I do not know whether I am singular in the view I take of these two sentences, but I understand them as inchoate disclosures, suddenly broken off through the irresolution of the speaker.
For instance, I do not understand the last, as Horatio understood it—"There needs no ghost from the grave to tell us this;" but I understand it as an intended revelation, begun, withdrawn, and cleverly turned off by the substitution of a ridiculous termination. It is then, when Hamlet finally resolves to withhold the secret, at least from Marcellus (when or where Horatio afterwards acquires it, is not explained), that he seeks to conceal his overwrought feelings by assumed levity.
Such is the way I read this scene; and, while I freely admit the difficulty presented in the fact, that, amongst so many acute students of Shakspeare, no one before should have seen any difficulty in the usual interpretation of this passage, I must at the same time declare, that I can perceive no single point in favour of that interpretation, save and except the placing of the "stage direction" where it now is. But this may have arisen from the early printers being misled by the apparent sequence of the word "that," with which the next line commences:
——"meet it is I set it down
That" &c.
It may be observed, however, that such a commencement, to a sentence expressive of wonder or incredulity, was by no needs uncommon. As, for example, in the first scene of Cymbeline:
"That a king's children should be so convey'd!"
I really can perceive little else than this "stage direction" to favour the usual reading, while, in that proposed by me, the sequence of action appears to be the most natural in the world:—
First, "My tables, my tables," &c.
Next, the continuation of the interrupted apostrophe, which occupies the time while getting forth and preparing the tables.