Tait McKenzie Johnson Junior Literature Seminar

12.14.10 Uma Satyavolu

Paper # 2

More in Heaven and Earth:

The Strange Eruption of Hamlet’s Ghost in Early Modern Epistemology

“Why cannot we remember all the contradictions which we feel within

our own judgment, and how many things which were articles of belief
for us yesterday are fables for us today?” (Montaigne 204)

“Fiction begins where human knowledge begins – with the senses.” So Flannery

O’Connor asserts in discussing the use of ghosts and other supernatural elements in realist

Southern fiction, suggesting that, though all writers are bound by what they can perceive, “the

realism of each novelist will depend upon his view of the ultimate reaches of reality” (O’Connor

1419-20). And yet, since the 18th century Enlightenment philosophic response to the superstitious

structures of the Roman Catholic Church, belief in the possibility of real encounters with the

supernatural has been gradually replaced by a faith in the total efficacy of rational science

(Goldstein 60-1). Despite the Romantic reinvestment of notions of spirit as valid ways of

imagining human truth, the modern world has a deep reservation about the realistic representation

of the supernatural: ghosts serve as merely plot mechanisms, psychological projections, or

momentary deviations from realist ideologies (Ackerman 119, Belsey 1-2, Smajić 2). According

to Srdjan Smajić, literary realism has been historically distanced from the supernatural as a

“mode of perceiving, comprehending, and representing persons, objects, and events in accordance

with natural laws and rationally explicable causal relations” (Smajić 1). As such, it seems near

impossible in the modern world to examine what O’Connor posits as an alignment between

realistic representations of the supernatural and an epistemological philosophic framework that

doesn’t believe in ghosts.

And yet, “ghosts can be fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in

our literature” (O’Connor 1421). As Catherine Belsey suggests, in the rational light of modern

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cities it is easy to forget the darkness and solitude of long winter night in the Early Modern

countryside, which prompted the telling of ghost stories and “experiences undreamt of in [our]

philosophy” (Belsey 20), stories that might “lean away from typical social patterns, toward

mystery and the unexpected” (O’Connor 1419). The poet Keats famously asserted what he called

the ‘Negative Capability’ of the plays of Shakespeare, in which “man is capable of being in

uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Cox 23). It is

possible to see, however, in the mysterious and ghostly opening scene of a play like Hamlet, that

Shakespeare may have indeed been extremely anxious about uncertainty and the limits of

knowledge: philosophical debates in Shakespeare’s Early Modern period hinged around questions

of skeptical uncertainty and the authentication of religious and supernatural knowledge (Landau

220, 226).

John D. Cox argues that the Early Modern resurgence of Pyrrhonic skepticism – which

refused to take a rational stance for or against the certainty of knowing – may not have been

incompatible with the religious faith of the time (Cox 23), which can be seen in Shakespeare as

well as in contemporary thinkers like Montaigne, Descartes, and Burton. By examining the

realistic representation of the Ghost in Hamlet in the context of this Early Modern ambivalence

between skepticism and faith, we can see the ways in which the supernatural may offer

knowledge beyond what is dreamt of in philosophy. In particular, the Ghost causes a “strange

eruption” in skeptical and religious ideological modes of explanation that allows for a wider

epistemic articulation of the limits of human history, mortality, and knowledge.

Before we can examine its philosophical implications, we must be able to see the Ghost

itself as Early Modern audiences may have seen it. Even shortly after the Early Modern period,

the Ghost in Hamlet was a site for contention. Voltaire felt that Shakespeare’s use of

supernatural elements was a “monstrous farce” and barbaric form of entertainment that broke the

Aristotelian aesthetic rules; and yet he found the effect produced by the Ghost so powerful that he

imitated it in his own plays (Townshend 63-4). The predominately positive critical and popular

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French reception to the Ghost was used to defend Shakespeare’s worth, despite intellectual

disbelief in ghosts as “superstitious foibles” (ibid 69-70). Dale Townshend suggests that in like

cultural defense, the English reframed Shakespeare as the ‘Gothic Bard,’ drawing on the term’s

polyvalent representation of an anti-classical, unenlightened, and yet natively English worldview.

While Shakespeare’s use of the Ghost eventually aligned the term Gothic with magic and the

supernatural in the literary tradition of Hawthorne and Poe – in which “empirical ‘reality’ is only

one of the many truths to which one’s beliefs lay claim” (ibid 67, Ramos 49-50) – in the 18th

century these Gothic valances were primarily seen as the result of the belief structures of the

unenlightened age in which Shakespeare lived rather than a lack of his genius (Townshend 67).

Shakespeare’s genius, on the other hand, may have been precisely that his native superstitions

were not crushed by classical education (ibid 68). While other contemporary critics may have

felt the Ghost was unnecessary to later action in the play, most audiences clearly found it

unthinkable to remove the Ghost from productions of Hamlet (ibid 68, Ackerman 72).

