Shakespeare's Hamlet - The Ghost Of Hamlet’s Father Essay

murder in a rash mood. It is not seen by Gertrude. It tries to urge

When Hamlet sees the ghost he is shocked that Horatio and Marcellus were being truthful, he immediately starts rejoicing and asking the ghost questions “Say why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?”

Hamlet questions the true intentions of the ghost and whether it be “a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,” (1.4.669). The Ghost enlightens the Prince of the treason committed by his uncle Claudius, which Hamlet doubts the legitimacy for an instance. According to “Hamlet’s Precarious Emotional Balance,” “Hamlet conceives a way out of his uncertainty, a way to make certain that he has not, because of his melancholy, simply hallucinated the ghost's revelations or been tricked by an evil spirit,” (Lidz). Hamlet develops a scheme to “catch the conscience of the king” by staging a play that depicts the murder of King Hamlet precisely (2.2.581).

 It is a commonplace to refer to Hamlet’s “dilemma” and a critical problem to explain in what this dilemma consists. A natural way to come to terms with the problem is obviously through the character that forces the dilemma upon Hamlet, that is to say, the Ghost. This is a particularly attractive approach, since it promises to bring the findings of modern research into Elizabethan

William Shakespeare's Hamlet is a drama which has been renound for its content and depiction of characters. Over the years, it has gone through many variations of interpretations and criticisms. One such criticism is the nature of the ghost who takes the form of Hamlet's dead father. At first glance, it may be sufficient to accept the ghost as the spirit of Hamlet's dead father who returns to the land of the living in order to have his son avenge his murder. However, looking deeper into the text, several unignorable signs become visible which lead us to see that the ghost is actually the devil in disguise. Kenneth Brannagh's 1997 production of Hamlet brilliantly portrays these signs of evil and

In this revenge tragedy, which is a play in which the plot typically centers on a spectacular attempt to avenge the murder of a family member, Hamlet’s call to adventure is when the ghost, whom he believes to be the ghost of his recently deceased father, beseeches Hamlet that he avenge his death (Charters and Charters 1251). At first looking at the ghost, he questions the authority of him and contemplates that the apparition is just the devil tempting him:

Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, begins with the appearance of a ghost, an apparition, possibly a hallucination. Thus, from the beginning, Shakespeare presents the air of uncertainty, of the unnatural, which drives the action of the play and develops in the protagonist as a struggle to clarify what only seems to be absolute and what is actually reality. Hamlet's mind, therefore, becomes the central force of the play, choosing the direction of the conflict by his decisions regarding his revenge and defining the outcome.

When the ghost makes this hefty claim, Hamlet almost cannot believe him and wonders if the spirit is really his father. He knows it is impossible to be certain and even suggests that the ghost may be the devil, revealing,“... the devil hath power T’ assume a pleasing shape” (132). Consequently, Hamlet devises a plan to find out the truth. When a troupe of traveling actors stays to entertain Hamlet, he instructs them to perform a play reenacting his father’s apparent death (128). Watching Claudius’ reaction to the play, he determines “I'll take the ghost's word for a thousand pound” (174).

    Does the ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet conform to the standards for ghosts in the days of the dramatist? This essay will answer this and other questions about the ghost in the drama.

The play Hamlet is a fable of how the ghost of a slain king comes to haunt the living with disastrous consequences. A rancorous ghost and a brother 's murder, lead the gloomy setting of Hamlet 's Denmark. Hamlet story opens with an encounter between young Hamlet, his dad 's ghost as well as the prince of Denmark. The ghost reveals to Hamlet that its murderer was his brother Claudius, who then rapidly wedded his widowed queen, Gertrude. As a result, the ghost presses Hamlet to seek vengeance on the man who stole his throne as well as his queen to which Hamlet consents.

The story opens in the cold and dark of a winter night in Denmark, while the guard is being changed on the battlements of the royal castle of Elsinore. For two nights in succession, just as the bell strikes the hour of one, a ghost has appeared on the battlements, a figure dressed in complete armor and with a face like that of the dead king of Denmark, Hamlet’s

The ghost made the whole situation for Hamlet seem even that much more unreal. He already wished that all of the recent events he had to deal with were not real. He then has to deal with the reality of this ghost. It seems to influence him terribly and takes a negative toll on his emotions. This occurrence continues to further diversify Hamlet’s feelings and emotions (Snider, 67).

    Though Shakespeare cannot claim the invention of the ghosts in tragedies, still he can claim to have clothed his ghost in Hamlet with convincingness. This essay concerns his one supernatural character in the tragedy.

With the appearance of the ghost the reader is, whether they realize it or not, being challenged to take a position on Hamlet's state of mind. At first the reader may take it at face value assuming that a ghost is a ghost and should be accepted as such. But after a deeper look using the psychoanalytic perspective of critical evaluation, it becomes believable that the ghost is just a trick of Hamlet's mind used to justify his urges to avenge his father's death, a sort of madness. It is hard to decide what to think about Shakespeare's introduction of the ghost because of the two different ways he portrays it.

This story begins on a cold night in Denmark Elsinore Castle when Hamlet’s trusted friend Horatio, and some guards see a ghost, the ghost of King Hamlet to be exact. The philosophical and complicated yet socially popular young Prince of Denmark, Hamlet, is busy fuming at his uncle Claudius who married his mom two days after his father's death. Hamlet suspects that they conspired to kill his father, and he even contemplates suicide. His hopes are lifted when he hears about the ghost.