Horatio is Hamlet’s best friend and schoolmate from Wittenberg University. He is Hamlet’s most trusted and loyal friend, and actually remains that way throughout the duration of the play, amidst all the chaos. He acts as a moral guide and a voice of reason for Hamlet, by using evidence and logic to draw conclusions. His trustworthiness and equanimity is established as early as the first scene in the play; he reasonably denies the existence of the ghost, until he sees it with his own eyes. At that point, he becomes justifiably scared and cautious of the events to come. Hamlet admires Horatio’s level-headedness, though has a completely different attitude towards life. Horatio is one of the few characters that survives the conclusion of the play – which can be seen as Shakespeare’s subtle endorsement of Horatio’s worldview – and so lives to tell the story of Hamlet and the Danish court.
