Chapter Six
Hamlet's Ghost Fear

Quam multa iniusta ac prava fiunt moribus.
—Terence^[1]

Tradition may justify social usages of all degrees of importance, because customs "contain in themselves the authority of the ancestral ghosts," according to William Graham Sumner: "It may well be believed that notions of right and duty, and of social welfare, were first developed in connection with ghost fear."^[2] Anxiety arises because "the ghosts of ancestors would be angry if the living should change the ancient folk-ways."^[3]

The phenomenon of "ghost fear" as it lingers in the custom of the castle is the tribute paid by romance to the necessarily irrational foundations of community itself, a tribute to the power of an institution or way of life, though posed in narrative terms. An example of ghost fear occurs in a scene in the prose Tristan , one that Malory abridges and that was a source for Ariosto's Tower of Tristan episode. The scene occurs after Tristan and Sir Dynadans ask some shepherds (whose acumen impressed Ariosto) if they know of any lodging. The shepherds say that a castle is nearby, where the custom is that knights must joust against their hosts. The moral issue of knowingly maintaining a foul custom soon

emerges. Dynadans excoriates the "vilainne coustume" that they maintain in their "ostel" (T2 2:132). Only a "vilain," not a knight, makes stranger knights battle before receiving hospitality! The knights answer that their fathers long maintained this custom ("Or saciés bien que nostre peres maintint ceste coustume mout longement," T2 2:133). Therefore they must maintain it until they die, for love of them ("pour l'amour de lui," T2 2:133). Dynadans responds that they offer hostility, not hospitality ("vostre maison n'est pas herberge, ains est tout droitement osteus, car il oste menu et souvent ses ostes!" T2 2:133). Although the lords of this castle make no impression on the japing Dynadans, their excuse is powerful. They maintain the custom because their fathers established it.

Another example, in Malory, occurs when Brunor le Noire, called La Cote Male Taile, explains that he wears a rich but hewn garment because his father was slain in it as he slept, and Brunor seeks revenge on his killer. Brunor accepts his duty without anxiety (and Malory merely comments at the end of his story that he avenged his father's death, after Arthur awards him the Castle of Pendragon which escheated from Sir Brian de les Isles, MD 9.9). In the story of the Weeping Castle, as we have seen, Galahalt feels compelled to avenge his father's death even though he despises the distant isle where he was born and the custom whose maintenance made Sir Tristram his enemy.

Ghost fear also holds Hamlet in its grip, as he feels pressured to conform to the old ways of the past, to take the revenge his father's ghost asks for, even though his reason is unpersuaded. Terry Eagleton contrasts Hamlet's commitment to traditions with the disdain for popular customs expressed by Coriolanus, who represents a new type of "bourgeois individualist," scornful of public forms and "as superbly assured in his inward being as Hamlet is shattered in his."^[4] Stanley Cavell claims that Hamlet's father's request for revenge "deprives his son of his identity, of enacting his own existence—it curses, as if spitefully, his being born of this father."^[5] Hilary Gatti relates Hamlet's father to the collective ghosts of all ideal fathers: she thus identifies Hamlet's grounds for

"revolt against prevailing cultural modes in the name of a more heroic past symbolized in the figure of a lost father."^[6] The phenomenon of "ghost fear," which links Hamlet to the old romance topos of the custom of the castle, involves the recognition by members of a human community that such "irrational" bonds as custom or taboo play a tremendous role in sustaining communities as communities. Whether registered on the level of superstition or general cultural anxiety, the "irrational" custom or tradition plays a role in sustaining society as a sphere within which it is then possible to make "rational" decisions about right and wrong, justice and injustice.

Justice is not a few rules or a set of demands, such as the acceptance of a duty of revenge. It requires knowledge, not a blind following of convention. Socrates makes this point in Plato's Republic , which concludes that virtue depends on the status of an agent, not his or her deed. As Julia Annas explains, "You cannot say what a virtue is by giving a list of kinds of action, for the same kind of action might not display that virtue, and the virtue might be displayed in other kinds of action."^[7] Spenser puts the same idea into narrative form in the legend of courtesy, where he refuses to list specific attributes of the virtue. Shakespeare's Hamlet seeks a similar resolution, but in a dramatic mode, to the conflict between action and knowledge. Like a castellan, or a knight errant who suddenly finds himself or herself forced to defend the foul ways of a castle, Hamlet explains the ways of Denmark to Horatio, raises questions about the meaning of what he must do, engages in a duel, and seems committed to customs. More important, the play throws onto the audience the burden of thinking about the arbitrary nature of convention and the relationship between force and justice. The play therefore mirrors Plato's conception of justice, with devices similar to those of chivalric romance, but with a twist. Where chivalric romance represents social practice in the form of a joust to win hospitality or a woman or to escape the demand for a toll as a way of talking about justice, violence, order, and civility, Hamlet represents the force of customs by hiding them.

