The Ghost
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: The spirit of the late King Hamlet, former ruler of Denmark, father to Prince Hamlet, and former husband to Queen Gertrude.
- Key Traits: Majestic, sorrowful, demanding, and theologically ambiguous.
- The Core Conflict: Trapped in Purgatory due to dying without absolution, the spirit demands worldly vengeance, forcing his son into an impossible moral and spiritual dilemma.
- Key Actions: Appears on the battlements to the guards and Horatio; reveals the truth of his murder to Hamlet; explicitly spares Gertrude from revenge; reappears in the Queen's closet to redirect his son's rage.
- Famous Quote:
"I am thy father's spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away."
(Act 1, Scene 5) - The Outcome: Having successfully ignited his son's quest for vengeance, the Ghost fades from the narrative, leaving Elsinore to consume itself in the resulting tragedy.
The Catalyst for Vengeance
The Ghost is the narrative engine of the play. Before its appearance, the deep corruption within the Danish court is merely suspected by Hamlet; the apparition makes it an undeniable, supernatural reality. By revealing that Claudius poured poison into his ear, the Ghost transforms a political usurpation into a horrific, primal act of fratricide, giving Hamlet his dark mandate for revenge.
Original
Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.
(Act 1, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
…Revenge his dreadful and unnatural murder.
This singular command shatters Hamlet's world. The Ghost's absolute demand for retribution bridges the gap between the world of the dead and the living, anchoring the entire plot. However, the spirit's rigid concept of honour belongs to an older, martial era, fundamentally clashing with his son's modern, intellectual hesitation.
Theological Ambiguity
Shakespeare deliberately leaves the true nature of the Ghost ambiguous, which is central to Hamlet's paralysis. In Elizabethan theology, ghosts were highly controversial. Catholics believed they could be souls returning from Purgatory, while Protestants believed Purgatory was a myth, meaning any apparition had to be an angel or a deceptive demon designed to damn the viewer's soul.
Original
The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me...
(Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The ghost I saw
Might be the devil, and the devil can
Mutate to something kind; and yes, perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my maudlin thoughts,
Because the devil's strong in states like that,
He tries to trick me.
This theological deception is why Hamlet cannot simply act on the Ghost's word. The spirit's vivid descriptions of hellish fires align with Purgatory, yet its demand for murder – a mortal sin – suggests a demonic nature. This ambiguity is what necessitates the "Mousetrap" play, as Hamlet must scientifically verify the Ghost's claims before committing violence.
A Fracture in Reality
The Ghost also serves as a physical manifestation of madness and psychological breakdown. In Act 1, the Ghost is visible to multiple characters (Horatio, Marcellus, Bernardo), establishing it as an objective reality. However, when it reappears in Act 3, only Hamlet can see it.
Original
Save me, and hover o'er me with your wings,
You heavenly guards! What would your gracious figure?
(Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh angels, save me! Hover with your wings,
Protecting me! What do you want, fine figure?
When Gertrude looks at the very same spot and sees "nothing at all," the audience is forced to question Hamlet's sanity. Has the trauma of the murder and his subsequent actions finally pushed his feigned madness into a genuine hallucination? The Ghost acts as the ultimate psychological stress test for the Prince.
"Most Catholics of Shakespeare's day believed that ghosts might be the spirits of the departed, allowed to return from purgatory for some special purpose... But for Protestants, the orthodox conclusion was that ghosts were generally nothing but devils."
— J. Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 1935
Key Quotes by The Ghost
Quote 1
I am thy father's spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.
(Act 1, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I am your father's spirit,
Doomed for a certain time to walk the night;
By day I starve, confined to purgatory
Until the crimes committed whilst I lived
Are cleansed and purged away.
Quote Analysis: The Ghost confirms its identity and introduces the theme of mortality and divine punishment. Its torment in Purgatory highlights the tragedy of being murdered suddenly, without the chance to confess one's earthly sins, fuelling the urgency of its demand for justice.
