The rooster at Elsinore, Horatio’s clause, and the ghosts that find their way back in
Shakespeare’s Hamlet does not open with the prince, the new king, or the queen. It begins at night on the battlements of Elsinore, where soldiers keep watch. The court is below them: the marriage, the succession, the official grief of the king’s death. Up here there is only cold stone, a changing of the guard, and something the watchmen have already seen twice. In that dark, two worlds are already meeting—the world that can be named by reason and the world that still walks after death. The play will not explain the meeting. It forces us to stand on that wall and experience the world of the watchtower guards.