Hamlet is possibly the greatest work of literature in the history of the English language, but it sure isn’t a very good ghost story.
First off, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the late King of Denmark, doesn’t act like a proper ghost. Other Shakespearean ghosts, in Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Richard III, get it right. They haunt the person responsible for their deaths, and only that person. These spectral avengers are half divine punishments, half vivid hallucinations of guilt-ridden minds. But the King’s ghost tries to get his revenge by pricking his innocent son Hamlet to the task, which is highly inefficient. One has to assume that he tried haunting Claudius directly, but his lout of a brother was too busy drinking and schtupping Gertrude to care. Hamlet, then, is plan B.
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