Mam.A sad tale’s best for winter:
I have one of sprites and goblins.
Her.Let’s have that, good sir.
Come on, sit down: Come on, and do your best
To fright me with your sprites: you’re powerful at it.
Mam. There was a man,—
Her.Nay, come, sit down; then on.
Mam. Dwelt by a churchyard: I will tell it softly;
Yond crickets shall not hear it.
Her.Come on, then,
And give’t me in mine ear.”
The important part which Shakespeare has assigned to the ghost in “Hamlet” has a special value, inasmuch as it illustrates many of the old beliefs current in his day respecting their history and habits. Thus, according to a popular notion, ghosts are generally supposed to assume the exact appearance by which they were usually known when in the material state, even to the smallest detail of their dress. So Horatio tells Hamlet how, when Marcellus and Bernardo were on their watch (i. 2),
“A figure like your father,
Arm’d at point, exactly, cap-a-pe,
Appears before them, and with solemn march
Goes slow and stately by them.”
Further on, when the ghost appears again, Hamlet addresses it thus:
“What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again, in complete steel,
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous.”