More Things in Heaven and Earth

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene 5 (Second Quarto reading; the Folio has "our philosophy")

The line is spoken by Hamlet to Horatio on the battlements of Elsinore, a few minutes after Hamlet has talked with his father's ghost and learned that his uncle is a murderer. It is not a meditation. It is a reply, in the middle of a tense exchange, to a man who has just said that what they have all seen is "wondrous strange", and it is immediately followed by Hamlet swearing his friends to secrecy and warning them that he may shortly behave very oddly on purpose. Taken out of the scene, the line has become a motto for open-mindedness about the supernatural, and it is often quoted at people who doubt ghosts, miracles or the paranormal, with Shakespeare's authority behind it. Put back in the scene, it is a sharper and stranger thing: a prince who has just been given a commission by a spirit from the fire telling the one educated sceptic in the play that his education does not cover this.

What follows explains the line in that order: the scene, the words, the two texts, the man it is said to, and then the oldest version of the thought, which is Plato's. The text used is the Second Quarto reading as printed in the Project Gutenberg edition of the play, with the Folio variant noted where it matters.

The Scene

The Ghost has appeared twice to the sentries before the play begins, and in the first scene Marcellus brings Horatio, a scholar from Wittenberg, to see it, because "Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy, / And will not let belief take hold of him / Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us." Horatio's own first words on the matter are "Tush, tush, 'twill not appear." It appears. His response is the response of a man who trusts evidence: "Before my God, I might not this believe / Without the sensible and true avouch / Of mine own eyes." He does not say it is impossible; he says he would not have believed it on report, and now he has seen it. By the end of the scene, when Marcellus repeats the old belief that at Christmas no spirit dares walk abroad, Horatio has moved a little further still: "So have I heard, and do in part believe it." The play establishes him, in its first ten minutes, as the character whose beliefs are proportioned to his evidence, and who adjusts them.

In the fifth scene Hamlet follows the Ghost alone, hears its account of the murder and its demand for revenge, and is rejoined by Horatio and Marcellus. He will not tell them what he heard. He makes them swear on his sword, three times, never to reveal what they have seen, and the Ghost's voice from under the stage says "Swear" with them. It is here, between the second and third oaths, that Horatio says "O day and night, but this is wondrous strange," and Hamlet answers: "And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. / There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. / But come, / Here, as before, never, so help you mercy, / How strange or odd soe'er I bear myself, / As I perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on". The famous couplet is embedded in a demand. Hamlet is closing down a conversation, not opening one, and the next thing he tells his friends is that he intends to act mad.

The Words

Three words in the line do not mean quite what a modern reader hears. "Philosophy" in 1600 was not a university department but the whole of rational inquiry into the nature of things, including what would later be called natural science; a "natural philosopher" studied the heavens and the elements. When Hamlet speaks of what is "dreamt of" in philosophy, he means the account of the world that learning gives, the catalogue of what exists and how it behaves. Horatio has been to Wittenberg, Luther's university, and the play makes him its scholar: he is the one who knows the omens that preceded Caesar's death and the one the sentries turn to when the Ghost appears: "Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio." His philosophy is the educated European picture of the world, and the Ghost is not in it.

"Dreamt of" is the second word. It does not say that philosophy denies such things; it says that philosophy has not imagined them. The charge is one of narrowness rather than error, and it is gentler and more sweeping at once: the sceptic has not refuted the Ghost, he has simply never had it in his head to consider. And "things" is the third, and the vaguest. Hamlet does not say "spirits" or "ghosts". He says there are more things, of unspecified kind, than the system contains. The line's fame rests partly on that vagueness, since it can be made to cover whatever its quoter has in mind.

Your Philosophy, or Ours

The two earliest reliable texts of the play do not agree on the pronoun. The Second Quarto of 1604–5 reads "your philosophy"; the First Folio of 1623 reads "our philosophy". Modern editions choose, and most choose "your", the Arden among them, but the choice changes the sense. With "your", Hamlet is needling Horatio: your learning, Horatio, the Wittenberg kind, does not reach this far. With "our", he is including himself and everyone else: the human account of the world is too small for what is in it. Editors who defend "your" sometimes read it as the general "your" of Elizabethan speech, as in "your philosopher", meaning the type rather than the person, which would soften the needle without removing it.

A reader does not have to decide. It is enough to notice that the line has always been two lines, and that the famous version, the one quoted against sceptics, is the one that makes it a rebuke to a particular man. The Folio's "our" would make it a confession, and a confession is harder to use as a weapon. Andrew Hui, in an essay on Horatio's philosophy in Renaissance Drama (2013), uses the variant not to settle the text but to show that Hamlet and Horatio hold two different accounts of how suffering is to be understood, and that the pronoun marks the gap between them.