Much of the popularity and powerful effect of the Ghost may be due to the way in which

Shakespeare invested his specter with a sense of “deepening mystery” and epistemic anxiety

“new to the early modern stage” (Belsey 1). As Oscar Wilde reminds us, “in Shakespeare’s day

ghosts were not shadowy conceptions, but beings of flesh and blood” (Ackerman 125). Drawing

on the earlier use of ghosts in Seneca, English stage ghosts had been typically blood curdling

rather than eerie, serving to set the scene or incite characters to violence the way Robert Burton

claims his age will have ghosts “be devils or the souls of dead men that seek revenge, or else

souls out of purgatory that seek ease,” rather than used to build a mysterious unease between

disbelief and fear (Belsey 6-7, Burton 1.193-4). Belsey suggests that Shakespeare was able to

represent this uncanny quality of the supernatural – in which fear is “brought into being by the

unknown” – by drawing his Ghost not only from religious superstitions but also from the folklore

tradition of ghost stories (ibid 7, 22). Like reports of actual supernatural encounters, ghost

stories foreground this uncertainty through a ghost’s questionable form, insusceptibility to

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rational reporting, and provocation of existential terror; all of which Shakespeare uses in Hamlet,

and may have left his audiences agreeing with the rational scholar Horatio, who can ultimately

only say that his encounter with the Ghost is “wondrous strange” (Shakespeare 1.5.163).

According to Alan L. Ackerman, one of the challenges of Hamlet (and theater in general)

is in “making visible subjects and objects of knowledge,” as the psychology of characters, like

ghosts, resists direct representation (Ackerman 121, 123). Though apparitions are popularly seen

as substanceless, and contemporary Christianity drew a clear distinction between the soul and the

body, ghosts are paradoxically not just etheric psychological projections: folk tales and theology

both cast ghosts as corporeal and physically threatening (Belsey 14, 24). The Ghost in Hamlet

appears in a similarly indeterminate form, “in the same figure like the king that’s dead” and in the

“very armor he had on/ When he the ambitious Norway combated” (Shakespeare 1.1.41, 60-1).

While armor was probably the easiest way of visibly costuming a ghost, the guards take it as

materially solid enough that they attempt to strike the Ghost with a partisan. When they do

however, “it is as the air, invulnerable,/ And our vain blows malicious mockery” (ibid 1.1.145-6).

As Burton says, spirits “may deceive the eyes of men, yet not take true bodies, or make a real

metamorphosis” (Burton 1.185), placing them outside of epistemologically certain modes of

perception.

Another representational aspect of ghost stories is their use of location, particularly the

alignment of ghosts with the terror produced by graveyards and other in-between places (like the

castle walls) (Belsey 10). As dead bodies spread disease, early modern religious accounts of the

walking dead equated ghosts to infection, mirrored in Hamlet’s vision of the air of Denmark as a

“foul and pestilent congregation of vapors” (ibid 15-6, Shakespeare 2.2.287-8). Early ghost

stories similarly frame events as happening “years ago” or far away, a distancing effect that

enhances credibility (opposite to the way modern media build credibility through casting fictional

events as based on ‘real incidents’) (Belsey 21). The Gothic and medieval castle of Elsinore is

far enough from Early Modern England that it can stand for the fragmented Reformation world,

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where “the very fundamentals of religious knowledge” are contended and where a ghost can’t

help but to appear (Landau 220).

Beyond the uncertain appearance and placement of ghosts, the supernatural provokes an

ambivalent response in those who witness it. Though the modern scientific attitude finds nothing

rational in ghost stories, Diane E. Goldstein argues that narrative accounts of supernatural

encounters contain a cautious structure that appeals to rational evidence within a scientific

methodology (Goldstein 70-1, 78), the way that Horatio appeals to his own empirical credibility

when he says, “I might not this believe/ Without the sensible and true avouch/ Of mine own eyes”

(Shakespeare 1.1.56-8). Rational ghost reports also rely on multiple witnesses and the replication

of experience, which can be seen when the guards call on Horatio “to approve [their] eyes” only

after the “dreaded sight [is] twice seen” (Goldstein 75, Shakespeare 1.1.29, 25), or the way

Horatio has to deliver the marvel to Hamlet “upon the witness of these gentlemen” (Shakespeare

1.2.193). Goldstein suggests that ghost reports also refer to reality-testing strategies to ascertain

the validity of the experience (Goldstein 74). Despite Hamlet’s willingness to “take the ghost’s

word for a thousand pounds,” he later stages the play-within-the-play as an epistemological test

of the ghost’s claim (Shakespeare 3.2.262, Landau 227). Though rational reports also typically

foreground facts over interpretations in order to distance their credibility from superstition

(Goldstein 76), as we will see, Shakespeare’s inclusion of possible interpretations in the response

to the Ghost may allow him to offer up the broader philosophical debates of his time.

