Observing this, we may remember another significant point of resemblance between Hamlet and Macbeth, the appearance in each play of a Ghost,—­a figure which seems quite in place in either, whereas it would seem utterly out of place in Othello or King Lear.  Much might be said of the Ghost in Hamlet, but I confine myself to the matter which we are now considering.  What is the effect of the appearance of the Ghost?  And, in particular, why does Shakespeare make this Ghost so majestical a phantom, giving it that measured and solemn utterance, and that air of impersonal abstraction which forbids, for example, all expression of affection for Hamlet and checks in Hamlet the outburst of pity for his father?  Whatever the intention may have been, the result is that the Ghost affects imagination not simply as the apparition of a dead king who desires the accomplishment of his purposes, but also as the representative of that hidden ultimate power, the messenger of divine justice set upon the expiation of offences which it appeared impossible for man to discover and avenge, a reminder or a symbol of the connexion of the limited world of ordinary experience with the vaster life of which it is but a partial appearance.  And as, at the beginning of the play, we have this intimation, conveyed through the medium of the received religious idea of a soul come from purgatory, so at the end, conveyed through the similar idea of a soul carried by angels to its rest, we have an intimation of the same character, and a reminder that the apparent failure of Hamlet’s life is not the ultimate truth concerning him.

If these various peculiarities of the tragedy are considered, it will be agreed that, while Hamlet certainly cannot be called in the specific sense a ‘religious drama,’ there is in it nevertheless both a freer use of popular religious ideas, and a more decided, though always imaginative, intimation of a supreme power concerned in human evil and good, than can be found in any other of Shakespeare’s tragedies.  And this is probably one of the causes of the special popularity of this play, just as Macbeth, the tragedy which in these respects most nearly approaches it, has also the place next to it in general esteem.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 54:  In the First Act (I. ii. 138) Hamlet says that his father has been dead not quite two months.  In the Third Act (III. ii. 135) Ophelia says King Hamlet has been dead ‘twice two months.’  The events of the Third Act are separated from those of the Second by one night (II. ii. 565).]

[Footnote 55:  The only difference is that in the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy there is no reference to the idea that suicide is forbidden by ‘the Everlasting.’  Even this, however, seems to have been present in the original form of the speech, for the version in the First Quarto has a line about our being ‘borne before an everlasting Judge.’]