8/17/16 First 90 Lines of Hamlet

1. What do we know so far? What's been established about the situation, and about Barnardo, Marcellus, and Horatio?

2. What is the mood of this first scene? How is that established?

3. What questions have been raised or remain to be answered?

So far, we know that Barnardo and Marcellus are guards, which we know because Barnardo takes the place of Francisco on guard, and Marcellus comes to Barnardo's aid. Horatio is a scholar, which we come to understand because they ask him to speak to the ghost, and it was believed that ghosts spoke Latin. We know that a ghost has been seen twice before the opening of the play; Horatio says "what, has this thing appeared again tonight?" [line 26] and the guards are all on edge because of this. When the ghost appears, the guards remark that it looks just like the recently deceased king.

The mood of the first scene is established through the way that we can sense the fear that the guards have. Francisco mentions that he is "sick at heart" [line 9], and when the ghost appears, Horatio says it "harrows [him] with fear and wonder." [line 51] The scene also takes place at night, which is a common symbol in literature for mystery or evil. The mood of the scene is tense and mysterious.

I am anxious to continue reading because I want to find out what the ghost potentially has to say. I have a feeling that there is foreshadowing in Horatio's statement that "this bodes some strange eruption to our state" [line 80] and that this will be a driving factor of the plot of the play. We still don't know if the ghost is actually the deceased king, and we don't know whether it will indeed speak to the characters.