For the last two nights, these two guardsmen—Marcellus and Barnardo—during their watch in the middle of the night, encountered a figure that looked very much like your father, dressed in full armor from head to toe...
...It appeared in front of them and marched by them, slowly and with dignity, at no greater distance than the length of his staff. He walked by them three times as they stood shaking in fear like jelly, too shocked to speakI knew your father. The ghost looked as much like him as my hands look like each other.They told me all about what they’d seen, swearing me to secrecy. On the third night, I stood guard with them, and the ghost appeared, just when they said it would and looking just as they had described.
I’ll call you “Hamlet,” “King,” “Father,” “royal Dane.” Oh, answer me! Don’t make me explode from curiosity. Tell me why your bones, which were blessed and sanctified in burial rites, have burst out of their coffin, and why your tomb, in whose quiet we buried you, has opened up its weighty marble jaws to spit you out again...