Ham. And therefore as a stranger giue it welcome.
There are more things in Heauen and Earth, Horatio,
Then are dream't of in our Philosophy But come, [Sidenote: in your]
Here as before, neuer so helpe you mercy,
How strange or odde so ere I beare my selfe; [Sidenote: How | so mere]
(As I perchance heereafter shall thinke meet [Sidenote: As]
[Sidenote: 136, 156, 178] To put an Anticke disposition on:)[8]
[Sidenote: on]
That you at such time seeing me, neuer shall [Sidenote: times]
With Armes encombred thus, or thus, head shake;
[Sidenote: or this head]
[Footnote 1: He feels his honour touched.]
[Footnote 2: The Ghost's interference heightens Hamlet's agitation. If he does not talk, laugh, jest, it will overcome him. Also he must not show that he believes it his father's ghost: that must be kept to himself—for the present at least. He shows it therefore no respect—treats the whole thing humorously, so avoiding, or at least parrying question. It is all he can do to keep the mastery of himself, dodging horror with half-forced, half-hysterical laughter. Yet is he all the time intellectually on the alert. See how, instantly active, he makes use of the voice from beneath to enforce his requisition of silence. Very speedily too he grows quiet: a glimmer of light as to the course of action necessary to him has begun to break upon him: it breaks from his own wild and disjointed behaviour in the attempt to hide the conflict of his feelings—which suggests to him the idea of shrouding himself, as did David at the court of the Philistines, in the cloak of madness: thereby protected from the full force of what suspicion any absorption of manner or outburst of feeling must occasion, he may win time to lay his plans. Note how, in the midst of his horror, he is yet able to think, plan, resolve.]
[Footnote 3: 1st Q. 'The Gost under the stage.']
[Footnote 4: While Hamlet seems to take it so coolly, the others have fled in terror from the spot. He goes to them. Their fear must be what, on the two occasions after, makes him shift to another place when the Ghost speaks.]
[Footnote 5: Now at once he consents.]
[Footnote 6: In the Quarto this and the next line are transposed.]
[Footnote 7: What idea is involved as the cause of the Ghost's thus interfering?—That he too sees what difficulties must encompass the carrying out of his behest, and what absolute secrecy is thereto essential.]
[Footnote 8: This idea, hardly yet a resolve, he afterwards carries out so well, that he deceives not only king and queen and court, but the most of his critics ever since: to this day they believe him mad. Such must have studied in the play a phantom of their own misconception, and can never have seen the Hamlet of Shakspere. Thus prejudiced, they mistake also the effects of moral and spiritual perturbation and misery for further sign of intellectual disorder—even for proof of moral weakness, placing them in the same category with the symptoms of the insanity which he simulates, and by which they are deluded.]
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