ABSTRACT
For a century, critics writing in the French neoclassical tradition had rejected such apparitions as contrary to reason. This chapter tells the story of the problem that preoccupied Lessing and occasioned his essays on belief in the theater - the legitimacy of onstage ghosts, particularly that of the ghost of Old Hamlet, a role traditionally held to have been played by Shakespeare himself. For much of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Shakespeare's plays stood in dramatic criticism as the antithesis to the "classical." French neoclassicists idolized their Greek forebears for their literary theatrical culture, even while condemning their theatrical extravagance in bringing gods, murders, mutilations, poisonings, and ghosts onto the stage. Voltaire did not protest this treatment of Shakespeare. On the contrary: years after his own stage ghost was rejected by its first audience, various factors had led him to feel more and more horrified at Shakespeare's growing influence on the French drama.
