Ghost
The Ghost is the catalyst that sets Hamlet's entire tragedy in motion. Its accusation transforms a court already unsettled by a hasty royal remarriage into the site of a secret revenge plot, and its brief, commanding appearances — only four in the whole play — belie the enormous narrative weight they carry. Every subsequent action Hamlet takes is, in some sense, an argument with what the Ghost demanded of him.
Appears In
Biography
The Ghost is the spirit of the late King Hamlet, dead barely two months and already walking the battlements of Elsinore in the exact armour he wore in life. It appears first to the watchmen Bernardo and Marcellus, and then to Horatio, before finally revealing itself to Hamlet — a slow escalation that lends the apparition a weight and credibility the play never allows the audience to fully dismiss as hallucination.
When it finally speaks to Hamlet alone on the platform, the Ghost delivers the accusation that detonates the entire tragedy: it was murdered by Claudius, poison poured into its ear while it slept in the orchard, and its soul now wanders in a purgatorial suffering it describes in harrowing detail. It demands revenge, yet tempers that demand with an instruction to leave Gertrude's judgement to heaven — a strange, humane qualification from a spirit otherwise consumed by wrath.
The Ghost's nature is left deliberately unresolved. Is it truly King Hamlet's soul, a demon exploiting his image, or a projection of Hamlet's own guilt and rage, as its final appearance — visible only to Hamlet, not to Gertrude, in the closet scene — seems to suggest? Shakespeare never settles the question, and that ambiguity is itself the engine of Hamlet's paralysis: he cannot act on a command whose very source he cannot fully trust.
Motivation
The Ghost wants two things above all: vengeance against the brother who murdered it, and release from the purgatorial torment it describes as unbearable. Its wrath toward Claudius is total, but it explicitly asks Hamlet to spare Gertrude any violence, leaving her to be judged by conscience and heaven rather than by her son's hand — a request that reveals a love surviving even betrayal.
Personality
The Ghost speaks with the authority of a king and the anguish of a man who died unshriven and unavenged. Its wrath is genuine, but it is shot through with grief — for its own suffering, for the crown and queen it has lost, and, however briefly, for the son it is about to burden with an impossible task. Its refusal to let Hamlet harm Gertrude suggests a moral precision beneath the fury, even as its very reality remains one of the play's great unanswered questions.