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“How now Horatio, you tremble and look pale”: Verbal Cues and the Supernatural in Shakespeare's Tragedies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
Extract
Barnardo' line “How now Horatio, you tremble and look pale,” delivered just after the ghost's exit in Act I, scene i of Hamlet, is at once a description of Horatio and a thematic statement about the effect of tragedy. By the end of the play, this phrase has come to signify the way amazing, horrifying, and profoundly tragic events affect the spectators: Hamlet addresses the “mutes or audience” to the “act” he, Laertes, Claudius and Gertrude have just performed as “you that look pale, and tremble at this chance” (V, ii, 334). When a character describes another in this way, the utterance constitutes a verbal cue: it tells the audience what is happening on the stage, or how the other characters are reacting to past or present events. A verbal cue can be thought of as a spoken stage direction, to use Raymond Williams' term, one which serves as a signal both to the actors and to the audience. Shakespeare repeatedly resorted to verbal cues in representing the ghosts, witches, and other supernatural visitations that figure prominently in Hamlet, Macbeth, and less prominently, in Richard III and Julius Caesar. Regardless of how they are represented on the stage, supernatural characters are essentially imaginative projections, who exist as much through the speeches and described reactions of others as through what they themselves say and do. Verbal cues thus serve as part of the characterization process; they help to define these creatures in terms of their effects on others. And as a theatrical strategy, the cues employ language to summon up visions in the mind of the spectator, creating images that no stagecraft, however spectacular, could equal.
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References
Notes
1 All quotations from Shakespeare's plays are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. Evans, G. Blakemore (Boston, 1974)Google Scholar.
2 Drama in Performance (New York, 1968), 97–100Google Scholar.
3 Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture (Cambridge, MA, 1984), pp. 68, 82–87Google Scholar; cf. Thomas Wright's treatise The Passions of the Mind in Generall and Primaudaye's The French Academye. Bevington's book is one of several recent studies in the area of visual statement and the language of staging that investigate the ways in which non-verbal elements constitute signals to the audience, signals that supplement, explain, and sometimes comment ironically on the language itself. See for example Homan's, Sidney collection, Shakespeare's “More Than Words Can Witness”: Essays on Visual and Non-Verbal Enactment in the Plays (Lewisburg, PA, 1980Google Scholar) and Slater, Ann Pasternak, Shakespeare the Director (Totowa, NJ, 1980)Google Scholar.
4 Charney, Maurice, “Hamlet Without Words,” Shakespeare's “More Than Words Can Witness,” p. 33Google Scholar. In his discussion of the non-verbal elements in the opening scene of Hamlet, Charney notes that the ghost does communicate by gesture, “crossing” Horatio and warning him off when Horatio boldly announces “I'll cross it, though it blast me” (24).
5 Bevington remarks that this speech “reads almost like a prompt book” (176).
6 Bevington, p. 87.
7 Cited by Dessen, Alan in Elizabethan Drama and The Viewer's Eye (Chapel Hill, 1977) p. 14Google Scholar.
8 Rosen, William, in Shakespeare and the Craft of Tragedy (Cambridge, MA, 1967)Google Scholar observes that both Hamlet and Macbeth begin with actions initiated by supernatural figures. Both create “an atmosphere of bewilderment” through darkness and the use of questions. The sense of uncertainty they create reinforces the protagonist's own uncertainty.
9 Rosenberg, Marvin, in his definitive compendium of information about the staging of Macbeth, The Masks of Macbeth (Berkeley, 1978)Google Scholar, notes that possibly in Shakespeare's time, but certainly by Davenant's, the phrase “Hover through the fog and filthy air” in Act I, scene i served as a stage direction, and the witches appeared as if floating in air (p. 15). Of the appearance of the witches, Rosenberg wonders whether Banquo's description is what the audience is intended to see, and whether they change in appearance between I, iii and IV, ii (p. 9).
10 Palmer, D.J., “A New Gorgon: Visual Effects in Macbeth”, Focus on Macbeth, ed. Brown, John Russell (London, 1982), p. 58Google Scholar.
11 Spencer, T.J.B., ed., Shakespeare's Plutarch (Baltimore, 1964), p. 100Google Scholar.
12 This is Shakespeare's only use of the word “stare” to mean start, or become stiff. He probably chose the word for the internal rhyme with “hair,” but the line, as a result, has a disorienting effect, since we tend to think of eyes, not hair, staring. Hair standing on end is a recurrent image associated with fear or horror in Shakespeare's tragedies, as is evident in the ghost's speech in I, v, Gertrude's description of Hamlet in III, iv, and Macbeth's allusion to images that “unfix his hair” in I, iii.
13 Rosenberg describes in detail the various ways Banquo's ghost has been depicted on stage, including productions which have substituted an imaginary ghost or a visual illusion achieved through mirrors, magic lanterns, lights, effigies, etc. He concludes, as do most writers on the subject, that Shakespeare meant the ghost to be played by an actor. This view receives support from Simon Forman's 1611 account of the ghost's behavior in the banquet scene. Forman reports that the ghost stepped behind Macbeth and sat in his chair as Macbeth rose to make his toast to the absent Banquo. Forman continues, “And he turning about to sit down again saw the ghost of Banquo, which fronted him so, that he fell into a great passion of fear and fury. “Quoted by R.A. Foakes in “Images of Death: Ambition inMacbeth, ”in Focus on Macbeth. Productions continue to omit the ghost, however; a recent example is the BBC production, in which Nicol Williamson stares at an empty space.
14 Charney cannot resist ending his essay with Arthur Colby Sprague's report that Garrick employed a mechanical wig to make his hair stand on end in this scene (p. 41).
15 For a good line by line account of the staging of the banquet scene, see Elliott, G. R., Dramatic Providence in Macbeth (Princeton, 1960)Google Scholar. Although he doesn't explicitly discuss verbal cues, Elliott has some interesting ideas about lines which could constitute cues; for example, he interprets the “see” in Macbeth's “See, they encounter thee with their heart's thanks” (III, iv, 9) as a hastily covered-up reference to the murderer, who has just entered (p. 127).
16 The thematic function of the progressive disintegration of order and ceremony during the banquet scene has been discussed at length by Rosen, L.C. Knights, and others.
17 The irony in the banquet scene stems largely from the way Macbeth repeatedly voices his wish that Banquo were there to grace the company. The ghost's appearance is thus a literal fulfillment of a command and promise.