heaven! O earth! what else? / And shall I couple hell?" (I.v.92-3). After brief consultation with Horatio, he considers going off to pray, to sort out what the Ghost has told him, whereupon the Ghost reappears, commanding him to act. This does nothing so much as cause Hamlet to question whether the Ghost, who repeatedly intones from beneath (the place of hell), is really the devil, whom he compares to other denizens of the cellarage or underworld, such as the mole and pioner (miner). At the end of the long II.ii, when Hamlet determines to catch the conscience of the king by means of the play, he returns to the problem of the destiny of his soul: "The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil; and the devil hath power / To assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps / . . . Abuses me to damn me" (II.ii.627-32).
In the film version, the Ghost's stark insistence on revenge takes the form of grim disapproval. The Ghost is unmoved by Hamlet's emotion, as if he is taunting, or more exactly haunting, Hamlet until the revenge is carried out. The film medium is suited to the enterprise of illustrating a haunting, and in the film, Hamlet cannot rid the vision from his presence. It follows him around the castle and indeed into the extremity of emotion in the closet scene, a further indication that the revenge enterprise is of greater moment than mere human emotions, suspicions, or misgivings. Thus Hamlet's delay in acting on the injunctions of the Ghost has the effect of challenging the injunctions of the cosmos. When, eventually, Hamlet does act overtly to avenge his father's death, the effect is to fulfill the both cosmic command and the impulse toward personal destiny.
The nexus of revenge and destiny accumulates in Hamlet's various soliloquies, which provide a commentary on the gap between intention and action and on the tension between conflicted emotions and the call of destiny itself. Consider that in I.ii, Hamlet is in such confusion...