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest.
(Act 1, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Don't let the King of Denmark's bed become
A sumptuous loveseat of fornication.
Quote Analysis: The Ghost appeals not just to personal vengeance, but to national purity. The spirit views Claudius and Gertrude's relationship as a desecration of the state itself, blending personal betrayal with political and moral pollution.
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught: leave her to heaven
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,
To prick and sting her.
(Act 1, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Don't taint the thought or actions you pursue
Against your mother, though; leave her to God,
And let her actions dig into her heart,
Like thorns that prick and sting.
Quote Analysis: Despite his fury at his brother, the Ghost displays a lingering affection and protective instinct towards Gertrude. By instructing Hamlet to leave her fate to God, the Ghost sets a boundary on the vengeance, a boundary that Hamlet struggles to maintain due to his obsession with gender and maternal betrayal.
Do not forget: this visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
(Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Do not forget! My visit here today
Is just to sharpen up your fading purpose.
Quote Analysis: Appearing during Hamlet's violent confrontation with his mother, the Ghost serves as an external conscience. It intervenes to redirect Hamlet's rage away from Gertrude and back towards the true target, Claudius, highlighting Hamlet's failure to execute his primary duty.
Key Takeaways
- The Prime Mover: The Ghost is the inciting incident of the play. Without its revelation, Claudius's crime would have remained hidden, and Hamlet's melancholy would have remained purely internal.
- Theological Symbol: The spirit embodies the religious anxiety of the Elizabethan era, trapped between Catholic doctrines of Purgatory and Protestant fears of demonic deception.
- The Echo of the Past: It represents an older, heroic, and martial worldview that directly conflicts with Hamlet's modern, Renaissance intellect.
- A Measure of Sanity: The Ghost's shift from an objective entity seen by multiple guards in Act 1 to a subjective hallucination seen only by Hamlet in Act 3 mirrors the Prince's psychological descent.
Study Questions and Analysis
Why is it significant that the Ghost is dressed in armour?
The decision to present the Ghost in full armour rather than in royal robes or burial vestments is one of the most carefully constructed pieces of stage semiotics in Shakespeare. The meanings the armour generates work at several distinct levels the surface action doesn't always make explicit.
The A1S1 stage direction is simply "Enter Ghost." The armour itself is established by the dialogue – Horatio identifies the apparition as resembling the late king in his combat against Norway.
Such was the very armour he had on
When he the ambitious Norway combated...
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
He wore a carbon copy suit of armour
As when he fought the firebrand King of Norway...
Shakespeare introduces the Ghost not as a generic spirit but as a specific historical figure whose visual identity has been preserved from a particular moment in the kingdom's military past.
The first level of meaning is dynastic-historical. The armour identifies the Ghost as the warrior-king of an earlier Denmark – the figure who, by the A1S1 account, killed the elder Fortinbras of Norway in single combat thirty years earlier and "smote the sledded Polacks on the ice." This was the heroic-martial Denmark whose authority rested on personal physical courage and direct military action. The armour is the visual sign of this older political-administrative mode.
The contrast with Claudius's Denmark is exact. Claudius's A1S2 opening speech is the play's clearest evidence of the new regime's operational style. Not martial but diplomatic (the dispatch of Cornelius and Voltemand to Norway). Not personal but mediated (the management of court grief through controlled rhetoric). Not direct but indirect (the murder by poison rather than by sword). The Ghost in armour is the visual reminder of what Denmark has lost – and what the new regime's procedural-rhetorical mode has replaced.
Stephen Greenblatt's 2001 Hamlet in Purgatory developed the argument. The armour operates as a piece of memorial costume, the visual sign of a historical moment the Ghost is attempting to return to the political-public sphere.
The second level is the threat register. Armour is the costume of war, and the Ghost's appearance "in arms" is a signal that Denmark is under attack – not, yet, by Fortinbras's troops on the borders, but by the suppressed crime at the centre of the regime. Horatio's A1S1 reading of the Ghost's significance – that it "bodes some strange eruption to our state" – names the function the armour performs. The visual demand that the suppressed military-political reality of the regime be acknowledged.
