, anger, and grief because of the funeral and marriage that "self-slaughter" has occurred to him in passing. The idea that life itself has purpose has no attraction: "O God! God! / How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, / Seem to me all the uses of this world!" (I.ii.132-4). It is equally clear that the marriage, following as it did hard upon the funeral, has so distressed Hamlet that he is willing to talk about it to those outside the family, notably his friend Horatio. When he tries to make a joke of it, noting that "the funeral baked meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables" (I.ii.180-1), he cannot sustain the levity, piteously exclaiming to his dear friend, "My father!--methinks I see my father" (184). Horatio's answer, that he has seen the elder Hamlet's ghost, provides Hamlet with a purpose that his inchoate mind had been seeking.
By the time his father's ghost has confirmed his worst fears, Hamlet nevertheless resents having been obliged by fortune to pursue revenge: "O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!" (
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