Damned Ghost: How Shakespeare saw through it and we didn't

In Hamlet, Shakespeare's play, a ghost tells a prince a terrible tale. ‘Is it true?’ the prince asks himself. This book asks, and answers, that same question. A ghost is something one may see and believe or look through and doubt. Doubt runs through the entire play. But it is in how Shakespeare used the ghost - missing from the original tale - The Story of Amleth - that he revealed a surprising truth; something not generally known. A story, from real-life history, sits unrecognised behind this play. Retold in the Ghost’s speech. Shakespeare lifted it almost word for word. And it tells us why Hamlet is right to test its word. To those who knew the truth, the ghost was transparent (and will be again to the readers or listeners of this book). Shakespeare, as always, lets us decide. From where he sat, writing his play in his own and his audience's time, he was imagining a future yet to come based on what had recently come to pass. We, in our time... we forgot.

(As a bonus, listeners will finally find out what is that book that Hamlet reads. You know the one? Containing "words, words words"?)

Abridged and adapted for audio from Elsinore: Hamlet, History Hidden in Plain Sight, by the same author, this book, written in a conversational style, follows a film crew shooting on location, looking for where Hamlet was really set. (It’s not where you think.) The title - Damned Ghost - is from the scene in which Hamlet tells Horatio, ‘There is a play tonight before the King. One Scene of it comes near the circumstance which I have told thee of my Father’s death.’ He says that if the king does not betray himself as a murderer, well, then the ghost was lying. ‘Observe mine Uncle. If his occulted guilt do not itself unkennel in one speech, it is a damnèd ghost that we have seene.' But we don’t start there. We're on a film set watching another re-enactment of real-life history and a very significant real-life death ...

© 2026 Adelene House (Lydbog): 9781919330525

Udgivelsesdato

Lydbog: 23. maj 2026