In Act 1, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, several significant dramatic elements are founded, which set up the ‘revenge plot’ of the tragedy and establish the character of Hamlet – but also, more generally, modernised the form of the traditional (pre-Shakespearean) ‘ghost’, and ‘revenge tragedies’. In 1.5, Shakespeare modifies the traditional ‘ghost’ figure of his predecessors, transforming it from ‘a mere machine’ to a character with constant agency (through younger Hamlet); this character, embodying the Elizabethan schools of religious thought, both protestant and Catholic, and based on the silent ‘phantoms’ of other plays, can be likened to the character of ‘Revenge’ in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy’, both present and somewhat autonomous characters that drive the revenge plot. The character of King Hamlet’s ghost sets up the precedent for later Shakespearean ghosts of agency, such as Banquo in Macbeth. However, Hamlet’s Act 1, Scene 5, is arguably more significant in terms of establishing Hamlet’s purpose, ‘madness’, and perhaps foreshadowing his ‘hamartia’ (his downfall, being the flawed agent of revenge).
In 1.5, Hamlet’s madness is founded, at least as a cover, and, as such, this scene forms the groundworks for the main revenge plot of the play (that of Hamlet and Claudius). Hamlet’s madness is intrinsically linked to the existence of the ghost, as the two characters seem to be linked, not only through their name, but in ideology: King Hamlet, ‘buried Denmark’ is presented as a noble, and ‘good’ king, and Hamlet is similarly presented as noble, in the way that he still mourns his father, in an ‘inky cloak’. Not only are these characters similar, but King Hamlet’s ghost might even be a fanatical emergence of an imposed ‘Self’ figure from Hamlet’s own mind – a product of madness, or ‘Melancholy’, one of the four humours that Greek physician Galen named. The affinity that the two Hamlet’s have is clearly represented in the line balance and structure, and the younger Hamlet’s constant affirmation of the older Hamlet’s wishes. When the Ghost speaks from under the stage, by the trapdoor, his imperatives to ‘Swear’ are only answered by Hamlet, who always takes the next line, such as ‘Hic et ubique?’. Moreover, the ghost’s dramatic focus on the ‘incestuous, adulterous beast… witchcraft of his wit... wicked wit’ harks back to Hamlet’s earlier soliloquy about his mother’s incest, exemplifying the idea that the ghost may be a product of Hamlet’s obsessive madness, reaffirming his concerns and suspicions. Hamlet’s madness and the simultaneous appearance of the ghost create the impression of Hamlet’s fate, or determinism, to be ‘mad’, Hamlet’s cry – ‘O my prophetic soul!’ – reinforces the idea that the Ghost is a fragment of Hamlet’s ‘Self’, as Stockton argues. The constant motif of ‘ears’/’hearing’, after King Hamlet was poisoned via his ear, exacerbates this, as whispers are often fund to be synonymous with madness, or ‘Other’ voices that infiltrate the ‘Self’, such as that of King Hamlet – a ghost with much more agency than other pre-Shakespearean ghosts, such as that of Senecan tradition. The agency of the ghost, perhaps a mad hallucination, or wishful thinking, of Hamlet’s own potential but failed agency (with his hamartia mirroring the lack of action the ghost can take as a non-living being), seems to recall that of the character of Revenge in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (late 1580s), who is a constant present on the stage and, therefore, is the driving force of the revenge plot.