In the 1590s, Elizabethan audiences—whose sense of humor was not as exquisitely refined as ours—laughed when, in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the magician and his demonic sidekick Mephistopheles, having made themselves invisible, snatch a dish of food and a cup of wine from the pope’s hands and then hit his holiness over the head. Shakespeare evidently liked the invisibility joke; he not only repeated it in a farcical bit of The Tempest but played with it in subtler ways in several of his most memorable ghost scenes. My favorite by far is the astonishing scene in Gertrude’s bedroom when Hamlet, having become increasingly gripped by fantasies of his mother’s sex life with his uncle—“In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed/Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love/Over the nasty sty”—is suddenly interrupted by his father’s ghost. According to a stage direction found only in the so-called Bad Quarto of the play, the ghost is dressed on this occasion not in full armor, as he had appeared in the first act, but in his nightgown, as if he were about to get into the enseamèd bed himself. But this time he is not glimpsed by everyone, as he had been on the ramparts, but only by Hamlet. Gertrude, seeing him stare wildly into space and talk to someone who is not there, is convinced that her son has gone completely mad.
Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep,
And as the sleeping soldiers in th’alarm
Your bedded hair like life in excrements
Start up and stand on end.
Among the effects of these strange lines is the lightning glimpse of soldiers jolted out of sleep by the warning blast of a trumpet and, more, a glimpse of hair that has been tucked in, as if in bed, suddenly standing up in horror, and, still more, the truly bizarre glimpse of “life in excrements.” What exactly those three words mean is not altogether clear. My gloss in the Norton Shakespeare says, “In insensate outgrowths (used of nails and hair).” Well, maybe. My mind at least also conjures up an image of shit harboring life, and since the play is obsessed with things rank and gross in nature and with the dead bursting out of the grave, this scatological association may not be purely personal.
As the word “peep” signals, it all seems funny, in a grotesque, slapstick way. And the joke centers, as it did in Doctor Faustus, on invisibility. “Do you see nothing there?” Hamlet all but screams at his mother. And she answers, “Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.” I wish I could entirely explain why these words of hers have haunted me ever since I first read them. I love the correction she makes, after she denies that she sees anything—of course, she sees everything, everything that is. And I love the confidence that she, like any rational person, has in her perception of what is right before her eyes. It is what is invisible that she cannot see, and that may in fact be nothing. Alternatively, of course, it may be everything, and the murderous joke may be on her. Or on Hamlet. Or on all of us.
Stephen Greenblatt’s most recent book is Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics.
