Frances Teague Department of English University of Georgia Athens, GA 30605 fteague@uga.edu

Old Hamlet's Ghost Shakespeare Association of America 2005

     In Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000), Sam Shepard’s performance as the ghost attracted attention. Haggard, the ghost first appears on video surveillance cameras and drifts into a Pepsi machine. In his next scene, often reflected in glass doors, he warns Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) of his uncle’s perfidy and charges him with the duty of revenge. Hamlet’s demeanor throughout the scene is fearful, and as the ghost approaches, the son steadily retreats, yet at the end they embrace. The third and final appearance takes place on Hallowe’en soon after a trick-or-treating child is seen in a Casper costume. In Gertrude’s bedroom after the murder of Polonius, the ghost calms the nearly hysterical Hamlet and tells him to see to his mother.[1]

Sam Shepard and Michael Almereyda, during filming.

Critics were mixed in their response to this ghost. Some complained that the business of having the ghost go into the Pepsi machine was crass product placement,[2] while others praised the brilliance with which such scenes translated an early modern text to twentieth-century New York. Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson remark, “Ever the pious son, the film, like its titular character, is haunted by the injunction to "remember" its father” (153).[3] They then analyze the ghost’s retreat into the machine:

While the mere presence of a Pepsi machine in a Hamlet set in the year 2000 is no surprise, this use of the machine appears extraneous to this film's translation of the play. It is not a required substitute like the ski cap, or the film within a film, the skyscrapers, the news conference, or Rosencrantz and  Guildenstern's laptop. All of these have more or less recognizable and readable equivalents within the playtext. Despite the fact that the Pepsi machine does not relate to the playtext in this relatively straightforward fashion, it nonetheless continues to mean. However, the way it is read depends upon the system(s) in which the audience can make it participate. The film presents itself as an indictment of corporate capitalism and globalization, and contextualized thus, the machine itself can be read as a satire on product placement. Conversely, the machine can also be read as a crass product placement within a commercial film that paradoxically assails its own commerciality. Further, the machine evokes Pepsi's then current marketing slogan—"The Next Generation"—and thus invites consideration of the play's themes of impeded biological and political succession. The machine can also be read as being "not a Coke machine," and hence not "The Real Thing," thus calling into question the ontological status of the Ghost (a pressing issue in the original play) and triggering associations with Arthur Koestler's Ghost in the Machine, and Sting's "Spirits in the Material World."  (159-60)

This paragraph highlights some of the complexity of the ghost’s appearance, but it is not exhaustive. While they mention a couple of soft drink company slogans, they neglect the one that Pepsi once used, “Come Alive with Pepsi,” although it does seem important. Elsewhere they discuss the way that performers’ lives and previous roles follow them into the characters within the film, but do not mention Shepard. Yet in Shepard’s case, his role as Ethan Hawke’s father in Snow Falling on Cedars (1999) is relevant, while as a playwright, he might be said have a literary father in William Shakespeare. (In a further complication, Almereyda recently directed a documentary about the production of one of Shepard’s plays, and much of the publicity commented on how the play evokes Shepard’s relationship with his own father.) Another element that they do not mention is the way that the Pepsi scene seems to citing the burlesque film of Hamlet, beer-drinkers’ favorite Cold Brew. In that comedy, the feckless Mackensie brothers manage to summon up the ghost of the former owner of Elisnore brewery by playing video arcade games in the employee lounge. As in Almereyda’s film, the “ghost in the machine metaphor” becomes literalized.[4]

The Mackensie Brothers, Strange Brew

While one could add to such points, what end would that serve? And how many times can one play on a phrase like “ghost in the machine” or the concept of “haunting”? One problem here is that the ghost scenes operate on too many levels. The ghost offers a troubling moment in the film because it means in too many ways. Nor is that observation true only of the ghost in the film: the ghost has been a source of confusion for centuries. I want to quickly look at some of the problems in the textual and historical ghost, then use what William Worthen says about surrogation to suggest a way of talking about the filmic ghost.

