Who is Horatio? He’s described as a friend of Hamlet, a fellow student at Wittenberg. He seems to be Danish, since he speaks of the elder Hamlet as “our King” and of Danes as countrymen.

But he’s not from Elsinore: He’s unfamiliar with Danish court customs and with people such as Laertes and Osric, and he says he’s seen the King only once (and presumably recently, since he recalls that the King’s beard, like his ghost’s, was gray).

Marcellus and Barnardo, like Hamlet, seem to regard Horatio as a learned and trustworthy companion, but he’s not a close friend — Hamlet is surprised to see him and finds his absence from the university puzzling. Hamlet calls him a good friend, but Horatio calls himself Hamlet’s “poor servant ever.”

At the end of the play, Horatio promises to tell his friend’s story to the Norwegian Prince and “report [his] cause aright,” restoring Hamlet’s reputation and honoring his memory. University of Alberta political scientist Leon Harold Craig notes that this seems to mean that Horatio plans to reveal that Hamlet’s seemingly wayward behavior had been feigned. But “can Horatio plausibly explain why Hamlet should think it ‘meet / To put an antic disposition on’? Indeed, does Horatio even know himself?”

(Leon Harold Craig, Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet, 2014.)

Sherlock Holmes has the reputation of being relentlessly dour — in “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” Watson even says that “Homes seldom laughed.” To counter this, A.G. Cooper counted up 292 instances of Holmes’ laughter, and Charles E. Lauterbach and Edward S. Lauterbach even compiled this table:

Frequency Table Showing the Number and Kind of Responses Sherlock Holmes Made to Humorous Situations and Comments in His 60 Recorded Adventures

Smile: 103
Laugh: 65
Joke: 58
Chuckle: 31
Humor: 10
Amusement: 9
Cheer: 7
Delight: 7
Twinkle: 7
Miscellaneous: 19
Total: 316

The explanation, they suggest, is that Watson was deaf.

(A.G. Cooper, “Holmesian Humour,” Sherlock Holmes Journal 6:4 [Spring 1964), 109-113; Charles E. Lauterbach and Edward S. Lauterbach, “The Man Who Seldom Laughed,” Baker Street Journal Christmas Annual No. 5 [1960], 265-271.)

As Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1893 story “The Adventure of the Reigate Squire” begins, Sherlock Holmes is recuperating after the unspecified-but-apparently-quite-taxing case of the “Netherlands-Sumatra company,” which left him lying exhausted in the Hotel Dulong in Lyons. Watson writes:

The triumphant issue of his labours could not save him from reaction after so terrible an exertion, and at a time when Europe was ringing with his name, and when his room was literally ankle-deep with congratulatory telegrams, I found him prey to the blackest depression.

Leslie S. Klinger’s New Annotated Sherlock Holmes includes this droll footnote:

Carol P. Woods calculates that to fill the average French hotel room to ‘ankle-deep’ would require 10,741 crumpled telegrams; and she muses that Holmes’s illness was caused not entirely by the exertions put forth in the Netherlands-Sumatra case but also by the telegram-crumpling itself, which would have required slightly over 179 hours of opening, reading, crumpling, and tossing.