I

We want desperately to know the customs of Denmark, and much of the power of Hamlet derives from the fact that we never do. Custom is mentioned more times in Hamlet than in any other Shakespeare play, and given a full range of meanings, but specific customs are often shrouded in mystery, making it difficult to project how Danes should behave. "Is it a custom?" asks Horatio in the fourth scene, after Hamlet explains how the king revels, but to what does Horatio refer? The king's drinking, his excessive drinking, or his drinking late at night? The kettledrum and trumpet "triumph" that follows each draught? Or—perhaps most logically—the disconcerting discharge of artillery, about which Horatio first asks, "What does this mean, my lord?" Hamlet answers directly—"it is a custom"—but pursues his own line of thought, never clarifying the custom (Hamlet 1.4.15). Eventually he gives Horatio a moral discourse about the effect of drunkenness on the national character. From this swirl of uncertainties, some meaning emerges: there is a royal Danish tradition of reveling to the point even of cannon fire that Hamlet's father had demurred from observing.

Despite this seeming clarity, cloudiness prevails in Denmark. The most ambiguous element in this midnight conversation is Hamlet's concession that he is "native here / And to the manner born." His saying "but to my mind, though I am native here" implies that he disagrees with his country's custom, that he approves of breaching it—"it is a custom / More honor'd in the breach than the observance" (Hamlet 1.4.15-16). But if Hamlet agrees with this breach, this battering of the wall of custom, his "though" is unnecessary. For the concessive suggests that Hamlet opposes even that custom he has witnessed, when not in Wittenburg, during the thirty years of his life—the time of his father's reign. He should say, "But to my mind, and I am a native here / And to the manner born," we don't usually do this sort of thing, although there is an old out-of-date tradition for it. A copulative would serve, but it

would also provide a definite statement of what the custom has been.

Such precision the play avoids here and everywhere. Certainly Danish drunkenness has never gone out of style, or Hamlet could not complain that his country is "traduc'd and tax'd of other nations." But the nature of the drunkenness oscillates. Drinking in Denmark is both excessive—"they clip us drunkards"—and minimal, important in its unimportance, a "vicious mole," "defect," or "dram of eale" whose corrupting influence is out of proportion to its size (Hamlet 1.4.18-36). We may say that Hamlet objects to the sign of the drinking, not the drinking itself. Rather than condemning the vice in his ensuing speech, Hamlet complains about how foreigners perceive Danish drunkenness. But if he is indeed meditating on the corrupting influence of Claudius, it is a corruption that at this point, before the appearance of his father's ghost, only he can see. His literal objection, this early in the play, would then be not to the stain of Claudius but to his uncle's Machiavellian exploitation of a popular Danish pastime to ingratiate himself with the people. For if all Danes drink, then Claudius is merely one of the boys, so to speak, and cannot infect the state. This logic supports the normal reading, that the custom to which Hamlet objects is the loud ceremony that accompanies and calls attention to the drinking. This is the custom one usually honors by breaching it, by not observing it. The custom of this custom is that it is not a custom—the custom is out of fashion.

The anxieties of a culture caught in a moment of painful transition shape the patterns of customary behavior in Hamlet that form and un-form before our eyes. Within the castle walls at Elsinore, codes of behavior have been lost or no longer obtain. The resulting social crisis has been obscured by debates about Hamlet's character or strictly ontological issues such as whether the ghost is really a demon, or whether an injunction to revenge is morally valid or was considered morally valid by Shakespeare's original audience. Hamlet's actions have been treated as a problem of individuality and identity. But that Shakespeare hides the mores of Denmark does not mean that such issues are aspects of Hamlet's or Gertrude's or the ghost's character and status. Instead, the play is

about our struggle to make sense of patterns, codes, and ideals of conduct that have suddenly become important to a man living through a social transition.

