Act 1, Scene 4

What happens?

• Midnight - Hamlet, Horatio and Marcellus are on the battlements of Elsinore castle hoping to see the Ghost and overhear Claudius’s drunken regrets

• Ghost appears and beckons Hamlet off the stage. Horatio and Marcellus tell him not to follow it but he does

Shared line

Line goes across and drops down like a step

Often in iambic pentameter

Connection between characters

“The air bites shrewdly, it is very cold”

Foreshadows the arrival of the Ghost

Personification and animal connotations

C/R “‘Tis bitter cold”

Iambic Pentameter

Anticipation due to fast pace, like raised heart rate

Scared but excited

“They crepe us with drunkards”

Other countries will know them as drunks with little power and anything they do will be overshadowed

“To the manner born”

Accustomed to the practice

Putting blame on something else

Hamlet and Denmark’s corruption

“Soil our addiction”

Dirty the good name of Denmark, but not his fault. That’s how the people of Denmark are brought up

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” - Marcellus

Disease and corruption

Self slaughter, sullied flesh, unweeded garden

Elizabethan understanding of Ghosts

Roman Catholic View

“that ghosts might be the spirits of the departed, allowed to return from purgatory for some special purpose” - John Dover Wilson

Protestant View

Ghosts are the imaginings of a melancholy mind - Reginald Scott

Ghosts are created by the devil who takes human form in order to bring harm to the living - King James 1, Daemonology