The third level is moral-judicial. The armour identifies the Ghost as a figure with the standing to make accusations – not a wandering spirit but the legitimate king whose murder requires public reckoning. The contrast with the A3S4 closet-scene reappearance, in which the Ghost is described in the First Quarto as wearing "his nightgown," is pointed. When the Ghost addresses Hamlet in the public space of the battlements, the armour signals the political-juridical weight of the demand. When the Ghost addresses Hamlet in the private space of Gertrude's chamber, the domestic costume signals the intimate-familial register the encounter now operates within.
Is the Ghost a demon or a true spirit from Purgatory?
The question is the central interpretive puzzle of the play and has organised critical reading of the Ghost since at least the eighteenth century. The play's evidence is, by structural design, irresolvable.
The case for Purgatory is exact. The Ghost's A1S5 self-description – preserved as Key Quote 1 on this page – names the specifically Catholic doctrine of postmortem purgation the Reformation had abolished. The vocabulary is precise. "confined," "purged," "term," "fast in fires" are all technical terms from the Catholic theological framework for understanding the intermediate state between death and salvation. The Ghost's "unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled" – describing his death without confession, communion, or last rites – is the specifically Catholic register of an inadequately prepared death. The assumption is that the Ghost's current condition is the direct consequence of that inadequate preparation.
The case for demon is equally exact. The Ghost demands an action – revenge by murder – that the Catholic theological framework it appears to operate within explicitly prohibits. Christian theology of every period treats murder as a mortal sin that imperils the soul of the murderer. A soul in Purgatory, moving toward salvation, would by definition not request actions that would damn the soul of the person carrying them out. The A2S2 Hamlet soliloquy – preserved as the body verse pair "Theological Ambiguity" on this page – names the problem with characteristic precision. The reading the Hamlet soliloquy permits is that the Ghost has appeared in the form of the late king specifically to deceive his son into damnable action. The appearance is itself the deception, and the apparent legitimacy of the demand is the mechanism by which the deception operates.
J. Dover Wilson's 1935 What Happens in Hamlet – quoted on this page – named the framework most directly. The play operates at the historical moment at which the Catholic theological apparatus for understanding ghosts (purgatorial souls returning for legitimate purposes) had been doctrinally abolished by the Reformation but had not, in the cultural-imaginative life of Shakespeare's audience, been replaced by any equivalent framework. The Protestant alternative was that all ghostly appearances were demonic, but the cultural-imaginative residue of the older Catholic framework remained available and visible in plays like Hamlet. Dover Wilson's argument was that the Ghost is therefore deliberately constructed to operate within both frameworks simultaneously, and the irresolvability of the question is the play's achievement rather than its failure.
Stephen Greenblatt's 2001 Hamlet in Purgatory extended the argument in modern terms. The Ghost is the "anomalous figure" whose theological-imaginative existence depends on the cultural memory of a doctrinal framework the new official theology had abolished.
Eleanor Prosser's 1967 Hamlet and Revenge developed the demonic interpretation in its strongest form. Every piece of textual evidence about the Ghost – its appearance at midnight, its demand for revenge, its disappearance at cockcrow – aligns with the demonological literature of the period. The play's decision is to mark the Ghost as a demonic instrument whose deceptive theology the audience is being invited to detect.
The deeper argument the play commits to is that the irresolvability is itself the answer. Hamlet cannot, on the play's evidence, determine the Ghost's nature. The audience cannot, on the play's evidence, determine the Ghost's nature. Shakespeare refuses to resolve a question the play's protagonist cannot resolve.
Why doesn't the Ghost speak to Horatio or the guards?
The A1S1 Ghost's refusal to speak to Bernardo, Marcellus, and Horatio is one of the play's most carefully constructed pieces of dramatic deferral. The multiple registers at which the refusal works aren't always immediately visible on the page.