Prior to and possibly enabling such philosophical analyses, there is another existential

component to the response to the supernatural, which the rational and classical knowledge of a

Horatio cannot contain (Landau 219). As Horatio aptly describes it, the ghost “harrows me with

fear and wonder” (Shakespeare 1.1.44). Horror is the most common reaction to ghosts and ghost

stories (Belsey 19); the guards are “distilled/ Almost to jelly with the act of fear,” and even the

Ghost itself claims that its tale “would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,/ Make thy

eyes like stars start from their spheres,/ Thy knotted and combinéd locks to part,/ And each

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particular hair to stand an end” (Shakespeare 1.2.204-5, 1.5.14-19). Yet as Horatio’s inclusion of

“wonder” in his response implies, fear is not the sole emotional response to ghosts.

Drawing on William James’s psychological approach to the existential validity of

religious experiences, Rudolf Otto offers a fuller picture of this affective response to the

supernatural. While God was philosophically conceived as rational in order to allow for belief

rather than mere feelings toward it, God (and other supernatural beings) “eludes the conceptual

way of understanding,” and thus provokes an irrational “creature-feeling” that Otto calls

“mysterium tremendum” (Otto 1-2, 10). The supernatural provokes mystery, in that such beings

are wholly “alien to us, uncomprehended and unexplained,” which in turn causes us to tremble

with an awe or dread deeper than plain fear (ibid 25-6, 14). This feeling is both daunting and

fascinating because it contains an overpowering sense of majesty, the way contemporary critics

suggested that Shakespeare presented his ghosts, “with the utmost Solemnity, awful throughout

and majestic” (ibid 19, Townshend 71). As Hamlet can only exclaim when he sees the ghost’s

near-divine majesty, “O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?/ And shall I couple hell? O,

fie! Hold, hold, my heart” (Shakespeare 1.5.92-3)

Though ghosts provoke this feeling of “grue” (or grisly horror) – which pleases audiences

in our wanting to be rid of them and thus the feeling – we are simultaneously fascinated because

the supernatural entices the imagination with a majestic glimpse of something that “has no place

in our scheme of reality;” and yet the supernatural is here and must be reckoned with (Otto 28-9).

Faced with his deep feelings of fear and wonder, Horatio’s rational response to the ghost’s

appearance is upended: “In what particular thought to work I know not/ But in the gross and

scope of mine opinion,/ This bodes some strange eruption to our state” (Shakespeare 1.1.67-9).

Beyond the literal state of Denmark, the supernatural causes an eruption to the assumed certainty

of human perceptual, mental, and emotional states, leaving witnesses and audience members in a

new state of epistemological uncertainty open to skeptical investigation.

While Mark Matheson reads Shakespeare’s plays in terms of their “oblique and

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inconsistent” use of religious discourses, the critic Aaron Landau suggests that such a reading

ignores the Early Modern context of a revived skepticism in response to the schisms in the church

and their contentions for religious legitimacy (Landau 218). Skeptical doubt may account for the

instability of ideological systems in Hamlet, undoing claims of knowledge and placing error and

ignorance as the basis for dramatic action: Hamlet’s inability to act is thus an epistemological

uncertainty of how to act (ibid 218-9). What does Early Modern skepticism look like though?

Writing contemporaneously to Shakespeare and likely influencing the Bard’s plays, Michel de

Montaigne was known for his skeptical stance toward supernatural agents (Spires 205). As

Montaigne says, “If I heard tell of ghosts walking or of prophecies, enchantments, sorcery, or

some other tale which I could not get my teeth into… I used to feel sorry for the wretched folk

who were taken in by such madness” (Montaigne 200-1). According to Margaret Spires,

Montaigne limited the scope of knowledge in his Essays solely to his natural faculties – instead of

Saint Augustine’s Middle Ages separation between knowledge of divine and human things

(wisdom vs. science), Montaigne limited his studies to what we know that we can know (ibid

206-7). This suggests a move from a Christian to a secular ideal of knowledge (ibid 208), in

which, as Montaigne says, “we attribute to simplemindedness a readiness to believe anything and

to ignorance the readiness to be convinced” (Montaigne 200). This seems to agree with the

modern scientific attitude in which “entities that we do not find evidence of when we make an

effort to look for them ought to be considered non-existent” (Keeley 143).

Ghost stories similarly begin with a frame of disbelief, at first limiting what is credible so

that, when supernatural evidence to the contrary is presented, it becomes affectively appalling

(Belsey 3). We can see this limited credibility in Horatio’s response to the possibility of the

Ghost in Hamlet. As an agent of sober rationalism trained in Lutheran Wittenberg, Horatio “will

not let belief take hold of him” and doubts that the supernatural is anything more than a “fantasy”

of the guards (Shakespeare 1.1.23-4). As a skeptic, Horatio limits his understanding of what he

knows we can know, referring to the Ghost as a “thing” (ibid 1.1.21). While Belsey reads the

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word “thing” as indicative of Horatio’s contempt for the supernatural (Belsey 3), it rather

suggests that ‘ghost’ is not something that fits into expected categories of knowledge: ghosts are

not living or dead, human or divine, solid or ephemeral, &c. At the same time, Horatio may be

adverse to having those categories of knowledge challenged. As Bernardo points out, Horatio’s

ears are “fortified against [the guards’] story” (Shakespeare 1.1.32), leading him to demand – as

Burton claims of philosophers who “hold all religion a fiction, opposite to reason and

philosophy” – that, “in spiritual things God must demonstrate all to sense.” (Burton 3.384).

