After Hamlet's interviews with the ghost, the "antic disposition" which tints his behavior is ironical; his remarks keenly cut down to where our laugh lies, but scarcely let its blood. The mood does not throw open the great valves of the heart as the sun-burst of Humor does. We enjoy seeing with what superior insight he baffles all the spies who cannot play upon a pipe, yet expect to play upon him. This gives to the scene the flavor of comedy. In the churchyard we taste the subacid of cynicism, so that Yorick's skull is quite emptied of its humor, and is only an ill-savored text to a chop-fallen discourse upon mortality.
But Hamlet radiates a gleam of geniality at a moment when you are least expecting it, as events transpire which ought to kill, you would think, the very heart of such a feeling: it is, indeed, expiring,--caught as it falls in the arms of the coming Irony. Let us enter, with Horatio and Marcellus, the scene upon the platform after Hamlet's dread interview with a murdered father. No wonder that his wonted evenness of manner is shaken; and we hear him writing truisms in his tablet, in a flighty style, as, for instance, that a man may smile and be a villain. But let us also make a note of that, as he did: it will interpret to us the tone of his subsequent demeanor which everybody thought was madness. In the mean time we are upon this spectre-haunted platform, seeking with his friends to discover what news the ghost brought. Hamlet trifles with them to put off their curiosity; but the scene soon rises to the solemnity of taking an oath, and one that is extorted by the experience of a vision which comes to so few that mankind has only heard of such things. But just as the human voices are about to pledge themselves to a secrecy which they must feel all their lives, and shudder in feeling, to be reflected upon them from the glare and publicity of purgatorial fires, a voice comes, building this terrific chord of a nether world up to their purpose, that it may unalterably stand. "Swear!" The deep craves it of them; it has joined the company uninvited, but they feel convinced that it is a comrade fated to go with them to their graves. "Swear!" it reiterates: no change of place can remove them from this importunity. The centre of an unatoned murder is beneath every spot to which they shift their feet.