The supernatural in hamlet and macbeth

John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet

has been reprinted many times. Like Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy, it still seems to be an influential book. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English describes it as “an academic best-seller.” Wilson accepts that the ghost of King Hamlet comes from Purgatory and so “is Catholic,” though he believes that otherwise the world of Hamlet is a Protestant world. “An established Protestant Church was a feature of [Shakespeare’s] Denmark,” just as it was a feature of Shakespeare’s England (69-70).

Wilson does not try to explain this inconsistency, which Shakespeare’s original audiences of believing Protestants and Catholics probably noticed more than a modern one does. The only obvious explanation seems to be that the inconsistency did not bother Shakespeare and that Shakespeare did not think it would bother the people in the theatre enough to matter. He could not have guessed how much it might bother academics hundreds of years later.
Wilson emphasizes the powerful impression that Hamlet’s first meeting with the Ghost would have made on the members of Shakespeare’s audience, all of whom, as believing Christians of their time, lived on much more familiar terms with the supernatural than most of us do (72). Of course the Ghost makes a powerful impression on Prince Hamlet too, though Wilson does not seem to think it worth pointing out that Hamlet’s hysterical exclamations as soon as the Ghost leaves the stage in Act I, Scene 3 (92-106) are prompted by what the Ghost has revealed to him and not at all by the amazing fact that he has just seen and spoken with a spirit from the dead. Even when he first meets the Ghost earlier in the scene, Hamlet’s only expression of wonder or fear is a single line: “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” (I.4.39). Can it be supposed from this that the average Elizabethan, who was used to thinking of the supernatural as only next door to everyday reality, would have reacted to meeting a ghost with as little amazement?
In the first part of his discussion of the Ghost, Wilson wants to show that Hamlet’s doubts about whether it is from heaven or not at least partly explain the “procrastination” that many critics before thought Hamlet is guilty of (73-75). Hamlet “assuredly has more excuse than any critic has yet perceived, and the excuse at least provides a strong motive for the introduction of the Gonzago play,” which previous critics had seen as a clumsy device of Hamlet’s to put off acting decisively (75). Wilson bases his argument on the fact that Hamlet’s actions follow step by step what contemporary experts recommended for dealing with ghosts. In delaying his revenge until he knows from Claudius’s behaviour at the play that the Ghost’s story is true, Hamlet is only showing common sense
Wilson pays special attention to what he calls “the cellarage scene” in Act I, where the Ghost, from under the stage, echoes Hamlet’s command to Horatio and Marcellus to swear to keep what they have witnessed secret. Wilson argues that until this point Hamlet has had no doubt that the ghost is what it claims to be and that what it has told him about his father’s murder is true. It is when the Ghost starts behaving like a conventional Elizabethan “underground demon,” Wilson says (83), that Hamlet begins to have doubts, doubts which would have been shared by Shakespeare’s audience who would have known all about ghost behaviour and ghost identification. “At the end of the first act, the Elizabethan audience could be no more certain of the honesty of the Ghost and of the truth of the story it had related, than the perplexed hero himself. Thus for the first half of the play the character that was on trial with them was not Hamlet’s but the Ghost’s” (84).
Wilson has several ideas about the Ghost’s appearance in the bedroom scene. He thinks that by this point in the play Hamlet is guilty of procrastination and that the Ghost is right to scold Hamlet for “thy almost blunted purpose” (III.4.111; 250). But this makes sense only if what Wilson himself calls “one of the minor points” of contemporary ghost theory” (250, note 2) is true: that angels and spirits cannot read the minds of humans. Because if they can (and it seems to me that a modern audience automatically assumes they can), the Ghost would know that when Hamlet in the prayer scene let pass the only opportunity he had of killing Claudius after making certain of his guilt, he did so for a very good reason that the Ghost would have to have approved of (“A villain kills my father, and for that / I, his sole son, do this same villain send / To heaven. / Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge,” I.3.77-79)
The Ghost appears in Gertrude’s bedroom when it does not just “Your tardy son to chide” (III.4.106), Wilson says, but because at that very moment Hamlet in his hysterical verbal attack on his mother seems about to attack her physically, in direct violation of the ghost’s command in Act I (“Leave her to heaven,” I.5.84-88). Wilson’s really interesting idea (though one that does not persuade me) is that the Ghost appears at that moment not only to keep Hamlet from physically attacking his mother, but to keep him from blurting out to her that her second husband was the murderer of her first. Hamlet’s stinging words have already “reduced the Queen to a pitiable condition” (250). The Ghost fears, Wilson says, that the truth of King Hamlet’s death would be too much for Gertrude’s weak constitution to bear (“Conceit [imagination] in weakest bodies strongest works,” II.4.114).
His tender solicitude for the Queen who has so greatly wronged him is already evident at his first interview with Hamlet; and the pathetic line
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works,
is an epitome of all the excuses that blindly chivalrous husbands have found for erring wives since the beginning of time. (251)
Wilson himself seems to have very little pity for the queen. He allows that it is “impossible” that she “knew of the murder all the time” (252), but he also says that had she not consented to adultery with Claudius, “King Hamlet might still have been alive and the ‘bed of Denmark’ undefiled” (251). And I suppose this is true, but then we would not have had Hamlet either.