Despite his reservations and appeals to evidence, when the Ghost appears, Horatio is forced to

revise his limited scope of knowledge and admit to Hamlet, “As I do live, my honored lord, ‘tis

true” (ibid 1.2.220-1).

That a scholar like Horatio is able to reverse his position and admit the possibility of the

Ghost’s existence suggests that something does not quite work in his mode of skepticism. The

problem is that there are more ways than one to doubt. According the Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy, there is a distinction between ordinary incredulity and philosophical skepticism. In

an ordinary incredulity like the kind we at first see in Horatio’s response to the Ghost, the

grounds for doubt can be removed; if we are presented with contrary evidence such as actually

seeing a ghost, then we’re forced to revise the scope of our knowledge (even if this leads to “fear

and wonder”). Philosophical Skepticism, on the other hand, attempts to render doubtful our

claims to be able to have knowledge altogether, in order to then find clearer rational grounds for

such knowledge, a project most associated with the philosophy of René Descartes. Writing a few

decades after Shakespeare, Descartes attempted to establish a firmer ground for scientific

knowledge and “make it impossible for us to have any further doubt” through a process of

doubting everything he had previously held to be true (Descartes 73, 76). Beyond doubting what

is “patently false,” Descartes doubted what was “not completely certain and indubitable,”

including the evidence of his sense perceptions and the ability of the senses to grant us true

knowledge (ibid 76).

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 Though Shakespeare could not have read Descartes, and Descartes’ methodological

skepticism was apparently beyond everyone in the Early Modern period, it is possible that the

two authors shared a “skepticism about supernatural intervention and causation” that hinged on

evidence of the senses (Cox 31). As Burton suggests, “we can no more apprehend [spirits’]

natures and functions than a horse a man’s” (Burton 1.184). Just because the characters in

Hamlet believe they see the Ghost doesn’t mean that it necessarily exists. As Ackerman points

out, there is confusion between the literal and metaphorical in the way Horatio and Hamlet talk

about the Ghost; both refer to is as existing in “the mind’s eye,” that is, in their imaginations

(Ackerman 124, Shakespeare 1.1.12, 1.2.185). As Horatio comments about Hamlet’s need to

believe in the Ghost, “he waxes desperate with imagination” (Shakespeare 1.4.87). Hamlet seems

to have a problem of taking images of fancy as more vivid than his perceptions; that he meets the

Ghost alone in Act 1 Scene 5 makes it impossible to determine whether the Ghost is real or a

private neurotic fantasy (as has been claimed by later critics like Stanley Cavell) (Ackerman 127,

Landau 225). As Burton might say, Hamlet is melancholy “by reason of corrupt imagination”

(Burton 3.58). While the Ghost clearly only appears to Hamlet and not Gertrude in the closet

scene in Act 2, we are still left with the problem that it is witnessed by everyone in the opening of

the play (Ackerman 130).

It doesn’t seem likely that Hamlet, Horatio, and the guards are collectively imagining the

Ghost (though it is tempting to suggest they are suffering a hallucination caused by the corrupt air

of Denmark, in a way similar to how Poe explains the supernatural occurrences of The Fall of the

House of Usher). Descartes however provides an alternative in what is called his “demon

hypothesis,” in which it is possible that they are all being supernaturally deceived. Doubting

even beyond his senses, Descartes asks if God didn’t bring it about that nothing actually exists the

way it appears; but as God is “extremely good and the source of all truth,” Descartes instead

posits that “some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his

energies in order to deceive me” (Descartes 78-9). Burton similarly claims that ghosts “deceive

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all our senses, even our understanding itself” (Burton 1.186). The characters in Hamlet suggest

this possibility after seeing the Ghost, as when Hamlet worries if it is “a spirit of health or goblin

damned” (Shakespeare 1.4.40). Horatio fears that the Ghost will tempt Hamlet into mortal

danger, “and there assume some other horrible form,/ Which might deprive your sovereignty of

reason,/ And draw you into madness” (ibid 1.4.72-4). Hamlet ultimately designs the play-within-

the-play to test this demon hypothesis, for if Claudius doesn’t corroborate the Ghost’s claim of

murder, then “it is a damnéd ghost that we have seen,/ And [Hamlet’s] imaginations are as foul/

as Vulcan’s stithy” (ibid 3.2.73-5).

