Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet

Author(s): Andrew Hui

Source: Renaissance Drama , Vol. 41, No. 1/2 (Fall 2013), pp. 151-171
Published by: The University of Chicago Press for Northwestern University
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/673910

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 Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet
a n d r e w h u i , Yale-NUS College

“There are,” says a poet as ingenious as profound, “more things in heaven and earth, than
are dreamt of in our philosophy.” This sentiment, which Genius accidentally let drop, is in
the main applicable also to the philosophy of our own day; and, with a slight modification, I
shall be ready to adopt it as my own. The only change that is requisite to make it available
for my purpose would be the addition—“and also between heaven and earth there are many
things which are not dreamt of in our philosophy.” And exactly because philosophy, for the
most part, does nothing but dream—scientifically dream, it may be—therefore it is ignorant,
ay, has no inkling even of much which, nevertheless, in all propriety it ought to know.
—Friedrich von Schlegel1

o ne of the most interesting, yet unexplored, cruxes in Hamlet occurs

when the Prince famously retorts, “There are more things in heaven
and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Q2,
1.4.165–66).2 Schlegel must have read the Folio, for it reads “our philosophy”
(F 1.5.166–67, my emphasis). What is the significance of this pronominal discrep-
ancy? Does “your” refer to Horatio himself, is it indefinite or plural? If we take it
as “our,” is the first-person plural inclusive or exclusive? Is Hamlet’s philosophy
commensurate with Horatio’s? The difference of one printed letter opens up a
field of philosophical questions about the play.
Usually when Shakespeare uses the word philosophy, he does so in the con-
ventional stoic sense—a calm understanding of life’s vagaries that prevents suf-
fering from lapsing into madness or despair. Upon Romeo’s exile from Verona,

I thank Stephen Orgel, Ben Weibracht, Talya Meyers, Philip Horky, Leonard Barkan, Hus-
sein Sarhan, Patricia Slatin, Christopher Warley, and the anonymous readers of Renaissance
Drama for their comments and suggestions.
1. Friedrich von Schlegel, The Philosophy of Life and Philosophy of Language in a Course of Lec-
tures, trans. A. J. W. Morrison (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847), 1.
2. All quotations from Hamlet are from the Arden 2nd ed. of Harold Jenkins (London: Thomp-
son Learning, 1982). I have also consulted the Arden third series of Ann Thompson and Neil
Thompson, which prints the Second Quarto of 1604–5 (2006). The texts of 1603 and 1623 appear
in a separate volume (London: Thomson Learning, 2007).

Renaissance Drama, volume 41, numbers 1–2. © 2013 Northwestern University. All rights reserved.
0486-3739/2013/4112-0007$15.00
151

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152 RENAISSANCE DRAMA FAL L 20 1 3

Friar Lawrence promises to him that “I’ll give thee armour to keep off that
word, / Adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy, / To comfort thee though thou art
banished,” to which Romeo replies, “Yet ‘banished’? Hang up philosophy. / Un-
less philosophy can make a Juliet, / Displant a town, reverse a Prince’s doom, / It
helps not, it prevails not. Talk no more” (Romeo and Juliet 3.3.54–60). Similarly, in
Much Ado about Nothing, Antonio advises Leonato to bear his suffering calmly,
to which his brother replies, “For there was never yet philosopher / That could
endure the toothache patiently, / However they have writ the style of gods”
(5.1.34–37).3 These instances belong to the philosophical tradition of consolatio—
an ethical balm to soothe the brokenhearted or the frightened soul. But in his
remark to Horatio, Hamlet the university student is using philosophy purely in
the theoretical sense—as a system of knowledge about the universe instead of
an attitude toward the universe. Spoken at a moment of high dramatic tension,
with the ghost breathing the word “Swear” from the beneath the stage, Hamlet
is mocking the futility of his and Horatio’s academic training when it comes to
the phenomenology of ghosts. At this early moment in the play, Hamlet un-
derscores the weakness, the smallness, of reason in the face of life’s terrifying
mysteries. The Prince of Denmark points to the limits of philosophy as an epis-
temological guide to the ontologically ambiguous, for it cannot explain spirits
within its parameters of rationality, since, as Schlegel suggests, it only dreams sci-
entifically.
What is philosophy in Hamlet? Who is Horatio in Hamlet? These are two
intertwined questions in the play that I will explore in this essay. Trying to de-
cipher what and whose philosophy it is prompts us to think about Horatio’s
larger function in the play, for he seems to me the most underappreciated char-
acter in Hamlet criticism. I propose that he is one of the most crucial: more
than a spectator, he drives the plot at the beginning, interprets it in the middle,
and narrates it at the end. Horatio’s appearances mark pivotal moments of rev-
elation: when the ghost appears, instead of merely quaking in fright with the
watchmen, he challenges it and demands that it speak (“I charge thee speak”).
He reports the reappearance of the ghost to Hamlet (“My lord, I think I saw
him yesternight”). He aids Hamlet in deciphering the King’s facial expressions
during the play-within-the-play (“I did very well note him”). He receives the
letter from Hamlet that reveals that he has been kidnapped by pirates. After his
return from England, Horatio is the Prince’s constant companion in the final

3. All quotations from the plays (except Hamlet) are from the Arden Shakespeare, Complete
Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (London: Thompson Learn-
ing, 2001).

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 Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet 153

act, attempting to interpret Hamlet’s enigmatic intimations of mortality (“If

your mind dislike anything, obey it”). Always on the brink of truth, he tries to
wrest meaning from ambiguous signs. He is the chief hermeneut, as it were, to
a succession of three royal persons: old Hamlet, Claudius, and Hamlet himself.
Hovering between confidant, best friend, courtier, and public servant, he is
Hamlet’s partner in his doomed search for certainty. As Christopher Warley
notes, “To interpret Hamlet means to become Horatio.”4 Yet his decipherment
is only partially successful—the ghost in fact refuses to speak to him; the guilt
of the King is not revealed publicly; and Hamlet ignores his advice in turning
down the duel. In the final act he turns from interpreter to narrator. In his dying
words, Hamlet asks Horatio three times to tell his story: first, “Thou livest. Re-
port me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied”; second, after persuading Ho-
ratio not to commit suicide, “absent thee from felicity awhile, / And in this harsh
world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story”; finally, after the arrival of
Fortinbras, “tell him, with th’occurrents more and less / Which have solicited”
(5.2.343–44, 352–54, 362–63). At the end he assumes the function that is par-
onomastically suggested in his name, as Stephen Orgel notes, an “aspirated—a
living, breathing oratio.”5
In this essay I wish to tease out Orgel’s point about the suggestive word-
play between Horatio and oratio and expand on Warley’s remark about Ho-
ratio as an interpreter, for together they suggest that his real function is that
of a philosophical rhetorician. As a university student trained in devising ar-
guments, forming syllogisms, and declaiming in disputations, he transfers all
these skills to the bloody events at hand when he reenters the courts of Elsinor.
Horatio partakes in the structure of discourse in which storytelling, circulation
of information, and memorializing are of the utmost importance and in which
he will emerge as the final voice. What has happened in the play and how it will
be represented must be reconciled with Horatio’s memory. His ultimate pur-
pose in the play, then, is to bear witness to his closest friend, to turn Hamlet
into Hamlet.
The essay does not propose a textual emendation to whether the line
should read “your” or “our.” Instead it takes it as an invitation to think about
Hamlet’s and Horatio’s philosophical dispositions. The instability of the letter

