O all you host of heaven!  O earth! what else? 
     And shall I couple hell?  O, fie!  Hold, hold, my heart;
     And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
     But bear me stiffly up.  Remember thee! 
     Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
     In this distracted globe.  Remember thee! 
     Yea, from the table of my memory
     I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
     All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
     That youth and observation copied there;
     And thy commandment all alone shall live
     Within the book and volume of my brain,
     Unmix’d with baser matter:  yes, by heaven! 
     O most pernicious woman! 
     O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! 
     My tables—­meet it is I set it down,
     That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
     At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark:  [Writing
     So, uncle, there you are.  Now to my word;
     It is ‘Adieu, adieu! remember me.’ 
     I have sworn ’t.

The man who speaks thus was, we must remember, already well-nigh overwhelmed with sorrow and disgust when the Ghost appeared to him.  He has now suffered a tremendous shock.  He has learned that his mother was not merely what he supposed but an adulteress, and that his father was murdered by her paramour.  This knowledge too has come to him in such a way as, quite apart from the matter of the communication, might make any human reason totter.  And, finally, a terrible charge has been laid upon him.  Is it strange, then, that he should say what is strange?  Why, there would be nothing to wonder at if his mind collapsed on the spot.

Now it is just this that he himself fears.  In the midst of the first tremendous outburst, he checks himself suddenly with the exclamation ’O, fie!’ (cf. the precisely similar use of this interjection, II. ii. 617).  He must not let himself feel:  he has to live.  He must not let his heart break in pieces (’hold’ means ’hold together’), his muscles turn into those of a trembling old man, his brain dissolve—­as they threaten in an instant to do.  For, if they do, how can he—­remember?  He goes on reiterating this ‘remember’ (the ‘word’ of the Ghost).  He is, literally, afraid that he will forget—­that his mind will lose the message entrusted to it.  Instinctively, then, he feels that, if he is to remember, he must wipe from his memory everything it already contains; and the image of his past life rises before him, of all his joy in thought and observation and the stores they have accumulated in his memory.  All that is done with for ever:  nothing is to remain for him on the ‘table’ but the command, ‘remember me.’  He swears it; ’yes, by heaven!’ That done, suddenly the repressed passion breaks out, and, most characteristically, he thinks first of his mother; then of his uncle, the smooth-spoken scoundrel who has just been smiling