Between Nature and Eternity: (Present)ing Absence in Theatrical Representations of Shakespeare as the Ghost of Hamlet

TL;DRAbstract

A poem that was published in The London Magazine in the summer of 1750 depicts an episode in which the ghost of Shakespeare appears to the actor David Garrick, inciting him to avenge the wrongs done to his works by those who would mutilate his natural genius through their own vainglorious adaptations. As Michael Dobson notes in his study, The Making of the National Poet, the poem capitalized upon the popular mid-eighteenth century representations that mythologized the relationship between the ghostly poet-playwright and the actor who was doing so much to expand and promote Shakespeare’s position at the zenith of the literary pantheon as analogous to that of the famous Danish prince (incidentally Garrick’s most famous theatrical role) and the Ghost of Hamlet Senior. So celebrated was this analogy that it became the victim of parody when Garrick became the prodigal son and disobeyed his spiritual father’s orders and he proceeded to stage his own adaptations of Hamlet and the representati

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