4. Christopher Warley, “Specters of Horatio,” ELH 75 (2008): 1026. Warley’s article is one of
the most substantial to appear, although his main goal is to use Horatio as a cipher to interro-
gate social distinction. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s critique, he is interested in critiquing the “scho-
lastic fallacy” of being a “rational, objective, and disinterested one” (1024–25).
5. Stephen Orgel, “The Comedian as the Character C,” in English Comedy, ed. Michael Cord-
ner, Peter Holland, and John Kerrigan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 38.

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154 RENAISSANCE DRAMA F A L L 2 0 13

is a synecdoche of the indeterminate philosophy of the play. The way to ex-

plain this antinomy of pronouns, I suggest, is to project this phrase forward to
the end, in which Hamlet and Horatio articulate two seemingly divergent in-
terpretations of suffering and misfortune. Hamlet’s is resigned, composed, per-
haps even peaceful, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them
how we will” (5.2.10–11); “there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow”
(5.2.215).6 Horatio’s, meanwhile, verges on the nihilistic: the events are nothing
but “carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,” brought on by “accidental judgments,
casual slaughters” (5.2.386–87). These accounts, I shall explain at the end of this
essay, rather than being mutually exclusive, are in fact complementary. In a way,
there is something supremely apt about the indeterminacy of the two pronouns,
for it exposes one of the chief dialectical tensions in the tragedy: one in which
the events that unfold at Elsinore are divinely sanctioned, the other in which
events are driven by human errors and accidents. Thus, the friction of “your”
and “our” philosophy coexists for the characters who have so mightily struggled
with “more things” in heaven and earth.
Critics have long been troubled by Horatio’s inconsistencies in Hamlet. He
appears as much of a cipher in the beginning. As often noted, the sentries seem
well aware of Horatio’s return to Denmark, so much so as to seek his help with
their ghost problem. Yet Hamlet is caught by surprise when Horatio appears at
court, which is all the more curious since he says he had been in Denmark for
the funeral of old Hamlet which occurred two months ago (1.2.174–76). Horatio
is a native Dane yet Hamlet has to explain to him the customs of midnight royal
carousing (1.4.15–18). He is presumably around the same age as Hamlet, yet
seems to remember what his father had worn on the day that Hamlet was born
(1.1.63–66). Frank Kermode comments, “Horatio . . . is a somewhat chameleonic
figure—a stranger or habitué of the court as the need arises.”7 Harold Jenkins
similarly observes, “Shakespeare seems undecided whether Horatio is in Elsi-
nore as a visitor or a denizen.”8 For Virgil Whitaker, “It is customary to speak of
Horatio as ‘plot-ridden.’ . . . I should prefer to say that he is ‘source-ridden,’ the
victim of Shakespeare’s failure to assimilate all the elements in the old play to

6. I am aware of the dangers of reducing Hamlet’s philosophy of life or tragic vision to these
two lines. But for my purposes I use his theological insights at the end of the play as embodi-
ment of his philosophical stance. For a different perspective, see John Guillory, “ ‘To please the
wiser sort’: Violence and Philosophy in Hamlet,” in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern
Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Trevor Douglas (New York: Routledge, 2000), 82–109.
7. Frank Kermode, introduction to Hamlet, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore
Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1139.
8. Harold Jenkins, introduction to Hamlet, Arden Shakespeare (1982), 123.

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 Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet 155

his new design.”9 For Alex Newell, “Shakespeare may have tried to superimpose
the identity of Horatio as a student onto Horatio as an officer of the watch, if
he found only the latter in the Ur-Hamlet, which is considered to be his main
source for Hamlet.”10
The critics’ suggestions of the morphing character of Horatio as a function
of the exigencies of the plot deserve rethinking, though, for they focus almost
exclusively on his inconsistency at the expense of his intellectual substance.
Why, for instance, would Shakespeare anachronistically insert a scholar from
Wittenberg, the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation, along with a mass of
other university pupils—Hamlet himself, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius
(who once played Julius Caesar at school), and Laertes (who is supposed to study
music in Paris)—into a twelfth-century source? I believe it is less useful to solve
all of Horatio’s dramatic inconsistencies than to think through his multiple intel-
lectual paradigms—the Protestant student, the ideal friend, the Roman stoic—
for there might even be a sort of unity that arises from this jagged composite.
As I shall argue, the unity of Horatio arises from his role as an interpreter, a
figure of hermeneutic mediation.

THE SCHOLAR
Indeed, Horatio is implicated in the general question of identity with which
the play famously begins, “Who’s there?” (1.1.1). It is repeated a second time to
him, “Stand ho, who is there?” to which he responds, “A piece of him” (1.1.15,
22). So even at the outset, Horatio betrays his awareness of a fragmented and
partial self. In his first encounter with Hamlet, he wryly confesses that he has
a “truant disposition,” meaning that he has a tendency to skip school, yet also
suggesting a sort of general elusiveness. Horatio dwells on the periphery—of
the university, of Elsinor, of the play. And it is precisely in habiting the edges
that he emerges at the end as the rhetorical voice of its future, its potential nar-
rative engine.11
As a student from Wittenberg, a recently founded university (1502) that rep-
resented the institutional change from scholastic theology to humanism, Hora-

9. Virgil Whitaker, Shakespeare’s Uses of Learning (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1953),
255.
10. Alex Newell, “The Etiology of Horatio’s Inconsistencies,” in “Bad” Shakespeare: Revalua-
tions in the Shakespeare Canon, ed. Maurice Charney (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Uni-
versity Press, 1988), 143–56.
11. Francis G. Schoff calculates that Horatio has 290 lines out of the play’s 3,931. In scenes 1,
2, 4, and 5 of act 1 he has 192 out of 442 lines. After Hamlet’s death, he splits the 44 lines with
Fortinbras, taking exactly half; “Horatio: A Shakespearean Confidant,” Shakespeare Quarterly 7,
no. 1 (1956): 53–54.

