Hamlet in Purgatory (Expanded Edition) by Greenblatt Stephen

Author:Greenblatt, Stephen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE SPIRIT OF HISTORY

Six or seven years after Shakespeare wrote Richard III, he returned in Julius Caesar to the idea of an apparition who appears to the man who murdered him and bears the burden of history. This apparition too is not represented as a fantasy, and though it is associated with dream, it is not emptied of reality. On the contrary, the play is careful to set its appearance in the context of other spectacular signs of what Cassius calls “the strange impatience of the heavens” (1.3.61), signs that include ghosts that “shriek and squeal about the streets” (2.2.24). Interpreting these prodigies as instruments of “fear and warning / Unto some monstrous state,” Cassius, drawing the superstitious Casca into his conspiracy, names the threat in terms that have the odd effect of identifying the living Caesar with a menacing apparition:

Now could I, Casca,

Name to thee a man most like this dreadful night,

That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars

As doth the lion in the Capitol;

A man no mightier than thyself or me

In personal action, yet prodigious grown,

And fearful, as these strange eruptions are.

(1.3.71–77)

Casca does not need to be particularly brilliant to grasp the meaning of Cassius’s allegory: “ ’Tis Caesar that you mean, is it not, Cassius?” (1.3.78).

Julius Caesar treats intimations of metaphysical horror with a ruthless irony already implicit in Cassius’s words: Caesar, when we see him in person, is all too human. Yet at the same time the omens and portents turn out to be true, and after his death Caesar proves with a vengeance to be “prodigious grown.” From this perspective, the tragedy would seem to stage the defeat of skepticism, the humbling of political rationality by the conjoined power of dreamers, soothsayers, augurers searching the entrails of animals, and shrieking ghosts. “You know that I held Epicurus strong, / And his opinion,” Cassius tells his aide-de-camp on the eve of the battle of Philippi; “Now I change my mind” (5.1.76–77). Everything Epicurus stood for—radical materialism, the mortality of the soul, the absence of metaphysical rewards and punishments, the triumph of clear-eyed reason over the night-birds of superstitious fear—crumbles as Cassius recounts the ominous presages he has witnessed. And the defeat in Brutus is still more crushing. He had been strikingly indifferent to the signs that had terrified everyone else—“The exhalations whizzing in the air,” he remarked coolly, “Give so much light that I may read by them” (2.1.44–45)—and now a comparable moment of reading turns into terror at the sight of Caesar’s ghost:

How ill this taper burns! Ha! Who comes here?

I think it is the weakness of mine eyes

That shapes this monstrous apparition.

It comes upon me. Art thou any thing?

Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil,

That mak’st my blood cold and my hair to stare?

(4.2.326–31)

The lines trace a seesaw of conflicting responses: a dimming of the candlelight by which he is reading (a dimming sometimes taken as the sign of a ghost’s presence) leads Brutus to look up. Startled, he sees someone—it is a

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