The Ghost of Kings Past

I am thy father’s spirit,

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night

And for the day confined to fast in fires

Til the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul… (Hamlet 1.5, 14-21)

When Hamlet meets with the ghost of his murdered father, the ghost pleads with Hamlet to exact revenge on his killer, so that he might be freed from purgatory, where his soul is trapped. The ghost tells Hamlet exactly how he suffers to deceives Hamlet's perception and reality and gets him to do his bidding. This particular passage works because Shakespeare is casting doubt on the real nature and motivations of the ghost by involving Purgatory in his story. To the Protestant population that made up Shakespeare’s audience, Purgatory was a Pagan concept, and not where any Christian soul would go; the ghost, to the audience, would seem more likely to be a demon in disguise.

Since only angels and demons can leave Heaven and Hell to speak to humans, the audience can only assume that the ghost is a liar. Hamlet himself is skeptical that his father really escaped Purgatory, drawing from his classical education at Whitenburg, which taught him about Pagan concepts. This skepticism is the reason that Hamlet schemes to have a troupe of actors recreates his father’s murder, to confirm whether the spirit told the truth about his uncle murdering his father. Considering the spirit’s demonic nature casts the spirit’s demand for justice in another light; justice is a Godly action, while revenge is selfish. Because of the thin line between justice and revenge, the spirit is asking Hamlet to gamble with his soul-based just on the spirit’s word. Assuming even that the spirit was Hamlet’s father, the spirit urges Hamlet to not lose himself in the task, saying, “But, howsomever thou pursues this act, / Taint not thy mind…” (1.5.91-2). Hamlet’s disobedience to this command leads directly to the deaths of Ophelia’s father, and arguably of Ophelia. Had Hamlet not been so consumed by the drive to get revenge for his father’s death, he would not have taken the first opportunity to stab at a curtain, thinking it was his uncle hidden behind it.

By gambling with his own soul, Hamlet begins to collect the souls of everyone who dies in the court during his quest for vengeance. If the spirit truly manipulated Hamlet, as Shakespeare implied by introducing Purgatory to the spirit’s story, then Hamlet became an agent of the demon, and it follows that his actions aligned with the demon’s desires. The most prominent example of the demon’s intentions comes in Act 5, Scene 2, in which the Queen is poisoned (collapsing before she can confess her sins, condemning her soul to Hell), Claudius is killed violently by Hamlet, and Hamlet and Laertes strike each other with Laertes’ poisoned sword. Rather than taking time to confess their sins with their final breaths, Laertes and Hamlet forgive each other for their actions; taking from the earlier Pagan belief in Purgatory, forgiving each other is also a Pagan action, completing a circle of rituals that the spirit set into motion at the beginning of the play.

Shakespeare created this sense of confusion and unease to further press the limits of the tragic genre; Hamlet’s good intentions to avenge his murdered father turn to a case of collecting souls for a demon using his father’s form to manipulate a grieving son. When Hamlet loses all the people he cares for—his mother, Ophelia, his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his old schoolmates—and has a chance to atone for his actions, he does not repent, condemning himself to Hell for the crime of wanting to release his father’s soul from torment in Purgatory. The audience would recognize the tricks and lies the spirit tells Hamlet, even if Hamlet is too clouded to follow his instinct of skepticism, creating the dramatic irony as the audience watches the depths to which Hamlet falls to serve his father’s will.

Work Cited

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Folger Shakespeare Library. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Washington Square P, 1992.