This study will examine William Shakespeare's Hamlet to determine the reason Hamlet first believes in the honesty of the Ghost and then manifests profound doubts about that honesty. Of course, the fact that the Ghost is indeed telling the truth does not change; what changes is the fact that believing in the Ghost's honesty (with respect to Claudius' having killed Hamlet's father) requires Hamlet to kill Claudius for justice and revenge. This is an act for which the philosophical Hamlet is not prepared. Hamlet immediately believes the Ghost's claims about the truth of his father's death because he is already in a state of rage at Claudius and his mother for their hasty marriage in the wake of the murder. His subsequent "doubting" of the honesty of the Ghost is more a means of delaying the inevitable than it is a legitimate reason to test the Ghost's honesty by trying to draw Claudius out of his pose of innocence. With respect to Hamlet's believing and doubting the Ghost, the study will focus on Hamlet's psychological composition and on the external reality in which that psychology exercises itself in the play.
Hamlet is in a state of great distress when he is first able to express himself freely. Before the arrival of the Ghost, Hamlet hardly suspects Claudius of the murder of his father, but he does feel that all is not as it should be in the royal family. In the monologue beginning with "O that this too too sallied flesh would melt" (Shakespeare 38), Hamlet makes clear that he has hardly accepted the consequences of his father's death. He bemoans his mother's "Frailty" which has led her to marry his uncle--her brother-in-law--less than a month after the death of his father, her husband. Apparently Hamlet does not suspect that Claudius is the killer, but he still harbors powerfully negative feelings toward the new king--and now his stepfather: "My uncle,/ My father's brother, but no more like my father/ Than I to Hercules" (Shake...