The textual evidence is exact. Horatio, having confirmed the Ghost's reality, addresses it directly with formal challenge.
What art thou that usurp'st this time of night,
Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march? By heaven I charge thee, speak!
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
What are you, in this dreadful hour of night,
In splendid military regalia
Worn by the now departed King of Denmark
In battle sometimes? Speak up, I say! Speak!
The Ghost "stalks away" without responding. Horatio's subsequent attempts at the second appearance – hypothesising about possible purposes (treasure, unconfessed sins, knowledge of impending disaster) – produce no response either. The Ghost vanishes at cockcrow without having delivered any message.
The significance of the refusal works at several levels.
The first is the dynastic-blood register. The Ghost's eventual disclosure in A1S5 names the murder of the king by his brother – a piece of information that constitutes both private grievance and dynastic crisis, and that requires the legitimate heir to receive it directly rather than through intermediaries. A. C. Bradley's 1904 reading developed the argument. The Ghost's message is, by its content, the kind of message that can only be delivered to the person whose action it requires. Horatio, however loyal, has no standing to act on a charge of regicide against the reigning king. The guards have even less. The message must reach the figure whose blood and political position give him the authority to respond to it.
The second register is dramaturgical. The A1S1 refusal builds the anticipation that the A1S5 disclosure will pay off. By the time Hamlet arrives at the battlements in A1S4, the audience has been waiting through three scenes for the Ghost to speak. The decision is to defer the speech until the moment of maximum dramatic concentration. J. Dover Wilson's 1935 What Happens in Hamlet named the mechanism. The deferral converts the Ghost's appearance from a piece of supernatural exposition into a piece of dramatic event. The audience experiences the disclosure alongside Hamlet rather than receiving it in advance through Horatio's report.
The third register is theological-evidential. If the Ghost had spoken to Horatio, the play would have been able to deploy Horatio's scholarly authority as the confirming witness of the Ghost's authenticity. The Ghost's refusal to speak to the scholar – and its willingness to speak only to the son – is available for a reading in which the Ghost is operating outside the scholarly-empirical framework Horatio represents. Stephen Greenblatt's 2001 reading would frame the refusal in terms of theological geography. The Ghost's communication is restricted to the figure whose familial-bloodline position permits the Catholic-purgatorial framework to operate, and the scholar Horatio (Wittenberg-trained, Protestant-empiricist) is structurally excluded from the framework's communicative range.
The deeper argument the play commits to is that the Ghost's refusal to speak to the guards is the mechanism by which the Ghost's message becomes Hamlet's private property. The private-property condition is the reason Hamlet cannot, throughout the play, share the burden of the charge with anyone except, eventually, Horatio (and even then only partially). The A1S5 swearing-of-secrecy that closes the scene confirms the arrangement. The Ghost's message has been delivered to Hamlet alone, and the witnesses to the Ghost's appearance are bound to silence about what they have seen.
How does the Ghost treat Gertrude?
The Ghost's treatment of Gertrude is one of the most carefully calibrated pieces of moral writing in the play. The decisions Shakespeare makes about the Ghost's attitude toward his widow work at several levels the surface command doesn't always make explicit.
The textual evidence is exact. In the A1S5 disclosure, the Ghost delivers two distinct judgements. The first on Claudius ("that incestuous, that adulterate beast / With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts" – a register of theological-criminal condemnation) and the second on Gertrude, which the Ghost articulates with pointed restraint – the "Taint not thy mind... leave her to heaven" command preserved as Key Quote 3 on this page.
The decision is exact. The Ghost's vengeance demand is calibrated. Hamlet is required to kill Claudius but explicitly prohibited from harming Gertrude. The "leave her to heaven" formulation operates within the Christian theological framework of providential justice – the position that some moral accountabilities are appropriately discharged not by human action but by divine judgement after death. The "thorns that in her bosom lodge" image names the mechanism. Gertrude's punishment is conscience, and the conscience is, by the Ghost's framing, sufficient.