II

Custom, writes Jonathan Dollimore, was the sixteenth century's word for ideology. Customs were regarded as both social practices and a means for the ruling class to control society.^[8] But customs are not just instruments of oppression, argues Marshall Sahlins in Culture and Practical Reason . They are expressions of a more deeply symbolic order. Customs are arbitrary in the sense Ferdinand de Saussure meant when he noted that there is no inherent relation between a sound-image and a concept. All words that express similar concepts in a given language determine the value of any term. Moreover, language mediates our perception of objects. Taken alone, neither practical reason nor culture (defined as a common understanding that transcends immediate circumstances) accounts for the symbolic logic that organizes behavior. Both together determine social forms. For Sahlins, therefore, a culture harnesses nature to its own symbolic work, because symbolism is not inherent in objects, but instead arises from a culture's perception of objects.^[9]

Hamlet faces a particular, even emblematic, problem of custom when he must respond to his dead father's presence. More than a catalyst to action, the ghost's appearance calls Hamlet to articulate his passionate attachment to the forms of things past whose loss he mourns. A variety of social ambiguities tease us because they offer themselves to historical positioning—current debates over drinking,^[10] or the fashion of wearing hats, or child actors—everything from suits of woe to Italian penmanship. Hamlet dies in a rapier duel, a social practice that had only recently come into fashion in late sixteenth-century England.

The effect of Hamlet's mirroring of contemporary England is to establish the illusion that new customs are urging themselves to the fore

in Elsinore. Ophelia takes as a sign of madness that Hamlet came to her with "no hat upon his head" (Hamlet 2.1.76). But later, Hamlet offers Osric a subtle lesson in how a social system may refuse to recognize another's good intentions, when he mocks Osric's social address by asking him to put his "bonnet to his right use, 'tis for the head" (Hamlet 5.2.92).^[11] For Osric, the forms of ceremony require that he take off his hat when speaking to his superior. Osric then experiences the panic of one for whom specific rules fail. When Montaigne visited Italy, he could not get over the fact that Alfonso if, the duke of Ferrara, removed his hat as a mark of respect to his visitors when they entered, and did not replace it until the audience ended.^[12] In contrast a later entry in his journal noted that the pope doffed his cap to no one ("le pape ne tire jamais le bonnet à qui que ce soit").^[13] Lancelot Andrewes traces to the Apostles' times the contention over "whether men were to pray uncovered , and women veiled or no?"^[14] Sumner (who knew Hamlet ) cited tipping the hat among usages that "contain no principle of welfare, but serve convenience so long as all know what they are expected to do."^[15] Although Boccaccio in his Filocolo makes a game of whether doffing a garland or putting it on signals more respect, the issue could be very serious.^[16] Suffolk's pride could not endure that he should "stand uncover'd to the vulgar groom" (2 Henry VI 4.1.124-128). These questions of what came to be called etiquette produce an anxiety of civility—civility in the sense Puttenham means it, as that which has to do with public society.^[17]

If sixteenth-century thinkers did not define customs as the arbitrary and symbolic expression of a culture, they nonetheless questioned the validity of customs as a source of values, despite their apparent usefulness. Customs represented the voice of the past but still required interpretation, giving them a two-faced or Janus-like quality. They were able to undergo change through time while remaining one and the same thing, like a substance that remains constant while what Aristotle would call its "accidents" change. Customs, since they were of no certain origin, were both always old and always new. This notion of precedence is the key to the strange concept of the "ancient constitution" that played

such a strong role in shaping English common law in the years when Shakespeare was writing.

The essence of custom was that it was immemorial, and the argument could . . . be used that, since the people had retained a given custom through many centuries, it had proved itself apt to meet all the emergencies which had arisen during that period. Custom was tam antiqua et tam nova , always immemorial and always perfectly up-to-date.^[18]

Custom was also a rhetorical as well as legal topic.^[19] When Thomas Wilson in his Arte of Rhetorique defined custom as that "which long time hath confirmed, being partly grounded upon nature, and partly upon reason," he did so to show how an orator could manipulate custom to suit his persuasive purpose.^[20] That is, the orator could discourse on time, nature, or reason, and define each to suit his topic. In particular the possibility of defining time to fit one's argument had been recognized at least since Saint Augustine, who confessed that he knew what time was as long as no one asked him, but when someone asked "What is time?" he did not know. Paul Ricoeur begins Time and Narrative with Augustine's remark to support his claim that time cannot be defined, only narrated.^[21] Ricoeur's thought, in turn, suggests that narrative is not so much a literary form as a category of knowledge, as time and space were for Kant. In postmodern terms, stories structure our experience of the world.^[22] When a dying Hamlet instructs Horatio "to tell my story," he realizes that Horatio will only be able to recount it "more or less": "the rest is silence" (Hamlet 5.2.349, 357-358).

