The Ghost has to be a demon. It can't actually be a spirit from Purgatory, no matter what test Hamlet applies. If it really were the soul of Hamlet Sr. sent back from Purgatory, then it would be sent back with the full consent of God Himself. But the Ghost explicitly commands that Hamlet seeks revenge on his father's murder, and we know that in a Christian context it is forbidden to seek revenge. "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord," goes the verse. Revenge is not a thing humans are supposed to pursue according to Christianity.
Ergo, the Ghost is a demon, and it is trying to get Hamlet to sin in a way that damns his soul. His earlier fears are correct.
>Reddit theories of Hamlet
FPBP
/thread
The Ghost is a hallucination. Claudius was innocent.
The ghost is specifically indeterminate to fuel Hamlet's need to determine despite is Doom to act.
Fricksake, and that Hamlet is 35 years older than the character.
>Fricksake, and that Hamlet is 35 years older than the character.
Hamlet is 30, Branagh was 36 in 1996.
>Hamlet is 30
based on what
According to the Gravedigger’s timeline. As a prince, Hamlet gets to go to university, study philosophy, mope, go crazy, and play mind games with teen girls like Ophelia for as long as he wants.
because I'm 30.
>could i have stayed with emma thompson?
sliding doors like a muhfug
>But the Ghost explicitly commands that Hamlet seeks revenge on his father's murder
no he doesnt, where? and where does he say to kill his uncle?
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homosexual
"Revenge his foul and unnatural murder."
he refers to "the father" which can apply to God. hamlet even says God, right before the ghosts revenge line. the murder can refer to the spiritual murder that claudius performed on the church, "the body of God" (1 cor 12 27), as the pharisees did to the christ, ie, the spiritual death of denmark caused by claudius's religious hypocrisy.
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youre the moron for not seeing this
>no he doesnt, where?
moron confirmed.
claudius may represent the sexual liberalism of henry viii who converted to protestantism due to personal failings. the rest of the theology is consistent with catholic beliefs, including the mystical union of the church with the body of christ and hence God the father.
There's no reason to believe god has to support a ghost from purgatory or hell appearing. Christopher Marlowe very cleverly has Mephistophilis say that he is in hell, while at the very moment he is discussing the pact with Faust in his study, and that wherever he may be, he is always in hell:
FAUSTUS.
Where are you damn’d?
MEPHIST.
In hell.
FAUSTUS.
How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?
MEPHIST.
Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it:
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?
Please stop interpreting Hamlet as le secretly about le reformation. It's gimmicky and doesn't fit if you're at all systematic about it, and we've heard enough of it. Shakespeare was a high church Anglican and that's that.
Just watched this. It was pretty good. Lotta words tho, I'm going to have to watch it again and then Olivier's also.
I liked his discourse on acting.
What's the idea, that Claudius is Luther?
>Shakespeare was a high church Anglican and that's that.
no he wasnt. then-mainstream church men are highly documented. that we know so little about shakespeare shows he led a life of extreme secrecy. and he showed so many catholic sympathies, his parents were hidden catholics after all, that all this secrecy strongly indicates he was hiding his catholic belief.
It's unbelievable how desperate you are to believe this. There's no confirmation his parents were secret Catholics, there's no confirmation he lived a life of extreme secrecy (that's just trying to rationalise why we know so little about him), but we know he attended church and there is plenty of very obvious support for Anglicanism in his plays. I can understand someone saying he was culturally Catholic, but the idea that he was a genuine Catholic who believed in Papal infallibility is just ridiculous. You just forget he wrote Henry 8th?
>full consent of God
>thinks God is in charge of anything that happens
COPE
>brings christian theology in out of nowhere
It’s a real ghost you homosexual
I thought the ghost was just pretty spooky
I think you may be right. If Laertes is the store brand Hamlet, then who is the store brand ghost? Of course it's Claudius, the guy who keeps pressuring Laertes to avenge his dead uncle. This implies that the ghost is not only a villain, but somehow more of a villain than Claudius in the story.
One reading has Hamlet conducting a University style investigation to the truth value of the ghost's claims as preceding taking action based on truth.
This is interesting, because it allows the conception of "What action is hamlet actually undertaking? Why can the play catch the conscience of the king?" But Hamlet as Science Bro plot-line weakens why he tells his girlfriend to frick off to safety long before "he knows," and why he doesn't just frick off back to University. Similarly, Hamlet has a knowledge of the conscience of the King but still spends two acts fricking about: it isn't knowledge of the external world that's the action, it is Hamlet's knowledge of himself.
Hamlet is interesting because he's a tragic hero who seeks to know why he must act and why it must be necessary in his turn away from the necessary action before necessarily acting.
It does make the play weak as frick because it goes meta, complete with play-within-play shit.
Now for a good Shakespearean tragedy, consider Titus.
Every time I read Hamlet, I can’t see Hamlet’s father as being anything but a cruel, barbaric king and it really colors how I read the play