Followed by eight beats of walking perhaps?
At least, this version of the text suggests it might be so.
It’s not the MOST compelling pause in a metric universe.
One might be inclined to tack these two syllables on to the previous line
Or the subsequent,
To cheat, as it were,
With the verse.
Or even – and this is my preferred one:
But come. Here as before,
Never, so help you mercy. . .
Which leaves us four beats of silence
Then three, rather than eight all at once.
In eight beats, I want the world to shift, for emotions to erupt
For silence to be the only choice – that or wailing –
With four and three
We can just take a breath.
Run a few steps.

There must be many dissertations categorizing exactly
What Horatio’s philosophy must be.
I remember from some class or text that he’s a stoic.
I’m not sure what such a theory is based on. Horatio doesn’t, as a rule, have a lot to say. Hamlet does the bulk of the talking in this relationship, so there’s not a LOT to go on.
We are given to understand that Horatio’s philosophy does not generally include ghosts but what else has Hamlet learned in the conversation with his dead father that has no place in the philosophy? Murder? Fratricide? Hell?
I would wager that there are both fewer things and more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any philosophy. Philosophy being an attempt to organize the world into sense and the world being the sort of place that tends to defy stringent organization.

Those sorts of visiting rules of etiquette get used so rarely here in this urban landscape. When your apartment is too small even for the people who live in it, it’s tricky to make space for strangers or even friends.
You meet in the bar
Or the café
Or not at all, eventually.
There are times, though, when I miss the opportunity to play hostess, to welcome the strangers (those known and unknown, those strange and stranger) but I am out of the habit. I will have to welcome you to my art instead – that’s the only place there’s my room.

Someone used this line as a title for something.
It might be a famous something (like a Willa Cather novel?)
But I can’t recall what that something is.
That’s the thing with Hamlet; People like to use these lines to signal the smartness of their work.
A surefire way to up the smug intellectual content of one’s work is to link it somehow to a line from Hamlet. What this says about me and this little project, I fear to investigate.
However, the world is full of references to Hamlet that the educated are meant to catch. In effect, this is why Hamlet is part of the canon. We teach it so that those references will not be made in vain. The culture must circle back on itself somehow – like the ouroboros eating its own tail.

Practically, now, how does the ghost travel so quickly underground? And why?
Are there tunnels for the dead? Like, sewers for corpses to move through
During the morning. Morning is clearly a threat to them so that perhaps they must
Hide themselves from the sun’s rays, like vampires.
Or has the morning made the ghost lose corporeality, turning him into a mist that flows from place to place, yet that can still speak (albeit in a lot less articulate way than the corporeal ghost).
Perhaps the dawn turns the ghost into a mole
Or a worm or a beetle
Or some tunneling creature and he ceases his martial stalk to become a scuttling earth-dweller making its way through soil and sod and stone.
But he’s one with a megaphone or some kind of strange amplification system that transforms his voice from the squeak of a mole to the imposing haunting voice of “Swear.”
The mist is my favorite solution because there’s a sort of uncontrolled dissipation in a mist. It can’t stay in one place; It has to move hither and yon with no authority or ground of its own. Water underground might have the same sort of movement quality, in that it cannot stop moving with gravity and geology and open pathways until contained or absorbed or collected somewhere. I like the idea of the king slipping away into something more elemental.

How does Hamlet’s relationship with his father’s ghost change so fast? Before he calls his dad an “old mole” he’s been silent and awed, trembling perhaps before the heightened rhetoric of his ghostly father – then once the ghost’s voice comes eerily up through the ground, he becomes irreverent and affectionate somehow. A mole conjures no really fearful quality (even for a Small Mammal-phobe like me). A mole is blind and cute and I picture one cradled in the palm of a hand, even a very old one, with grey whiskers, perhaps a long beard, still, harmless. Perhaps even more than harmless.

And isn’t it sort of condescending to say something is well said when you’ve just said that very thing yourself?
It’s like when a child learns to talk and we praise him for the very thing he’s repeating, when really we just said it ourselves.
Dramatically, this scene makes sense in performance. It’s satisfying to see Hamlet treat the scary ghost like a cute old spirit, like Casper, not a poltergeist –
but I can’t figure out how to explain this shift.

They haven’t heard much, have they? Mostly, they’ve seen.
All they’ve heard from the ghost is “Swear” – which is not much to speak of.
Unless –
Is Hamlet, perhaps, concerned that they have overheard his chat with his dad?
Does he suspect they’ve been eavesdropping and caught wind of all the news?
Is it possible they HAVE been eavesdropping?
They were only steps behind him when they followed.
That is quite a long scene for them to catch up so much later.
They’d have every reason to listen in. They’re concerned for Hamlet’s safety,
They want to be assured he will not be tempted to the flood or something.
They could, in fact, have heard and perhaps Hamlet is rightly concerned with their silence. Is there any evidence for them NOT hearing the big reveal?
I’ve never seen it played that way
But I’m curious about what would shift if Horatio and Marcellus were witnesses
To the ghost’s news.
There is such a lot of eavesdropping in this play already, it’s not impossible for there to be a little more, is it?

Why do these gentlemen need to swear over the location of the ghost’s voice?
Is it so the ghost will hear?
He seems to hear them fine.
Is one spot of ground more sacred than another?
Are the ley lines better suited for swearing wherever the ghost
leads them with his voice?
What is the value of shifting ground over and over for this swearing?
Why tunnel underground to call up above?
What does the ghost get out of it?
Besides maybe the pleasure of messing with a group of people.

During my most miserable time there, I had a dream about a plant. My plant was wilting and drying out in its home under the stairs, in the dark. I was doing my best to care for it but it was almost impossible in the environment it was in.
I knew I was like that plant, planted in the wrong place. I thought about cacti attempting to grow in rainforests and water lilies trying to grow in a desert.
So I shifted ground.
I’d believed that it shouldn’t matter where I was, I wanted to bloom wherever I was planted. I’d spent so many years uprooting myself, I thought I would do well to send some roots into the soil where I was, even though the soil wasn’t rich with my kind of nutrients.
So I shifted ground.
I thought in coming back to my home garden, the one where I’d bloomed so brightly years before, I would once again burst with growth, push forth brightly colored flowers, shoot green stalks skyward. Yet, this old familiar garden was crowded. There was no room to grow. Or perhaps whatever nutrients enriched this soil before had been depleted.
I am hesitant to shake this familiar dirt from my roots, afraid that all of these re-plantings will not serve me but ground that will not grow things must lie fallow sometimes and plants wanting to bloom again need the best light, the best water and the best ground. Shift now.

1. Once you find out the translation of this bit of Latin, can you keep the Beatles song “Here, There and Everywhere” out of your head?
2. Why is Hamlet speaking Latin right now? He’s not trying to impress anyone, I would imagine. Do the rest of the people in this scene speak Latin? Hamlet’s a scholar. Horatio is too. So that’s two. Does the ghost? Marcellus? In the midst of a moment when a ghost is throwing his voice all over the stage, why throw in a Latin phrase?
3. Was this maybe some popular Latin catch phrase that everybody used? Like a Renaissance “Isn’t that special?”
4. Normally, the characters that toss in a Latin phrase or two are high on the self-importance scale. Holofernes. Polonius. The occasional high falutin’ fool. Hamlet’s wordy, for sure – but pompous? Maybe.