HORATIO
"The air bites shrewdly," said Hamlet, following Horatio and Marcellus up the stone steps to the battlement.
"It is nipping," Horatio agreed, "and an eager air." He sensed the prince's nervousness.
"What hour now?" Hamlet asked as they stepped out onto the open space.
"I think it lacks of twelve," Horatio said, but Marcellus, who had led the way, said, "No, it is struck."
"Indeed, I heard it not." All he could hear was the wind and the sound of the waves far below. "It then draws near the season wherein the spirit held his wont to walk." Suddenly, from the castle below came the sound of trumpets and a rumble that Horatio took to be the firing of small cannons. "What does this mean, my lord?" he asked Hamlet.
The prince gave a grimace of disapproval. "The King doth wake tonight and takes his rouse, keeps wassail and the swaggering upspring reels, and as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down the kettledrum and trumpet thus bray out the triumph of his pledge."
"Is it a custom?"
"Ay, marry is't, but to my mind, though I am native here and to the manner born, it is a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance. This heavy-headed revel east and west makes us traduced and taxed of other nations: They clepe us drunkards and with swinish phrase soil our addition, and indeed it takes from our achievements, though performed at height, the pith and marrow of our attribute."
Horatio sensed that Hamlet was relieving his nervousness in talk, and let him chatter on, though his own attention was centered on watching for the ghost.
"So oft it chances in particular men," the prince went on, "that, for some vicious mole of nature in them, as in their birth wherein they are not guilty (since nature cannot choose his origin), by their o'ergrowth of some complexion oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason, or by some habit that too much o'erleavens the form of plausive manners -- that these men, carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect (being Nature's livery or Fortune's star)...." (Marcellus gave Horatio a questioning look, to which he responded with a smile of amused indulgence for the prince's garrulousness.) "... her virtues else, be they as pure as grace, as infinite as man may undergo, shall in the general censure take corruption from that particular fault: the dram of eale doth all the noble substance of a doubt to his own scandal...."
"Look, my lord, it comes," Horatio interrupted him. For the familiar deep chill had come upon him and the ghost appeared from the fog.
"Angels and ministers of grace defend us!" Hamlet cried out, crossing himself. Slowly he moved toward the figure. After a moment of silent wonderment -- Horatio noticed that even the wind and the waves seemed to have grown still -- Hamlet spoke to the ghost in a kind of incantation: "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."
The ghost gave no reply.
"O answer me," the prince pleaded, "let me not burst in ignorance but tell why thy canonized bones hearsed in death have burst their cerements, why the sepulchre wherein we saw thee quietly interred hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws to cast thee up again."
Still the ghost was silent.
With an increasing desperation in his voice, Hamlet demanded, "What may this mean that thou, dead corpse, again in complete steel, revisits thus the glimpses of the moon, making night hideous, and we fools of nature so horridly to shake our disposition with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?"
Silence.
"Say why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?"
Finally, with a slow and dreamlike grace, the figure raised a hand and motioned Hamlet forward. Stunned, Horatio said, "It beckons you to go away with it as if it some impartment did desire to you alone."
Marcellus echoed him: "Look with what courteous action it waves you to a more removed ground." But then, with alarm in his voice, Marcellus added, "But do not go with it."
Horatio, waking to the possible danger to the prince, stepped forward and took his arm. "No, by no means."
Hamlet tore his gaze from the ghost and looked at Horatio. "It will not speak: then I will follow it," he said, as if talking to a child.
"Do not, my lord," Horatio urged, as Marcellus took a step to block Hamlet's path toward the ghost.
"Why, what should be the fear?" Hamlet said, becoming increasingly agitated. "I do not set my life at a pin's fee, and for my soul -- what can it do to that, being a thing immortal as itself." He nodded toward the ghost. "It waves me forth again. I'll follow it." He twisted out of Horatio's grasp.
Desperately searching for an argument that would stay Hamlet's course, Horatio stepped in front of him and said, "What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, or to the dreadful summit of the cliff that beetles o'er his base into the sea, and there assume some other horrible form which might deprive your sovereignty of reason and draw you into madness?" Hamlet looked into his eyes, as if assessing this warning. "Think of it," Horatio continued. He remembered how once he had stood on the cliff with Hamlet, who had expressed a horror of falling from it. "The very place puts toys of desperation without more motive into every brain that looks so many fathoms to the sea and hears it roar beneath."
But Hamlet had turned his gaze again to the ghost, which was withdrawing and still beckoning. "It waves me still," he said, and then spoke directly to the spirit: "Go on, I'll follow thee."
Marcellus and Horatio stepped into Hamlet's path again. "You shall not go, my lord," said Marcellus as Horatio urged, "Be ruled, you shall not go," and Hamlet commanded, "Hold off your hands."
He struggled free of their grasp. "My fate cries out and makes each petty artery in this body as hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve." He turned toward the ghost. "Still am I called -- unhand me, gentlemen," he said as they tried again to restrain him. Suddenly, he drew his sword and turned to confront them. "By heaven I'll make a ghost of him that lets me! I say away!" Horatio and Marcellus backed off, as Hamlet called out to the ghost, "Go on! I'll follow thee," and was swallowed up in the night and fog.
"He waxes desperate with imagination," Horatio said, stunned at the violence his friend had exhibited.
Marcellus was less shaken. "Let's follow. 'Tis not fit thus to obey him."
Horatio nodded his agreement. "Have after," he said, as they plunged into the darkness. "To what issue will this come?" he asked Marcellus, still trying to come to terms with Hamlet's behavior and the ghost's actions.
"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," Marcellus said.
Horatio stopped. What good could come of their pursuit of Hamlet anyway? "Heaven will direct it," he called out to Marcellus, who had gone on ahead. But Marcellus persisted, "Nay, let's follow him." Horatio had no choice but to resume the pursuit.
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