The platform again — Hamlet sees the ghost

Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus on the platform after midnight. The new king's drinking can be heard from the castle, complete with cannons and trumpets at every toast. Hamlet finds the custom shameful — "more honored in the breach than the observance" — and uses the moment for one of his characteristic generalizing speeches. A single defect, he says, can make a whole nation or a whole man "take corruption from that particular fault." The "dram of evil" speech is sometimes cut from modern productions; it is among the play's clearest meditations on how reputations are made.

Then the ghost appears. Hamlet, terrified, addresses it: "be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, / bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, / be thy intents wicked or charitable, / thou comest in such a questionable shape / that I will speak to thee." The ghost will not speak in the others' presence. It beckons Hamlet to follow it to a private place.

Horatio and Marcellus try to stop him. The figure may be a devil; it may lead him to the edge of the cliff and assume some monstrous shape. Hamlet pulls free — "my fate cries out" — and goes after it. They follow at a distance, Horatio saying Marcellus's earlier line back to him: "something is rotten in the state of Denmark."