The character of the ghost in Hamlet can be presented in many different ways, because he can be interpreted differently by each person who reads/performs Hamlet.
Some people say that the ghost of the King isn’t real, and that it is just a figure of Hamlet’s imagination, and his way of clarifying his belief’s about Claudius and his dead father. Hamlet declares that he has a ‘prophetic soul’ after the ghost says that it was Claudius who killed his father, causing the reader to wonder whether Hamlet is just trying to find an excuse to believe his own suspicions, in the form of the ghost of his father. After all, the ghost does say a lot of the things that Hamlet has said himself, ‘damned incest’; Hamlet has said something along these lines in his soliloquy ‘incestuous sheets’, which gives the impression that the ghost is just Hamlet’s mind playing tricks on him telling him what he wants to hear.
The ghost could be interpreted as evil, and something that is out to do harm to Hamlet - he teases Hamlet with information it is not going to tell ‘I could a tale unfold’; he is manipulative, saying that ‘if’ he ever loved him when he was human and his father, he should revenge his murder, which causes the audience to ask the question of whether or not the ghost is trustworthy, or whether it is something sent to sway Hamlet and force him to kill Claudius. The ghost tells Hamlet of how his father was killed by poison being poured into his ears, but there is also the question of is that what the ghost is doing to Hamlet? Pouring poison into his ears, so to speak, so that he believes his own thoughts about who killed his father, and also to make him angry, by telling him details like how the poison would have reacted within his body, to make Hamlet emotional and more vengeful.
The Laurence Olivier version of Hamlet helps to portray the ghost as a gentle being, with his soft voice and simple effects. This supports the interpretation of the ghost that some readers may take, which is that the ghost simply is Hamlet’s father, who was murdered by his brother, and a character that should be felt sympathy for. Most readers could sympathise with the ghost dying before he was allowed to repent for his sins (‘no reckoning made but sent to my account with all my imperfections on my head’), whether you believe in heaven/hell/purgatory or not, because you can tell of his distress of this by how he describes it as ‘O horrible, O horrible, most horrible!’.
While the Laurence Olivier version of Hamlet could be seen to make the ghost seem more gentle, the ghost could also be seen as something scary; it is the stereotypical ghost in the sense that you can’t fully see it, and it is whispering in a manner that is not simply to say something quietly, it is like they are trying to achieve a ‘shivers down your spine’ scared feeling from the audience. There are elements of this in the play; the ghost is telling of his own murder, a subject that isn’t supposed to be friendly and happy, its supposed to spook people, and could have spooked people in the time that Shakespeare wrote it because people relied on religion more, so ghosts would not be seen as friendly helpful beings but rather a being that should not be trusted and would be seen as a bad sign.
The ghost played by Patrick Stewart seems angrier, which is understandable to the viewer because he has been killed by his own brother. This is evident in the text with the way the ghost talks about his brother, ‘that incestuous, that adulterate beast’ – the repetition of ‘that’ implies that there are many other things that the ghost could have chosen to say about his murderous brother. There are also a lot of negative words in the text, which gives the impression of anger and bitterness, ‘vile’, damned’, ‘wretch’.
My interpretation of the ghost is that I believe that it is an actual ghost, even though there is reason behind the belief that the ghost is a product of Hamlet’s imagination, but because Horatio and Marcellus have both seen it it reinforces my belief that the ghost is real. I also think that the ghost is supposed to be slightly scary, and untrustworthy, which helps to make Hamlet seem more mad to the reader, because even now if a person believes in ghosts they generally don’t see ghosts as a good thing, or at least find them slightly unnerving, whereas Hamlet trusts every word the ghost says. This makes Hamlet seem desperate, like he is so thankful that he has got to see his father again he will believe anything this figure says, which makes him seem slightly without reason, and therefore mad, or at least going mad.
I agree with you on the idea that the Ghost was real. Back when this was written, ghosts, and the spiritual world, was a massive way of life. Shakespeare himself was very superstitiuous, and therefore included a lot of unnatural phenomena in his writing. And so it is very likely that he first wrote the Ghost in, as when someone had died it was thought that their spirits remained on the earth for a certain amount of time, and so the sprit of the dead king could well have been roaming the castle; whether he had been murdered or not. However whether Hamlet had the conversation with the Ghost is a completely different matter. Even though the guards insist on following him, they never catch him with the Ghost, even though they spend a considerable amount of time togther. This could suggest that the whole scene with the Ghost is in Hamlets head, and Hamlet, out of pure jelousy and rage creates the idea of his Uncle killing his father and convinces himself by projecting an alter-ego in front of himself to convince him so.
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