Five days after he opened the National Theatre of Great Britain, Peter O’Toole sat in a BBC studio talking about ghosts. The date was October 27, 1963. His stage that week was the Old Vic, where the National had launched itself on October 22 with an uncut Hamlet, four and a half hours of it, directed by Laurence Olivier and starring O’Toole, thirty-one years old and world famous off the back of Lawrence of Arabia. On television he had company worth the license fee: Huw Wheldon hosting the late-night arts program Monitor, Orson Welles holding forth across the table, and the veteran Ernest Milton, who had worn the black doublet himself decades before. That conversation survives, and I have been living inside it for a week.

The production behind the broadcast has its own folklore. While filming Becket, O’Toole and Richard Burton agreed that each would play Hamlet on stage, and the story goes that a coin flip assigned the cities and directors: London and Olivier for O’Toole, New York and Gielgud for Burton. O’Toole could give the National only twenty-seven performances before film commitments reclaimed him, the reviews ran from respectful to bloody, and the working relationship between star and director curdled. None of that touches what he said on camera. An actor can be miscast, misdirected, and mauled in the papers and still know the play down to the studs, and five days into the run, O’Toole knew it that way.

Here is the passage that stopped me, with one stutter of the tongue smoothed and nothing else touched. Wheldon has asked what the play is about, and then whether the man playing Hamlet feels terror when the ghost walks:

“The passions. I mean, to me, all Shakespeare’s plays are essays in the passions. The highest of which and the most noblest and the one which governed and made man different from the beast was reason. Sloth was a passion, grief was a passion, anger, jealousy, revenge, all these things. Hamlet, I think, is in a way a tragedy of grief.”

On the terror question: “Again, I’m afraid the play stands or falls by this very point. I think, personally, it is inadequate to explain the play, but I don’t think it would be inadequate to an Elizabethan audience. The attitude to the ghost was the papist attitude, which was that spirits were sent from purgatory. And they appeared three times without saying anything. One had to observe their expressions, whether they were pale or red, or in sorrow or in anger or what. Then on the fourth occasion, this is papist doctrine of the 17th century, on the fourth occasion they would announce what in fact they had returned to earth for. But they had to be questioned very particularly. Now, Horatio, in his speeches, follows the papist doctrine perfectly.”

That is a working actor doing scholarship out loud, five days into the hardest part in the language, with Orson Welles two feet away waiting to pounce. I want to take it seriously and take it apart, because it stacks three separate claims: one about Elizabethan psychology, one about the genre of the play, and one about the Roman Catholic Church. He scores differently on each.

Start with the passions, because the frame is period-correct and the phrase deserves stealing. Elizabethans inherited a model of the soul stacked in three stories: a vegetative level shared with plants, a sensitive level shared with beasts, and a rational level reserved for man. The passions lived on the middle floor. Your horse felt fear, your hawk felt rage, and so did you; what set you apart was the magistrate installed above them, reason, whose whole office was to bridle passion before it wrecked the house. That doctrine was in the bookstalls while Shakespeare wrote. Timothy Bright’s Treatise of Melancholie appeared in 1586 and mapped the black bile Hamlet wears like weather, and Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall arrived in 1601, right about when the play reached the boards. Calling the plays “essays in the passions” places Shakespeare where his first audiences would have placed him, in the theatre of the governed and ungoverned heart.

Then he garbles the blueprint. The period’s own handbooks seated reason above the passions as their judge, and promoting it into their ranks as “the highest of” them collapses the architecture the whole doctrine was built on. Aquinas, whose taxonomy stood behind the Elizabethan manuals, counted eleven passions and filed sloth nearby as acedia, a species of sorrow hardening into sin, so O’Toole’s list mixes deadly sins with movements of the soul the way a Tudor sermon might, loosely and to good effect. I forgive the muddle for two reasons. First, his ear was already halfway to Elsinore: “the most noblest” is a double superlative in Shakespeare’s own manner, cousin to “the most unkindest cut of all.” Second, the play carries the correct doctrine in its pockets. Hamlet loves Horatio for being no “passion’s slave,” and he measures a man who leaves his “godlike reason” unused as “a beast, no more.” An actor who absorbs those lines eight shows a week has the substance right even when the seminar answer comes out sideways.

