Always, this is played as a sort of ghostly disappearance sound.
I hear it as “Remember Meeeeeeeee!”
But reading it here, now, it strikes me as poignant.
As far as any character in the play knows, these are the ghost’s last words.
And said to his son, they have a sort of “No, duh” quality –
In that How could a ghost possibly be forgotten? How could a FATHER be forgotten?
I think this is what we fear most about death, though,
That we will be forgotten. We want someone to keep us in his memory,
At the very least. We want to leave something behind of ourselves.
This ghost has left a great deal. He has a son.
He leaves a kingdom, subjects, a real legacy
A place in history, stories of his heroism.
He likely leaves coins stamped with his image,
His tomb, decorated with his likeness,
His name listed in the history books of Denmark
And all his actions and deeds, recorded
But all he wants, as he leaves, is to not be forgotten.
He entreats his son to remember him.
What exactly he wants him to remember
We can’t know. It could just be the sound of his laugh.

French again! This ghost speaks a lot of French for a Danish guy!
I guess the afterlife is like France.
Which for me, sounds pretty good.
I’d very much enjoy an afterlife of watching the sea undulate along the Riviera.
If I cannot eat good bread and cheese (Is there food in the afterlife?)
I’d at least enjoy the atmosphere.
For the English of this period, though, with their French animosity,
Perhaps to go to France would be to end up in hell.
The flames that purge his gross sins
Are French ones. The infernal fire keepers: French.
The language
Slipping into the dead
Like fish into water.

Questions:
1) Why a French morning all of a sudden? Matin is the same number of syllables. The iambs work the same either way. We are in Denmark, after all, not France.
2) Glow-worm? Is this an actual glow-worm? Or is this a metaphor? Is the moon a glow-worm? A star?
3) Isn’t a fading glow-worm an awfully cute harbinger of morning?

Where are we with the numbers of Farewells?
This is a specialized one. A specific farewell
To a specific person and with a suddenness –
Its difference in a long series of farewells
Stands out. Also, it’s three syllables longer.

I fully support the ghost’s strategy here.
There’s an assumption that Gertrude has these thorns,
That her conscience will nag at her
Sooner or later. He recommends just leaving her be.
I’m a big fan of leaving people be in general –
I’ll always get behind a Mind Your Own Business platform.
Hamlet doesn’t really follow this advice.
He attempts to pull on those thorns in her chest. He tries to jimmy them
Into a pricking position. He pokes at the swelling where they’re embedded
So much so that the ghost makes his only other appearance specifically
To put a stop to it. He doesn’t show up to help Hamlet put a sword
Through Claudius at prayer. He doesn’t nod his head in approval of the play
But he turns back up to tell his son to stop meddling in Gertrude’s heart.
It’s a curious and moving respect that he maintains for his wife. He remains
Her protector, her defender, even after being betrayed by her.
This makes me feel a sort of affection for the ghost when nothing else does.

Now how’s the son of a murdered king
SUPPOSED to pursue this act
Without tainting his mind?
Seems to me, instilling a murderous directive
Is instant taint and it’s the ghost that’s
Doing the tainting.
However – howsomever
I also question how a soul
Could contrive anything at all
Unless I’m vastly misunderstanding
What a soul is.
It would seem to me that contrivance
Would be a quality of the brain
So I wonder how one prevents
Thy soul from contriving
Even against one’s mother
Or whomsoever.

When I played the Queen of Denmark
I ended up with the guy who played the king.
For the second part of the tour we shared a bed. Sometimes
I thought of that bed as the Royal Bed of Denmark.
I became fascinated with the metaphors
Surrounding our bed and a poem emerged –
a long, Hamlet-infused poem that I labored over
For years. It was my epic.
Because that time was epic.

But now is not the time for that story.
I will say that my royal bed of Denmark (or Harrisonburg, VA)
Was not a couch for luxury (though it was a water bed, it wasn’t ours)
Or damned incest (we barely knew each other) and while we did
Do some rolling around in that bed, there were many lines we did not cross.

I continue, though, to be fascinated with the Royal Bed.
The rituals of the Royal Bed in pre-Revolutionary France
For example, are fairly well documented,
Courtiers standing around while King and Queen got into bed,
Watching and waiting over conception.

What pomp, what rules
Surrounded the Royal Bed of Denmark?
Was Hamlet conceived publicly?