David Siegler plays the Ghost in Hamlet, and he is also Noah Siegler's father! It has been especially wonderful watching a father and son play father and son in this play:

It is a family joke how I manage to conceive of my character in whatever play I am in as the central character of the play, no matter how small a role others may perceive the character to have.  For instance, who can doubt that The Sound of Music could really be named The Tragedy of Max Detweiller?  Max, starting out as a cynical opportunist, traverses the greatest emotional distance of any character in the play, ending up giving his life (or so I figure- it's not really in the script) so that the Von Trapps may escape.

So, now that I’m playing Hamlet’s Ghost, it seems a fair question to ask whether Shakespeare, in entitling the Danish play "Hamlet," meant the title to refer to Hamlet, Sr. (the Ghost) or Hamlet, Jr. (of “to be or not to be” fame).  I’m thinking he was thinking of Hamlet, Sr.

Hamlet, Sr. sets the whole tragic train of events in motion, when he appears as a ghost to urge Hamlet, Jr. to avenge his murder.  And where is he left at the end of the play?  Claudius is dead, for sure, but so is Hamlet and so is Gertrude, for whom he shows, in both scenes in which he speaks, an undying love despite what has happened.  And Hamlet, Sr. is still dead, and still burning in purgatory day in and day out.

I do not know if one’s term in purgatory can only be based on those crimes done in one’s “days of nature” or if the term can be extended for additional crimes committed from beyond the grave. (It is probably a situation that has arisen with sufficient infrequency not to have commanded a definitive theological answer.)  But even if the Ghost does not pay with additional eons spent in purgatory for the additional deaths he has caused, it seems as though, at the end of Act V, the Ghost must be standing, unseen by us all, open-mouthed and horrified at the edge of the stage, seared- even more so than by the flames of his prison house- by the realization that revenge does not lead to nobility but to utter desolation.