“A tragedy of grief” holds up better than anything else he said that night, and I would defend it in court. The play opens inside an argument about mourning. A court has remarried with the funeral meats still warm, and the one man still wearing black gets lectured for it by the new king, who calls persistent grief “impious stubbornness” and “a fault to heaven.” Hamlet answers that his blacks are costume and his sorrow the real garment, “that within which passes show.” Grief then multiplies through the play like a strain through a ward. Ophelia, mourning a father murdered by the man she loves, dissolves into the madness Hamlet only performs. Laertes shows what grief looks like when it keeps to the revenge play’s timetable, all speed and no soul, so that we can watch Hamlet refuse the schedule. By the graveyard, grief has become a trade, handled by professionals with jokes and a spade, until the prince, holding the skull of the man who carried him on his back, finally says a plain loving thing about the dead, then shouts another over Ophelia’s open grave at the wrong volume, in the wrong place, at the worst possible time.

Scholarship caught up with him decades later. In 2001 Stephen Greenblatt published Hamlet in Purgatory, which argued that when the Reformation demolished purgatory it also confiscated the tools of grief. For centuries the living could do something for their dead: pray, fast, endow a mass, buy down the sentence. English authorities banned that whole apparatus and declared the prison house of souls a fiction, and the longing the old system had organized needed somewhere to live. Greenblatt’s answer is the theatre. A ghost who begs “Remember me,” in a kingdom where nobody can lawfully pray him out of the fire, is asking for the one help still legal to give. Memory replaced the mass. Read that way, Hamlet’s refusal to move briskly on becomes the play’s whole subject, and an actor in a 1963 television studio got there thirty-eight years before the professors made it fashionable.

Now the ghost, where the quote gets brave and the errors get interesting. O’Toole’s foundation is solid. The apparition on the battlements is Catholic down to its fingerprints. It describes itself as “doomed for a certain term to walk the night” and by day “confined to fast in fires, till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away,” which is purgatory in everything except the forbidden word. It complains of dying “unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,” the sacramental checklist of a Catholic deathbed missed at every box: no final Eucharist, no confession and absolution, no anointing. And this walks onto a London stage around 1600, in a Protestant state whose Articles of Religion (1571) had ruled the Romish doctrine of purgatory “a fond thing vainly invented.” The official line held that souls travel one way at death, so anything pacing the parapet had to be an angel on rare errand or, far more likely, a devil wearing a dead man’s shape. Hamlet knows both catechisms and flips between them under pressure, hailing the thing as “a spirit of health or goblin damned” and later worrying that “the spirit that I have seen may be the devil.” Shakespeare sharpens the joke by sending his prince and Horatio to school at Wittenberg, Luther’s own university. Two Protestant-trained scholars meet the one ghost only Rome can explain.

He did his homework, and I would bet my library on the book. What Happens in Hamlet, published by John Dover Wilson in 1935, sat in the dressing-room bags of two generations of classical actors, and every plank of O’Toole’s ghost lecture walks out of it. Dover Wilson had brought the era’s standard ghost treatise, Lewes Lavater’s Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght, back into print in 1929, and he read the play’s opening scenes as a staged debate among the period’s three positions on apparitions: Marcellus and Barnardo hold the old Catholic view, argued in print by Pierre Le Loyer in 1586, that a soul might return from purgatory; Horatio arrives as the skeptic in the mold of Reginald Scot, denying that spirits take material form at all; and Hamlet voices the Protestant line of Lavater and of King James’s Daemonologie, that a walking spirit is usually a devil wearing your dead. O’Toole never cites any of this on camera, and he does not have to. The scheme is in his mouth. What he changed in transmission is where the trouble starts.

Take the timetable first, three silent visits and speech on the fourth, delivered as if a pontiff had scheduled apparitions like trains. No such doctrine exists. Purgatory itself is real doctrine with real dates, affirmed at Lyon in 1274, defined at Florence in 1439, reaffirmed at Trent in 1563, and the Church allowed, following Aquinas, that God might permit a departed soul to appear to the living. A schedule of appearances was never part of the package, and “papist doctrine of the 17th century” misses the calendar twice over, since the doctrine is medieval and the play is Elizabethan. So where did O’Toole’s timetable come from? From the play. The sentries have watched it walk on two nights before the curtain rises, “this dreaded sight, twice seen of us.” On the third night it stalks past Horatio twice and says nothing. On the fourth night it draws Hamlet apart and talks for a hundred lines. Count by nights and O’Toole’s arithmetic holds to the digit; count by entrances and it wobbles; either way the schedule belongs to a dramatist rationing his reveal, building three nights of dread before he spends the voice. As a playwright I take the misattribution personally. The suspense engineering of Act One is craft, and the byline on it reads William Shakespeare, no imprimatur required.

