Post No. 13,816
Date uploaded in London – 25 October 2024
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Ghosts in Shakespeare‘s Plays (Post No.13,816)
Ghosts appear in five Shakespearean plays: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Richard the Third, Macbeth and Cymbeline. In all but one of these plays, and in many other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas, a ghost is a murdered person who needs someone to avenge their deaths.
Their function is to warn the hero of the play to revenge their deaths, and/ or to torment their murderers.
The plays and the ghosts are:
Hamlet: Hamlet Senior.
Macbeth: Banquo.
Richard III: Everyone Richard killed or was in some or another responsible for or connected to.
Julius Caesar: Caesar.
Cymbeline: Pot humus’s father mother and brothers.
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The appearance of a ghost in the opening scenes of “Hamlet” suggests that this is a play with Catholic sympathies at a time when this was a dangerous affiliation. Ghosts were a feature of the world of superstition and witchcraft that Protestant Europe wanted to leave behind, making the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s father a provocative gesture.
in “Shakespeare’s Ghosts,” F.W. Moorman sheds some light on some of the earlier history of the supernatural. In the Middle Ages a popular belief was “that the ghosts of criminals, suicides, or murdered persons, walked the earth after death, that they sometimes entered into compacts with the living, that they appeared at midnight and ‘faded on the crowing of the cock,’ and that at their approach the lights grew dim—all this is a part of the primitive ghost-lore common to most European nations” (Moorman 197). This is very similar to contemporary ideas about the supernatural that exist in the United States. Keeping these beliefs in mind, Moorman goes on to say that, because of these beliefs, the Catholic church was able to better prove the idea of purgatory.
Moorman quotes Louis Lavater, who was a Swiss protestant reformer, that Catholics believed that “… they come from Purgatory, and are permitted to walk the earth for a season, ‘for instructing and terrifying of the living.’
Despite the progressing enlightenment of the Renaissance, superstition was still rampant among Elizabethan Londoners, and a belief in such things as astrology was common .
Bear-baiting, was a highly popular spectator sport, and the structure where they were generally held was not unlike the theatres of the day. A bear was chained to a stake in the centre of the pit, and a pack of large dogs was turned loose to bait, or fight, him. The bear eventually tired was mauled by the dogs. Then there were the public hangings, whippings, or drawing and quarterings for an afternoon’s entertainment. So, the violence in some of Shakespeare’s plays was clearly directed at an audience that revelled in it.
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Did Shakespeare believe in ghosts? We have no evidence as to what Shakespeare personally
believed. What we can say is that he knew that a ghost was a very effective dramatic device. So too with devils and spirits. In the early 1590s, as he was carving out his career as a player and playwright, two of the most
celebrated plays in the London theatre repertoire were Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, which is presided over by the Ghost of Don Andrea and a personification of Revenge, and Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, conjuror of the devilish spirit Mephistopheles. In each case, the supernatural is the driver of the action: the demand for revenge in one case, the quest for illicit knowledge in the other.
Shakespeare’s ghosts are visible to some but not all characters.
Hamlet is mourning the loss of his father when he hears something worse. The ghost of his father appears to him and asks him to avenge his murder.
(Quotes on Ghosts are given at the bottom of this post)
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Hindu Ghost Stories
In India, Hindu texts have lot of ghost stories. Katha Sarit Sagara has several ghost stories. Vikram and Vetal is the most popular ghost story. Brahma Rakshas (the brahmin ghost) appear in several books. Even Ramakrishna Paramahamsa told us the ghost that gave a barber seven jars of gold . This is like Hindu Midas story. Swami Vivekananda said that some spirits followed him seeking help and he prayed strongly for them and then they stopped coming.
Ananatha Rama Dikshitar, famous religious speaker, also narrated a story in the eighth part of Jayamangala Stotra about driving a ghost.
But the most notorious ghost mentioned by Tiru Gnana Sambandar (600 CE) and Tirumular (around 800 CE) and in several Tamil proverbs is the woman ghost of Neeli; She kiiled 70 Chettiars/ Businessmen.
Every town and village in India has a ghost story and people are scared to go there in the night. But the modern men who live in crowded multi story buildings never bothered about lonely places or the ghosts; in fact they are scarce in crowded India.
Hindus believed that the people who died due to murder, suicide, accidents wander as ghosts. Brahma rakshas or the Brahmin ghosts are the ones who committed some offence and died. Till this day we see ghost busters in rural parts. They are more in Kerala.
Many of the ghost stories are false; they are spread by people who wanted some juicy stories. Criminals also used them to keep the people away from their dens.
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Ghostly Quotes of Shakespeare
A collection of Shakespearean quotations on ghosts, witches and omens :
I have heard (but not believ’d) the spirits of the dead
May walk again: if such thing be, thy mother
Appeared to me last night; for ne’er was dream
So like a waking.
