Horatio

'There are more things in heaven and earth...'

Horatio comes from Hamlet, where he is one of the first characters we meet (or at least, as he says, ‘a piece of him’), staking out a freezing cold castle wall in hopes of seeing a ghost. In the true crime drama of Hamlet, he is our narrator: always a step outside, and yet never as removed from events as perhaps he seems.

‘As a stranger give it welcome’

The part of me that used to be a performer is obsessed with the question of where Horatio is from. The evidence is contradictory: “Oh day and night, but this is wondrous strange,” Horatio says, and Hamlet replies, “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome”—which can be read two ways. Either ‘you, who are also a stranger (that is, a foreigner) ought to welcome this fellow strange thing’—or ‘you should welcome this strangeness as if it were a stranger/foreigner.’ 

As of the beginning of the play, Horatio is known to the soldiers of Elsinore, even though Hamlet isn’t yet aware that his school buddy has come to visit him in Denmark. He saw Hamlet’s father the King once. He is well-informed about the politics of the state, and the doings of the deceased king he calls ‘ours’—and yet is unfamiliar with the Danish custom of wassailing, and Hamlet has to explain why he hears celebratory trumpets and cannons hailing the king’s celebrations. 

Generally when Shakespeare is being so inconsistent, the answer is that the question at hand doesn’t matter and Shakespeare didn’t care. It is of passing interest to an actor, but overall irrelevant. But the more I think about it—that he is both local and ‘a stranger,’ both familiar and bemused—the more I see this as a piece of what makes Horatio who he is both narratively and structurally, a person who is both inside and outside at the same time. He is too educated to really make one of the soldiers in whose company we meet him, but clearly close enough that they came to him rather than a prince and courtier when they needed a man who could speak (presumably in Latin) to a ghost. Hamlet confides in him, but Rosencranz and Guildenstern ignore him, and the rest of the court seems perfectly comfortable casually ordering him around. 

I wonder if, perhaps subconsciously, this feeds into the fact that these days you will often see a Horatio who is not a white man. If Horatio is the true crime narrator, he is also the type we see in so many films: the gay/Black/female best friend. His job is not to have a story, but to help tell someone else’s. Already existing in between worlds, his identity unfixed, he is therefore someone whose role does not feel dramatically altered if you change that identity. 

Off-the-record 

The gaps he falls into are textual as well—though the textual variants of the texts of Hamlet are too numerous to begin to discuss here, one point of interest is Horatio’s shifting position as confidante.

In the middle part of the play, Horatio flits in and out. He disappears for some time after telling Hamlet that he has seen the ghost of his father, reappearing to assist in Hamlet’s attempt to entrap his uncle with a play that tells the story—as far as Hamlet understands it, as far as the ghost has told him—of how this uncle murdered his own brother. Then he’s gone again as Hamlet careens into chaos and, eventually, England, once again reappearing to greet Hamlet on the shores of Denmark, armed with a letter and incredulity at the tale of Hamlet’s impossible return. 

In the interim, he speaks to Hamlet’s mother. 

What he says and where varies from version to version. In the quarto text of 1605, the first and slightly longer widely-accepted version of the play, he speaks to Queen Gertrude at some length about Ophelia, explains that she is spiraling into madness after the accidental murder of her father at Hamlet’s hands. Gertrude, initially resistant, relents: she’ll talk to Ophelia to avoid rumors spreading. 

In the folio text, the version that appeared in the 1623 collection of Shakespeare’s plays, Horatio’s lines are absorbed by a ‘Gentleman.’ He is still there, though, and speaks only once—this time, sounding Gertrude’s former note of caution that maybe it would be best to speak to Ophelia, lest rumors spread. The same closing line—“Let her come in”—takes on two very different tones in two different mouths: a command from a queen, and a humble suggestion. 

You’ve perhaps heard of the ‘Bad Quarto’ of Hamlet, the 1603 printing of the play that feels half-remembered, shortened and strange. The scenes are more or less there, and the sense of the lines, but their precise poetry is not. This version is generally rejected wholesale, with the occasional exception of the scene that Horatio and Gertrude share—not discussing Ophelia, but Hamlet, and the news Horatio has received that Hamlet is safe and bound for Denmark once more. Gertrude offers much more unequivocal support of her son than she ever musters in the more commonly accepted texts, and makes Horatio the messenger of her well-wishes. 

In every version, Horatio carries someone’s confidence: the pleas of Ophelia to speak to the Queen, or the Queen’s quiet counselor when she hears of Ophelia’s madness, or the bearer of Hamlet’s news and the Queen’s words of love to him in return. 

Educated but unimportant, loyal but unaligned, he is Denmark’s secretary: a person set apart, a person who oversees secrets. 

‘Tell my story’ 

Shakespeare knows that the people who experience great events are rarely the best ones to narrate them (assuming they’ve survived). Horatio’s in-and-out/both-and-neither position is at the last in service of his role as the teller of Hamlet’s story, the only other person who has seen and understood (nearly) everything that happened.

I had a professor who loved to describe the first time she saw a production that killed Horatio at the end. ‘Bid the soldiers shoot’ in honor of Hamlet, says the Norwegian Prince Fortinbras, who has led his conquering army into Denmark—and they shoot Horatio! Brilliant! (she said). But to me, this betrays what the play is and what Horatio is for in pursuit of cheap shocks. Horatio is everyone’s friend, of course it would be a final stab to an audience’s heart to kill him.

But he has a job to do, the job he has existed in anticipation of doing for the entire play. Hamlet has been from the start a play about secrets: who killed the old king, what Hamlet is doing and what he knows, who is on Hamlet’s side and who is not. Conditioned by the age of the gritty reboot, where prestige is conferred by violence, perhaps means we are compelled by a realistic ending of even more slaughter, this time cold and political instead of melodramatic and personal. But Horatio exists to make that impossible. All the secrets are known, and there is someone alive who remembers them.

If he wasn’t from Denmark at first, he is indelibly of Denmark now, the only bearer of its recent history, the person who knows how to speak to—and now, for—ghosts.

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