Horatio
Play
Summary
Hamlet's closest friend and fellow student from Wittenberg, Horatio serves as the play's moral compass: a man of stoic equanimity who loves without excess and fears without cowardice, everything Hamlet admires and cannot himself achieve. He is the sole principal character to survive the final catastrophe; Hamlet's dying charge to him — "report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied" — makes Horatio, and by extension the audience, the keeper of the play's meaning.
Notable Quotations
"Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!" *(5.2)*
"I am more an antique Roman than a Dane." *(5.2 — as he prepares to drink the poison)*