The Relationship of Hamlet and the Ghost
FREE SAMPLE CRITICAL ESSAY
A dying Hamlet grants the Ghost the atonement his suffering soul needed more than the revenge he demanded: he surrenders Denmark to the son of the man murdered by his father on the day of the prince’s birth: “Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!” (1.5).
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Essay introduction /
Thesis statement
“The king’s to blame”
‘Kill your uncle in revenge for my death, ignore your mother, avoid losing your sanity, and don’t worry about my suffering in the afterlife.’
In simple terms, these are the Ghost’s four instructions in 1.5 to the title character of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
The Ghost tinges his demands with emotional blackmail: “If thou didst ever thy dear father love …” But offers the prince no practical guidance: “However thou should accomplish this act …”
By the play’s end, Hamlet has broken every one of the directions issued by the “apparition” (1.1) who appears in the “questionable shape” (1.4) like “the king that’s dead” (1.1).
But, after many “purposes mistook” (5.2) and mirroring Laertes’ journey from revenge to forgiveness, the prince finds another way to keep the promise he made to his late father’s memory: “Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!” (1.5).
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#Hamlet: Is the Ghost "like the king that's dead" ultimately to blame for the play's many deaths?
1
Who or what is the Ghost in Hamlet?
“Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy”
In 1.1, the skeptical “scholar” Horatio dismisses as a “fantasy” claims by the castle guards Marcellus and Barnardo of witnessing “this dreaded sight.” But the evidence of his eyes convinces him “this thing” is real and resembles the “form” of “our last king.”
The Ghost presents himself as a soul returned from a Catholic purgatory, where he is suffering “for a certain term … in fires” until his sins are “purged away” (1.5).
Prince Hamlet leans towards the Protestant view of ghosts: they may be truth-revealing spirits (“airs from heaven”) or manipulative demons (“blasts from hell”, 1.5). He first believes the former (“It is an honest ghost”, 1.5), but later fears what he has seen “may be a devil” who “Abuses me to damn me” (2.2).
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Old King #Hamlet's Ghost: from a Catholic purgatory, a Protestant hell - or his son's imagination?
2
Two Hamlet brothers: one living, one undead.
“A brother’s murder”
A single murder, two suffering souls. Old King Hamlet died with his sins unconfessed (“all my imperfections on my head”, 1.5) and must so endure a limited period of punishment in purgatory. An entire eternity of hellfire awaits his brother, Claudius; it is the price he knows he must pay for his stolen crown and queen: “O, heavy burden” (3.1).
In the play’s final scene, a conscience-stricken Laertes declares “The king’s to blame” (5.2). But which king? So many lives would have been spared had “the king that’s dead” (1.1) asked not for revenge but for prayers to end the suffering of two souls: his in the “sulfurous and tormenting flames” (1.5) of purgatory, and his brother’s on Denmark’s throne, “limed” and “struggling to be free” (3.3).
As much as Hamlet idolizes his dead father and despises his usurping uncle, in the prince’s “O cursed spite” (1.5) remark there is a recognition that both brothers share blame for the dilemma in which he is placed: trapped between the murderous ambition of a living brother and the vengeful fury of an undead one.
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#Hamlet: The prince swears an oath only to "remember" his father's Ghost, not to avenge him.
3
Hamlet, the Ghost and Gertrude
“Leave her to heaven”
To the Ghost in 1.5, Gertrude is both a “radiant angel” and a “seeming-virtuous queen.” For what he sees as her sins (“those thorns”), he wishes her to be punished in the next life (“Leave her to heaven”) after being tormented by them in this one (“To prick and sting her”).
Despite the Ghost’s command, Hamlet cannot ignore his mother. To the Ghost’s revenge mission, the prince adds a second, more poignant quest of his own: to reunite in the afterlife his fractured-by-Claudius family of mother and father.
Hence Hamlet’s desire to first rescue his mother’s soul (“Repent what’s past. Avoid what is to come”, 3.4) before he condemns his uncle’s (“as damned and black / As hell, whereto it goes”, 3.3).
That the Ghost in Gertrude’s closet is visible to the prince but unseen by his mother (“To whom do you speak this?”, 3.4) reveals the gulf between the haunted-by-the-past Hamlet and the live-in-the-moment queen.
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#Hamlet seeks to reunite in the afterlife his fractured-by-Claudius family of mother and father.
4
The Ghost’s anger and Hamlet’s madness
“Taint not thy mind”
After being instructed by the Ghost to “Taint not thy mind” (1.5), the prince immediately and without explanation decides to feign madness.
Is Hamlet setting in place a defense of temporary insanity should he kill Claudius and face a trial before Denmark’s nobles? It is exactly this excuse prince later offers to Laertes as a defense for his murder of Polonius: “I here proclaim was madness. / Was’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet … Who does it, then? His madness” (5.2).
But the prince’s exploitation of “fair Ophelia” (3.1) to spread word of his “antic disposition” (1.5) leads him to the edge of insanity (“It hath made me mad”, 3.1) and sends her to actual madness and “self-slaughter” (1.2).
