I have already alluded to the significance of the reappearance of the Ghost in this scene; but why does Shakespeare choose for the particular moment of its reappearance the middle of a speech in which Hamlet is raving against his uncle?  There seems to be more than one reason.  In the first place, Hamlet has already attained his object of stirring shame and contrition in his mother’s breast, and is now yielding to the old temptation of unpacking his heart with words, and exhausting in useless emotion the force which should be stored up in his will.  And, next, in doing this he is agonising his mother to no purpose, and in despite of her piteous and repeated appeals for mercy.  But the Ghost, when it gave him his charge, had expressly warned him to spare her; and here again the dead husband shows the same tender regard for his weak unfaithful wife.  The object of his return is to repeat his charge: 

     Do not forget:  this visitation
     Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose;

but, having uttered this reminder, he immediately bids the son to help the mother and ‘step between her and her fighting soul.’

And, whether intentionally or not, another purpose is served by Shakespeare’s choice of this particular moment.  It is a moment when the state of Hamlet’s mind is such that we cannot suppose the Ghost to be meant for an hallucination; and it is of great importance here that the spectator or reader should not suppose any such thing.  He is further guarded by the fact that the Ghost proves, so to speak, his identity by showing the same traits as were visible on his first appearance—­the same insistence on the duty of remembering, and the same concern for the Queen.  And the result is that we construe the Ghost’s interpretation of Hamlet’s delay (’almost blunted purpose’) as the truth, the dramatist’s own interpretation.  Let me add that probably no one in Shakespeare’s audience had any doubt of his meaning here.  The idea of later critics and readers that the Ghost is an hallucination is due partly to failure to follow the indications just noticed, but partly also to two mistakes, the substitution of our present intellectual atmosphere for the Elizabethan, and the notion that, because the Queen does not see and hear the Ghost, it is meant to be unreal.  But a ghost, in Shakespeare’s day, was able for any sufficient reason to confine its manifestation to a single person in a company; and here the sufficient reason, that of sparing the Queen, is obvious.[61]

At the close of this scene it appears that Hamlet has somehow learned of the King’s design of sending him to England in charge of his two ‘school-fellows.’  He has no doubt that this design covers some villainous plot against himself, but neither does he doubt that he will succeed in defeating it; and, as we saw, he looks forward with pleasure to this conflict of wits.  The idea of refusing to go appears not to occur to him.  Perhaps (for here we are left to conjecture)