Hamlet, madness and ghosts.

[ShadesmarBead]

I’m reading (and loving) Hamlet for the first time before I go and see the NT Live performance at the cinema this Thursday.

From listening to you Tube videos/podcasts and the text I understand that one of the themes of the play relates to madness, and the question of is Hamlet ‘mad’?

Obviously our modern day understanding of metal health conditions and psychiatry are different to those at the time of Shakespeare’s day but I am impressed by his writing and portrayal of MH symptoms we would recognise today (low mood, suicidal ideations, pressured speech, flight of ideas, unkempt appearance etc).

I would love to know how the inclusion of a ghost would have been perceived by the audience at the time of its initial production. Today, visual and auditory hallucinations of a dead father encouraging revenge would definitely be perceived as symptoms of psychosis, but when Shakespeare wrote it did (some? more?) of the general population think that such things were real? Or would the audience then as now suspend their belief and understand the ghost as an important device to get the plot started?

More so the latter I'd say, the audience would have taken it as a plot device or metaphor - unlike other Shakespearean ghosts this one appears and speaks to multiple different characters rather than just being an eerie presence e.g. Banquo at the feast, so on a superficial level at least we're invited to take the character of the ghost as 'real' within the world of the play, although of course as with all things Shakespeare there are multiple different layers of meaning and interpretation, you can definitely also read it as Hamlet losing his grip on reality and others either being drawn into his trauma or playing along with his directions (like actors in a play).

Remember the play wasn't set in contemporary (to Shakespeare) England, it's in a fictionalised late mediaeval Denmark which would have emphasised the 'unreality' of what was being watched even to Shakespeare's audience (many of whom by the by probably did believe in ghosts, as do many modern audiences!).

Shakespeare plays a lot in Hamlet with the idea of metaphor and reality/unreality, truth/lies, deception/self-deception with the whole play within a play thing and 'there are more things on earth Horatio' and so on. The playwright is definitely encouraging us to be quite conscious that we're watching a play and actors with lots of theatrical references, and therefore to think about what that means about the nature of reality and existence - the term existentialism wasn't coined for several hundred years after but you could say Hamlet was a pioneering existentialist text...

Thank you for your reply @NoctuaAthene
I hadn’t realised that the play is set in a different time period to that of the original audience (not sure if that is due to my ignorance or Shakespeare’s timeless writing). I did wonder if it was a fictionalised Denmark with all the weird (not-at-all-Nordic) names.

I absolutely love all the multilayered meanings to everything in this play and how they all raise more and more questions. Just the character of the ghost has had me down a rabbit hole of WTF does this mean??

Cant wait to watch it performed later this week.

Bear in mind that other characters (Bernardo, Marcellus, Horatio) also see the Ghost, including when Hamlet isn’t present (and recognise him as the old king), so even though Gertrude can’t see him when he appears in her closet to Hamlet, he does seem to exist as ‘real’ within the play.

Also that there’s a contemporary point being raised for Sh’s own audience, at a time when Protestant and Catholic beliefs and practices were still at loggerheads in a technically C of E country — the Ghost says he’s come from Purgatory, where he is enduring torment because he died without the last rites. The C of E has no such place. Some critics have used it as part of the evidence to suggest S was a secret Catholic, others just think he’s drawing on a Catholic worldview which lingered still.

Thanks @Wapentake
How wonderful would it have been to listen in on an every man or woman’s take on the ideas raised about purgatory from Shakespeare’s time.
Hamlet’s decision not to kill Claudius while he is praying as his soul would go straight to heaven is also really interesting. Is that a catholic doctrine too?

In the play I watched last night they chose to do something interesting with the ghost. So he is ‘real’ (played by a walking talking actor) in the first act so Horatio et al interact with him too. In the closet scene with Gertrude he doesn’t reappear, Hamlet is just talking to an empty chair. I think this means that the director has chosen in this version to commit to Hamlet most definitely descending into true madness by this point in the play.

Hamlet only pretends to be mad. His problem isn’t madness but intelligence. He has a piercing, penetrating intellect that paralyses him. It’s not so much that he can’t take revenge, more that he can’t see the point.

Harold Bloom is amazing on Shakespeare. He writes that Hamlet is an intellectual trapped in a grotty revenge tragedy - almost as if he knows he’s in a play. I sometimes feel the same about characters in novels, where they are too big for the story and can’t be contained by it (Lizzie in Pride and Prejudice, for example, or Micawber in David Copperfield, or even Jeeves in the P. G. Wodehouse books).

If you haven't already seen it I recommend the episode of Who Do You Think You Are? with Judi Dench for her Denmark/Shakespeare connection.