“Shakespeare preserves him for special purposes” –Rosenberg, (12).

Unfortunately, when making cuts to a play directors typically throw out, or parse down, many of Horatio’s lines. Horatio “is as close as the play gets to a ‘normal’ character who sees for us, and in whose innocence we can trust” (12). Horatio’s loyalty to Hamlet never wavers throughout the play. Likewise, Horatio is the first one to witness the ghost, not Hamlet. Horatio justifies Hamlet; he makes Hamlet seem justified, thus keeping this play a true tragedy. After Hamlet’s death at the end of the play, Horatio states, “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” (V.ii.358-360).

In the batch of Horatio’s we analyzed on this website, we have “weak” Horatios, “absent” ones, and “the devoted friend.”  "Absent” and “weak” Horatios may at first sound similar, but there is a difference.

One “weak” Horatio was played by Stephen Dillane in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1991 production of Hamlet. Dillane’s lines were cut down tremendously, but that did not mean that he did not appear in scenes. He talks briefly in the ghost scene, not at all in the gravedigger scene, and then misses one of the most important line in the play in Hamlet’s dying scene. Instead of saying the full set of lines in Act V, scene ii, lines 358 – 360, Horatio only says line 360; “And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” Is Hamlet’s heart not noble in this production? Is he not a sweet prince? At the very least he does not redeem Hamlet in this play. Whether this was intentional or not by Zeffirelli is not clear.

Karl Geary plays an “absent” Horatio in Michael Almereyda’s 2000 Hamlet. In this production, Geary is “absent” and he has a good reason; he has a girlfriend. The one prominent part that Horatio plays is in the early scenes of this production where he tells Hamlet about the encounter with his father’s ghost. After that scene, Horatio is barely a shadow in the background of two more scenes.

One Horatio that is true to his friend Hamlet is Leo Bill who was in Lyndsey Turner’s 2015 production of Hamlet. Bill opens the entire play next to his friend Hamlet and the connection between the two school friends extends throughout the rest of the play. Bill appears frequently to support Hamlet and holds his dying friend in the end of the play reassuring us that Hamlet was a “sweet Prince.”

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