The supernatural in hamlet and macbeth

Robert H. West, Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery
 
Whether the ghost of King Hamlet is a Protestant ghost and comes either from heaven or hell, a Catholic ghost coming from heaven, hell, or Purgatory, or is neither Protestant nor Catholic but a hallucination of Hamlet’s troubled mind, are questions that many writers on Hamlet have tried to answer. Robert H. West in Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery thinks that King Hamlet’s ghost is an “ambiguous ghost” (56). He argues that, according to Elizabethan ghost beliefs and to what Shakespeare actually wrote, there is equally good evidence for claiming that the Ghost is “a Catholic ghost, a paganesque ghost” or “a devil” (61). What is more, West says, Shakespeare intended the Ghost’s nature to be ambiguous. “Shakespeare knowingly mixed the evidence and did it for the sake of dramatic impact” (63).
West sets out the ambiguities of King Hamlet’s ghost. It says that it comes from Purgatory, but the convincing evidence of Claudius’s guilt (his behavior at “The Mousetrap”) is not necessarily convincing evidence that the Ghost’s claim of where it has come from is true. “To tell a truth as part of a wicked and deceitful design was, as Banquo and innumerable pneumatologists [ghost experts] warn, a thing devils often did. So perhaps the ghost is a devil” (61).
West points out that the Ghost’s pleas to Hamlet to be merciful to his mother are consistent with orthodox Catholic belief of Shakespeare’s time about how spirits from Purgatory behave, but that the Ghost’s commands of revenge are not. Orthodox Catholic belief did not allow for a ghost from Purgatory to call for vengeance, and in other Elizabethan plays there are no ghosts “that may be supposed saved souls” that behave in anything like this bloodthirsty way (60). On the other hand, West says, although it was believed that the devil might, as Banquo says in Macbeth (I.3.124-126), “tell us truths . . . to betray’s . . . In deepest consequence,” no spirit expert of Shakespeare’s time thought that one of the devil’s tricks was to “prescribe Christian forbearance and an untainted mind,” as the Ghost does (61). So maybe the Ghost is, after all, a good spirit. West’s point is that an audience in the theatre just does not know the truth about the Ghost with any certainty, and that Shakespeare did not want it to know.
As a dramatist, Shakespeare recognized that making things too clear works against dramatic impact and mystery. “Decisive explanation of supernatural figures tends to reduce their effect of awe and mystery; the indecisive answers Hamlet provides to the standard questions it raises tend rather to create awe and mystery” (65). The way West sees it, scholars and critics have generally taken the wrong approach. By trying to see how Shakespeare’s representation of the Ghost fits with the various ghost beliefs of his time “point for point,” they have been working at the “puzzle” of the Ghost (66) and are “fairly certain to end with a confusing failure” (57). What they should be doing instead of treating the ghost as a puzzle is to recognize that “we cannot rationally fathom the ghost” (68), and that the Ghost’s dramatic power comes from that very fact. Like the real-life ghost experiences claimed by some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the great and the not so great (65), and believed by many to be true, “the Ghost of King Hamlet is never explicable” (66). It is not an intellectual puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be dramatically experienced. It is one expression of what West calls “the outer mystery,” the ultimately unknowable world that exists apart from human thoughts and feelings and which is the “indispensable background” to tragedy’s exploration of the “inner mystery,” the ultimately unknowable human heart (1, 4-5).