Instead, and like everyone in Shakespeare’s Denmark, he is compelled to take part in a cynegetic danse macabre. Faustus changes his request in lines 36-38. Hamlet’s suggestion that the table of his memory is inscribed with “records” thus makes excellent sense. For Claudius, by contrast, we know that valour is a dispensable virtue, emptied out and of significance only in retrospect; victory is its own reward and can be attained by any means. His “to be, or not to be” has been wholly forgotten. In this most allusive of plays, itself inscribed over literary strata of still-­unresolved complexity, Shakespeare invites those invested in the humanist project to think again about the referential dynamics to which they have committed themselves. Whether mediated in mnemonic or historical form, it can only exist through modes of representation that are as subject to partiality as they are to distortion. Hamlet’s suspicion and hatred of his uncle grow with each day as he bears witness to the king’s obnoxious revelry. She is nonplussed, and shows no sign of recognising the likeness of herself in the Player Queen. dared to make comparison [of himself] with Tully: which insolencie made the learned Orator to growe into these termes; why Roscius, art thou proud with Esops Crow, being pranct with the glorie of others feathers, of thy selfe thou canst say nothing, and if the Cobler hath taught thee to say, Ave Caesar, disdain not thy tutor, because thou pratest in a Kings chamber: what sentence thou utterest on the stage, flowes from the censure of our wittes; and what sentence or conceipte of the invention the people applaud for excellent, that comes from the secrets of our knowledge. He is instead wounded by what looks to him like the frostily disingenuous confirmation of her earlier rejections, and a further denial of the bond they had shared. In performing instinctively, his brains are like an actor taking to the stage without a script, and without a comprehension of the significance or scope of the part he must play. This is worlds away from what he permits himself in his first soliloquy, where memory and grief are pushed out of focus as a sort of given. Due in the main to the vitality of the Aristotelian tradition in sixteenth-­ and seventeenth-­century education, the distinction was a staple of early modern writing. These were ordinarily treated as a species of emblem, and were frequently glossed in a prologue or pre-­prologue. Everything suggests that these hopes had been real. That such an approach should not have met with universal acclaim from his first audiences can hardly be counted surprising. Chance occurrences, in the strictest Aristotelian and Boethian sense. Humanist models of history, of poetry, and of philosophy cannot “show . . . To discuss Hamlet as a post-­humanist tragedy is to offer an explanation of the cultural and intellectual dynamics to which it responds, and against which it should be read if we are to offer a critically or historically sensitive account of it. What makes the experience of Hamlet so distinctive is that Erasmus’s ironies are not nearly as dark. Subjectivity is obvious enough: the way in which one remembers something is contingent on where one was, how one felt, and whether one understood what one was experiencing when initially experiencing it. One could not erase the memories that one’s visual prompts were designed to key. It might be objected that I am describing Hamlet as a work of nihilism, in which nothing signifies “but as ’tis valued”. In the attempt to win it as his own, he challenged Old Hamlet to single combat: (For so this side of our known world esteem’d him), Did slay this Fortinbras, who by a seal’d compact, Did forfeit, with his life, all those his lands. Hamlet again intrudes to explain the import of the action. If Polonius can’t remember his own script, how does he imagine that his son will be able to internalise it? The story that Hamlet recounts goes as follows. He is determined to resist the urging of Horatio and Marcellus that he should treat the Ghost with circumspection, and grabs at the first thing he can think of to help. Plot, like character, is divinely authored: what the Roman and Christian traditions call providence. Either way, it can be no accident that a playwright who has so decisively grasped the core of Boethius’s De consolatione, to say nothing of the allegorical relationship between fortuna and seafaring, has chosen to have his philosopher prince treat as providential an unexpected turn of events that matches so closely the textbook definition of chance or fortune. More arresting by far is Hamlet’s implication that human apprehension can be thought of as divine. Rather than meditating on the nature, sanctity, or desirability of being alive, Hamlet is most likely reading—as he was when last stepping onto the stage at 2.2.167–68. His psychological balance restored, he continues about his business with intelligent equanimity. Eventually, perhaps, with despair; but pretence comes