Shakespeare, in folds

When they meet in 1.5, the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father offers his son two stories. ‘Lend thy serious hearing | To what I shall unfold’ (1.5.5-6), he says, and then, a moment later, ‘I could a tale unfold whose lightest word | Would harrow up thy soul’ (1.5.15-16). The first story is the account of his murder by his brother Claudius, which he duly gives with all its circumstances and compelling details (1.5.59-80). The second is a description of his sufferings in purgatory, and that he cannot narrate: But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison-house I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part And each particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fearful porpentine – But this eternal blazon must not be To ears of flesh and blood. (1.5.13-22) I could tell you a terrifying story, the Ghost tells his already-terrified son, but I can’t, I’m not allowed. The Ghost himself might be thought of as an unfolded (or at least an unwrapped) thing, having ‘burst [his] cerements’ (1.4.48), cast off his graveclothes, left them lying untidily in a corner of the tomb, in a blasphemous parody of the Gospel accounts of Christ’s Resurrection. But only one of the Ghost’s stories is unfolded; the other remains unspoken and unheard, but not (thanks to the Ghost’s framing of it) unfelt. It remains folded into the play; it could still be unfolded, folded out.