The Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Yeats’s The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919)

The mood Yeats creates through the ghost in The Only Jealousy of Emer is uncanny and eerie and is similar to what Shakespeare does in his play, Hamlet, which was considered to be an innovative way of telling a ghost story at the time of its composition in the Renaisance. In this paper, I will discuss Yeats’s use of ghost in The Only Jealousy of Emer and compare it with Shakespeare’s use of ghost in Hamlet, the technique of which has now become classical. KCI Citation Count: 2