first. And yet this circularity of argument fuels the suspicion that Hamlet continues to cherry-­pick arguments to suit his whims, and that his commitment to providence is a façade. In his hands it is a metaphor through which to comprehend the way things are, however disagreeable these might seem to be. Nor are they intended to sound as if they are. And this is the right way which wee are to take for the quenching of our choler, that so wee may bridle our anger, and keepe our selves quiet. For now, what can be said without fear of contradiction is that there has been little agreement as to what Hamlet’s soliloquy is actually about: numerous candidates have been proposed, including suicide, murder, mortality (general), mortality (Hamlet’s), and revenge. According to another tradition that has its fountainhead in Aristotle, human life is animated by three souls: the vegetative, the sensitive, and the intellective. Further, he chooses the memorial inscription through which to record the moment not because it is representative, but because it conforms to that which his discourse of reason (working overtime to hold his self-­image together) will allow. Conversely, Hamlet remains determined not to have to confront or acknowledge the binds into which he and his peers have been cast by the privation of moral order, and he evades them by seeking to adapt the personae bequeathed to him by late sixteenth-­century convention. Within a moment or two, Cressida gives way.) Presumably, these lines were delivered by students moving as energetically as possible around the theatrical space available to them. It also reveals something about the suitability of his imagination for poetic invention, and about the capacity of poetry—specifically, of dramatic poetry—to represent human affairs in a world afflicted with competing visions of the truth. At the same time, Hamlet appears open about playing the hypocrite himself. While on his way to Poland, Hamlet praised his achievements for defying “all that fortune, death, and danger dare” (4.4.52). The feeling of superfluity, like that of platitudinousness, is compounded by his mode of expression. so also hee useth the helpe of Memorie to keepe and retaine in his minde whatsoever hee hath knowen by any of the sense, eyther externall or internall. And, unlike Kyd’s Hieronimo, how little difference it would make if Hamlet were to have come by the evidence that he affects to pursue. His undercooked theorizing not only pays little heed to the place and status of his dozen or sixteen lines, but reveals him to have precious little idea of how drama might be said to function. One way in which to respond to the ambiguities of the Ghost might be to emphasise its status as dramatic artefact. While all of this gels perfectly with Laertes and his eventual downfall, the fact is that these ideas have not the least pertinence for Hamlet the revenger as he appears before us. Second, because Hamlet begins to say something of what he truly feels: he desires sovereignty over his country and his mental life—one way or another, the ability to count himself a king. It was, for example, held up to ridicule by the author or authors of the third and final Parnassus play, produced at St John’s College, Cambridge (the alma mater of Greene and Nashe) in 1601 or 1602; namely, The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, printed in 1606 as The Returne from Pernassus; Or, the Scourge of Simony. Reflecting on his wife’s avowed determination not to remarry after his death, the Player King informs her that. Not content with the idea that he can instantly forget all that he has internalized through his lessons and reading, he now exploits the ambiguity of mnemonic and mnemotechnic metaphors, particularly of the graphic sort, to propose that he will wipe away every image or likeness that he had hitherto experienced, and that had become impressed on his memory: “all forms, all pressures past”. A little earlier, he had warned Ophe­lia that as Hamlet is a prince and thereby bound to a version of reason of state rather than to emotional attachment, he is likely to use her for his sexual gratification before casting her aside. He continues in a similar vein until dismissing them to prepare for their show forty-­five lines later. What is more, Gertrude has become “Th’imperial jointress to this warlike state” (1.2.9), a style and a status that she would not have enjoyed under King Hamlet II. Preceding it was, in the first place, the act of apprehension and, in the second, that of judgement (sometimes labelled composition or division). Before going any further, a summary of the action that takes place in and around the Murder of Gonzago/Mousetrap might be helpful; this passage of the play is so familiar that distortion is hard to avoid. But she cannot now see him. But something more than effrontery or impressive delivery is required to succeed either with the judicious or in the long run. Whether they appreciate it or not, they have abandoned