Ghost in Hamlet

Introduction

Hamlet is a tragic play written by William Shakespeare. It was composed between 1599 and 1601. Shakespeare challenged the audience's intelligence and the religious, moral and legal codes of the time. Did Shakespeare not have an aesthetically consistent grand design in mind when he wrote this work? No final answers are possible because the text is embedded with contradictory material (Hazlitt, pp.233-256). This paper examines Shakespeare's dramatic secret of a "Ghost" in Hamlet. The idea of a "Ghost," a being of uncertain existence, whether an idea or an event or the soul of a deceased person, is effectively used  to create a world of doubt into which Hamlet is drawn by the words of what seems to be the ghost of King Hamlet.

Discussion

Chapter no1 represents the world of Hamlet, to whom the Ghost delivers a message that is impossible to prove. It is when trapped in this world of seeming, that Hamlet utters the famous "To be or not to be" phrase. On the other hand, Hamlet himself acts as Ghost for Claudius; that is, Hamlet appears before Claudius as the provider of a dubious world. At a certain point enters, and the two worlds develop in parallel till the final, feud scene like two facing mirrors--the mirror of Hamlet and the mirror of Claudius. And these two facing mirrors give an infinite number of reflections. The verbal techniques which Iago used were, contrary to general belief, in most cases not "lies": they were called as villainous maxim violations and they resulted in the creation of a "Ghost Implicative": a false implicates that Iago artfully created to get Othello to assume that Iago had something to hide. Othello's simple one-utterance-with-one-meaning life is mediated by the Ghost Implicative into a life of implicative, a world of one utterance with multiple ...