Quem vocabis? Ghostbusting in Elsinore

It is literally Baltic tonight.  Fingers of sea mist climb the battlements and leave wet salt prints on the stone. A bare bodkin of wind pierces your cloak and presses its point against your quivering flesh. There’s no moon and as you look up at the one bright star you-ouch- stub your toe on something in the darkness.  You wish you were back in your bed under a warm sheepskin. And that’s where you were, dreaming of Wittenberg fräuleins, until just before midnight, when Marcellus shook you awake and reminded you that you said you would come out and join the night watch in case it appeared again. It’s just imagination, you had told him, but he kept going on and on about it, no no, we definitely saw it, and not just once but twice. Please, Marcellus had begged, we need an educated man, someone who’ll be able talk to it.  You had smiled at that, but with the dodgy state of Denmark presently, it was probably a good idea to keep in the good books of the military. So now here you were, frozen to the nuts on a wild ghost chase. What a way to pay off your student loan…

Who you gonna call?

In Hamlet’s opening scene, Shakespeare invented the horror movie. We begin literally and figuratively in the dark, in ominous silence - not a mouse stirring, sharing the loneliness and fear of a nervous guard, Francisco. The tension is broken by the appearance of his relief. Francisco is only too pleased to hand over to his officer Bernardo: ‘tis bitter cold and I am sick at heart he says, blurting out a hint of the terror he has endured, alone in this haunted place.

Luckily for Bernardo, he has company:  his fellow officer Marcellus, who has brought along insurance in the form of our reluctant hero, Horatio. For when there’s something strange in the neighbourhood of Elsinore, who you gonna call but an alumnus of the University of Wittenberg? Even though Horatio is sceptical about the existence of the Ghost, Marcellus wants him there, that if again this apparition come/ He may approve our eyes and speak to it. Why do they need Horatio in particular to do this? Because he has studied Latin, the lingua franca of spooks, spectres and most other supernatural beings. When the Ghost appears, Marcellus commands: Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio...

Now, such is the precarious position of classical languages in schools and universities today that we would struggle to find a student capable of engaging with a revenant on a castle battlement. Indeed, the modern youth’s exposure to the Latin language is likely to be confined to a few semi-latinate spells in a Harry Potter novel (lumos maxima, indeed: you would have thought that she could afford proper Latin)

To be fair, there is a long history of Latin muddle before the Muggles. The conjuror’s phrase hocus pocus is probably derived from hoc est corpus meum of the Latin Mass, the words mangled either accidentally through ignorance, or deliberately in Protestant mockery of the Roman Catholic belief in transubstantiation.

Whether practising wizardry, turning bread into flesh or pulling rabbits from hats, Latin has been the traditional go-to tongue, at least in the western imagination. Until the vernacular reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, it was, for some, the only respectable medium of communication with God: the Good Lord is now apparently capable of understanding English these days, however. Some authorities still believe that the judicious deployment of a few words of Latin will get His attention, in the way that a Parisian waiter will deign to notice you only if you address him respectfully en francais; thus President Jed Bartlet, in the West Wing episode Two Cathedrals, unable to discern God’s purpose in permitting the innocent to suffer, tells Him to go to hell in Latin (eas in crucem literally means get on a cross, something of a sore point with the Almighty, one would have thought).

As with God, so with the Devil. In Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe has the eponymous alchemist conjure up Mephistophilis with a blood-curdling Latin incantation: …Orientis princeps Belzebub inferni ardentis monarcha, et Demogorgon, propitiamus vos, ut appereat, et surgat Mephostophilis… (now that is a proper spell, Ms Rowling).

The precise meaning of all this Prince of the East, monarch of hellfire stuff would be comprehensible to only a tiny fraction of the audience; but all could buy into the idea that magical power was associated with the study of arcane texts – after all, hadn’t those Latin-speaking, Bible-reading priests been able to turn wine into blood and bread into flesh?

The old word for this sort of magic or occult knowledge was gramarye, which is of course derived from the same root as grammar, meaning the nuts and bolts of a language, or the book you can learn it from. Etymological digression -the word glamour is another variant of this root, and presumably gets its present meaning from the idea that magic can be used to enthral or bewitch others, that spells can dazzle the eyes of the beholder. A Glam Rocker, therefore, is etymologically a cousin of a grammarian.

Goodnight sweet prince...

It is gramarye that Potter is studying at Hogwarts, and that Bartlet employs to address his God. Gramarye is used by Faustus as a way to connect with the supernatural, a portal through which he can negotiate a deal with Lucifer for 24 years of fun-filled life in return for his soul. Despite the fact that he gets to snog Helen of Troy, this is generally considered to be a poor exchange: Faustus has wasted his knowledge on trifles. Horatio uses his learning more fruitfully, attempting to engage with the apparition to determine why it is walking the earth – does it have a message about dangers facing Denmark, by any chance? But Horatio has been dragged out of bed not only because he can use his Latin grammar to connect with the supernatural; he can also use it to disconnect. Marcellus knows that if anything goes wrong with the ghostly interaction, his scholar companion will have the wherewithal to carry out an old-fashioned Catholic exorcism.

Thus the first Act Ghost scenes of Hamlet set up a problem which will recur throughout the play, and which offers us an insight into Shakespeare’s England, where state and personal religion was still in a state of flux following the Reformation: Horatio is a sceptic, and studies at Wittenberg, a university with deep Protestant associations; when the Ghost speaks to Hamlet, it describes its torment in Purgatory, a Catholic concept rejected as unbiblical by the Reformers. Since there was no Purgatory in Protestant theology, it followed that there were no ghosts: therefore anything that presented itself as a ghost was probably a devil in disguise. The tragedy of Hamlet stems from the Prince’s inability to decide whether what he has seen is an honest ghost (I,v,138) or a devil assuming a pleasing shape (II,ii,574). Hamlet and Horatio, torn between Catholic and Protestant interpretations of their ghostly encounters in Elsinore, reflect the religious tensions racking Tudor England, and perhaps Shakespeare himself.