The ghost has been a troubling presence in Hamlet from the outset. Absent from the source material, the ghost evidently exists in a lost play (probably by Kyd) where he cries out “like an oyster-wife.”[5] This lack of decorum in the source ghost is paralleled by a lack of decorum in Shakespeare’s creation. Unlike a well-behaved early modern stage ghost, the ghost of Hamlet’s father does not wear a shroud, the conventional attire, but rather his armor.[6]  Arriving on the ramparts, the ghost hastens to explain to Prince Hamlet that he is not his father, but rather his father’s spirit, doomed to wander liminally in Catholic Purgatory—another slippage of decorum in Protestant England.  As generations of English teachers have pointed out, the ghost then delivers a charge that Hamlet cannot possibly carry out. The son is to revenge his father’s “foul and most unnatural murder” and stop his mother and stepfather from sleeping together, but he is not to taint his own mind or upset his mother in achieving revenge, although nothing is said about how the young man is to commit murder or interfere in his mother’s sex-life without some sort of repercussions.[7] The ghost disappears, leaving much unanswered and Hamlet unable to say whether he has been talking with an honest or demonic spirit. In 3.4, the spirit pops up again to scold Hamlet. On this occasion he stirs up trouble by being invisible to Gertrude, although Horatio, et al., had no trouble seeing him earlier. Perhaps he is aware of an inadequate costume, as he is now wearing his night-gown. But what can we expect from a role that serves as the precipitating incident that precipitates inaction?

Yet the ghost is important and in the theater he is often a powerful presence. His source in Hamlet may have amused Thomas Lodge, but there is a clear debt as well to Nemesis and Don Andrea in The Spanish Tragedy and all the ghosts who seek revenge in earlier Senecan tragedies. Clearly, this ghost, like those in Richard III or Banquo in Macbeth is supposed to impress upon the living the horror of death. Quite aside from this literary inheritance, the ghost is the dead parent returning to speak once more with the son who survives and mourns him, an emotionally resonant situation. . In films, however, as Neil Forsyth has pointed out, such supernatural manifestations may lose some of their symbolic force if the audience perceives them as just another example of special effects.[8] At some level the audience knows that the ghost isn’t a true spirit, but rather a two-dimensional simulacrum painted in light on a screen. (Small wonder that Asta Nielsen simply left him out.) In fact, as Forsyth argues, moments of Shakespearean supernatural events are principally reflexive, drawing attention to their existence in the technologically mediated film. Perhaps that observation helps explain why many films of Hamlet simplify the ghost scenes, as Bernice Kliman has pointed out, and erase questions about his nature. [9]

In a heritage film, and films of Shakespeare’s plays, however avant garde, fall into that category,[10] what is a production to do with those aspects of heritage, like ghosts, that we no longer regard as plausible? In a horror flick, we may see ghosts who make us cower in our seats—I still can’t bring myself to watch The Haunting again, after seeing it first run—but I have yet to see a frightening ghost in a film of Hamlet. Perhaps the problem is that the real ghost in films of Hamlet isn’t the spirit of Hamlet’s father, but the play itself.

In his essay, “Drama, Performativity, and Performance, “ William Worthen suggests that we never see Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but always a surrogation of the original:

Much as Hamlet exists as a work variously iterated in a textual history—as a range of printed, unprinted, and hypothetical (Shakespeare's manuscript) texts—so it is also surrogated in various forms, in innumerable audiotape, videotape, film, and stage performances. A performance of Hamlet is not a performance of a text. Instead, it uses a text (usually a palimpsest of texts) of Hamlet within a specific selection of available regimes of production (acting styles; set and costume design; the representational rhetoric of stage, film, or video) to perform a new iteration of Hamlet, an iteration that—though it may be encoded with signs of fidelity or resistance, to an "original," to Hamlet, to Shakespeare—is finally a surrogation of the work, one instance of "the doomed search for originals by continuously auditioning stand-ins" (Roach, Cities 3).[11]

This account of what occurs in performance (or in reading, or in editing) takes an uncompromising position: there is no original Hamlet any longer, so there can be no such thing as an “authentic” production. One can contrast this approach with that of Fedderson and Richardson, who speak of Almereyda’s film as a parasite on the playtext, “As a parasite, Almereyda's Hamlet is dependent upon its host—Shakespeare's Hamlet—for its existence, yet it is simultaneously engaged in a struggle to differentiate itself from it and so establish a separate identity for itself” (153). But if there is no host to feed one, how can the film or anything about it be parasitical?