Demonic deception may have been the “most common explanation for abnormal thinking

and behavior” in the Early Modern age, as men commonly believe that the devil “infatuates the

world, deludes, entraps, and destroys many a thousand souls” (Burton 3.325). As Cox points out

however, the effect produced by the possibility of such deception has vastly different implications

in Shakespeare’s plays. While for Descartes it serves as a “skeptical prelude to rational

certainty,” in Hamlet such suspicions place the tragic results of the play within the Christian

moral framework of a fallen world, where “human knowledge is partial, distorted, and self-

serving, but where moral insight is not only possible but requisite” (Cox 33-4, 26). The

uncertainty of the Ghost’s reality and intentions is not an indifferent academic debate because of

its religious implications; encountering the ghost exposes Hamlet to the danger of madness or the

temptation to sin (Landau 220, 225). In Elsinore, like in Early Modern Europe, moral uncertainty

can get you killed or condemned to hell. Montaigne shares Shakespeare’s doubts about human

moral as well as intellectual capacity, suggesting that such error derives from “having recourse to

God in all our designs… without considering whether the occasion is just or unjust” (Cox 24).

Uncertain as to whether the Ghost’s call for revenge is of heavenly or hellish design; Hamlet is

forced to hesitate in killing Claudius and unjustly sending “this same villain… to heaven”

(Shakespeare 3.3.77-8). The problem seems to stem from the fact that, though God had been held

as the ultimate source of reason and truth, God – like the Ghost – is by nature inscrutable, and

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requires man to more fully determine what constitutes grounds for proof in our assumed ability to

know divine plans (Keeley 143).

Though Descartes’ mode of skepticism would eventually return God to its rational peak

as a source for truth, this certainty was being drastically questioned by the Reformation schisms

of the Early Modern period. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, both the

Protestant Reformation and the counter-Reformation defense of Catholicism drew on the

Pyrrhonic skeptical arguments of Sextus Empiricus that were currently being rediscovered in

Europe. Unlike the now more commonly accepted Academic Skepticism of Descartes, what is

called Pyrrhonic Skepticism refused to give assent to whether we can know or not know, which

was used by both sides of this religious debate to limit the dogmatic pretensions of philosophical

reason. The reformers, on the one hand, used such skepticism to claim that God was unknowable

and faith must be based on passionate commitment, where Catholic apologists like Montaigne

were skeptical of Protestant dogma and thus may have recommended loyalty to the prevailing

religious beliefs and rituals of the age (a view termed ‘fideism,’ which will be examined in fuller

detail below). As Montaigne argues, “what brings as much disorder as anything into our

consciences during our current religious strife is the way Catholics are prepared to treat some of

their beliefs as expendable. They believe they are being moderate and well-informed when they

surrender to their enemies some of the articles of faith which are in dispute” (Montaigne 204)

One such prevailing article of faith questioned by Protestant reformers was the Catholic

tradition of selling indulgences, particularly to remove dead souls from purgatory. In a reversal

of the medieval view espoused by Saint Augustine in which funerals are only for the living

because God does not let the dead to return in the form of ghosts, in the 12th Century the Church

sanctioned purgatory, serving institutional interests of requiring additional masses paid for by the

bereaved in order to release the souls of their loved ones from suffering (Belsey 8-9). As Burton

contends of the Church making “religion mere policy” in this way: “nothing is so effective for

keeping the masses under control as superstition” (Burton 3.328). It is in this belief that the

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Ghost in Hamlet seems to exist, claiming that it is “doomed for a certain term to walk the night,/

And for the day confined to fast in fires,/ Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature/ Are

burnt and purged away” (Shakespeare 1.5.10-13). Under Catholicism, Hamlet could have bought

an indulgence for his Father’s sins, but in the Reformation World – as in the play – no such outlet

is available. While this has been used to support readings of Hamlet in which the inconsistently

conflicting religious ideologies resolve in favor of Protestantism (Landau 218-9), the Ghost still

exists beyond Protestant dogma, suggesting instead that there may be a greater design at work in

what appears as Shakespeare’s examination and dismissal of every available philosophical and

theological response to and explanation for the Ghost.

Despite the Protestant abolishment of purgatory and the official religious sanction for

belief in spirits, people in the Early Modern age continued to tell ghost stories and profess belief

in real ghosts, with claimed supernatural encounters growing so common that Bishop James

Pilkington had to admit in 1564 that everyone still believes in them (Belsey 9). As can be seen in

the treatment of ghosts in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, belief in spirits may not

have conflicted with official theological positions or rational scientific philosophies in the Early

Modern mind. According to Mary Ann Lund, Burton combined scientific and spiritual

approaches to reality to an extent unique in the Early Modern age, including both ‘Heathen’ and

Christian stories as equally necessary to his primary goal of curing melancholy (Lund 666, 678).

As Burton said, melancholy “is a disease of the soul… as much appertaining to a divine as to a

physician” (Burton 1.37). Despite contemporaneous texts on disease that drew clear distinctions

between physical and spiritual causes (Lund 670), Burton considers the natural and supernatural

on the same footing, claiming, “general causes are either supernatural or natural,” which drew on

ancient Hippocratic debates about “whether the disease come not from a divine supernatural

cause, or whether it follow the course of nature” (Burton 1.178-9).