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156 RENAISSANCE DRAMA F A L L 2 0 13

tio embodies the early modern fusion of Stoic and Protestant rationality.12 His
task as a mediator—an interpreter between the known and the unknown, local
and international, past and present, skepticism and faith—is established in the
first scene. Though his disputation with the ghost has been rightly allegorized as
a confrontation that pits Catholic belief and Protestant skepticism, very little has
been made of his long speech in which he discourses at length on the ominous
tones of impending war (1.1.83–128 [111–28 only in Q2]).13 This occurs after the
specter’s appearance, when Marcellus tells the group to “sit down,” asking if
someone can tell him why the country is so busy with preparations of war.
“That can I,” Horatio volunteers eagerly (1.1.83). In a play so concerned with its
own theatrical possibilities, the scene on the ramparts presents us with the first
of many instances of storytelling and gives us a foretaste of Horatio’s rhetorical
capabilities: in the dead of night, Horatio turns their meeting into a current-
affairs colloquium. He expounds on the mysteries of Denmark’s roiling politics
just as he will explain the fall of the royal household in the end. As befitting a
scholar, Horatio also acts as the voice of ancient history, bringing up the events
before the assassination of Caesar and providing the background story of the
international struggle between Denmark and Norway. With his speech of some
forty lines (1.1.83–128), he briskly establishes Danish foreign affairs of thirty
years ago (84–98), sketches the recent ambitions of young Fortinbras trying to
reconquer his ancestral kingdom (99–110), and after a brief interruption from
Barnardo, draws a number of parallels to ancient Roman history (116–28). While
Horatio might not believe in present ghosts, he seems to have faith in the rel-
evance of pagan spectral premonitions and historical typology. Antiquity and
modernity, heaven and earth, are in exact typological correspondence: “And pro-
logue to the omen coming on, / Have heaven and earth together demonstrated /

12. To be sure, Calvin in the Institutes criticized the “new Stoics” who remained in the men-
tal attitude of apatheia instead of embracing the passionate Christian life of devotion. But the
attempt to reconcile Stoicism with Christianity is almost as old as Christianity itself. Justus Lip-
sius’s De constantia proposes how a Christian in adversity should turn to the Stoic ethics of con-
stantia to alleviate the sufferings of the soul. Guillaume Du Vair wrote Philosophie morale de
Stoïques as a Christian version of Epictetus’s Enchiridion. See Mark Morford, Stoics and Neostoics:
Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Jason Lewis
Saunders, Justus Lipsius: The Philosophy of Renaissance Stoicism (New York: Liberal Arts Press,
1955).
13. For representative sampling, see John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 66–75; Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), 118–42; Miriam Joseph, “Discerning the Ghost in
Hamlet,” PMLA 76 (1961): 493–502; and Stephen Greenblatt’s chapter “The Rights of Memory,”
in Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 102–45.

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 Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet 157

Unto our climatures and countrymen” (127–28). (Here the “heaven and earth”
anticipates the “heaven and earth” that Hamlet will invoke in dismissing his phi-
losophy.) The precise time of which he speaks is unknown—we do not find out
that it was thirty years ago until the gravedigger’s speech in act 5—the only
temporal marker in his speech is the indefinite “was”: “Our last King, Whose
image even but now appeared to us, / Was as you know by Fortinbras of Nor-
way” (1.1.83–85, my emphasis); then, the narrative fast-forwards to the present:
“Now, sir, young Fortinbras, / Of unimproved mettle, hot and full, / Hath in the
skirts of Norway here and there . . . [sought] to recover of us . . . those foresaid
lands / So by his father lost” (1.1.98–107, my emphasis). He uses the apparition
of the ghost as a way to explain the “preparations” and “this post-haste and
rummage in the land.” So it was in Rome as well: “In the most high and palmy
state of Rome / A little ere the mightiest Julius fell / The graves stood tenantless
and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets” (1.1.116–
19). Like a good humanist, Horatio employs exempla from antiquity to help him
understand the present. Following the Ciceronian model of historia magistra
vitae, Horatio employs Roman biography as a model for current events, which
foreshadows the many later references to the classical world: Orestes, Hyperion
and Satyr, the Fall of Troy, Hecuba, Polonius playing Julius Caesar, Alexander,
and finally his own “I am more an antique Roman than a Dane” (5.2.346).14 The
opening scene, then, establishes Horatio not so much as an agent of ghoulish
interpretation but more a political and historical pundit, an insider of the court
with the latest gossip, on which he is pleased to offer his own commentary. Yet
here in rotten Denmark, as opposed to Rome, instead of squeaking and gibber-
ing ghosts, we have a spirit who is most resoundingly silent in his refusal to
speak to anyone but his son. Horatio’s very failure of spiritual contact between
the living and the dead (King Hamlet) sets him up in the end to be the conclu-
sive arbitrating voice between the dead (Prince Hamlet) and the living.

THE FRIEND
It is significant that Horatio’s first word in the play is “friends”—for this an-
nounces his most obvious role in the play. “Friends to this ground,” he tells
Francisco (1.1.16). The emphasis on ground stresses the material substance,
the physical sovereignty of Denmark, the opposite of her dead, insubstantial
sovereign. But, of course, this is not stable ground, because Denmark’s throne
has been usurped (rendering Hamlet groundless and dispossessed, in Margreta

14. For more classical references in the play, see Martin Mueller, “Hamlet and the World of
Ancient Tragedy,” Arion 5, no. 1 (1997): 22–45.

