The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [387]
Shakespeare deliberately shrouds all this in a mysterious fog, where none of these points is anything like so clearly defined. We do not see the old king in life, so we have no direct evidence as to whether he was `light' or `dark. It is not even known that he had been murdered, since it was generally believed that he had died by accident, bitten by a snake. The play opens, at night, with the sentries talking in hushed tones on the battlements about having twice seen his ghost, and all the language used about this apparition makes it seem anything but a figure of light. When Horatio joins the watch, the Ghost makes a third appearance, looking grim and warlike, and disappears when a cock crow heralds the approach of daylight. Clearly this is a creature of darkness; and Horatio notes how, as light dawns, it had `started like a guilty thing' and scuttled away. Marcellus recalls the old folk belief that, in the nights around Christmas, no ghosts are seen, because the time is `so hallowed and so gracious' that `no spirit dare stir abroad'.
The first time we see the play's hero is the following day. Prince Hamlet has been plunged into suicidal depression by the death of his father and his mother's overhasty remarriage. `O God, God' he muses:
When his friend Horatio breaks in on this morbid soliloquising to tell him about the spectral vision of his father, Hamlet, in his disordered state, cannot wait for the moment when darkness returns and he too may see this creature of the night.
Hamlet's immediate response on seeing the Ghost suggests even more strongly that it is a personification of the dark power. 'Angels and ministers of grace defend us' he cries out, before asking the ghost whether it is a `spirit of health or goblin damned'. Horatio is fearful that the Ghost may deprive Hamlet of `the sovereignty of reason' and draw him into madness. Everything is calculated to make us see the Ghost as a deadly presence which bodes nothing but ill for Hamlet, and this is reinforced when it explains how it has come from a place where it is being fearfully punished for its `foul crimes: Although the Ghost speaks of this realm of everlasting fire as if it were purgatory, it sounds more like hell. Then this infernal apparition comes out with its real message. Hamlet must not believe that his father died because he was bitten by a snake. He was treacherously and horribly poisoned by his brother, and it is now Hamlet's duty to `revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.
What is so striking is how Shakespeare has taken the original version, based on the familiar symbolism of a son having to kill a 'dark Father' in order to become a `light Father, and put it so deliberately into the mould of Tragedy. How can it be right for Hamlet to follow the instructions of this messenger from hell? The very course so many heroes need to take in order to reach the happy ending is now presented as the first fatal step on a tragic downward spiral. And once Shakespeare has launched Hamlet on this path, we see how the rest of the play follows the archetypal five-stage tragic pattern,
The first act has been the Anticipation Stage. The Ghost has provided the Focus, and Shakespeare has presented him as a Tempter, egging Hamlet on to do something which is thoroughly dark. The play's second act is the Dream Stage, in which Hamlet pretends to have parted company with reality, as a cover for the deadly course on which he is now set. The height of this comes when he arranges to put on the play which will confirm Claudius's guilt. Even now Hamlet is not certain the Ghost was telling the truth. But The Mousetrap is the device in which he will `catch the conscience of the king'.
As evidence for what is really