CHAPTER XVIII.

STAGE GHOSTS.

The ghost, as a vehicle of terror, a solvent of dramatic difficulties, and a source of pleasurable excitement to theatrical audiences, seems to have become quite an extinct creature.  As Bob Acres said of “damns,” ghosts “have had their day;” or perhaps it would be more correct to say, their night.  It may be some consolation to them, however, in their present fallen state, to reflect that they were at one time in the enjoyment of an almost boundless prosperity and popularity.  For long years they were accounted among the most precious possessions of the stage.  Addison writes in “The Spectator”:  “Among the several artifices which are put in practice by the poets, to fill the minds of the audience with terror, the first place is due to thunder and lightning, which are often made use of at the descending of a god, at the vanishing of a devil, or at the death of a tyrant.  I have known a bell introduced into several tragedies with good effect, and have seen the whole assembly in very great alarm all the while it has been ringing.  But there is nothing which delights and terrifies our English theatre so much as a ghost, especially when he appears in a bloody shirt.  A spectre has very often saved a play, though he has done nothing but stalked solemnly across the stage, or rose through a cleft in it and sunk again without speaking one word.  There may be a proper season for these several terrors, and when they only come in as aids and assistances to the poet, they are not only to be excused but to be applauded.”

The reader may be reminded that Shakespeare has evinced a very decided partiality for ghosts.  In “The Second Part of King Henry VI.,” Bolingbroke, the conjurer, raises up a spirit.  In “Julius Caesar,” Brutus is visited in his tent by the ghost of the murdered Caesar.  In “Hamlet,” we have, of course, the ghost of the late king.  In “Macbeth” the ghost of Banquo takes his seat at the banquet, and in the caldron scene we are shown apparitions of “an armed head,” “a bloody child,” “a child crowned, with a tree in his hand,” and “eight kings” who pass across the stage, “the last with a glass in his hand.”  In “Richard III.” quite a large army of ghosts present and address themselves alternately to Richard and to Richmond.  The ghosts of Prince Edward, Henry VI., Clarence, Rivers, Grey, and Vaughan, Hastings, the two young Princes, Queen Anne, and Buckingham invoke curses upon the tyrant and blessings upon his opponent.  It would be hard to find in the annals of the drama another instance of such an assembly of apparitions present upon the stage at the same time.

In Otway’s tragedy of “Venice Preserved,” the ghosts of Jaffier and Pierre, which confronted the distracted Belvidera in the last scene, were for a long time very popular apparitions, although in later performances of the play it was thought proper to omit them, and to allow the audience to imagine their presence, or to conclude that Belvidera only fancied that she saw them.  Here, however, is the extract from the original play: