2.1 The Ghost's identityīarnardo's initial question "Who's there?" (25,3) aims at Francisco still hiding in the dark, but it also hints at an ambivalence of identities that is an essential part of all the play's characters. The Ghost's primordial identity is a verbal one, and within this context he gains his specific reality. The guards on Helsingor talk about him (26,2ff) and so his presence in language precedes his actual arrival. When the former king's ghost first enters the stage, his appearance is well prepared. There aren't, and never were, any people.ĭeath only reveals the vacuity that was always there. On the other hand, it may help to contextualise Shakespeare's enigmatic Prince in a new perspective. This essay may contribute to this discussion using a particular "case study".
There is a current trend in social scientific studies on death and bereavement towards exploring the ways the dead are present or represented respectively within and around the bereaved and towards the ongoing interaction between the deceased and the mourners (Hallam et al. By remaining betwixt and between in the dead's characteristic way and by not precisely answering the initial question he is the driving force of Hamlet's fate and the play's plot. The deceased's ghost – to put my thesis differently – mediates between Hamlet's "inner" world of emotions, thoughts and motives and the "outer" world of events and relations past and present. They express personal emotions while being shaped by social relationships and contextual influences.
Grief and mourning are both individual and social phenomena. It is this ghost – so the main assumption of this essay – that is implied in the play's first sentence, a protagonist simultaneously present and absent, perceived and denied, a question as well as an exclamation mark, a mirror and a motive of Hamlet's tragic mourning. Out of the abundance of literature in the field of literary criticism I will chose studies focussing on Hamlet's mourning and his father's ghost respectively. Contextual framework – the play's historical setting and prevailing reception – will be considered where appropriate but will not be used as a core interpretative clue. My point of view will be a "naïve" one in the sense of reading the play as a documentary, the text's surface, as it were. The focus will be on Hamlet, the deceased's son, but other protagonists will be included if and as far as they interact with him. In this essay, I will consider myself being a witness of events experienced, utterances made and actions accomplished by individuals reacting to the death of an important member of their social network. It is them that will reveal "who's there": in the text, on the stage and in the awareness of both ourselves and the play's protagonists. Since the play itself refuses to provide a concluding answer, it is up to us, the readers or viewers, to make our decisions. To answer these questions means to define a frame of interpretation, one more among the hundreds that have already been used to fill volumes of explanations and critical comments. "Who's there?" Who is it that we – together with Barnardo, Francisco, Marcellus, Horatio, and, of course, Hamlet – are going to meet in an instant's time? And then: who is acting in front of us? Danish courtiers in a mythical time? Representatives of an Elizabethan world of art, science, philosophy and politics? Actors playing their roles? Individuals entrapped in an intriguing net of personal and collective motives, experiences and tragedy? What we hear when the curtain opens and "Hamlet" begins is a question that miraculously mirrors the plot of the play as well as the musing of the audience about what to expect of this probably best known and most discussed work of dramatic literature ever written. I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch?įirst words have their own magic. Than that in all those vast times and spaces,
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