The key to this disagreement is the term “surrogation” that Worthen borrows from Roach’s ground-breaking book, Cities of the Dead. It does not mean simply that each performance, whatever the medium, is a surrogate for an impossible-to-recreate authentic original. Rather Roach means the entire process whereby a community performs its memories of itself. In the book’s opening section, he points out that when a colleague who plays a particular role in a department’s life retires or dies, another colleague steps forward and plays the role that has been abandoned. Extending that personal observation to the circum-Atlantic world over several centuries, he posits that once a community has found a performed work that powerfully affects its expression of identity, the community cannot bear to give it up, even when the cultural and social circumstances that gave the performance its original power have changed or died. A performance continues, becomes an always metamorphosing tradition as one alteration after another is met and subsumed. Surrogation, then, is the process that reconciles memory and loss, performance, and substitution:

Into the cavities created by loss through death and other forms of departure . . . , survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates. . . . [S]urrogation rarely if ever succeeds. (4)

Such performances are far from parasites, instead being new evolutions from the original. Looking at them, one cannot see the lost original but can catch glimpses of its lineaments, a hint of family resemblance, in the acting out of a lost heritage.

The Fuseli engraving of Hamlet and the ghost

I would suggest that the problem of the ghost’s meaning too much is a consequence of surrogation. When the weight of the absent original—whether the murdered king of Denmark or the dead playwright or the missing authoritative text—must be filmically represented, the anxiety of reproducing the lost original leads filmmakers generally to over-compensate by putting too much emphasis on those moments in their films that have to do with history or memory. Scenes with the ghost of Hamlet’s father, whether the interminable and unnecessary flashbacks that Branagh provides, the extra-textual funeral sequence Zeffirelli invents,  or the over-clever, over-loaded scenes in the Almereyda—are the moments when a production is least free of the past, most concerned with reproducing the irreproducible, locked in an attempt to remember a forgotten past.  (Small wonder critics are tempted to pun and say that the ghost is a haunting presence.)

Reading Peter Donaldson’s essay on Loncraine’s Richard III, I was especially caught by the epigraph he includes from the writer Maxim Gorky. Seeing his first movie in 1896, Gorky commented, "Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. . . . if only you knew how strange it is to be there." That line offers an uncanny parallel to the observation of film pioneer George Demeny. In 1892 Demeny thought movies offered "the replacement of motionless photographs, frozen in their frames, with animated portraits that can be brought to life at the turn of a handle" to please viewers who could "see once again the features of someone now dead" (quoted in Geoffrey O’Brien’s Phantom Empires) Movies show us the features on someone who, if not now dead, will be. They allow us to visit the Kingdom of the Dead.

Perhaps the reason that we are haunted by the question of authenticity in Shakespeare films is that we want Shakespeare’s ghost, like Hamlet’s ghost, to speak to us and tell us all his mysteries. But no one can ever film William Shakespeare. Instead we have his surrogates, pages of text that we try unsuccessfully to make speak for him. When we watch Shakespeare films, we are engaged in the cultural project of surrogation, seeking “to fit satisfactory alternates” “into the cavities created by loss,” as Roach says. Because the memory of the original is gone, we seek to fit the hole left in our cultural matrix and perform a substitution in our minds. Thomas Lodge was unimpressed by the ghost of Hamlet’s father because he thought it was like an oyster wife peddling her wares. While one can talk about all the meanings implicit in Sam Shepard’s performance, the way that the ghost finds the threshold to the other world in a Pepsi machine is truer to that earliest tradition than any learned analysis.