “appearances” and invisibility at the play’s opening predict the instability of Prince Hamlet’s immediate domain. One might argue that the ghost’s invisibility in 1.1 also suggests its utter unhelpfulness throughout the duration of the play. It leaves Hamlet to suffer alone with his charge to revenge that “most foul and unnatural murder” (1.5.25). Its shape shifting and ability to split foreshadows Hamlet’s own emotional, domestic, and politically unstable realm.
In closing, this exploration of the Ghost gets at the heart of staging an early modern play under early modern playing conditions. Ralph Alan Cohen exhorts that “directors who pay attention to the stage and the stagecraft of Shakespeare and his contemporaries will find that in doing so they will be freeing the plays from the accreted technological conventions that have substituted for their strongest dramatic energies. In particular, such directors will find themselves turning to the plays two elements most crucial to the future health of theater: the performer and the audience.”23 And, as Gurr and Ichikawa emphasize, “What the scene actually is and what it seems to be, what the audience is asked to believe for the moment that it is supposed to be, were features of original staging much more obviously at odds for the first audiences than they are now to audiences who have cinematic aids to satisfy their imaginations.”24 These contrasting modes of imagination are precisely why an invisible ghost works in staging Hamlet using original practices today. If directors (or teachers) want to jar a visceral response from an audience (or a class) “jaded by spectacular cinematic special effects technology,”25 but do so in a reconstructed early modern playing space (or even the front of a classroom), they must rely on the text’s unstable representation of the Ghost as their cue.
Notes
1. American Shakespeare Center podcast, October 2011, www.americanshakespearecenter.com/education. All citations from Hamlet are taken from Hamlet in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: WW Norton, 1997).
2. Michael Pennington, Hamlet: A User’s Guide (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996), 30.
3. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “apparition, n.,” http://www.oed.com/.
4. Dover J. Wilson and May Yardley, “Of the Ghost Scenes in Hamlet and Elizabethan Spiritualism,” in Lewes Lavater, Of Ghosts and Spirits Walking by Night (1929; New York: Kessinger Publishing, 2003), 29.
5. Wilson, “Of the Ghost Scenes in Hamlet,” xii.
6. Catherine Belsey, “Shakespeare’s Sad Tale for Winter,” Shakespeare Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2010): 2.
7. Robert Hapgood, Hamlet: Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 105.
8. Belsey, “Shakespeare’s Sad Tale for Winter,” 4.
9. Ibid.
10. David Brailow, “’Tis Heere. ’Tis Gone’: The Ghost in the Text,” Stage Directions in Hamlet, ed. Hardin Aasand (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 106.
11. Belsey, “Shakespeare’s Sad Tale for Winter,” 13–14.
12. Belsey, “Shakespeare’s Sad Tale for Winter,” 14.
13. See the British Library’s excellent “Shakespeare in Quarto” website. Its First Quarto copy of Hamlet (1603) uses the word “horrors.” The Second Quarto (1604) uses the spelling “horrowes.” Belsey reminds us of these variations in footnote 15 of “Shakespeare’s Sad Tale for Winter.”
14. Hapgood, Hamlet: Shakespeare in Production, 101.
15. The Second Quarto includes in its stage directions next to Horatio’s line “Ile crosse it though it blast me” that “It spreads his arms.” We are left to wonder whether the arms being spread belong to the figure of the Ghost or to the character Horatio as he has a physical encounter with the Ghost.
16. Baz Kershaw, “Oh For Unruly Audiences! Or, Patterns of Participation in Twentieth-Century Theatre,” Modern Drama 44, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 133–54, 140–41.
17. Lian Loke, George Khut, and A. B. Kocaballi, “Bodily Experience and Imagination: Designing Ritual Interactions for Participatory Live-Art Contexts,” Designing Interactive Systems Conference, Newcastle, England, 2012.
18. Victor Turner, “Frame, Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6, no. 4 (Dec. 1979): 465–99; 487.
19. Turner, “Frame, Flow, and Reflection,” 478.
20. Hapgood, Hamlet: Shakespeare in Production, 109.
21. Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theaters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9.
22. Gurr and Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theaters, 1.
23. Ralph Alan Cohen, “Directing at the Globe and the Blackfriars: Six Big Rules for Contemporary Directors,” in Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, ed. Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 211–25, 212.
24. Gurr and Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theaters, 121.
25. David Brailow, “’Tis Heere. ’Tis Gone’: The Ghost in the Text,” 112.