The A3S4 closet-scene reappearance develops the decision further. When Hamlet's interrogation of Gertrude has escalated to the point of physical violence, the Ghost intervenes specifically to protect the mother from the son. "But, look, amazement on thy mother sits: / O, step between her and her fighting soul: / Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works: / Speak to her, Hamlet." The arrangement is one of the most pointed pieces of evidence in the play of the Ghost's lingering affection for Gertrude.
Janet Adelman's 1992 Suffocating Mothers developed the argument. The Ghost is operating, in the A3S4 intervention, as the protective patriarch whose continuing care for his widow constitutes a moral register Hamlet's misogynistic vehemence has, by this point in the scene, abandoned.
The deeper question the Ghost's treatment of Gertrude raises is the relationship between erotic possession and theological judgement. Why does the Ghost spare Gertrude when, by every account, she has committed the same theological offences (adultery, hasty remarriage to her brother-in-law, possible complicity in the murder) that condemn Claudius? The play's evidence doesn't finally resolve the question. The decision permits several readings.
The first is the providential reading. Gertrude's offences are between her and God, and the Ghost is restricting his demand to the criminal-political offence (the regicide) that lies within human jurisdiction. The second is the affectional reading. The Ghost loves Gertrude, however inadequate her response to his death has been, and the love is the ground for the protective restriction on Hamlet's vengeance. The third is the dramaturgical reading. The play requires Gertrude to remain available to the action for the remainder of its arc, and the Ghost's restriction is the mechanism by which her survival is secured.
The A5S2 poisoned cup completes the irony. Gertrude, having been spared by the Ghost, dies anyway – by the poison Claudius has prepared for Hamlet, and which Gertrude drinks against Claudius's warning. The "leave her to heaven" command has been honoured in its specific form (Hamlet has not killed her) but circumvented in its outcome (Gertrude dies as collateral consequence of the vengeance the Ghost demanded).
The argument the play commits to is that the Ghost's protective restriction was structurally insufficient. The vengeance the Ghost demanded against Claudius could not, by the play's mechanism, be executed without consuming Gertrude alongside its principal target.
Why can Gertrude not see the Ghost in Act 3, Scene 4?
The A3S4 closet-scene asymmetry – in which Hamlet sees and converses with the Ghost while Gertrude, standing in the same room, sees nothing – is one of the most carefully constructed pieces of dramatic ambiguity in the play. The irresolvability of the question is itself the achievement.
The textual evidence is exact. Hamlet's response to the Ghost – the body verse pair "A Fracture in Reality" on this page – is delivered with the same conviction and theological vocabulary that characterised his A1S5 response to the Ghost. Gertrude's response is the play's most directly opposing piece of evidence.
Alas, how is't with you,
That you do bend your eye on vacancy
And with the incorporal air do hold discourse?
... Whereon do you look?
(Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh no! But how are you,
For you're transfixed upon a vacant space,
Discussing formally with empty air?
... What are you looking at?
The first interpretive position the play permits is the selective-revelation reading. The Ghost has the supernatural capacity to determine its visibility – to appear to whom it chooses and to remain invisible to others. The A1S1 evidence supports the position in a different form. The Ghost appears to multiple witnesses (Bernardo, Marcellus, Horatio) but refuses to speak to them, suggesting a capacity for partial revelation that the closet scene extends to full invisibility for Gertrude. The function of the reading is to preserve the Ghost as an objective external entity whose communications are calibrated to specific recipients.
The second interpretive position is the hallucination reading. The Ghost has no objective reality in the closet scene. The apparition is Hamlet's psychological production, generated by the immense stress of the situation (the just-completed killing of Polonius, the violent confrontation with Gertrude, the unresolved Oedipal-aggressive dynamics of the scene). The function of this reading is to mark the A3S4 scene as the threshold at which Hamlet's "antic disposition" has converted from feigned to genuine madness, and the Ghost has become the visible symptom of the conversion.
