“My lord, I did;
But answer made it none: yet once, methought
It lifted up its head and did address
Itself to motion, like as it would speak.”
The walking of spirits seems also to have been enjoined by way of penance. The ghost of Hamlet’s father (i. 5) says:
“I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg’d away.”
And further on (iii. 2) Hamlet exclaims:
“It is a damned ghost that we have seen.”
This superstition is referred to by Spenser in his “Fairy Queen” (book i. canto 2):
“What voice of damned ghost from Limbo lake
Or guileful spright wand’ring in empty ayre,
Sends to my doubtful eares these speeches rare?”
According to a universal belief prevalent from the earliest times, it was supposed that ghosts had some particular reason for quitting the mansions of the dead, “such as a desire that their bodies, if unburied, should receive Christian rites of sepulture, that a murderer might be brought to due punishment,” etc.[76] On this account Horatio (“Hamlet,” i. 1) invokes the ghost:
“If there be any good thing to be done,
That may to thee do ease and grace to me,
Speak to me.”