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158 RENAISSANCE DRAMA F A L L 2 0 13

de Grazia’s reading);15 it literally gapes open through the trap door when the
Ghost appears, and the territory is finally invaded by a foreign force. Though he
is a friend to this ground, it is very shaky ground indeed. Nor is it entirely clear
in what sense Horatio is Denmark’s friend: unlike the other Danish characters,
he has no familial associations or defined occupation within the court. Hamlet’s
relationship to Horatio crisscrosses the dense hierarchical network of vertical
and horizontal relationships in the play—parent-child, sovereign-subject, divine-
human, lord-servant, brother-sister, comrade-and-sentry, rival states.16 Since they
are on such intimate terms, according to ancient theories of friendship, theirs
should be one of equality; and yet Hamlet is still prince, the princeps, the first
citizen, which makes Horatio his subordinate. This imbalance is emphasized
when they first meet: Horatio addresses Hamlet, “Hail to your lordship . . . your
poor servant ever,” though Hamlet is quick to use his authority to make him an
equal, retorting, “Sir, my good friend, I’ll change that name with you” (1.2.160–
64). Lurking within this greeting of inversion is a dialectic of affection and obe-
dience that will unfold throughout the play, Hamlet always addresses Horatio
by his first name but for Horatio, Hamlet is always “My Lord.” Nevertheless,
these two echoes of “friend” are resonant: in a plot replete with treacheries, trea-
sons, and betrayals, Horatio’s and Hamlet’s amity proves to be the only authentic
relationship at the end.
Horatio and the sentinels form a confidential micro-polity in the first scene.
He organizes a mini-constituent meeting whose purpose is to inform the young
Prince of these strange nocturnal hauntings, “Do you consent we shall acquaint
him with it / As needful in our loves, fitting our duty?” (1.1.177–78, my empha-
sis). Hamlet is drawn quickly within this circle, and the Ghost from the ground
demands that they swear their secrecy. In the third act, Horatio is enmeshed in
another confidential pact. In the midst of directing the Mousetrap, Hamlet stops
for a moment to give an encomium to his friend:

HORATIO. Here, sweet lord, at your service.

HAMLET. Horatio, thou art e’en as just a man

As e’er my conversation cop’d withal.

15. See Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007).
16. Franco Moretti maps the different relationships of characters in the play as networks
and very interestingly suggests, “But Horatio’s space—ambassadors, messengers, sentinels, talk
of foreign wars, and of course the transfer of sovereignty at the end—all this announces what
will soon be called, not Court, but State.” Yet he suggests that Horatio as a character is “flat,”
with which I disagree. See “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” New Left Review 68 (2011): 91–93.

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 Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet 159

HORATIO. O, my dear lord—

HAMLET. Nay, do not think I flatter.

For what advancement may I hope from thee
That no revenue hast but thy good spirits
To feed and clothe thee? Why should the poor be flatter’d?
No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
Where thrift may follow fawning. Dost thou hear?
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice,
And could of men distinguish her election,
Sh’ath seal’d thee for herself; for thou hast been
As one, in suff ’ring all, that suffers nothing,
A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards
Hast ta’en with equal thanks; and blest are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commeddled
That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger
To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee.
(3.2.52–74)

In this laudatio, Hamlet implicitly retrieves the ancient idea of friendship as a

relationship that mutually reinforces virtue.17 Christopher Warley points out that
Hamlet’s admiration for Horatio’s freedom from the anxieties of fortune is
rooted inextricably in Horatio’s poverty: “Such poverty provides Hamlet with a
disinterested, objective interpreter, someone with an ability to know, finally, the
truth of things.” But Warley adds that Hamlet’s praise itself is not really an
objective account of who Horatio is; it is more a projection of his desire.18 The
praise is meant to be read against the “fawning” behavior of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, the false buddies whose “candied tongues lick absurd pomp.”

17. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1156b5, “Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who
are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good
in themselves. Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for
they do this by reason of their own nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as
long as they are good—and goodness is an enduring thing”; in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed.
Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1061. All references to Aristotle will be from
this edition.
18. Warley, “Specters of Horatio,” 1033.

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160 R E NAISSANC E DRA MA FA LL 20 1 3

Laurie Shannon observes in her study of Renaissance friendship that relation-

ships between friends in this period often emphasis the likeness and parity of
friends.19 Yet such equality is put under considerable pressure in the case of
Hamlet and Horatio, who are unequal both in status (one is the heir apparent
and the other has “no revenue”) and disposition (one “antic” and the other “not
passion’s slave”).20 Indeed, this speech espouses nothing but the differences be-
tween the two, celebrating Horatio’s self-mastery and autonomy from the con-
tingencies of the world. Certainly, there is more than a hint of projection in
these lines, as Hamlet is describing the Stoic apatheia or constancy of emotions
that he wishes to have, not the antic disposition that he feigns perhaps all too
well. Yet, though Hamlet places Horatio in his cor cordis, does he not also “wear”
him to cloak his own disquietude? This psychic “wearing” extends to a forensic
investigation of Claudius’s guilt and finally the proxy voice of Hamlet. Hamlet’s
encomium of Horatio thus in one stroke exposes the disparity between the two
and yet the necessity and complementarity of their relationship.
Whether the praise of friendship is genuine or not (and we have no reason
to think it is not), Hamlet is not paying Horatio compliments without pur-
pose. He is inviting him to join his plot to catch the conscience of the King:

There is a play tonight before the King:

One scene of it comes near the circumstance
Which I have told thee of my father’s death.
I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot,
Even with the very comment of thy soul
Observe my uncle. If his occulted guilt
Do not itself unkennel in one speech,
It is a damned ghost that we have seen,
And my imaginations are as foul
As Vulcan’s stithy. Give him heedful note;
For I mine eyes will rivet to his face;
And, after, we will both our judgments join
To censure of his seeming.
(3.2.75–87)

Why does Hamlet need Horatio to observe Claudius? Since Horatio is one who
is not a slave to passion, he would be able to verify independently Hamlet’s

19. Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespeare Contexts (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002). See also Thomas MacFaul, Male Friendship in Shakespeare and
His Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
20. Yet Horatio does say at the end that he is an “antic Roman.”

