One hole too many: ghosts and mad women in Hamlet and MacBeth

Abstract

According to theorist Michel Foucault, Renaissance madness, as a negation of the positive capacities of the mind, is closely associated with the ultimate negation: death. Heiner Mueller, in a postmodern reworking of the Hamlet mythology, also establishes a connection between insanity and corpses, ghosts, and haunting. In the midst of King Hamlet's funeral procession, Hamlet the son leaps into the coffin (a prefiguring of his own imminent death) and literally feeds his father's remains to the frenzied, maddened crowd. Mueller's representation of Hamlet brings to mind Euripides' ancient Greek conception of insanity and mortality. In The Bacchae, a group of mad women unknowingly dismember the prince, Pentheus, and gruesomely sport with his remains (1.1164-1191). Euripides' representation of a close association between death and specifically mad women has particular resonance with Shakespeare. A close examination of Hamlet and Macbeth provides a fascinating confirmation of the assertions of Foucault and Mueller. In these dramas, Shakespeare draws a close association between the experiences of female madness and ghostliness. Ophelia and Lady Macbeth, in their mad moments, as well as the ghost of King Hamlet and the ghost of Banquo, all share in serving as mirrors or blank canvases for their audiences, in lieu of possessing identities independent of external projections. While many scholars have debated the dramatic reality of King Hamlet's ghost,[1] the principal question concerns the extent to which young Hamlet unconsciously fabricates the ghost's cries for revenge out of his own mental disturbance. We see a similar practice of over-identification with regard to Ophelia, whose identity before and after her descent into madness is appropriated and manipulated by other characters' self-serving narratives. In Macbeth, abstrusely significant supernatural phenomena, including the menacing presence of Banquo's ghost, beg for interpretation by the characters. In a parallel fashion, Lady Macbeth's madness is highly spectacular and performative, taking place before an audience who cannot help but extrapolate horrific truths from it. An explanation as to why two seemingly disparate groups (male ghosts and mad women) have this defining characteristic in common can be found in the words of Aeschylus' Clytaemnestra, both a ghost and a mad woman. Significantly, the Greek queen must awaken the Furies to operate as her agents and exact revenge against Orestes' matricidal act. To her great frustration, Clytaemnestra is unable to act on her own behalf. Similarly, the kinship established between ghosts and mad women in Shakespeare's plays can be located in their shared fundamental passivity in the face of violent male action.