A. C. Bradley's 1904 reading developed the second position in its most influential form. The A3S4 Ghost is the evidence of Hamlet's psychological deterioration. The Ghost is, by A3S4, a hallucination, the externalisation of Hamlet's accumulating guilt over his delay and his accumulated rage at his mother.
The third interpretive position, developed in Janet Adelman's 1992 Suffocating Mothers, treats the asymmetry as gendered theological geography. Gertrude, the figure whose sexual conduct the Ghost has just been protecting from Hamlet's vengeance, is barred from seeing the Ghost because the Ghost's purgatorial-Catholic framework operates within a religious-imaginative geography Gertrude's adulterous-political conduct has placed her outside. The Ghost is real, on this reading, but visible only within the male-dynastic line the regicide has displaced.
Modern productions have varied considerably in their handling. Some stage the Ghost as physically present and visible to the audience, leaving Gertrude's blindness as evidence of her moral-spiritual condition. Others stage the Ghost as invisible to the audience as well, marking the apparition as Hamlet's hallucination. Others use lighting or sound effects that permit the Ghost to be ambiguously present without resolving the question. The play's text supports all three options.
The deeper argument the play commits to is that the irresolvability is the answer. Gertrude does not see the Ghost. Hamlet does. The play doesn't tell the audience which of these visions is real, and the question of whether the closet-scene Ghost is objectively present or psychologically generated can't be settled by any piece of evidence the play provides.
What does the Ghost mean by "Remember me"?
The Ghost's closing instruction at A1S5 is one of the most carefully placed pieces of dramatic command in the play. The meanings the instruction generates work at several distinct levels the surface plea doesn't exhaust.
Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me.
(Act 1, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Goodbye, goodbye! Hamlet, remember me.
The textual evidence is exact. The Ghost has, by the end of A1S5, delivered the disclosure of the murder, the identification of Claudius as the murderer, the protective restriction on action against Gertrude, and the formal demand for vengeance. The "remember me" closing is therefore not a request for affectionate recollection but the operational mechanism by which the entire preceding disclosure is converted into Hamlet's binding moral obligation.
The first level of meaning is memorial-theological. Stephen Greenblatt's 2001 Hamlet in Purgatory developed the argument. "Remember me" operates within the specifically Catholic theological framework of postmortem remembrance, in which the prayers and memorial acts of the living were understood to assist the souls of the dead in their purgatorial transit toward salvation. The Reformation had abolished this framework – Protestant theology held that no action of the living could affect the soul of the dead – but the cultural-imaginative residue of the older framework remained available, and the Ghost's instruction operates within it. Hamlet is being asked not merely to recall his father affectionately but to participate, through his action, in the spiritual process by which his father's purgatorial term can be completed.
The second level is the performative-binding one. Hamlet's response to the instruction is one of the most extended pieces of evidence on the binding character of the command. In the soliloquy that immediately follows the Ghost's departure, Hamlet performs the conversion. He commits to wiping away "all trivial fond records, / All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past" – the scholarly learning, the cultural-aesthetic formation, the private memories of youth and observation – so that the Ghost's commandment can live alone "within the book and volume" of his brain. Hamlet is evacuating every other element of his consciousness to make space for the single binding command. The "remember me" has become the only content of Hamlet's psychological interior.
The third level is the destructive-identitarian one. Catherine Belsey's 1989 reading developed the argument. The "remember me" instruction operates as the dismantling of Hamlet's pre-Ghost identity. Before the Ghost's appearance, Hamlet had been a scholar (the Wittenberg studies), a lover (the relationship with Ophelia), a son in normal mourning for a recently deceased father. After the "remember me," these constitutive elements of identity are required to be subordinated to the single binding command. The cost is exact. Hamlet's identity becomes coterminous with the vengeance project, and the various failures, hesitations, and self-accusations of the subsequent acts are the consequences of the identity-substitution the instruction has effected.
