Shakespeare’s Spirit

Shakespeare created some memorable ghosts (think Hamlet’s father or the ghost of Banquo), so it is no surprise to find his apparition in later fiction. Indeed, in literature before 1800, the fictional Shakespeare appears almost exclusively as a spirit. Most commonly, he takes the stage to offer a ghostly endorsement for productions of his own works. His spirit also has a critical side, lamenting newfangled plays and deflating the pretentions of bad actors.

Familiar Verses from the Ghost of Willy Shakespeare to Sammy Ireland

George Moutard Woodward
London: Richard White, Piccadilly, 1796

The author, also known as “Mustard George,” was a well-known caricaturist in the late eighteenth century. Those skills are put to use in this brief satire in which the ghost of Shakespeare gives advice to Samuel Ireland, whose son, William Henry Ireland, had been discredited for forging Shakespeare documents earlier in this same year. In a humorous twist near the end, Shakespeare critiques contemporary editors and stage directors, saying he’ll wave judgment and not “pronounce them forg’d,” because so many hands have edited and altered his works over the years “that I make oath, and swear it on the spot, / I scarce know what is mine, and what is not.”—FCR

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1700's Sanders - Woolf Shakespeare's Spirit

This House To Be Sold

J. Stirling Coyne
London: National Acting Drama Office, 1847?

Written in the 1840s, during the controversy over the sale of Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford, this play imagines the ghost of the playwright haunting the new owner, a nouveau riche fishmonger who, like the English public, no longer appreciates him and his works. This is an example of the use of Shakespeare as a mouthpiece for a cause, in this case, the preservation of historic buildings in Stratford-upon-Avon. —VH

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1800's Clarke - Furness Shakespeare's Spirit

The Apotheosis of Shakespeare and Other Poems

Frank Fether Dally
With Illustrations by G. F. Sargent.
London: Published by J. Brown, Week Street. Whittaker and Co. Ave Maria Lane, 1848

In the mid-1800’s, P.T. Barnum proposed to purchase the neglected house where Shakespeare was born and move it to America, motivating the British government to buy it first, restore it and open it to the public. This poem, written for the occasion, praises Britain for coming to its senses. Lauding the home as “the very throne of thought,” Dally envisions the house inhabited by a panoply of Shakespeare’s characters, and visited by poets and other “children of Song.” These spirits’ paeans invoke Shakespeare’s spirit from the tomb and deify him as the source of poetic inspiration. -CP

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1800's Clarke - Furness Shakespeare's Spirit

The Sale of Shakespeare’s Ghost

Don Mark Lemon
The Black Cat 13/8 (1908): 36-43

Millionaire and aspiring writer Robert Varel answers a small newspaper advertisement offering to lease the ghost of Shakespeare for $10,000 a week. After a demonstration, however, he is not satisfied to rent the miraculous fountain pen that scribbles lines from The Merchant of Venice as well as original lines when he puts the nib to the pages of the special portfolio. He must own the ghost—and he buys it for $1,000,000. He writes a pretty good five-act play entitled “Prince Edward,” before he realizes he’s been duped in this short story of a fool and his money. -VH
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1900's Leigh - Rowlands Shakespeare's Spirit

The Seen and Unseen at Stratford-On-Avon: A Fantasy

William Dean Howells
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1914

The scarcity of the information on Shakespeare’s life offers a license for fictional authors to reconstruct his personality. This ‘Fantasy’ takes the form of a travelogue in which an American tourist is following the Shakespeare trail, attending the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon. On his travels, the narrator happens to ‘wonder at the cinematic apparition’ of William Shakespeare. Luckily Shakespeare’s phantom is a friendly and genial fellow who insists on taking the narrator on a personal tour of his birthplace. This romanticized narrative covers all disputed aspects of Shakespeare’s life. The narrator can directly converse with Shakespeare on issues such as his relationship with his wife and the authorship debate. It also includes a very appealing characterization of Francis Bacon, as the narrator gets to meet with the ghost of Bacon, an extremely unsavory and grumpy man. –VL

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1900's Gaiman - Kipling Shakespeare's Spirit

Everything and Nothing

Jorge Luis Borges
First published in El hacedor, Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1960
In an anthology of the same name. Translated by Eliot Weinberger, John M. Fein, and, James E. Irby.
New York: New Directions, 1999

In Everything and Nothing, opposites entail each other. The struggle and the union of extremes is a prevalent theme in Borges’ work and in this short story he teases out the metaphysics of what it means to be Shakespeare by equating the playwright with God. Or does God equate himself with the spirit of Shakespeare? At once the essential necessity and nihilism of creativity are invoked, alongside an examination of what it is to be human/actor/writer through the complicated construction of the self, recalling As You Like It’s ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’. Ultimately, Borges brilliantly manages to bend the end of the dichotomy of everything and nothing together; making Shakespeare nobody and everybody. —VL

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1900's Akenside - Burgess Shakespeare's Spirit

Shakespeare’s Memory

Jorge Luis Borges
First published in Veinticinco Agosto 1983 y otros cuentos. Madrid: Siruela, 1983
Translated into English by Andrew Hurley in The New Yorker, 13 April 1998: 66-69

Borges contemplates not so much a spirit of Shakespeare as the memory palace of the Bard, which has been transmitted to various takers over the years. When a Shakespeare scholar obtains the memories, he is finally able to understand his subject perfectly. But what at first seems a boon, soon becomes a curse.

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1900's Akenside - Burgess Shakespeare's Spirit