Scene summary
Away from his friends, Hamlet forces the Ghost to speak. The ghost says it is the spirit of the father, condemned for a certain term to wander by night and burn by day until the crimes of its life are purged, and forbidden to tell the secrets of its prison. It asks Hamlet to avenge it. It reveals that the official version, that a serpent stung it while it slept in the garden, is false: it was Claudius, its brother, who poured poison into its ear while it slept in the orchard, after seducing Gertrude. The poison curdled its blood and covered its body with crusts, and it died without confession, without blessing and without settling accounts. It asks that the revenge not stain Hamlet’s mind nor turn against his mother, and that he leave her to heaven. At dawn it bids farewell with “remember me.”
Hamlet swears to erase everything else from memory and keep only his father’s commandment, and calls Claudius a smiling villain. Horatio and Marcellus find him. Hamlet speaks in evasions and asks for secrecy, then makes them swear on the sword, while the voice of the ghost, under the earth, repeats “Swear!” To Horatio, who finds it all very strange, he says there are more things in heaven and earth than his philosophy dreams of. He also asks that, if they see him act in an extravagant way, they not reveal that they know anything, for he may pretend. As he leaves, he laments that time is out of joint and that he was born to set it right.
Analysis
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