Close to the beginning of Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and Hamlet are again on the battlements of Elsinore, while Claudius and his court feast below. They are about to see Old Hamlet’s ghost for the second time, but before it appears, Shakespeare includes a brief vignette that illustrates the relationship between Hamlet and the society that has formed his consciousness. As they wait, they hear ‘A flourish of trumpets’ and ‘two pieces of ordnance’. Horatio is nervous and does not recognise these signals, but Hamlet is well aware that these noises mark the new king’s ‘wassail’ (1.4.10). Each time Claudius drinks, he notes: ‘The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out / The triumph of his pledge.’
Everything about this dramatic moment points to Hamlet’s dissociation from the society into which he was born. He is quite literally out in the cold. His description of the wind as biting ‘shrewdly’ (1.4.1) would by the 1590s have connoted cunning and intelligence as well as the simple wickedness that the word signified 100 years before, and it sets up a powerful contrast to the trumpets associated with his uncle, which are ‘braying’ like donkeys. Hamlet and his companions are sober, focused and engaged in business with a spirit; Claudius and his following ‘swagger’, ‘rouse’ and ‘drain’ their wine: the essence of carnality. Most importantly, Hamlet explicitly rejects his heritage:
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