Thus Horatio on the ghost of Hamlet's father. Good dramatic poetry; but here it must serve a baser turn, as an illustration of my theme. My question is this: when the spirit is being extravagant and erring, just what is it being ? The editors are quite willing to tell us. For example, Dowden, in the Arden Shakespeare, has the following notes: extravagant] wandering out of bounds, vagrant; ‘erring’, straying; and the Variorum Shakespeare takes a similar view. So Hamlet's father's ghost is simply wandering about away from the nether world to which it must return at daybreak.