My Kingdom for a Ghost: Counterfactual Thinking and Hamlet

The removal of Claudius’s confession in Hamlet sets up an insurmountable asymmetry in knowledge vis-à-vis what Hamlet knows about goings-on at court from within the play, versus what we have the pleasure of knowing about the play from without. Claudius’s confession is all that makes the play intelligible to us because only the confession verifies Claudius’s guilt, and thereby the Ghost’s story, definitively. But only we hear the confession; no one else in the world of the play hears it, certainly not Hamlet. Therefore, it is entirely within our purview to imagine what the play might look like without the confession. The purpose of this paper is to pose the counterfactual question: what if we, as audience, had not heard Claudius’s confession? Without it, for example, we would have no way of knowing whether or not Claudius did or did not in fact kill the king. Hence we would have no way of verifying whether or not the Ghost’s testimony is true or false. And since Hamlet and those at court are not privy to the confession, how or in what way do they perceive events in contradistinction to how we (are made to) perceive the same events? These questions are not merely pedantic—posing them and attempting to answer them carries profound philosophical and ethical ramifications, some of which this paper attempts to elucidate.