The watch on the platform

Midnight on the battlements of Elsinore. The sentry Francisco is relieved by Barnardo — "'Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart" — and Horatio, a scholar friend of the prince, arrives with Marcellus to confirm a story he has refused to believe. The soldiers say a figure has appeared on the wall twice now, in the dark, armed exactly as the late king Hamlet was when he killed the king of Norway in single combat thirty years ago.

It comes again. It walks across the platform in armor and stops. Horatio, addressing it as "the majesty of buried Denmark," commands it to speak. It will not. Marcellus tries to strike it with his halberd — too late; it walks past them. They argue, in the dark, about what they have seen. Horatio thinks it bodes some "strange eruption" to the state. Marcellus, in one of the play's most-quoted lines, says "something is rotten in the state of Denmark."

The cock crows. The figure starts and is gone. They debate whether to follow it; Horatio refuses to speak to it again that night. The light begins to come up. They decide they must tell Hamlet, the dead king's son and the figure's only intelligible audience: "this spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him." The watch ends. The play has been on stage less than fifteen minutes and has already given the audience the line about the rotten state, the figure of the ghost, and the conviction that whatever is wrong here will not stay buried.