The fourth level is meta-theatrical. The "remember me" operates as the play's instruction to its own audience. Just as Hamlet is being asked to remember the Ghost's disclosure, the audience is being asked to remember what they have just witnessed in A1S5. The entire subsequent action of the play is, in some sense, the audience's exercise in remembering a Ghost-scene that the play doesn't return to until the A3S4 closet appearance.
The A5S2 dying instruction Hamlet gives to Horatio – "to tell my story" – closes the arc the "remember me" had opened. Hamlet's death produces, in turn, the obligation to remember Hamlet that Hamlet has, throughout the play, been bearing for his father. The play is, by this reading, an extended meditation on the moral weight of remembrance and on the consequences of identity organised around the obligation to remember.
Does the Ghost ultimately achieve its goal?
The question of whether the Ghost achieves what it set out to achieve is one of the most carefully constructed pieces of moral-political accounting in the play. The answer the play permits is that the goal is achieved in its specific form but at a cost the goal cannot, finally, justify.
The textual evidence on the achievement is exact. By A5S2, Claudius has been killed by Hamlet – first with the poisoned sword, then forced to drink the poisoned wine he had prepared for Hamlet – and the regicide the Ghost had charged his son to avenge has been formally answered. The specific demand of A1S5 – the "Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder" command preserved as the body verse pair "The Catalyst for Vengeance" on this page – has been discharged.
The cost of the discharge is, however, comprehensive. Beyond Claudius's death, the play's catastrophe consumes Polonius (killed by Hamlet in A3S4), Ophelia (drowned in A4S7), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (executed in England by Hamlet's forged letter), Laertes (killed by his own poisoned sword in A5S2), Gertrude (killed by Claudius's poisoned cup in A5S2, the Ghost's protective restriction on her notwithstanding), and Hamlet himself (killed by the poisoned sword's residual venom in A5S2). The arithmetic is exact. The Ghost's demand for the death of one man has produced the deaths of eight, including the entire royal line he had been attempting to vindicate.
The political consequence is equally exact. The Danish throne, vacated by the deaths of the entire House of Hamlet and the entire House of Polonius, passes to Fortinbras of Norway – the son of the man the elder Hamlet had killed in the single combat the Ghost's armour commemorates. The symmetry is one of the most pointed pieces of evidence on the catastrophic instrumentalism the Ghost's vengeance has produced. The regime the Ghost was attempting to restore through his son's action has been, by the action's consequences, definitively terminated.
J. Dover Wilson's 1935 What Happens in Hamlet developed the argument that the play is, fundamentally, the dramatic working-out of the question its title implicitly poses. What happens, in the practical political-moral arithmetic of the world the play depicts, when the Ghost's command is followed. Dover Wilson's answer was that the play stages the comprehensive demonstration of the command's costs. The vengeance is achieved, but the kingdom is destroyed in the process of achieving it, and the play commits to the inadequacy of any moral framework that requires the destruction it has produced.
Stephen Greenblatt's 2001 Hamlet in Purgatory extended the argument in theological terms. The Ghost's command, operating within the Catholic-purgatorial framework that the Reformation had abolished, has produced consequences the framework itself cannot, finally, justify. Hamlet's commitment to honouring his father has not, by the play's evidence, advanced his father's purgatorial transit toward salvation. The comprehensive catastrophe the commitment has produced is structurally indistinguishable from the actions of a demon attempting to damn the entire House of Hamlet.
Eleanor Prosser's 1967 Hamlet and Revenge completed the argument. The catastrophe is the play's clearest evidence that the Ghost was, after all, the demon Hamlet had feared in A2S2. The demand for revenge was the deception, and the apparent purgatorial framework was the disguise.
The play doesn't adjudicate between these readings. What it commits to is the fact that the Ghost's goal has been achieved in its narrow form and catastrophically exceeded in its broader consequences. The deeper argument the play permits is that the question of whether the achievement was worth the cost is, finally, the moral question the audience is being asked to answer.
