Yet some critics have questioned the reality claim of the Ghost within the world of the play, along with the ethics of his call for revenge–just as, indeed, young Hamlet himself feels compelled to test the truth of the Ghost’s accusation through “The Mousetrap,” the play within the play. In a crucial way the whole plot of Hamlet depends upon the Ghost. We must decide, along with young Hamlet, whether the Ghost is “a spirit of health or goblin damned.” In this paradigmatically modern play, the Ghost hearkens back to the late medieval world of magic and superstition, the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory–as well as the generic conventions of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Scholars have tended to focus their attention on the character of young Hamlet, but the Ghost of King Hamlet is arguably the interpretive crux of Shakespeare’s play.

Salt Lake City, Utah me.” Hamlet’s Ghost calls out to us across the space of four hundred years, and by all evidence we are in no danger of forgetting him.

King hamlet