Ophelia and Hamlet each leave behind a “wounded name” (5.2): she, a “document in madness” (4.5) who was “incapable of her own distress” (4.7); the prince, “he that is mad” after “losing his wits” (5.1).
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"How came he mad?" - #Hamlet asks about himself to the grave-digger.
5
Essay conclusion / Summary
“Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!”
In the final 5.2 scene, Hamlet’s killing of Claudius is not long-delayed revenge. It is his immediate and spontaneous response to the king’s guilt for the death of Gertrude, Laertes and the prince himself: “In thee there is not half an hour of life.”
Laertes refers to his murdered father Polonius in his dying words. But the Ghost who appears at the beginning and the middle of the play goes unmentioned by Hamlet at the end. However, the prince has not forgotten his vow, made in 1.5: “‘Remember me.’ I have sworn’t.”
In his one act as king, a dying Hamlet surrenders Denmark to the son of his father’s old rival. In so doing he grants his “dear father” (2.2) something more than vengeance: atonement for his land-grabbing, “Extorted treasure in the womb of earth” (1.1) sins committed “in his days of nature” (1.5)—and with it escape from his afterlife torment in the “prison house … fires” (1.5).
“Alas, poor Ghost” (1.5), indeed.
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#Hamlet grants his father not the revenge he demanded but the atonement his suffering soul needed more.
6
The most helpful book ever for students and teachers of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
42 x 1,500-word model essays
Chapter-by-chapter guide to Hamlet Model Essays
IN THIS BOOK ARE THREE 1,500-WORD SAMPLE ESSAYS ON EACH ONE OF THE FOLLOWING 14 CHARACTERS, RELATIONSHIPS, AND THEMES. THAT’S 42 SAMPLE ESSAYS IN TOTAL.
#1: The Character of Hamlet
Born a prince, parented by a jester, haunted by a ghost, destined to be killed for killing a king, and remembered as the title character of a play he did not want to be in. If at the cost of his life, Hamlet does in the end “win at the odds.”
#2: The Character of Claudius
His “ambition” for Denmark’s crown leads him to commit one murder only to find that he must plot a second to cover up the first. When this plan fails, his next scheme leads to the death of the woman he loves followed by his own.
#3: The Character of Gertrude
“Have you eyes?”, Prince Hamlet demands of his mother. Gertrude‘s “o’erhasty marriage” dooms her life and the lives of everyone around her when her wished-for, happy-ever-after fairytale ends in a bloodbath.
#4: The Character of Ophelia
As she struggles to respond to the self-serving purposes of others, Ophelia’s sanity collapses in Elsinore’s “unweeded garden” of falsity and betrayal. Her “self-slaughter” is her revenge for her silencing and humiliation.
#5: Relationship of Hamlet and the Ghost
Hamlet grants the Ghost the atonement his suffering soul needed more than the revenge he demanded: he surrenders Denmark to the son of the man murdered by his father on the day of the prince’s birth.
#6: Relationship of Hamlet and Claudius
Uncle and nephew are two men at war with each other—and themselves. Claudius is haunted by the murder he has committed (“O heavy burden!”); Hamlet by the one he hasn’t yet (“Am I a coward?”).
#7: Relationship of Hamlet and Gertrude
A haunted-by-the-past Hamlet seeks the truth about his father’s death (“Do you see nothing there?”). A live-in-the-present Gertrude seeks to protect her second husband and crown (“No, nothing but ourselves”).
#8: Relationship of Hamlet and Ophelia
Their relationship begins in uncertainty, descends into mutual deceit and rejection, and ends with their double surrender to death: Ophelia, to the water; Hamlet, to Claudius’ rigged fencing duel.
#9: Relationship of Hamlet and Horatio
“Those friends thou hast … Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel.” Horatio is Hamlet’s trusted confidant in life and vows to remain the keeper of his memory after the prince’s death.
#10: Relationship of Claudius and Gertrude
A marriage of mutual self-interest: Claudius wanted to become king; Gertrude wanted to remain queen. In the end, both die by the same poison her second husband used to murder her first.
#11: Main Themes of Hamlet
A king murdered, an inheritance stolen, a family divided: Elsinore’s older generation destroys its younger when two brothers—one living, one undead—battle in a “cursed spite” over a crown and a queen.
#12: The Theme of Revenge
Hamlet and Laertes journey from revenge, through obsession and anger, to forgiveness. And the revenge sought by the Ghost on King Claudius becomes the revenge of Old King Fortinbras on Old King Hamlet.
#13: Deception and Appearance versus Reality
“Who’s there?” The characters struggle to distinguish between truth and falsehood in a play-long triple pun on the verb ‘to act’: to take action, to behave deceitfully, and to perform in theater.
#14: The Theme of Madness
“Your noble son is mad”, Polonius tells Denmark’s king and queen. But is Hamlet ever really insane? If not, why is he pretending to be? And is the prince’s “antic disposition” the cause of Ophelia’s traumatic breakdown?