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 Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet 161

suspicions. This is in keeping with the pact of secrecy that they have maintained
since the beginning. Horatio knows about the apparition of the Ghost but not
the story about Claudius’s guilt. Both of them then participate in the secret in-
quiry of exposed consciousness. They take part in the ever-widening spheres
of spying in the play: from Polonius’s asking Reynaldo to snoop on his son, to
Claudius and Polonius, “seeing unseen,” spying on Hamlet, to Claudius sum-
moning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to secretly observe his nephew, to Hamlet
eavesdropping on Claudius praying in the chapel, to Polonius hiding behind the
arras in the Queen’s chamber. Hamlet and Horatio, also “seeing unseen,” in
staging the performance turn the tables. Claudius becomes the “seeing seen”
from the other perspective: he is watching the show that mimics his own crime,
so he is seeing but “unseeing” in the sense of not recognizing. Horatio and
Hamlet are seeing but “unseen” by the others. In this dizzying mirror of exter-
nalized internal states, the King is absorbed in the theatrical play—but the play
itself is an image of what he has done in the past—so it is a refracted manifes-
tation of his memory—and he himself as the royal spectator is also at the center
of the drama surrounded by his new wife, courtiers, and friends. Watching, he
is watching himself, and he is watched by others. Horatio, recruited by Hamlet,
participates in this circulation of recognitions. All the other spies, those of Clau-
dius, are either inept or untrustworthy. But nobody ever suspects Horatio. Once
again he is the silent witness to the silent face of a king, for in the scene of the
ghost, Horatio observes the visage of the dead king, “very pale” with “a counte-
nance more in sorrow than in anger” (1.2.231). This time with Claudius, he does
not describe what he observes:

HAMLET. O good Horatio, I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound.
Didst perceive?

HORATIO. Very well, my lord.

HAMLET. Upon the talk of the poisoning?

HORATIO. I did very well note him.

HAMLET. Ah ha! Come, come music; come, the recorders.

[Enter Rosencrantz and Gildenstern]

(3.2.282–85)

Perhaps he is about to explain, but they are interrupted by Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern. What exactly did he “well note”? In a way, Horatio does not need to
respond, since Hamlet and the audience already know that the King is guilty. It is

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162 RENAISSANCE DRAMA FAL L 20 1 3

only the other characters who do not seem to notice or draw the inference about
the King’s culpability.

THE ORATOR
In act 5, Horatio is Hamlet’s constant companion. In every single scene—the
meditation on the skull of Yorick; the discovery of Ophelia’s death; the fight
with Laertes in the graveyard; the revelations of the English excursus; Osric’s
invitation; and the final duel—Horatio is Hamlet’s abiding audience. His one-
liners interrupt Hamlet’s verbalized interiority, serving as the literal articula-
tions that punctuate Hamlet’s otherwise monologic discourse. And though Ham-
let seems to be speaking to himself, many of his metaphysical speculations are
in fact directed to Horatio: “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well, Horatio, a fellow
of infinite jest” (5.1.177); “Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing . . . Dost thou think
Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’th’earth?” (5.1.189); “To what base uses we
may return, Horatio!” (5.1.196); “I am very sorry, good Horatio, / That to Laertes
I forgot myself ” (5.2.75–76). These lines are evidence that in Horatio Hamlet
has found a sympathetic audience. Horatio’s presence calms Hamlet down,
whereas in his early monologues, he tends to drive himself crazy when alone. If
after his return from England Hamlet becomes less hysterical, more plangent,
and resolute in accepting his fate, one has to ask what role Horatio serves in
Hamlet’s recognitions and what Horatio himself gathers from this experience.
One could say that the Prince’s initial intense solitude, as exemplified in the
soliloquies of the first four acts, is turned into ruminative conversations—albeit
of a one-sided variety—about revelation and providence in the last act precisely
because of the ever-present and ever-stabilizing Horatio.
Their relationship reaches its most intense pathos in Hamlet’s valediction.
His statements about his death are always framed with the vocative “Horatio,”
repeated no less than four times: “I am dead, Horatio.” “Horatio, I am dead”; “O
God, Horatio, what a wounded name, / Things standing thus unknown, shall I
leave behind me!” “O, I die, Horatio” (5.2.337–58). Horatio’s identification as a
Roman (“I am more an antique Roman than a Dane”), though ultimately re-
jected, brings full circle his initial allusion to the death of Julius Caesar. Like
a true Roman, he is both noble and impulsive in insisting that he perish with
his beloved friend. For the Stoic, suicide is the ultimate act of human agency
against the inhospitable cosmos. One would willingly sacrifice one’s life for vir-
tue, for Seneca writes that “fortune can do nothing over him that knoweth how
to die.”21 Horatio summons ancient Romanitas as a model for living and dying.

21. Seneca, Epistles, 70.7. Quoted in Geoffrey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Ox-
ford: Clarendon, 1996), 53–56. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, who kill themselves out of grief, or
Othello, from guilt, Shakespeare’s Romans kill themselves out of dignitas. For the relationship

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 Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet 163

But his death fantasy is brief, dispelled by Hamlet’s last commandment. He will
not be Brutus or Cassius in Julius Caesar nor Charmian, Iras, or Eros in Antony
and Cleopatra (although the latter three are perhaps not the best examples of
Roman virtue). In their crowning exchange, he serves in effect as a secular con-
fessor in Hamlet’s ars moriendi. Horatio’s words turn from Roman to Christian,
framed in a dulcet Petrarchan liturgy: “Good night, sweet Prince, / And flights
of angels sing thee to thy rest” (5.2.364–65). In a play full of the terrestrial lan-
guage of soil, dirt, dust, flesh, and worms, Horatio’s elegy, tracing the arc of the
soul’s ascent, is one of the few uplifting passages, and perhaps the only one that
truly partakes of the beauty of the sacred. His benediction is a literal a-dieu, to God.
It is unclear whether he sees his Prince ascending to Paradise or brought to
Purgatory, or what the doctrine of his angelology is. Nonetheless, “the flights of
angels” that Horatio harkens are certainly celestial, but Horatio becomes the ter-
restrial angel (from the Greek angelos, messenger), a herald, who reports speech
by listening, collecting, organizing information, and then announcing it to the
public.22 The play begins with Horatio trying to extract speech from dead old
Hamlet, “Stay, speak, speak,” “Stay, illusion, speak to me, speak to me, o speak,”
and ends with Horatio’s promise to Hamlet to tell his story, “let me speak
to th’yet unknowing world,” “I shall have also cause to speak, / And from his
mouth whose voice will draw no more” (5.2.384–85, 396–97). In the silence of
both Old and Young Hamlet, Horatio will be the spokesman in addressing
Fortinbras and “the noblest of the audience.” His thesis reveals to us his own
philosophy as a dramaturge:

So shall you hear

Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause;
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads. All this can I
Truly deliver.
(5.2.385–90)

between Renaissance drama and Seneca, see Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Sene-
can Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), especially the dis-
cussion on Hamlet, 276–82; as well as A. J. Boyle, Tragic Seneca: Essay on the Theatrical Tradition
(London: Routledge, 1997), 141–210.
22. See James Barrett, Staged Narrative: Poetics and the Messenger in Greek Tragedy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002). The crucial difference is that in Greek tragedy, the mes-
senger reports offstage actions, whereas in Shakespearean tragedies most deaths occur onstage.

