Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The Ghost Suggests The Author’s Multiple Personality

At the beginning of the play, the ghost of Prince Hamlet’s deceased father, King Hamlet, is seen by four people: Hamlet, Horatio, and two sentries. The Ghost says that he was murdered and should be avenged. But is he telling the truth? Prince Hamlet must find out and take appropriate action.

Ghost Crucial in Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

“Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most realistic, most modern tragedy…It is therefore remarkable, and perhaps not without a personal significance, that he should have made the supernatural element more prominent here than in any other of his dramas. The first act is a little play in itself, and the Ghost is the hero of it; 550 out of 850 lines are concerned with him…He is a character of the play in the fullest sense of the term. He retains a human heart, for all his stateliness, and there is more than a touch of pathos about his majestical figure…The Ghost is the linchpin of Hamlet; remove it and the play falls to pieces” (1, p. 52).

But was a Ghost really necessary?

Obviously, since Hamlet has been a hit for more than four hundred years, Shakespeare made the Ghost work. At the same time, I would agree with the above quotation in that his choice of a ghost as a crucial literary device is “perhaps not without a personal significance.”

Why is the ghost an odd choice for Hamlet? Not because ghosts are a bad literary device. Wilson makes an excellent case for the long history and wide appeal of ghosts (1). But, in my view, Shakespeare could have used a different literary device that dwarfs the history and appeal of ghosts: dreams. And, after all, even in Hamlet’s own “To be or not to be” soliloquy, death is associated not with ghosts, but with dreams.

Shakespeare could have used dreams instead of a ghost with little change in characters, costumes, or action. Instead of the four characters seeing a ghost, they could have all dreamed of King Hamlet’s spirit’s asking to be avenged, all dreaming on the same night (thus avoiding the possibility that one suggested the idea to the next). As we would see each man asleep in a darkened corner of the stage, the spirit of King Hamlet would take center stage, costumed and acting just as he does now as the ghost. Each dreamer could get up and speak with the spirit (just as he did the ghost) to dramatize his own version of the dream. (I don’t insist on any details. Obviously, Shakespeare could do it better than this rough sketch.)

The wider appeal of dreams

Whereas only a sizable minority of the Elizabethan audience would have completely believed in ghosts—and some in the audience would have scoffed—everyone had dreams and could imagine how they would feel if their father had died, supposedly of natural causes, but then they and three relatives or friends all had the same dream, in which father said that he’d been murdered, and couldn’t rest in peace until justice had been done.

Thus, though either ghosts or dreams would work, dreams are more universally familiar to almost any audience, and is the natural choice. So Shakespeare probably had some personal reason for choosing ghosts over dreams.

Ghosts, Characters, Alternate Personalities

Experiencing ghosts is similar to writers’ experience of their characters, and both ghosts and characters are, essentially, like experiencing alternate personalities. So if the writer had multiple personality, ghosts (rather than dreams) would be his natural choice.

Moreover, ghost stories, per se, are related to the theme of the double (the literary metaphor for multiple personality). For example, I found Henry James’s story “The Private Life”—discussed in my post on multiple personality’s host personality—in a book titled Ghost Stories (2). Also, in my post on dictionaries of literary terms, I noted that the USA dictionary had an entry for the double, but none for ghosts, while the two UK dictionaries had the reverse. Ghosts and doubles are two versions of similar things, but ghosts are more British.

In conclusion, ghosts are often metaphors and euphemisms for multiple personality, and if an author uses ghosts when he doesn’t have to, I would include that in what I call “gratuitous multiple personality.” According to Multiple Identity Literary Theory (the subject of this blog), a writer’s gratuitous use of things related to multiple personality probably reflects the author’s own psychology.

1. John Dover Wilson. What Happens in Hamlet. Cambridge, The University Press, 1959.

2. Henry James. Ghost Stories: Henry James. Wordsworth Editions, 2001/2008.