The pale-or-red business is my favorite error in the whole broadcast, because O’Toole is quoting his own part back at us as canon law. Act One, scene two. Hamlet, grilling Horatio about the apparition, asks: “What, looked he frowningly?” Horatio: “A countenance more in sorrow than in anger.” Hamlet: “Pale or red?” Horatio: “Nay, very pale.” There sits the observational checklist, complexion and expression, sorrow and anger, in dialogue O’Toole was speaking that week at the Old Vic. Play a scene often enough and it starts to sound like the Council of Trent. He mistook the script for the catechism, and honestly, the mistake flatters the play: Shakespeare wrote an interrogation so procedurally convincing that a smart actor filed it under theology.

“Questioned very particularly” earns partial credit, and here the errors get finer. The Church did keep a discipline for testing apparitions, the discernment of spirits, descending from the scriptural command to “test the spirits” and codified for confessors long before Shakespeare. Folk practice added a rule the play dramatizes to the letter: a ghost cannot speak until spoken to. Barnardo says it plainly, “It would be spoke to,” and Marcellus hands the job to the educated man, “Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio,” then “Question it, Horatio.” Horatio’s formal charge runs down the catalogue of lawful reasons a spirit might walk that the ghost treatises had compiled: some good deed to be done, foreknowledge of the country’s fate, treasure hoarded in the womb of the earth. So far, so accurate. Then the credit runs out. Lavater, the era’s most-read compiler of that catalogue, was a Zurich Protestant who listed every reason ghosts were said to walk and then explained the walkers away as devils and melancholy, and Dover Wilson, O’Toole’s evident source, casts Horatio as the resident skeptic in Scot’s mold, a man who “will not let belief take hold of him” until the thing stands in front of his eyes. The interrogation Horatio then performs ran on rails every confession used. Calling it papist perfection flattens a three-cornered controversy into a rubric, and it flattens Horatio too, whose arc from scoffer to shaken witness is the audience’s own dress rehearsal for belief.

One more piece of context his confidence skates past: the scholars had settled nothing. W. W. Greg argued in 1917 that the ghost is Hamlet’s hallucination. Roy Battenhouse countered in 1951 that the spirit’s pagan furniture disqualifies a Catholic purgatory altogether. Robert West wrote in 1955 on the ghost’s deliberate ambiguity. And in December 1961, twenty-two months before the Monitor broadcast, Sister Miriam Joseph ran the apparition through the Catholic tests in the pages of PMLA and passed it as a genuine soul from purgatory, and Eleanor Prosser would soon publish the case, in 1967, that the thing is a demon and Hamlet damned for listening. O’Toole’s certainty sat in the middle of an unfinished war, which is where an actor’s certainty belongs. A scholar can suspend judgment for forty years. An actor has an entrance at eight.

Give O’Toole his due for the most honest sentence in the quote: the doctrine “is inadequate to explain the play” for him personally, though it would have carried a 1601 house. That is the actor’s dilemma stated without varnish. You cannot play a footnote, and you cannot borrow terror from a theology your audience buried four centuries ago, so the modern Hamlet needs a bridge to the battlements that still bears weight. His director had one: Olivier spent decades reading the part through Freud, and his 1948 film announces it in voiceover, “a man who could not make up his mind.” O’Toole on television reaches past the couch, back to the passions and to grief, and I think his bridge is the sturdier one, because a viewer who shrugs at purgatory still knows what it costs to bury a father and be told to hurry up.

Twenty-six days after that broadcast, on November 22, 1963, the President of the United States was shot in the open air in Dallas, and the country began running the opening act of Hamlet at national scale. A head of state slain, the mystery around the killing never settled to general satisfaction. A public studying the widow’s countenance the way Hamlet grills Horatio, sorrow read against anger, pale against red. Rites debated, succession managed briskly, official bodies convened to question the dead man’s ghost by proxy, commissions in place of sentries, and the ghost, as ghosts do, answering only the questions it chose. I am wary of cheap parallels, and this one has lured better writers than me into overreach, so I will hold it to what the play teaches: the dead cannot be questioned particularly, however particular our need, and a state that hurries its mourning leaves something walking the battlements for decades.

The Monitor tape runs about twenty minutes, and near the end the talk loosens into shop and laughter, four men who love a play arguing about a ghost while the studio clock runs out. O’Toole got the century wrong, promoted reason above its station, misfiled his own dialogue as Vatican procedure, and handed Horatio the wrong catechism. He also named the play’s engine, grief, ahead of nearly everyone, and defended the one claim that matters most: the first audiences brought a live and dangerous frame to that midnight platform, and the play was built to stand inside it. Somewhere in London tonight an actor is waiting in the dark wings of that opening scene. The sentries are cold. Something is coming that must be spoken to before it will speak. Four centuries on, we still lean forward, every one of us with our own dead, waiting to hear what it wants.