In his discussion of ghosts, Burton raises the spectral paradox of the Early Modern age:

“Many men will not believe they can be seen, and if any man shall say, swear, and stiffly

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 maintain, though he be discreet and wise, judicious and learned, that he hath seen them, they
account him a timorous fool, a melancholy dizzard, a weak fellow, a dreamer, a sick or a mad
man, they contemn him, laugh him to scorn, and yet… How far the power of spirits and devils
doth extend, and whether they can cause this, or any other disease, is a serious question, and
worthy to be considered” (Burton 1.183, 181)

Just because philosophers, religious dogmatists, and atheists alike deny the existence of ghosts

“because they never saw them,” there are just as many credible sources that “have an infinite

variety of such examples of apparitions of spirits, for him to read that further doubts, to his ample

satisfaction” (Burton 1.180, 184). Though he was himself a pastor, as well as a clearly rational

Early Modern thinker, Burton skeptically refrains from taking either a philosophical or religious

stance for or against the actual existence of ghosts; he prefers instead to rationally catalogue their

number and types so that those who do believe in ghosts will have this information available for

their cure just as much as he informs those who only require knowledge of medical anatomy.

In examining the responses to the Ghost in Hamlet, Shakespeare seems to agree with

Burton that “our stories are full of such apparitions in all kinds” (Burton 1.190). It is not, as

Landau claims, that the ghost causes a “debacle of human knowledge,” in which the rational

Classicism of Horatio is transformed “into a series of ‘incredible’ tales about graves standing

tenantless, sheeted dead squeaking and gibbering in the Roman streets” (Landau 219). The Bard

instead sides with Burton’s Early Modern skeptical position that, in the absence of certainty

surrounding an event such as caused by a ghost; all modes of cultural discourse and explanation

must be honestly and un-dogmatically examined. It is not just to tell fantastic tales that Horatio

explores the various surviving folktale reasons for a ghost’s return: “if there be any good thing to

be done,/ That may to thee do ease… If thou art privy to thy country’s fate,/ Which happily

foreknowing may avoid… Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life/ Extorted treasure in the womb of

earth,/ For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death” (Shakespeare 1.1.130-8). The guards

similarly raise superstitious religious readings of the Ghost’s relation to divinity, without

claiming whether these readings are true, as when Marcellus remarks, “Some say that ever ‘gainst

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that season comes/ Wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated,/ This bird of dawning singeth all

night long,/ And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad” (Shakespeare 1.1.158-161). Horatio

honestly wants to know what “they say,” and responds to all these possible interpretations with a

surprisingly open-minded attitude that contemporary audiences may have agreed with: “So have I

heard and do in part believe it” (ibid 1.1.165).

While this openness toward the possibility of real supernatural experiences seems

contradictory to the modern scientific understanding of skepticism, it may in fact be the clearest

articulation of Early Modern attempts to resolve the epistemological crises of their age. Even

Montaigne – who originally felt that belief in the supernatural was madness – ultimately agrees

that it is a greater madness to dismiss such beliefs outright without equally considering the

possibility that they are true (Spires 212):

“It is not that experience has subsequently shown me anything going beyond my original beliefs
(nor is it from any lack of curiosity on my part), but reason has taught me that, if you condemn in
this way anything whatever as definitely false and quite impossible, you are claiming to know the
frontiers and bounds of the will of God and the power of Nature” (Montaigne 201).

Critics like Cox primarily attempt to read Montaigne’s articulation of Pyrrhonic skepticism as

solely reaffirming local customs and contemporary religious expectations, following Montaigne’s

assertion that “we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the

opinions and customs of the country we live in” (Cox 28). This kind of ‘Catholic Pyrrohnism’ –

what Richard Popkin termed ‘fideism’ – would have enabled “believers to eschew reason, even to

the point of complete skepticism, in order to emphasize faith and grace” (ibid 28, 30). While it is

true that Early Modern skeptical debates did not compel doubt in Christian faith (Cox 35) –

Montaigne, Descartes, Burton, and Shakespeare all still believed in God – that does not mean

skepticism compelled irrational belief in only God or an un-questioned belief in God. As

Montaigne recommends, “we ought to judge the infinite power of Nature with more reverence

and a greater recognition of our own ignorance and weakness,” and that, “if we can not be

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convinced we should at least remain in suspense. To condemn them as impossible is to be rashly

presumptuous, boasting that we know the limits of the possible” (Montaigne 202).