(The Winter’s Tale, 3.3)
Angels, and ministers of grace, defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn’d.
Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell.
Be thy intents wicked or charitable.
Thou com’st in such a questionable shape,
That I will speak to thee.
(Hamlet, 1.4)
But, soft: behold! lo where it comes again!
I’ll cross it, though it blast me. – Stay, illusion!
If thou hast any sound, or use a voice.
Speak to me.
(Hamlet, 1.1)
What may this mean.
That thou, dead corse, again, in complete steel,
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon.
Making night hideous ; and we, fools of nature,
So horridly to shake our disposition,
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this?
(Hamlet, 1.4)
My hour is almost come,
When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself.
(Hamlet, 1.5)
O, answer me:
Let me not burst in ignorance! but tell,
Why thy canoniz’d bones, hears’d in death,
Have burst their cerements! why the sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn’d.
Hath op’d his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast thee up again.
(Hamlet, 1.4)
Why, what care I ? If thou canst nod, speak too, –
If charnel-houses, and our graves, must send
Those that we bury, back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites.
(Macbeth, 3.4)
The ghost of Caesar hath appear’d to me
Two several times by night : at Sardis, once;
And, this last night, here in Philippi fields.
I know, my hour is come.
(Julius Caesar, 5.5)
Glendower. – I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur. – Why, so can I; or so can any man:
But will they come when you do call for them ?
(1 Henry IV, 3.1)
Infected he the air whereon they ride,
And damned all those that trust them.
(Macbeth, 4.1)
The night has been unruly: where we lay,
Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i’ the air; strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible
Of dire combustion and confused events
New hatch’d to the woeful time: the obscure bird
Clamour’d the livelong night: some say, the earth
Was feverous and did shake.
(Macbeth, 2.3)
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
(Macbeth, 4.1)
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol;
The noise of battle hurtled in the air,
Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan,
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.
(Julius Caesar, 2.2)
The bay-trees in our country are all wither’d
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth
And lean-look’d prophets whisper fearful change.
(Richard II, 2.4)
For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,
And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger;
At whose approach, ghosts, wandering here and there,
Troop home to churchyards: damned spirits all,
That in crossways and floods have burial,
Already to their wormy beds are gone.
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.2)
The southern wind
Doth play the trumpet to his purposes,
And by his hollow whistling in the leaves
Foretells a tempest and a blustering day.
(1 Henry IV, 5.1)
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.
(Hamlet, 1.1), Bernardo to Horatio, speaking of Hamlet’s father’s ghost.
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse:
And even the like precurse of fierce events,
As harbingers preceding still the fates
And prologue to the omen coming on,
Have heaven and earth together demonstrated
Unto our climatures and countrymen.
(Hamlet, 1.1)
At my nativity
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
Of burning cressets; and at my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shaked like a coward.
(1 Henry IV, 3.1)
No natural exhalation in the sky,
No scope of nature, no distemper’d day,
No common wind, no customed event,
But they will pluck away his natural cause
And call them meteors, prodigies and signs,
Abortives, presages and tongues of heaven.
(King John, 3.4)
Calpurnia here, my wife, stays me at home:
She dreamt to-night she saw my statua,
Which, like a fountain with an hundred spouts,
Did run pure blood: and many lusty Romans
Came smiling, and did bathe their hands in it:
And these does she apply for warnings, and portents,
And evils imminent; and on her knee
Hath begg’d that I will stay at home to-day.
(Julius Caesar, 2.2)
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight?
(Macbeth, 2.1)
Bloody thou art; bloody will be thy end.
(Richard III, 4.4)
Before the times of change, still is it so:
By a divine instinct men’s minds mistrust
Ensuing dangers; as by proof, we see
The waters swell before a boisterous storm.
(Richard III, 2.3)
How bloodily the sun begins to peer
Above yon busky hill! the day looks pale
At his distemperature.
(1 Henry IV, 5.1)
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MY OLD POSTS ON GHOSTS
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1.
26 Mar 2016 – Tansen and Tamarind Tree! Ghosts in Tamarind Trees! (Post No 2666). tansen tomb. Research Article by london swaminathan. Date: 26 March ..
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MUSLIM, CHRISTIAN SUPERSTITION ANECDOTES (Post No.4725)
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Date: 19 July 2017; Post No. 4096
White Mustard Seeds to drive away the Ghosts!
Research Article No.1743; Date:- 23 March, 2015
–Subham—
Tags- Ghosts, Spirits, Apparitions, Shakespeare plays, Hindu Texts, Vikram and Vetal, Brahmarakshas
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