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164 RENAISSANCE DRAMA F A L L 2 0 13

Now that the actors’ inventions are accomplished, Horatio the orator begins
crafting his own inventio. He uses a trio of philosophically loaded words: “un-
natural,” “accidental,” “casual.” His interpretation seems to be unlike Hamlet’s,
who prophesies the “election” of Fortinbras and the guiding hand of providence
in the fall of a sparrow. Paradoxically, for the scholar who studied in the same
town as Luther, who had a high view of God’s authority in guiding human ac-
tions, there is no divinity that shapes Horatio’s end. Do these lines mean that
Horatio has had a crisis of faith over the providence of human affairs? Does he
deny Hamlet’s story any ethical or metaphysical coherence, only to make Ham-
let nothing but a revenge tragedy?
According to this view, Horatio divides the events of the play into two kinds:
those that took place without cause, “casual” (from casus, or accidental) and
those “put on by cunning and forc’d cause” (from causa). And both outcomes
escape the actors’ intentions. For Horatio, there is no teleology, nor redemp-
tion: all events are contingent and unintentional. There is no higher design of
tragedy from which meaning can be wrested, except that “purposes” have been
launched into the sky only to land on the “inventors’ heads,” a circular kind of
justice of that depends less on the actions of higher intelligence than earthly
gravity. If so, Horatio is not a Stoic any more by the end of the play.
Perhaps this is why critics have generally found Horatio’s coda unsatisfactory.
Anne Barton describes it as “leaving out everything that seems important, re-
ducing all that is distinctive about this play to a plot stereotype.”23 Terence
Hawkes argues that Horatio’s “solemnity . . . mocks at the subtleties, the innu-
endoes, the contradictions, the imperfectly realized motives and sources for
action that have been exhibited to us.”24 Franco Moretti is equally unsympathetic,
chalking it up to Horatio’s “mediocre conscientiousness.”25 Michael Neill like-
wise calls Horatio’s imagination “stolid” and his account “uninstructive.”26
More productive, I think, would be to see Horatio’s closing lines as an ex-
pression of Neostoicism. In his influential De constantia (translated into En-
glish in 1596, and which Shakespeare was probably familiar with), Justus Lipsius
lists a long series of divinae clades (divinely sanctioned disasters): horrifying ex-
amples from history meant to illustrate the utility of divine punishment and

23. Anne Barton, introduction to her edition of Hamlet (London: Penguin, 1981), 52.
24. Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag (London: Routledge, 1986), 93.
25. Franco Moretti, “The Great Eclipse,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: On Sociology of Literary
Forms (London: Verso, 1983), 55: “What of the ‘rest’ which is nothing if not the meaning of what
has happened? On it falls Hamlet’s prohibition: let no-one presume to confer meaning on it.”
26. Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1997), 241.

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 Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet 165

to demonstrate that evils such as earthquakes, pestilence, war, and tyranny are
but inevitabilities of the human condition—indeed, of God’s plan for the preser-
vation and improvement of the whole world. From the Neostoic perspective,
a rational man, like Horatio, must accept the contingencies of the world with the
mental fortitude of constantia: “the upright and immovable mental strength,
which is neither lifted up nor depressed by external or accidental circumstances”
(De constantia I.4), similar to Hamlet’s earlier praise of the man “whose blood
and judgment are so well commeddled / That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s
finger.” The practice of apatheia—“man / That is not passion’s slave”—makes
it possible to survive amid catastrophe.
As such, Horatio’s “accidental judgments, casual slaughters” can thus be
accommodated in the same worldview as Hamlet’s “there is a special provi-
dence in the fall of sparrow.” At least a Neostoic would try to hold both of
these together, however uneasily. Indeed, as Michael Witmore points out, in
Horatio’s brief speech is packed an entire epistemology of accidents, divine
foresight, and human action. Witmore’s book, The Culture of Accidents, uses Ho-
ratio’s speech as a springboard to explore the special intellectual force of “ac-
cident” in the early modern context, for it traverses the legal, rhetorical, theo-
logical, and philosophical traditions.27 For Aristotle, accidents are events that
defy human powers of calculation and foresight. In the Metaphysics, he writes:
“‘Accident’ means that which attaches to something and can be truly asserted,
but neither of necessity nor usually, e.g. if one in digging a hole for a plant found
treasure. . . . Therefore there is no definite cause for an accident, but a chance
cause, i.e., an indefinite one. Going to Aegina was an accident, if the man went
not in order to get there, but because he was carried out of his way by a storm
or captured by pirates” (1025a15–27).28 In the broadest sense accidents compete
with intention, since they are fundamentally about the power of events that frus-
trate or compete with human desires.
From Aristotle to the Stoics, from Boethius to the scholastics, accidents were
the meetings of two or more causally independent chains of action, meetings
that humans could know only as coincidence. An important shift in the six-
teenth century occurs in the explanation of human phenomena: Calvin’s idea
of providence argues that God was conspicuously active in every unexpected
turn of events, since he foresees and arranges things in advance by disposing

27. Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). My following discussion is indebted to his first
two chapters, 17–61. See also Ross Hamilton, Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press).
28. Aristotle, Metaphysics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, 777.

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166 RENAISSANCE DRAMA F A L L 2 0 13

them in certain circumstances. Fortune is then turned into an instrument of

God’s providence. Calvin’s theology holds that events that some ignorantly
called “chance” or “fortune” are in reality a testament of God’s special and en-
during care of the world, even though the explicit connections between those
events and divine purposes are hidden to ordinary men’s eyes. The world is
such that God is in control of every variable in his vast creation. As Calvin ex-
plains in The Institutes: “Scripture, more fully to express that nothing is trans-
acted in the world but according to his destination, shows that those things are
subject to him which appear most fortuitous. For what would you be more
ready to attribute to chance, when a limb broken off from a tree kills a passing
traveler? But very different is the decision of the Lord, who acknowledges that
he has delivered him into the hand of the slayer.”29 Indeed, he uses the very
same allusion to the Gospel of Matthew in his discussion of the operations of
Providence: “But faith ought to penetrate more deeply, namely, having found
him Creator of all, forthwith to conclude he is also everlasting Governor and
Preserver—not only in that he drives the celestial frame as well as its several
parts by a universal motion, but also in that he sustains, nourishes, and cares
for, everything he has made, even to the least sparrow.”30 Calvin’s God becomes
the governing force in a world that is structured along the lines of a theatrum
mundi, where individuals are the wondrous spectators to their own providen-
tial experience.31 This is where theology and drama converge: accident is what
makes life and tragedy as its imitation happen. Tragedy occurs at the intersec-
tion of accidents, chance, and providence: what seem like errors to the actors
are coherent, indeed indispensable events in the design of the author. This is
how “our” and “your” philosophy could both be valid readings. As actors in the
play, Hamlet and Horatio wonder incessantly at the immense scope and power
of providence and chance. For Witmore, “drama and other genres of fiction en-
capsulate an inarticulate metaphysics or a set of organizing assumptions about
how the totality of events in a given world are related to some hypothetical source
of order.”32 That is, drama presupposes that the relationship between different
agents has a narrative wholeness. Sudden interruptions are the necessary in-

29. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. Mitchell, trans. Ford Lewis Bat-
tles (London: SCM Press, 1961), bk. 1, chap. 16, pt. 1, 225–26.
30. Ibid., 227. For the intersection of the Shakespearean and Calvinist sparrows, see Alan
Sinfield, “Hamlet’s Special Providence,” Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980): 89–98.
31. See Robert White, “Theatrum Mundi: The Theatre Metaphor in Calvin,” Australian Jour-
nal of French Studies 31, no. 3 (1994): 309–25.
32. Witmore, Culture of Accidents, 40.

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 Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet 167

gredients in the production of the story line. The seemingly random sequence
of events is almost always made into some sort of order in Shakespeare’s plays.
The dramatic urge is to have accidents wrested into a plot, for all elements to
be articulated into a coherent line and given structural unity. This is the way in
which the fall of the sparrow and casual slaughters both make sense as causal
explanations. For Shakespeare and Hamlet, they acknowledge the design of “let
be.”
We now see how our initial question concerning the typographic difference
in the line, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are
dreamt of in [y]our philosophy,” can be reconciled. The character of Horatio
compels us to think about the ultimate meaning of tragedy—the antithesis be-
tween Hamlet’s divinely shaped ends and Horatio’s human errors prompts
the audience to ponder deeply about the pathos of tragic awe. Indeed, immedi-
ately before Horatio says, “Oh day and night, but this is wondrous strange,”
to which Hamlet responds, “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome”
(1.5.172–73). In the final scene, when the stranger Fortinbras enters upon the
scene, Horatio welcomes him by asking, “What is it you would see? If aught
of woe or wonder, cease your search” (5.2.367). It is this sense of “wonder”
and “strange” that mark both their philosophies. As Aristotle says in the Meta-
physics, it was on account of wonder that men began to philosophize (982b13).
At the end, it is not as a stranger but an observer versed in wondrous spec-
tacle that Horatio gives the play its uneasy closure. He does not plunge into ni-
hilism nor equate the crimes of man to the dissolution of the universe, as in
the chorus of Seneca’s enormously influential Thyestes.33 But that does not
mean he provides any moral sententiae typical of the conventional classical cho-
rus either. Both Stoic philosophy and Calvinistic theology agree that the world
is governed by a higher principle. The rational mind survives in a seemingly
irrational world by being in tune with the universe’s silent logos. Displaying a
fortitude in the face of catastrophe, Horatio simply wants to restore order back
to the polis by preventing further calamity and misjudgment, “lest more mis-
chance / On plots and errors happen.”
The first quarto is explicit in setting up Horatio as a tragic storyteller:

33. Right after the chorus discovers that Thyestes has been fed his children by Atreus, they
exclaim, “The regular cycles of heaven are lost; sunset and sunrise will not exist. . . . Our hearts
are shaken and trembling, trembling with enormous fear / lest the shattered cosmos fall in the
ruin ordained by fate” (789–830). In Seneca, Tragedies II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2004), 295–97.

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168 RENAISSANCE DRAMA F A L L 2 0 13

Content yourself. I’ll show to all the ground,

The first beginning of this tragedy.
Let there a scaffold be reared up in the market-place
And let the state of the world be there,
Where you shall hear such a sad story told
That never mortal man could more unfold.
(17.120–25)

The first lines of the play command a character to “unfold” his identity. In the
last lines a character will “unfold” the narrative. Multiple theatrical and meta-
theatrical frames operate in this epilogue/prologue: first, the story he is about
to tell to Fortinbras and to the “nobles”; second, the story that he tells to the
immediate audience in the theatre; third, beyond the contemporaries, the fu-
ture generations who will hear this story, in the sense of what Cassius says in
Julius Caesar: “How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over /
In states unborn and accents unknown?” (3.1.111–14). Aristotle writes that “the
plot-structure ought to be so composed that . . . anyone who hears the events
which occur experiences terror and pity as a consequence of the events them-
selves” (Poetics, 1453b5, my emphasis). The ghost of Hamlet the father speaks
not to Horatio at the beginning. At the end the spirit of Hamlet the son will
speak through his friend. For Hamlet, “the rest is silence,” but for Horatio, his
rest is his beginning: the history of Hamlet. Just as the ghost begs Hamlet to
“Remember me,” the dying Hamlet begs Horatio to publicly remember him,
“report me and my cause aright.” The critical difference is that Old Hamlet
wants to address Hamlet privately, whereas Hamlet at the end wants Horatio
to address the whole body politic. The prior memory is exclusive and takes the
secret form of revenge. The latter is universal and public. If, as Stephen Green-
blatt argues, Purgatory was invented as a cultural practice of mediating the dead,
and Protestantism destroyed this institution, I want to suggest that Horatio re-
places the mourning of Purgatory with a public, secular testimony. In the play,
three sons vie to remember the rights and rites of their father: Laertes, For-
tinbras, Hamlet. Horatio as their coeval is conspicuously lacking a father. He
mourns as a friend. Resisting the recidivist impulse of revenge, Horatio be-
comes the first and last mourner of Hamlet. (Whether Fortinbras listens is an-
other matter.) Hamlet is fully aware of the power of witnessing, of having a
posthumous advocate. In a deep sense, he has failed to do this for his father.
The son is in the same position as his father at the end—he needs someone to
remember him. What is crucial is that Hamlet does not ask Horatio to avenge
him. Horatio will postpone his own death, his suicide (“Here’s yet some li-
quor left”), to bear witness to the world. That the young Wittenberg scholar
will be the voice of memory suggests the final banishment of the ghost. In

