Act One: The Ghost · Hamlet

It was midnight on the battlements of Elsinore, the royal castle of Denmark, on the cold sea-coast; and the sentries were changing.

"Who's there?" called Bernardo, coming on to relieve the watch. "Nay, answer me," said Francisco. "Stand, and unfold yourself." It was a bitter night — "'tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart," said Francisco, going off — and the soldiers were uneasy. For two nights running, at this hour, a thing had appeared to them on the platform: a figure in armour, walking with slow and stately step, with the face of the old King Hamlet, who had died two months before.

They had brought with them tonight a sceptic: Horatio, a scholar, friend to the dead king's son. Horatio said it was their fantasy. And as they sat and talked of it, the Ghost came — "Look where it comes again!" — in the very armour the king had worn when he fought the King of Norway; and Horatio, trembling, charged it to speak. It stalked away. It came once more; Horatio crossed its path and begged it to speak, if there were any good thing to be done, or any secret it had buried; and as it seemed about to answer, the cock crew, and it faded like a guilty thing. Horatio was shaken. "Let us impart what we have seen tonight," he said, "unto young Hamlet; for, upon my life, this spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him."

There was talk, too, on the battlements, of war. The dead King Hamlet had, thirty years before, killed old Fortinbras of Norway in single combat, and won his lands; and now young Fortinbras, the Norwegian king's nephew, hot-headed and ambitious, was gathering an army of lawless men to win those lands back. Denmark was arming, day and night. Something, they felt, was wrong in the state.

In the great hall of the castle, the new king held his first court. He was Claudius, the dead king's brother; and he had not only taken the throne, but had married the dead king's widow, Queen Gertrude, within a month of the funeral. He spoke smoothly, gracefully, of their grief and their joy:

"Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death the memory be green, and that it us befitted to bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom to be contracted in one brow of woe, yet so far hath discretion fought with nature that we with wisest sorrow think on him, together with remembrance of ourselves. Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen, have we — as 'twere with a defeated joy, with one auspicious and one dropping eye, with mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage — taken to wife."

He dealt with business: he sent ambassadors to the old, bedridden King of Norway to restrain his nephew Fortinbras. He gave leave to Laertes — the son of his chief counsellor, the old, wordy Lord Chamberlain Polonius — to go back to his studies in France. And then he turned to the one figure in the court who wore black.

It was Prince Hamlet, the dead king's son: a young man, a student at the university of Wittenberg, brilliant, melancholy, quick of tongue — "the glass of fashion and the mould of form," as one who loved him said, "the observed of all observers." He stood apart, in his "inky cloak," and would not join the rejoicing. "A little more than kin, and less than kind," he muttered, when Claudius called him his cousin and his son. The king and queen begged him to cast off his mourning: all that lives must die. "Ay, madam, it is common," said Hamlet. "Why seems it so particular with thee?" asked his mother. "Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not 'seems'." And he would not go back to Wittenberg, as he wished; they asked him to stay in Denmark, and he said he would obey his mother.

Left alone, he poured out his heart:

"O that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, or that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God, God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on't, ah fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely."

His father — "so excellent a king" — had loved his mother so tenderly that he would not let the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly; and she had hung on him "as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on" — and yet, within a month, before the shoes were old in which she followed his body, she had married his uncle, "no more like my father than I to Hercules." "Frailty, thy name is woman!" It was not, and it could not come to good. "But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue."

Then Horatio came, with the soldiers, and told him what they had seen. Hamlet questioned them closely: armed? from head to foot? his face? pale or red? "A countenance more in sorrow than in anger." He would watch with them that night. "If it assume my noble father's person, I'll speak to it, though hell itself should gape and bid me hold my peace." Alone, he said: "My father's spirit — in arms! All is not well. I doubt some foul play."

Laertes, before he left for France, warned his sister, Ophelia, against Hamlet. The prince had been courting her, with gifts and declarations of love; but he was a prince, Laertes said, and could not choose for himself; she must guard her honour, and not believe him. Ophelia promised — and told him, smiling, not to preach the steep and thorny way to heaven and then tread the primrose path himself.

Then Polonius came in, and gave his son his blessing, and a long string of advice: "Give thy thoughts no tongue . . . Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice . . . Neither a borrower nor a lender be . . . This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." And when Laertes had gone, the old man turned on his daughter, and asked her what there was between her and the Lord Hamlet. "He hath, my lord, of late made many tenders of his affection to me." "Affection! Pooh! You speak like a green girl." He forbade her to see the prince, or talk with him, or receive his letters. "I shall obey, my lord," said Ophelia.

That night, on the battlements, Hamlet watched with Horatio and the soldier Marcellus. Below, in the castle, the king was carousing, with trumpets and cannon at every draught of wine — a custom, said Hamlet, more honoured in the breach than the observance. And the Ghost came.

"Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, be thy intents wicked or charitable, thou com'st in such a questionable shape that I will speak to thee. I'll call thee Hamlet, King, father, royal Dane. O, answer me!"

The Ghost beckoned him away. His friends tried to hold him back — it might lead him to the cliff's edge and there take on some horrible form and drive him mad — but he broke from them: "I do not set my life at a pin's fee . . . Unhand me, gentlemen; by heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me!" He followed it into the dark. "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," said Marcellus.

On a lonelier part of the battlements, the Ghost spoke.

"I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night, and for the day confined to fast in fires, till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away." He could not tell the secrets of his prison-house; but if he did, the lightest word of it would freeze Hamlet's blood. "If thou didst ever thy dear father love, revenge his foul and most unnatural murder."

"Murder!"

"Murder most foul, as in the best it is; but this most foul, strange, and unnatural."

It had been given out, said the Ghost, that a serpent stung him as he slept in his orchard. "But know, thou noble youth, the serpent that did sting thy father's life now wears his crown." "O my prophetic soul! My uncle!" Claudius — "that incestuous, that adulterate beast" — had won the queen's love with his witchcraft and his gifts; and then, as the old king slept in his garden, as was his custom in the afternoon, his brother had stolen upon him with a vial of poison, and poured it into the porches of his ears; and it had coursed through his body like quicksilver, and covered his smooth skin with a vile crust. "Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched, cut off even in the blossoms of my sin," without confession or last rites, sent to his account with all his imperfections on his head. "O, horrible! O, horrible! Most horrible!"

He must not let the royal bed of Denmark be a couch for luxury and damned incest. But his mother he must leave to heaven, and to the thorns that lodged in her own bosom. "Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me."

"Remember thee!" cried Hamlet, alone. "Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe. Remember thee! Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records . . . and thy commandment all alone shall live within the book and volume of my brain." "O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! . . . That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain."

When his friends found him, he was wild and strange; he would not tell them what the Ghost had said. He made them swear, on his sword, never to reveal what they had seen — and from under the ground the Ghost's voice cried, "Swear!" — and he warned them that he might, hereafter, think fit to "put an antic disposition on" — to act the madman — and that they must never by look or word suggest that they knew why. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." And then, as they went down:

"The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite, that ever I was born to set it right!"