ABSTRACT
The explicit ‘stagedness’ of the spectre becomes a source of embarrassment and threatens the dramatic integrity of the ghost, betraying the primary challenges in performing the ghost story. However, the theatrical medium of the ghost stories, even as it poses a challenge to the aesthetic integrity of the ghost story through the potentially embarrassing need to furnish the ghost with a material and spatial form, become central to its power. Despite the twentieth-century decline in the ghost story form, which Julia Briggs attributes to the fact that the Great War had trivialised invented horrors by comparison, the ghost story did not disappear from the English stage completely. When the theatres reopened after the Interregnum period, stage ghosts were seen as old-fashioned, properly confined to revivals of William Shakespeare’s plays, an authorial name increasingly aligned with a reassurance of dramatic quality.
