'Hamlet': the opening scene

Shakespeare’s four great tragedies all open in uncertainty and discomfort. In Macbeth, three ‘weird’ figures of indeterminate gender speak in riddles. In Othello, two men mutter obscurely in a Venetian street, one telling the other of his contempt for his own boss, and then the two rouse the house of a respected Senator. In King Lear, two noblemen discuss with dismay how the aged King is favouring one Duke over another, following which the said King, appallingly, slices up his own kingdom.

And so to Hamlet. We are on the misty battlements of Elsinore Castle just after midnight. A guard called Barnardo coming on duty nervously calls out Who’s there? And the man who is already on duty, and is about to be relieved, Francisco, retorts:

Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.

Because it’s his job to ask who’s there; in his anxiety, Barnardo has got it wrong.

In that brief exchange the unsettling tone of the play is set. A few lines later, Francisco says he is glad to get off duty :

For this relief much thanks. ‘Tis bitter cold, And I am sick at heart

So it’s not just the cold that has discomfited him. In the first two lines we also see some of the central themes of the play prefigured: Who’s there? In other words, who are you? Identity will be at the heart of this story. Just what or who is Hamlet? Is he a revenger? Is he truly a Prince of Denmark? By the end of the play he can state firmly

This is I, Hamlet the Dane.

But this is only after much questioning. This play is full of questions of all sorts, most famously in that well-known line starting ‘To be…’

The second line is also suggestive:

Stand and unfold yourself.

Again, identity: who are you? Reveal yourself for what you truly are. And this is a story which really will reveal the truth about people, and show how they behave in the most extreme of circumstances. We will see the true unfolding of many characters: Claudius’s evil, Ophelia’s fragility, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s shallowness, Polonius’s self-serving foolishness, Horatio’s unrelentingly solid decency. It is a play which will unfold the full variety and range of human character, and in which – eventually – everyone will be seen for what he or she truly is.

The men are then joined by Horatio and Marcellus. The unease continues. Barnardo asks and receives the unenthusiastic reply ‘A piece of him’. This is crystallized by Marcellus’s question

What, has this thing appeared again tonight?

He says that he has invited the sceptical Horatio along

who will not let belief take hold of him / touching this dreaded sight twice seen of us.’

Nothing is certain.

When the ghost does appear a few lines later, its identity is still uncertain: it looks like the king that’s dead, but it may be usurping

this time of night, Together with that fair and warlike form in which the majesty of buried Denmark / Did sometimes march.

Usurp is another charged and significant word: it means to take what is not rightfully yours, and of course it is Claudius who is the true usurper. Horatio surely speaks for them all when he states that

in the gross and scope of my opinion, This bodes some strange eruption to our state.

Marcellus asks him to explain why

this strict and most observant watch / so nightly toils the subject of the land'

and why the shipwrights do

not divide the Sunday from the week … and make the night joint-labourer with the day?’

In other words, why is everything abnormal, why is everything topsy-turvy? Horatio’s long speech - mostly for the audience – reminds us of the story of the older Fortinbras, and introduces the central theme of the play: the younger Fortinbras is seeking revenge for his father’s defeat and death, and has sharked up a list of lawless resolutes to challenge Denmark. This is the source of the posthaste and rummage in the land. So Denmark, just like Scotland in Macbeth and Venice in Othello, is facing a real and imminent external threat. And just like those two plays, it turns out the true threat is internal (from Macbeth himself, and Iago’s evil plotting in Othello).

Barnardo calls the ghost a portentous figure. Horatio backs this up with his talk of Rome when Julius Caesar was assassinated: there were terrible harbingers, and nature itself was in turmoil. The sheeted dead were roaming the streets of the city. When the ghost reappears, Horatio attempts to ask it about thy country’s fate / which happily foreknowing may avoid. If only.

At the end of the scene the Ghost disappears

like a guilty thing / upon a fearful summons’

because the cock has crowed and dawn is coming (a trick by Shakespeare – 10 minutes ago it was midnight) and Horatio goes off to tell Hamlet what they have seen.

Then we get what might be regarded as a more conventional first scene – the court meeting in formal session, presided over by the King. Claudius seems confident, eloquent and in full control. But we in the audience are still thinking about that dramatic opening scene. This happens in Macbeth too: its opening scene presents us with three weird women, chanting semi-obscure sentences. Our first feeling is unease. We cannot listen to Claudius without being very much aware that his predececessor is rumoured to be haunting the battlements of the castle.

This opening scene sets up so much of this enormous play, which is full of unforgettable characters and dramatic scenes. It’s all there already – identity, questioning, revenge, a world teetering on the edge of chaos. We are ready to plunge into its vastness.