are meant in the play to assume that he ought to have obeyed the Ghost;" and again (p. 139), "We construe the Ghost's interpretation of Hamlet's delay ('almost blunted purpose') as the truth, the dramatist's own interpretation." Dr. Francis Maurice Egan's essay (The Ghost in Hamlet, 1906) stands by itself as a discriminating study in which the ghost is constantly kept in the foreground. The distinction, however, which Dr. Egan draws between the exalted mission of the ghost, seeking only the salvation of Denmark and the preservation of his royal line, and Hamlet's sinful eagerness to exact vengeance by returning evil for evil, is one which I have difficulty in reading into the play. Still less can I see in this the chief concern of the play, and the cause of Hamlet's failure.
The play of Hamlet is characterized not merely by the presence of a supernatural being among its persons, but by the actual participation of this supernatural being in the action.[1] Unlike the ghost of Andrea in The Spanish Tragedie, a mere spectator of the mortal struggle in which his enemies perish, the ghost of Hamlet's father concerns himself practically in the scheme
- ↑ I am taking it for granted, in this paper, that the ghost is intended by Shakespeare as a genuine apparition, and not as a hallucination. This is so apparent that Professor Stoll (The Objectivity of the Ghosts in Shakespeare, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, N.S. xv. 203) regards it as a point not calling for demonstration. The opposite opinion has been maintained with great ingenuity