The temporal indeterminacy of Shakespeare's As You Like It , another play about a young man whose father's spirit impels him to action against current corruption,^[23] corresponds to our inability to construct a full account of Hamlet . In the comedy, probably written just before Hamlet , it is unclear how long Duke Senior has lived in the Forest of Arden: Charles the wrestler implies at one point that Duke Frederick has only recently banished his brother, but Celia later says she was "young"

when the banishment occurred.^[24] When Duke Senior asks his forest followers whether "old custom" has not "made this life more sweet / Than that of painted pomp?" (As You Like It 2.1.2.), he may mean that he and his followers have grown accustomed over a long time to winter and rough weather, or he may mean that they have rediscovered in the pastoral setting certain lost virtues of friendship and consideration—the "old custom" that, the play suggests, they will bring back to court as soon as the plot allows them to return after their sojourn in the forest.

Hamlet never learns what to do—or more precisely, when to do it. Orlando, by contrast, receives good instruction. Rosalind's education of her lover, moreover, takes the form of lessons in timing, from her initial lecture on the varying pace of time—it trots, ambles, or gallops according to circumstances—to her insistence that Orlando be on time in keeping his appointments with her. As a strong woman who shapes the social order to suit herself, Rosalind is Shakespeare's successor to Spenser's Britomart and Ariosto's female warriors (Marfisa and Bradamante), who compete with men in the customs of chivalry, often by controlling time, while wandering through the forests of romance. Rosalind's instruction of a rather bewildered Orlando—she cures his passion by polishing his manners—turns her restoration, by means of the play's powers of illusion, into the vision of a better world of courtesy and civility, a world of good customs to which the medieval concept of chivalry continues to be applied.^[25]

The proper names of As You Like It (Arden, Orlando, Oliver, Charles) echo those of the Italian romanzi . (In Thomas Lodge's euphuistic pastoral Rosalynde , Shakespeare's direct source, the hero is named Rosader, not Orlando.) Shakespeare almost certainly knew the custom of the castle topos, not just from John Harington's translation of the Furioso or from The Faerie Queene , but also from commonly reprinted chivalric romances such as Malory's Morte Darthur, Bevis of Hampton, Palmerin of Englande, Palmerin d'Oliva , and especially Amadis of Gaul , where every adventure of both Amadis and his brother Galaor involves a castle and a foul custom, often the product of an enchantment that prevents a young

lady from attaining her rightful inheritance.^[26] Given the shift in mode from chivalric narrative to drama, the custom of the castle forms the background to Shakespeare's imagery if not the object of his direct imitation. Customs remain an important theme in Shakespeare's later plays, one whose meaning can be brought out by keeping in mind the elements of the custom of the castle topos: the keeper of the custom, the errant knight who faces it, the nature of the custom, and the castle that contains it.

III

Shakespeare rarely uses the word custom in plays earlier than Henry V , where the first use of a form of the word occurs when York speaks of the king's "customary rights" in France. Attracted by the perquisites of custom, King Henry sends Exeter to France to say that he intends to have all the honors that belong to the crown of France "by custom, and the ordinance of times" (Henry V 2.4.83). By the end of the play, Henry finds in his use of custom a way to legitimize the royal inheritance left him by his usurping father. His boldness contrasts to the vascillations of disinherited Hamlet.

To avoid offending the ghost of those ancestral kings whose line his own father had usurped, Henry V learns to manipulate customs. We see his political acumen in symbolic form at the end of the play as Henry woos Katherine of France. When he wants to kiss her, he ignores her appeal to custom, which is given in French to stress its ineffectiveness (just as York wants the king to say "pardon" in French to nullify the efficacy of the words in Richard II ): "Les dames et demoiselles pour être baisée devant leur noces, il n'est pas la coutume de France."^[27] When Henry kisses her, he overcomes custom as a sign of Katherine's otherness and opposition to him. He also affirms his political dominance.

O Kate, nice customs cur'sy to great kings. Dear Kate, you and I cannot be confin'd within the weak list of a country's fashion. We are the makers of manners, Kate; and the liberty that follows our places

stops the mouth of all find-faults, as I will do yours, for upholding the nice fashion of your country in denying me a kiss; therefore patiently and yielding. [Kissing her .] (Henry V 5.2.268-275)

Henry's theory that he can create customs—although he leaves unsaid the usual justification that he is only restoring an older usage that has been usurped—reappears in Hamlet in the opening speech of Claudius. The new king welters between nature and reason (which Claudius calls "discretion"). But Hamlet calls into question Claudius's political manipulation of custom. Where Claudius thinks Hamlet's time of mourning too long, Hamlet thinks it too short. Where Claudius is justified by reason, which claims to understand death and so control one's reaction to it, Hamlet claims to be justified by nature, which would mourn. Claudius condemns his nephew's behavior as "a fault to nature, / To reason most absurd, whose common theme / Is death of fathers" (Hamlet 1.2.102-103). But Hamlet's scorn raises questions: Why not "mirth in funeral" and "dirge in marriage" (Hamlet 1.2.12)? What is the customary period of mourning for a father? For Gertrude's dead husband?

