Page 58 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

I N T R O D U C T I O N Ii

turn to earth or that souls might be released from Hell
to do so. Many of them, therefore, came to the con-
clusion that ghosts could not possibly be the dead, and
must be spirits of another sort. They might conceivably
be angels, but in most instances they were undoubtedly
devils who 'assumed'—such was the technical word—
the forms of the departed for their own evil purposes.
Catholic theologians, on the other hand, defended the
traditional explanation with much learning and industry.
The dispute was one of the major interests of the period.
'Of all the common and familiar subjects of conversa-
tion,' writes one of the controversialists, 'that are entered
upon in company concerning things remote from nature
and cut off from the senses, there is none so ready to
hand, none so usual, as that of visions of Spirits, and
whether what is said of them is true. It is the topic that
people most readily discuss and on which they linger the
longest, because of the abundance of examples; the
subject being fine and pleasing and the discussion the
1
least tedious that can be found .*
All this, the controversy and the various points of view
belonging to i^ is mirrored, very faithfully and in-
terestingly mirrored, in Hamlet. The 'philosopher*
Horatio and the simple soldier-man Marcellus stand
respectively for the sceptical and the traditional inter-
pretations. But Hamlet, the student of Wittenberg, is
chiefly swayed by Protestant prepossessions. When he
first hears of the Ghost he says
If it assume my noble fetter's person,
I'll speak to it though hell itself should gape
And bid me hold my peace 5

1
v. p. 22a of Lewes Lavater, Of Ghostes and Spirites
walking by Nyght (1572), ed. by J. Dover Wilson and
May Yardley, 1929. In my Introduction and Miss Yardley's
essay on 'The Catholic position of the Ghost Controversy
of the Sixteenth Century' will be found a lengthy treatment
of the spiritualistic problems of Hamlet*