The story of the Ghost, as we have it in our surviving text, seems very incomplete and confused, and would be actively pernicious if taken as moral advice, when the play was new. Fredson Bowers said he was meant as a moral warning against revenge, but he is close to the other revenger, Old Hieronymo, who is deliberately put into a test-case situation where almost anyone would consider revenge a duty. Also an expectation is aroused but never gratified. The play opens with the ghost explaining himself to the audience, so far as he can; he has been sent back to earth from the classical underworld because the officials there could not decide whether he died as a lover or a soldier; if as a lover, he can go to the Elysian fields and be with Bel-imperia. His case was moved up and up in the legal hierarchy till it reached Pluto, whose wife grinned and whispered in his ear, and on her advice this ghost has been sent back to learn the answer. He is led by Revenge in person, who says: ‘Here sit we down to see the mystery’ (1. i. 90). But the mystery is never solved, and we do not even hear whether the ghost is adjudged to have died as a lover. It is hard to see how Proserpine would arrange that, however willing she is, as he has told us that he was killed in a battle against the Portuguese.