Hamlet (Vol. 35) | Eleanor Prosser (essay date 1967)
Eleanor Prosser (essay date 1967)
SOURCE: "Spirit of Health or Goblin Damned?", in Hamlet and Revenge, 1967, pp. 132-42.
[In the following excerpt, Prosser asserts that Shakespeare's Ghost is not Hamlet's father but an incarnation of the Devil, and details the manner in which this demon exhorts Hamlet to revenge.]
Act I, Scene v
Now, at last, the Ghost speaks. And now we face the first serious possibility that it may indeed be the departed soul of Hamlet's father, returned from Purgatory, where he is "doomed for a certain term" to "fast" in "sulphurous and tormenting flames" until his "foul crimes … are burnt and purged away."32 Very well, let us shift our perspective, as many in Shakespeare's audience may have done, and test it on its chosen grounds—test it, that is, by Catholic doctrine.
What is the mission of the Ghost? Even before it announces its identity, we are warned: it comes to command revenge. Its...
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