Hamlet Act I, Scene iv Summary

We're back to the battlement with Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus.
While waiting for the ghost, Hamlet and Horatio look through the windows of the palace at Claudius, who is carousing drunkenly. Hamlet is disgusted.
The ghost shows up, and Hamlet is freaked out. He wonders if it's a "spirit of health or goblin damned." Translation: Is this a friendly ghost, or an evil spirit sent from hell?
History Snack: You probably want to know what Elizabethans thought about ghosts. The answer's complicated because there were lots of conflicting ideas floating around. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, there was a whole lot of religious and spiritual confusion in Europe, what with the Protestant Reformation recently going down and England breaking from the Catholic Church under King Henry VIII. One of the things the Protestant Church rejected (in 1563) was the notion that spirits who were stuck in Purgatory, a place where sins were "purged," could come back and ask the living for prayers that would help them get to heaven faster. Basically, Protestants (and England and Denmark were Protestant nations) said no more Purgatory and no more ghosts. Period. Understandably, the Ghost's appearance is a bit confusing for the play's characters and the play's audiences.
The specter beckons Hamlet forward in a horrible and ominous way.
Hamlet's friends get freaked out (understandably) and tell him not to go with the evil-spirit-looking thing. They are afraid it might convince him to do terrible things or, make him go insane. (Some thought that evil spirits could cause the living to go mad.)
Marcellus then utters the famous lines: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."
Hamlet ignores his friends' warnings, and the ghost leads Hamlet away for a private conversation.

Act I, Scene v

Act I, Scene iii