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William Shakespeare was tied up with the daily life of Eugene O’Neill’s family and with O’Neill’s growth and education. It was a psychologically necessary for Shakespeare to have written Hamlet just as O’Neill had to write Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten. Hamlet seems to have exerted considerable pressure on O’Neill’s creative imagination when he was writing his last two plays, Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten. That the past controls the present is the strongest thematic link between O’Neill’s last two plays and Hamlet. The return of the ghosts of the past, the shattering of illusions, the disappointment with what life has become, the sense of what could have been―these are common to the three plays. Shakespeare’s Hamlet allowed O’Neill to become better acquainted with his own night and with the night of the dramatic world he created. Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, dealing with the ghosts of the past, was written in the shadow of Hamlet, itself dealing with the ghosts of the past.