And in a later scene (i. 4) Hamlet says:
“Say, why is this? wherefore? What should we do?”
The Greeks believed that such as had not received funeral rites would be excluded from Elysium; and thus the wandering shade of Patroclus appears to Achilles in his sleep, and demands the performance of his funeral. The younger Pliny tells a story of a haunted house at Athens, in which a ghost played all kinds of pranks, owing to his funeral rites having been neglected. A further reference to the superstition occurs in “Titus Andronicus” (i. 1), where Lucius, speaking of the unburied sons of Titus, says:
“Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths,
That we may hew his limbs, and, on a pile,
Ad manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh,
Before this earthy prison of their bones;
That so the shadows be not unappeased,
Nor we disturbed with prodigies on earth.”
In olden times, spirits were said to have different allotments of time, suitable to the variety and nature of their agency. Prospero, in the “Tempest” (i. 2), says to Caliban:
“Be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps,
Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins
Shall, for that vast[77] of night that they may work,
All exercise on thee.”
According to a popular notion, the presence of unearthly beings was announced by an alteration in the tint of the lights which happened to be burning—a superstition alluded to in “Richard III.” (v. 3), where the tyrant exclaims, as he awakens:
“The lights burn blue.—It is now dead midnight,
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh—
*****
Methought the souls of all that I had murder’d
Came to my tent.”
So in “Julius Cæsar” (iv. 3), Brutus, on seeing the ghost of Cæsar, exclaims:
“How ill this taper burns! Ha! who comes here?”