ghost character

plural ghost characters

1. broadcastingA character who is mentioned as appearing on stage, but does not do anything and seems to have no purpose.

   Beside this detailed information which Hall provides about Matthew Gough, Shakespeare's Gough is a ghost character. There is, indeed, no way in which an audience could pick up who he is when he appears only to be killed immediately.

   2003, Catherine M. S. Alexander, The Cambridge Shakespeare Library, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 231

   2 more examples

   A ‘ghost’ character is one who is marked as present on stage, but given no lines to speak: many editors consider the inclusion of these characters to be an oversight on the part of the writer or printer, and so remove them from modern stage directions; […]

   2010, David Coleman, John Webster, Renaissance Dramatist, Edinburgh University Press, →ISBN, page 68

   Joseph A. Porter's discussion of the ‘ghost character’ of Valentine in Romeo and Juliet is also illuminating: Porter describes Valentine as a ‘symptom or by-product of Mercutio's transformation’ from rival lover (in Shakespeare's source) to friend […]

   2014, Lena Cowen Orlin, Othello, A&C Black, →ISBN, page 277

2. computingA kanji included erroneously in the JIS X 0208 character set (not traceable to the sources used to compile JIS X 0208).