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King Hamlet's Ghost in Belleforest?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2021
Extract
In the voluminous literature which has arisen in connection with all possible aspects of Shakespeare's Hamlet, a respectable percentage is found to deal with the Ghost. The character, function, and antecedents of the Ghost, like those of the other dramatis personae, have been subjected to the most searching scrutiny and analysis. In particular, Shakespeare's use of a ghost rôle in Hamlet has been discussed in relationship to the evolution of the Senecan ghost in Elizabethan drama, and compared to other “revenge” ghosts of contemporary or earlier authors. In the light of the obvious relationship of the ghost rôle in Hamlet to that of the Senecan-Elizabethan stage ghost, no further pedigree has seemed necessary for the Ghost himself as a character in the play. This is the more understandable in that, so far as I have been able to ascertain, the scholars who have discussed the sources of Hamlet have been unanimous in stating or implying that no trace of the Ghost exists in any of the accepted sources of the play. With the general accuracy of these impressions regarding the genesis of the rôle there can be no quarrel. It should nevertheless interest and perhaps startle researchers and students in the field to learn that the ghost of Hamlet's father did “appear” in one of the accepted sources of the play, the Histoires tragiques of François de Belieforest.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962
References
Notes
1 See, for example, Anton Adolph Raven, A Hamlet Bibliography and Reference Guide, 1877-1935 (Chicago, 1935), pp. 220-223.
2 For a useful summary of recent discussion of the Ghost, and in particular on the question of its relationship to Elizabethan pneumatology, see Robert H. West, “King Hamlet's Ambiguous Ghost,” PMLA, lxx (December 1955), 1107-17. The Ghost as a revenge ghost is fully discussed by Fredson T. Bowers in his Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 1587-1642 (Princeton, 1940), pp. 62-100.
3 An obvious exception would be the Ur-Hamlet, or supposed lost pre-Shakespearean Hamlet play; indeed the only personage besides Hamlet himself whom we know positively to have been in this play is the Ghost (cf. well-known references such as that in Robert Nash's introduction to Thomas Greene's Menaphon). With the tangled questions of the authorship of the Ur-Hamlet and its relationship to the Hamlet of Shakespeare we are not concerned here; it is to be noted, however, that if Shakespeare himself is not the author of the Ur-Hamlet, then it may well have been the earlier author who evolved the Ghost in essentially its present form, and hence was the immediate beneficiary of any “influences.”
4 Belleforest (1530-82) took his version of the Hamlet story from the Danish historian, Saxo Grammaticus, altering somewhat the facts of the narrative, but more particularly imposing upon it his personal morality.
5 The question of the edition of Belieforest's story most likely to have served the author of the English play is complex; readers interested in the evidence in favor of the edition here cited are referred to my study, The Histoires Tragiques of François de Belleforest (Univ. of Virginia diss., 1959; LC Mic. 59-4246).
6 The use of enfer in the plural in French typically refers to the pagan Hades, in the singular to the Christian Hell. If Belieforest's shade is accepted as having influenced the Ghost in Hamlet, additional weight would thus seem to be lent to the arguments of those who maintain that Shakespeare intended to represent the Ghost as pagan rather than Christian (e.g., Roy W. Battenhouse, “The Ghost in Hamlet: a Catholic ‘Linchpin‘?” SP, xlviii (1951), 161-192, who also notes [p. 192] that Belleforest, in his introductory remarks, takes pains to situate his story in pre-Christian Denmark). It should, however, be noted that the theological evidence in the Belleforest story, like that in the Shakespeare play, is ambiguous. While there is little doubt that Belleforest places his shade in Hades rather than in Hell, still our pious author feels uneasy over Hamlet's usurpation of the Divine prerogative of vengeance, and goes to some pains to justify him (discussed by Bowers, op. cit., pp. 87-88). With Belleforest, who at his best is notably inconsistent, this mixing of Christian and Classical morality and attribute is almost certainly accidental; it is the thesis of West (see n. 2) that in Shakespeare the ambiguity of the Ghost's attributes is intentional.
7 Bowers takes note of this passage from Belleforest in the work cited, pp. 87-88; he does not, however, note any possible connection of this spirit to the Ghost. Since the original completion of this article, however, the possibility of such a connection has been noted by Bernard Grebanier in his The Heart of Hamlet: the Play that Shakespeare Wrote (New York, 1960), p. 78: “There is no Ghost in the tale. That character . . . was added by Kyd . . . Kyd may have taken the hint, it seems to us, from Hamblet's last speech to Fengon.”
8 In some editions of the Histoires tragiques the variant indigne, rather than indigné, is to be found. If this is the authentic reading, then King Horwendil was represented as “unworthy [undeserving] of such strange treatment” rather than “indignant at” it. The latter expression would of course have a more vividly evocative force than the former; either reading makes perhaps equal sense in Belleforest's loose sixteenth-century syntax. Again the point is more fully discussed in my study of the Histoires tragiques.
9 Cf. Hamlet i.v.
10 In this connection it should also be recalled that it is from the very meagerly characterized prototypes of Belleforest's tale that the rôles of Polonius and Ophelia, altered almost beyond recognition, were created; the adaptor was then reading with attention to detail.
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