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 Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet 169

the beginning he was compelled to speak to the dead, “Speak to it! Thou art a
scholar”; at the end he speaks to the living, “Let me speak.” Horatio is the real
pivot from the past to the future in the play. At the end, as Paul A. Kottman ar-
gues, the anticipation of future testimony arises with the scene of speaking,
thus a shared futurity of memory.34
Horatio’s promise of a future oration is in line with the ending of Romeo
and Juliet when the Prince says, “Go hence to have more talk of these sad
things. / Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished” (5.3.307–8); of Othello
when Ludovico promises that “Myself will straight aboard, and to the state /
This heavy act with heavy heart relate” (5.2.369–70); of Antony and Cleopatra,
when Caesar says “their story is / No less pity than his glory which / Brought
them to be lamented” (5.2.359–61); or of Julius Caesar, when Antony eulogizes
Brutus as “the elements / So mixed in him that nature might stand up / And
say to all the world, ‘This was a man’!” (5.5.75–76). Tragic protagonists in Shake-
speare always show a remarkable interest in their posterity, and the survivors
attempt to memorialize or monumentalize them in some appropriate way. It
is in the narrative transfiguration as stories from Hamlet into Hamlet, from
character to history, from what has just happened into what we have just heard
that their meaning can be found. These concluding speeches underscore a self-
consciousness on the part of the characters qua characters and the recognition
that they themselves need time to think about the actions that have just oc-
curred on stage. This redistribution of knowledge suggests the willingness of
the actors to look back upon and review their own performance; that is, they
become their own interpreters. In tragedy, because all the great protagonists
have perished, these endings have the dynamics of a reintegration—the respon-
sibility lies upon those in the know to broadcast the events to the rest of the
community, “the unknowing.” (Of course, given that Denmark has just been
invaded, such reintegration of the community is put into doubt.) For Fortin-
bras and the English ambassadors, they literally do not know what happened,
since they were not eyewitnesses to the happenings that the audience has seen.
In the extra-theatrical sense, the audience has as much authority as the char-
acters themselves. After all, we have witnessed firsthand the deeds of all the
actors, and literally know everything that has happened in the play. Horatio did
not overhear Claudius’s prayer and he was not in the Queen’s chamber; we
were. In this way the characters in the drama are in an analogous position

34. Paul A. Kottman expands on this point in his chapter “Speaking as One Witness to An-
other: Hamlet and the ‘Cunning of the Scene,’ ” in A Politics of the Scene (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2007), 139–65.

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170 RENAISSANCE DRAMA F A LL 2 01 3

as the audience—to contemplate and make sense of these wondrous events.35

Whatever the case, there is a looping effect in the narrative: they go off into an
alternate reality where they will begin to interpret what has just unfolded be-
fore the audience.
One can take these voices as the early modern stage version of the ancient
chorus: the civic voices that seek to understand and incorporate the stunning
events back to communal memory. Julia Lupton writes that “if Hamlet is the
object and mirror of our imaginary fascination, Horatio directs the symbolic
dimension of our subjective capture within the scenes before us. A late rem-
nant of the classical chorus, Horatio performs this work in the mode of pub-
lic opinion formation, as he goes about testing, weighing, and summarizing
the state of the union throughout the drama.”36 Horatio folds the extraordi-
nary events that have just occurred back to the sense of the everyday, not with a
moment of reflection but the promise of reflection. As such, they bring clo-
sure dramatically as well as psychically. But this wish of wrapping things up also
opens an aperture into another possible world: the birth of competing versions
and multiple retellings.
What is the significance of Horatio’s instruction (which Fortinbras repeats) to
bear Hamlet’s corpse high “on the stage”? Throughout the play we have seen
much concern with dead and living bodies: the unbody of the ghost, the hid-
den body of Polonius, the mock theology of the King’s two bodies, the grave-
side clownish debate about Ophelia’s burial, Yorick’s skull, and the corpses of
Laertes, Claudius, Gertrude. These remain resolutely earthbound. Hoisting Ham-
let’s body up in the air can be seen as the counterforce of all the gravitational
pull of other inert bodies, an upward act that is a dialectical move to the down-
ward biblical proverb of “fall of a sparrow.”37 His sullied, solid flesh is on dis-
play before the stench of decay offends public decorum. Elevated in the air by
a flight of four captains, Hamlet is released from the ground so that he might
be a spectacle “to all the ground,” an echo of Horatio’s initial words of “friends
to the ground.” In a sense, this artificial lifting temporarily suspends Hamlet’s

35. On narrative retelling in the period after the play has ended, see Robert Weimann, “Thresh-
olds to Memory and Commodity in Shakespeare’s Endings,” Representations 53 (Winter 1996):
53–73.
36. Julia Lupton, “Hamlet, Prince: Tragedy, Citizenship, and Political Theology,” in Alterna-
tive Shakespeare 3, ed. Diana E. Henderson (London: Routledge, 2008), 191. Timothy Wong reads
Horatio as a figure of constituent sovereignty in light of Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba in “Stew-
ard of the Dying Voice: The Intrusion of Horatio into Sovereignty and Representation,” Telos 153
(2010): 113–31.
37. The “fall of the sparrow” also echoes the “Fall of Princes” exempla in Boccaccio’s and
Lydgate’s de casibus tradition.

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 Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet 171

dissolution into the “quintessence of dust.” Here the final descent of this prince
is at least briefly halted and borne aloft as a spectacle for all to marvel at.
The two remaining male speakers—Horatio and Fortinbras—split Hamlet’s
identity: one private and restrained scholar, the other brash international in-
vader. Hamlet wanted to be the former but should have been the latter.38 In
the end they both have his vote: “But I do prophesy th’election lights / On For-
tinbras. He has my dying voice” (5.2.360–61) and “since my dear soul . . . could
of men distinguish her election, / Sh’hath seal’d thee for herself ” (3.2.63–5; my
emphasis). Though Fortinbras will enforce the new political order, Horatio, as
court historian and the bearer of Hamlet’s memory, will shape it. The world is
“unknowing,” and Horatio is the one who can “truly deliver.” The ending—and
by extension death—is the horizon of expectation for every storyteller. The be-
ginning—and by extension life—is horizon of potentiality for every storyteller.
Horatio’s story will be the last, and the first, of the many lines of storytelling
within and beyond the play.

38. Nigel Alexander reads Fortinbras’s war and Horatio’s friendship as symbolizing the con-
cordant discord of Mars and Venus, in Poison, Play and Duel: A Study in Hamlet (Lincoln: Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press, 1971), 200.

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