Hamlet Scene Analysis: The Ghost of Hamlet - ACT I Scene 5
The creative responsibility of an actor is obliged to carefully study the text, scene by scene, elucidating the general and immediate concern of the character, along with the objectives they have as well as the tactics that the character employs to achieve them. In Act I, Scene 5, Hamlet's overarching motivation is to find out the identity and the nature of the ghost. Is it his father? Why the ghost is haunting the castle? At the beginning of the scene, Hamlet has been lured, against Horatio's better judgment, away from his friends to a remote place. Hamlet said in the scene before that he did not value his life, but he clearly has some reservations as he begins the scene by saying "Where wilt thou lead me? speak; I'll go no further." He is essentially bargaining with the mysterious ghost, hoping that the ghost will reveal his mission rather than force him to perhaps risk his life by going to the edge of the castle wall. After all, the ghost might be a devil. The ghost of Hamlet's father, if one accepts that the ghost really is Hamlet's father and is telling the truth, is trying to persuade his son to avenge his murder. The ghost of the old king wants his son Hamlet, who he knows is an intellectual, indecisive, but loving bo
But although the old king calls Gertrude lewd, he also chides Hamlet not to harm her. " Hamlet, at first reluctant, immediately becomes the ghost's sympathetic audience when he hears of the horrors that his father's spirit is suffering during the day, in the fires of purgatory, because of Claudius' murder. On one hand, he calls her alliance with his brother incestuous. This concern also lends the ghost a moral authority, and makes his strange story seem even more credible to eager Hamlet-the ghost is not a bloodthirsty demon, he seems to come with a purpose, and he echoes what Hamlet already believes about both Claudius and Hamlet's mother, even though Hamlet did not discern the exact, poisonous and underhanded manner in which his father was killed. Most of his speech is spent unpacking his own grievances, and ensuring that Hamlet gets the necessary information to do the ghost's bidding, as requested. He also reproaches her for choosing "to decline/Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor/ To those of mine!" The ghost would likely feel this way about any man Gertrude selected to succeed him, but he feels even worse knowing that his brother and his murderer is sleeping next to his former wife in the form of the same person. "O my prophetic soul! My uncle!" After confronting the ghost, and, at least at that moment, been persuaded through sympathy and pity that it is his father's suffering spirit, he becomes a captive audience for the tale that the ghost has been obsessed with telling since the beginning of the play. Despite the ghost's skillful invocation of pity, either because he is really a demon, or because he has become so separated from fatherly emotion, he does not show much tenderness to his son, other than to tell his son to remember him. " Hamlet, normally not at a loss for words, is horrified to hear about the terrible suffering his father, whom he believed to have been a good man and a good king is suffering. Hamlet has never liked Claudius, his uncle, and he is eager to believe bad things about him. He occasionally slows the ghost down with interjections of pity. The ghost tells Hamlet that guilt is enough: "nor let thy soul contrive/Against thy mother aught: leave her to heaven/And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge, /To prick and sting her. However, this coolness and officiousness could also simply be the character of the old king, as he was a leader of a nation, and perhaps an admired rather than a tender father. He uses ethical appeals to Hamlet as a Dane: "Let not the royal bed of Denmark be/A couch for luxury and damned incest.
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