RALPH: In order to better understand this passage, we need to review one of the most important practices in Catholicism: the sacrament of confession.

SARAH: Catholics confess their sins to a priest and ask for forgiveness. They are usually given a penance to perform, and then receive absolution or forgiveness. These sins might be immoral actions, like lying or stealing — but they can also be seemingly small — like feeling proud about something, being angry, or wishing ill of someone else.

RALPH: That's why it was considered important to go regularly to confession — if you were to die before having your sins absolved, then they must be atoned for in the afterlife, either by suffering for a specific time in purgatory, or in the case of very serious sins — usually called mortal sins — being condemned to eternity in hell.

SARAH: So the ghost is complaining that as a result of his sudden death at Claudius' hands, he had un-absolved sins on his head — whatever sins he had committed since his last confession. These sins apparently weren't horrible, or the King would have gone to Hell. But they were serious enough for him to go to Purgatory — he says that he is confined to "fast in fire" until the sins have been "burnt and purged away".

RALPH: This is one of the reasons why Catholics put an emphasis on having last rites before death — it's a final confession with a priest that absolves the dying person of sins before he or she heads off to the afterlife. King Hamlet's ghost describes his own lack of last rites with three interesting words. The first word is "unhouseled". Housel is another word for the Eucharist, or communion, the sacrament where Jesus' presence is celebrated through the representation of his body and blood in bread and wine.

SARAH: The second word is "disappointed." This seems a familiar word to us, but here the term means unprepared, in the sense that the king was unprepared for death since he wasn't able to have a final confession.

RALPH: And finally, "unaneled" meant he had not been anointed with holy oil, another part of the sacraments performed on the dying.

SARAH: So the ghost describes himself as "Cut off even in the blossom of my sin, Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled, but sent to my account with all my imperfections on my head."

RALPH: The point he's making is that the real tragedy of his death isn't just the murder, but the condition of his soul when Claudius murdered him — King Hamlet hadn't had any of the last rites necessary to go peacefully to Heaven. Claudius' real crime, the crime that the ghost wants revenge for, is having killed King Hamlet when he wasn't spiritually prepared to die.