This essay establishes King James I’s Daemonologie and Reginald Scot’s Discouerie of Witchcraft as intertexts for Hamlet. It demonstrates how the diabolical linguistic register borrowed from these intertexts both heightens the verisimilitude of Hamlet’s madness and expands the performative potential of the Ghost. Performativity has often been discussed as a theme for this play, but usually only in relation to Hamlet himself. This essay avoids the reductionism of the “Ghost critics” and extends the performativity theme to the Ghost as well by offering him a diabolical mask to try on in addition to his many others.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Kallendorf, H., (2025), "Intertextual Madness in Hamlet: The Ghost's Fragmented Performativity", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Kallendorf, Hilaire. "Intertextual Madness in Hamlet: The Ghost's Fragmented Performativity." Renaissance and Reformation 34 (4): 2010. 69-87. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v34i4.10802. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.