ABSTRACT
It makes sense in the English context to start with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which is, in a sense, perhaps the best-known ghost story of all. But in Hamlet, the very operation of the story depends crucially on the nature of this ghost, be he, as Hamlet exclaims, “spirit of health or goblin damned”; does this ghost come to remind him of his duty, a duty of vengeance, or to tempt him to unspeakable acts? It is worth remembering that Hamlet can be, and has been, performed with or without the ghost: that is to say, with an actor playing the ghost present on stage — or not. The space of the ghost — or perhaps the ghost of the space, the ghost which haunts the wide open spaces, which gives wild nature its being and renders us intruders upon a different order. We might say then that, from this perspective among many others, ghosts are integral to narrative.
