GHOST                        So did it mine

And a most instant tetter barked about

Most lazar-like with vile and loathsome crust

All my smooth body.

Thus was I sleeping by a brother’s hand

Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched,

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,

Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,

No reckoning made but sent to my account

With all my imperfections on my head.      (1.5.70-79)

So did it mine—the poison ran through my veins, thickening my blood—and a most instant tetter barked about most lazar-like with vile and loathsome crust all my smooth body. It’s a viscerally unpleasant image, the skin becoming stiff with sores, like terrible psoriasis—it’s just recognisable enough to be horribly familiar—I was instantly a leper, an outcast (the opposite of king), disgusting. Also, tree-like, not even human, in a dreadful, grotesque metamorphosis. Then the almost-wistful invocation, remembering of the smooth body makes it even more tactile and sensual; his skin (a word which doesn’t appear) became the opposite of smooth, and one still has to imagine touching the appalling surface it has become. (Is this what is being concealed by the armour, is his body still like this, even after death? And the armour also performs that hardened layer; that’s what one imagines touching, too, hard, perhaps spiky, inhuman.) A pause to contemplate on the half line, as the Ghost prepares to state, unambiguously, what has been done.

Thus was I sleeping by a brother’s hand, of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched. My brother, your uncle, killed me while I slept; he took my life, stole my crown, and my wife, all at once. In a moment. And—because it was so sudden—I wasn’t prepared for death, and especially not spiritually. I was cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, when they were in full flower (this doesn’t mean that the old king was especially sinful, just human); I died unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled: I hadn’t taken the sacrament, confessed my sins and been absolved; I hadn’t received the last rites, been anointed. I was wholly unprepared; there was no time! I wasn’t ready!

The fear of sudden death was a deep-seated one and although ideas about purgatory have often been more central to thinking about the religious universe of the play, its dramatization of a post-Reformation fin de siècle crisis of praxis as much as doctrine or faith, this anxiety over how one might prepare for death, in the absence of the medieval Catholic ars moriendi, the ‘art of dying’, was real. What a good death might look like was still moot, still uncertain. There was no reckoning made! continues the Ghost. I had no time to make things right, to go over the balance sheet of my life and make amends (by confession and penance); I was sent to my account with all my imperfections on my head. I went to my doom, to be judged by God, in a state of sin, not grace.

There has to be existential horror here, and terror too. It’s given even more intensity by the vivid sensuality of the conceits: the garden, the body barked like a tree, the blossoming sins; the skin, rendered simultaneously tactile and untouchable; the imagining of absent rituals, including holy oils and the Eucharist, and the half-remembered flash of a whitewashed Doom, a naked soul being weighed in the balance by a stern archangel—and found wanting.

Happy New Year?!