Distracted by the reappearance of his father's ghost, which now only he can see, Hamlet, who thinks himself one who must set things right, accuses his mother of staining his father's memory. Wildly assuming she has intercourse with Claudius every day (what is the norm for married Danish royalty where the male partner drinks excessively?), he would have her refrain from her adulterous bed for one night, "and that shall lend a kind of easiness / To the next abstinence, the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature" (Hamlet 3.4.161-162). His lecture to her reflects an approach to moral education through "habituation" that, R. M. Frye observes, "can be traced through Luther, Erasmus, Aquinas and many others, back to Aristotle."^[28] It is her ability to choose, and the uncertainty of the moral value of an action, that leads him to call custom a "monster" (as Viola in Twelfth Night calls herself a monster because, disguised as a man, she is half one thing and half an-

other). Hamlet tells his mother that she has the power to choose whether she will rely on a habit that makes her "act in character" in an unproblematic way, or whether she will consider that her lovemaking is a habit that ought to be changed because it leaves her vulnerable. But does Gertrude have such a choice?

Besides leaving us uncertain about some customs and habits, certain judgments in Hamlet assume an unsupportable definitiveness. Laertes and Polonius, for example, tell Ophelia how to behave with Hamlet, but the play is vague about premarital conduct. Hamlet's behavior is not custom but "a fashion and a toy in blood" (Hamlet 1.3.6). Laertes objects that Hamlet's inheritance makes him unfit for Ophelia: "His greatness weigh'd, his will is not his own." But since Gertrude has no objections ("I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife," Hamlet 5.1.244), we cannot be sure what the custom is. What should Ophelia do? Laertes lectures her, but she asks him to consider his own behavior. On that subject, Renaldo seeks to learn from Polonius, whose standards are not clear, what is expected of a young Dane in Paris.

By withholding evidence of Hamlet's normal patterns of behavior and daily routine—whether he practices fencing or plays pranks (such as, perhaps, appearing in slovenly dress before Ophelia)—the play makes it impossible for us to judge how far he deviates and whether he is mad. Everything in the play seems deviant, but in another culture—in England, as the grave digger says—no one would notice (Hamlet 5.1.155). Shakespeare can make his characters do anything and make us believe anything he puts into the world of Hamlet because he withholds the norms.^[29]

Shakespeare eliminates what Fredson Bowers called "the normal guideposts to assist an audience in its interpretation of the action."^[30] The resulting "vagueness" (Bower's word) shifts our attention to the moral status of Hamlet, a status that seems to alter in the last act.^[31] In answer to our own puzzlement, we seem to glimpse Hamlet's soul when he lectures Horatio on the fall of a sparrow and declares that the "readiness is all" (Hamlet 5.2.219-222). As G. K. Hunter writes, Hamlet's

heroism depends less on "acting or even knowing than upon being. "^[32] The shift parallels Plato's search for the meaning of justice elsewhere than in the world.

Our view of Hamlet's inner history may change, but not that of others: Claudius is still a murderer who, although he loses his life, gets his man. As Harry Levin observes, "Tragedy always culminates when the survivor takes over with an appeal to the restoration of order."^[33] Might not right triumphs in the form of Fortinbras, who orders a military funeral for Hamlet, although Hamlet has shown no inclination for life in a regiment. What is the funeral custom for a prince? Is it to be buried in armor, like his father's ghost? Or is the equation of royalty with soldier-ship the form the Norwegian Fortinbras prefers, the custom he intends to establish, once the election lights on him, when and if he takes up residence within the battlements of Elsinore, keeping the customs of the Danes?

Hamlet , like Spenser's Book of Courtesy, questions whether civility can ever be defined in a particular way. All custom of the castle scenes are images of social integration, but some of them give special emphasis to the particular strain of altering custom. Doubt and uncertainty attend the realization that customs may be created, that people alter the institutions they pass to the future. The next chapter shows Shakespeare's solution to this anxiety in the castles of Macbeth , which illustrate the distant, future orientation of English customary law. The model for the displacement of medieval castles in subsequent fiction, Macbeth offers an oxymoronic vision of the future as the time of good customs.