Though he had originally sought to limit the scope of available human knowledge,

Montaigne admits that there is a real danger to any limited or dogmatic worldview: “as soon as

you have established the frontiers of truth and error… and then discover that you must of

necessity believe some things even stranger than the ones which you reject, than you are already

forced to abandon those frontiers” (Montaigne 204). Burton conversely concurs that though

superstition “dilated herself, error, ignorance, barbarism, folly, madness, deceived, triumphed,

and insulted over the most wise, discreet, and understanding men,” any form of belief can have

positive effects: “a religion, even if false, as long as it is believed, moderates passion, checks self

indulgence, and makes subjects obedient to their prince” (Burton 3.322, 329). Even modern

literary critics like Smajić agree that to draw a line between the rational scope of literary realism

and the realistic representation of the supernatural “is to make an arbitrary distinction based on a

limited, ungeneralizable experience of reality… and a limited, arbitrary definition of realism”

(Smajić 16). In Hamlet, when Horatio’s attempts to examine what the Ghost is and means

through the various cultural modes of theological, popular, existential, and academically skeptical

discourse leave him unable to say anything certainly other than that the supernatural is “wondrous

strange,” Hamlet Pyrrhonically consoles him that it is not a negative thing to have to abandon his

limited and now distant frontiers of knowledge: “therefore as a stranger give it welcome./ There

are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”

(Shakespeare 1.5.163-6).

The source of tragedy in Shakespeare’s play however, may be that Hamlet is not able to

disinterestedly follow his own skeptical advice. Hamlet welcomes the ghost in accepting the

possibility of its appearance, but it has appeared in the form of his recently deceased father; “such

a questionable shape/ That [he] will speak to [the Ghost]… though hell itself should gape/ And

bid me hold my peace” (ibid 1.4.43-44, 242-3). The uncertainty caused by Hamlet’s state of

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mourning has such deep personal, political, and spiritual implications within the confusion of

discourses of the Early Modern age, that the prince can’t help but demand an epistemological

resolution from his father’s spirit, whether or not the Ghost can provide the answers that Hamlet

sorely needs (Landau 221-2). “Let me not burst in ignorance,” Hamlet says, “but tell/ Why these

canonized bones, héarsed in death,/ Have burst their cerements” (ibid 1.4.44-6). Hamlet wants to

know beyond the possibilities for knowledge offered by skepticism. But can the Ghost – as

Smajić suggests of the supernatural in modern realist narratives – articulate a “revelation beyond

the powers of ordinary human knowledge” (Smajić 7)?

Belesy echoes what we saw as the “strange eruption” caused by the existential response

to the supernatural: that by belonging to a past that should be closed by death, and yet returning to

trouble the present and future, the Ghost suspends the rules of nature and familiar categories of

knowledge, prompting Hamlet to shake with “thoughts beyond the reaches of the soul” (Belsey 5,

Shakespeare 1.4.56). Burton concurs that Early Moderns believed that ghosts “have

understanding far beyond men, can probably conjure and foretell many things” (Burton 1.186).

In the play, Horatio tells his ghost stories of the “sheeted dead” and cosmic strife “as harbingers

preceding still the fates/ And prologue to the omen coming on,” while Bernardo offers a Christian

reading of the Ghost as offering divine revelation in his allusion to the star above Christ’s birth

(Shakespeare 1.1.115, 122-3, 36-7, Landau 220). Landau suggests that Hamlet reads the Ghost in

terms of its revelatory ability to grant new states of consciousness undermining previous

knowledge, in that it can wipe away “all trivial fond records,/ All saw of books, all forms, all

pressures past,” and offer a new “commandment… within the book and volume of [Hamlet’s]

brain” (Shakespeare 1.5.98-100, 102-3). At the same time however, this revelatory ability of the

Ghost may not transcend the limits of human knowledge; though Hamlet exclaims “O my

prophetic soul,” the Ghost only confirms what Hamlet already suspected about his father’s

murder (Landau 224, Shakespeare 1.5.40).

While the Early Modern man continued to believe ghosts were concerned with earthly

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justice, despite Augustine’s insistence that the dead are indifferent to the things of this world

(Belsey 17), Shakespeare’s genius was in allowing the Ghost’s concern with justice to reflect and

make legible the larger political turbulence that haunts the world of Denmark in the play. As the

Ghost allows Hamlet to rightly recognize, “my father’s spirit in arms? All is not well. I doubt

some foul play… Foul deeds will rise,/ Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes”

(Shakespeare 1.2.252-5). The ability of ghosts to voice otherwise unspeakable truths is one of the

main critical appeals of the literary supernatural; as Theodore Adorno argued, in the face of

trauma, art “must rely on techniques of representation and signification at odds with our

commonly agreed upon perception of reality” (Smajić 3, Ramos 54). Looking at the

metaphorical use of the term ‘ghost’ to describe the characters in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom,

Peter Ramos argues that ghosts are the most appropriate symbol for addressing “the agonizing

paradoxes that arise when one looks backwards toward a personal and communal trauma”

(Ramos 53). Where realistic and rational representational techniques tempt us to “speak nothing

beyond respectful silence” in the face of atrocities like human slavery or the Holocaust, ghosts

articulate a broader historical understanding of the way the past continually influences the

present, embodying the “haunting presence of the silent, invisible victims of the past” (ibid 47-8,

50).

