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King Hamlet's Ambiguous Ghost

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert H. West*
Affiliation:
University of Georgia, Athens

Extract

A few years ago Roy W. Battenhouse published what is perhaps the most original and provoking theory of the nature of the ghost in Hamlet since the article by W. W. Greg which, with its contention that the apparition is to be understood as wholly subjective, prompted J. D. Wilson's study of Elizabethan spirit-lore. Battenhouse argues in essence that the ghost shows far too much vindictiveness (in the cellarage too much artfulness) to be a saved soul. It must therefore, he thinks, be out of some paganesque purgatory rather than the Catholic one, as Wilson had confidently asserted. Whether or not Battenhouse may be thought“ to have made his point, he has certainly raised some real difficulties for those who would regard the ghost as Catholic.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 70 , Issue 5 , December 1955 , pp. 1107 - 1117
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955

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