SOURCE: Kastan, David Scott. “‘His semblable is his mirror’: Hamlet and the Imitation of Revenge.” Shakespeare Studies 19 (1987): 111-24.

In the following essay, Kastan asserts that Hamlet tries to persuade himself that revenge is a means of restoring the past, but ultimately rejects vengeance, both because it is futile and because it entails replicating the crime that incited it.

Through the streets of Jerusalem at the present day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his shoulders. He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation.

—Oscar Wilde

What replication should be made by the son of a king?

—Hamlet, IV.ii.11-12

I

Hamlet is not alone in attending to the compelling voice of a ghost; Shakespeare himself apparently remembered the “ghost which cried so miserally [sic] at the Theator, like an oister wife, Hamlet, revenge.”¹ Hamlet's source, almost certainly...