Horatio's Philosophy

What is Horatio's philosophy, that it should have no room for ghosts? The play gives three clues. He is a Wittenberg man, which in 1600 meant Protestant learning, and Protestant learning had abolished Purgatory, which is where this Ghost says it comes from; a ghost asking for prayers and revenge was, to a Lutheran, a theological impossibility or a devil. He is the man Hamlet praises in the third act for being "not passion's slave", the friend who takes fortune's buffets and rewards with equal thanks, which is a Stoic ideal in Stoic words. And at the end, with Hamlet dying, he reaches for the poisoned cup himself and says "I am more an antique Roman than a Dane," meaning that he would follow his friend in death as a Roman Stoic would, until Hamlet stops him: "Absent thee from felicity awhile, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story." Hui's reading, which this piece follows as a reading, is that Horatio is the play's Neostoic, and that his famous last words over the body, "Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest," are a Stoic's acceptance that has made room, at the last, for something Stoicism does not supply.

So the philosophy that has not dreamt of the Ghost is a specific one: Protestant in its theology, Stoic in its temper, and evidential in its method. Horatio is not a fool and not a dogmatist. He is the best kind of sceptic the play can imagine, the one who changes his mind when he sees the thing, and the line is aimed at him precisely because he is the man most likely to hear it.

The Older Layer

The thought has a history before Shakespeare, and the oldest clear statement of it is Plato's. In the Symposium, Diotima tells Socrates that Love is neither god nor mortal but "a great spirit (daimon), and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal." Such spirits, she says, carry messages both ways: "He interprets between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods"; and "God mingles not with man; but through Love all the intercourse, and converse of god with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on." Plato's cosmos has a middle region, populated by beings that are "more things" than either the human or the divine account contains, and whose office is to cross the gap. The editor's guide to Platonic symbolism, The Fairest Bond, places such beings on the plane of Water, "at one time seen, but at another concealed", as the Epinomis says of the demigods; a ghost that walks at midnight and vanishes at cockcrow is a creature of exactly that description, and a reader of the guide will find the Ghost of Elsinore sitting comfortably in its glossary beside the mist and the mirror. That is the guide's reading, offered here as such.

But Plato also supplies Horatio's side. At the start of the Phaedrus, Phaedrus asks Socrates whether he believes the story that the north wind Boreas carried off the maiden Orithyia from the banks of the very river they are walking beside. Socrates answers: "The wise are doubtful, and I should not be singular if, like them, I too doubted." He could, he says, give a rational account, a gust of wind, a fall from the rocks; but he will not spend his time on it: "Now I have no leisure for such enquiries; shall I tell you why? I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous." This is the sceptic's humility rather than the sceptic's denial, and it is nearer to Horatio's "do in part believe it" than to anything Hamlet says. The two Platonic passages together are the whole exchange on the battlements: there are more things than we dream of, and the wise, knowing it, are doubtful and attend to themselves. Plato held both, and so, by the end of the play, does Horatio.

How the Line Travels

The line's afterlife is mostly as a rebuke, and mostly the rebuke runs the way Hamlet's does: against the person who thinks the world is exhausted by what is known. It is quoted in defence of ghosts, of religion, of the paranormal, of any claim that learning has left out. Used that way, it quietly drops everything the scene supplies: that Hamlet has just received instructions from a spirit he will spend the next two acts testing, because he knows, as he says later, that "the spirit that I have seen / May be a devil"; that the line is a means of ending a conversation; that the sceptic it is spoken to is the most reliable witness in the play. Shakespeare gives the line to a man who has reason to want his friends to stop asking questions.

It can be turned the other way, and has been. A recent review in the Times Literary Supplement, defending the philosopher's armchair against the claim that philosophy needs anthropology, ends a paragraph by observing that there may be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in philosophy, "but not that many more, surely". That is Horatio's answer, two acts late, and it is a fair one: a philosophy that has not dreamt of everything may still have dreamt of most of it. The line survives because it can be said from either side of the battlements.

Where It Leaves You

Read in its scene, the line is not a doctrine but a move in a relationship between two kinds of mind: one that has seen something and must act on it, and one that has seen the same thing and must decide what to believe. Hamlet is right that Horatio's philosophy did not contain the Ghost. Horatio is right, over the course of the play, to go on asking what the Ghost is, and his caution is what lets him survive to tell the story. The two Platonic passages suggest that this is not a quarrel to be won. There are more things than we dream of, and the wise are doubtful, and both sentences are true at once.

Three questions remain for the reader. If the line is "our philosophy" rather than "your", does it still work as a rebuke, or does it become something closer to an admission? What, in Horatio's conduct over the five acts, does the Ghost actually change, and what does it leave as it was? And when the line is quoted today against a sceptic, which Horatio is being addressed: the one who said "Tush, tush", or the one who said "do in part believe it"?