The Ghost of Hamlet’s father is certainly a victim of murder, but as Horatio comments,

“there needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave/ To tell us” that the murderer Claudius is a

villain and “arrant knave” (Shakespeare 1.5.125-6). The old king was also the central figure in

resolving Denmark’s previous border wars with Norway, and it is the return of the Ghost in his

warlike form that prompts the characters to remember this recent history; as Bernardo point out,

“well may it sort that this portentous figure/ Comes armed through our watch so like the king/

That was and is the question of these wars” (ibid 1.1.9-11). The Ghost further allows the guards

and Horatio to admit that the communal trauma of war is still going on despite the internal

dramas of Elsinore, thus boding “some strange eruption to our state,” but this time to the literal

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state of Denmark. As Marcellus is forced to conclude, “something is rotten in the state of

Denmark” (ibid 1.4.90). It seems that there is a deeper political implication to the Ghost’s

commandment of revenge; that if the rotten personal conflicts in the heart of Elsinore remain

unresolved, all Denmark will fall pray to the machinations of Fortinbras, on whom Hamlet does

“prophecy th’ election lights” at the conclusion of the play (ibid 5.2.334).

The political is not the only larger sphere that the Ghost makes legible in Hamlet.

Encountering the Ghost of his father confronts Hamlet with “the fact of human mortality and his

own eventual destiny” (Belsey 13). As Belsey suggests, the use of ghosts in otherwise realistic

literature allows for “intimations of mortality not easily registered within a realist frame,” in that

death is a limit to human knowledge despite official theological or popular superstitions about

what might happen beyond death (ibid 2, 25). The inability to know what lies beyond life causes

a similar epistemic terror as is typical of encounters with the supernatural, leading Hamlet to

seriously ponder “the dread of something after death,” and that “the undiscovered country, from

whose bourn/ No traveller returns, puzzles the will,/ and makes us rather bear those ills we have/

Than fly to other we know not of” (Shakespeare 3.1.78-82). Despite Hamlet’s uncertainty of how

to either live or die, impending death forces us to action, but without such knowledge it leads to

the erroneous actions that have deep moral results.

As Townshend suggests, death thus stands in an intimate relation to truth, in that it causes

a break in the fabric of everyday life that needs to be epistemologically resolved (Townshend 74,

77). This is particularly the case in the Early Modern period, where the proper morning rituals

surrounding the Catholic notions of purgatory are cut short by Protestant skepticism, leading to

the anxiety of Hamlet’s need to remember and mourn his father (ibid 75-6). As Lacan later

suggested about the Gothic relation of ghosts to aborted mourning practices, what we don’t

mourn haunts us (ibid 77). The Ghost does not only allow Hamlet to recognize his own mortality

but also his uncertainty of what happens after death. Are we condemned to purgatory for our

sins, do we go to heaven – as he’s afraid Claudius might – despite our sins, can we kill ourselves

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and despite that go to heaven as does Ophelia, or, if we can’t know what happens beyond death,

does it matter if we die early and violently (Belsey 26)? “To be, or not to be, that is the question”

(Shakespeare 3.1.56). Far from granting Hamlet an answer however, the Ghost raises these

questions to the extent that Hamlet eventually must conclude, “since no man of aught he leaves

knows, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be” (Shakespeare 5.2.197-8). The Ghost ultimately forces

us to recognize the uncomfortable fact that, no matter what we do, we all will die.

In the end, death is the result of all human striving after power and knowledge; though

man is “noble in reason” we are yet “a quintessence of death” (ibid 1.2.293, 298). The tragedy

for Hamlet, like for the Early Modern age, is that problems of error, insufficient knowledge, and

theological misconception cost people their lives, and all attempts to philosophically examine the

human condition no more allow Horatio to explain events at the end as at the beginning of the

play (Landau 228, 230). Though Horatio attempts to “speak to th’ yet unknowing world/ How

these things came about,” the bodies on stage remain a mere spectacle of spiritless corpses

(Shakespeare 5.2.358-9, Townshend 74). Jonathon Dollimore asserts that the endings of

Shakespeare’s tragedies are opaque in regards to divine justice, but as Cox points out, in the

Reformation world, God is no longer “accessible to human reason” (Cox 39), echoing

Montaigne’s admission that we claim recourse to God’s design regardless of whether we can

know such a design, and may thus be forced to recognize our human limitations.

This stands as the crux of the Early Modern epistemological crises; that though we ought

not to limit the scope of possible knowledge – allowing for a belief in the supernatural that

broadens our epistemological frontiers; at the same time we are forced to recognize that we may

not be able to attain an ultimate source for religious or philosophical knowledge (Landau 230),

and are thus left with the guards in Hamlet, stranded on the uncertain castle walls telling ghost

stories for entertainment. Though the “strange eruption” of the Ghost raises questions about

history, mortality, and knowledge itself, it simultaneously troubles those questions to a greater

uncertainty, at least until Descartes revitalized the rational abilities of God for the Enlightenment.

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But within Shakespeare’s Early Modern period we may only be able to follow Horatio’s final

advice, that regardless of what we seek, “if aught of woe or wonder, cease your search… lest

more mischance/ On plots and errors happen” (Shakespeare 5.2.341-2, 373-4).

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