Quote Analysis

The Ghost clarifies that while all murder is foul, this particular murder is exceptionally so because it is 'strange, and unnatural.'

The repetition of 'foul' and 'most' hammers the word into Hamlet's mind, but the piling up of near-synonyms—'strange,' 'unnatural'—also suggests the Ghost is struggling to find language extreme enough. The syntax breaks down into fragments rather than flowing, as if moral categories cannot contain what Claudius has done. This makes the crime feel like it exceeds normal human wickedness, justifying revenge as restoring order rather than perpetuating violence.

Support a thesis that Shakespeare uses the Ghost's rhetoric to frame revenge as cosmically necessary—the excessive language positions Claudius's crime as a rupture in nature itself, so that Hamlet's hesitation later seems like a failure to answer a metaphysical crisis, not just a family grievance.