discrimination and discernment for mere impact—for the expedience and indifference to truth that delineate the bullshit artist. As discussed above, Hamlet first addresses the Ghost’s commandment by expressing his piety in the manner of one who has not outgrown his training in Erasmian copiousness. No need to struggle with the memory of your father when you can fetishize his ghost’s instruction to “remember me” instead. Specifically, I want to explore the notion that Hamlet is concerned less with the claims of the past on the present than with exposing the perspectives from which the shifting present apprehends, appropriates, and frequently reshapes that which has gone before it. Compare the text of Q1. Put as simply as possible, these memorial rights do not exist anywhere other than his own head. O bosom black as death! The point here is that although Hamlet’s succession might not have been guaranteed, his mother’s union with Claudius effectively rules it out. Instead, by promising to sweep to his vengeance with “wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love”, he inadvertently reveals that he does not possess a very large share of the unmediated, and “natural”, love with which the Ghost takes him to regard his father’s memory. Nevertheless, in failing to disentangle the metaphorical and conceptual thickets in which Shakespeare has Hamlet become ensnared, it leads us astray. On the most basic level, he alludes to, and shapes to resolve, his earlier frustration that “all occasions inform against me” (4.4.32)—henceforth, he will be ready to do what needs to be done whenever the opportunity arises to do it. In fact, his philosophising is bound to superficiality, to seeming, and to the twin demands of his emotions and self-­image; he relies on the language and assumptions of early modern philosophy, but he is not even a philosopher as the early moderns understood the category, let alone an embodiment of philosophical transcendence. The question is a nice one, all the more so for one who has just chosen not to kill his apparently praying uncle on the stated grounds that it would be too kind a death, and who has just murdered Polonius without the least show of sorrow at taking a life. Jonson, Chapman, and Marston seized upon the same characteristics, including in their collaborative Eastward Ho! The De consolatione attempts to synthesize the vicissitudes of fortune and history within the order of divine providence, and to offer a framework through which to understand both temporal and eternal living. Most notably, scholars have explored the technologies to which Hamlet refers in discussing the “table” of his memory and the “book and volume” of his brain. If Gertrude’s memories were the only ones at issue in these lines, such an explanation would probably suffice. The point is not just one of lexical curiosity. Whatever “discourse of thought” might connote here, it is not the province of the senses. It is grotesquely apt that when Hamlet encounters Laertes straight after holding forth to Horatio, he drops providence as his self-­exculpation of choice: “Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? The civic personae of the De officiis are thereby transformed into hunting camouflage; disguises adopted in order to hide from one’s likely predators or intended prey, and that further serve to prevent one from having to confront one’s likeness as reflected in others. Hamlet has acted “without consideration, regard, or good grounde”, but has succeeded despite doing so, not in virtue of it; his saviour has in reality been the randomness of human events over which Fortuna presides. A passage at the heart of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly provides the perfect vantage point from which to review the relationship between Hamlet and the orthodoxies of humanist tradition. To Hamlet’s “Would not this, sir . . . Might makes right. He purports to describe Denmark’s state of being—what it “is”, or at least what it “is” to him—rather than how it seems to him and might seem different to others. Either the Christian or the Roman view of the matter may be right; both views, likewise, might be wrong. Second, watch Claudius closely for blushing or other physiological signs of guilt. Instead, he sets himself against Boethius, against Cicero, against the conventions of humanism in the philosophical and religious round. He arouses the passionate desire of his stepmother, Phaedra, who determines to seduce him in a form of amatory hunt. Hamlet resumes his attack on his mother’s marriage for the remainder of the closet scene, and never again mentions his father’s mnemonic or spectral likeness. The journey from here to a parody of the notion that human affairs comprise a theatrum mundi is short: [M]en come foorthe disguised one in one arraie, an other in an other, eche plaiyng his parte, till at last the maker of the plaie, or bokebearer causeth theim to avoyde the skaffolde [i.e., leave the stage], and yet sometyme maketh one man come in, two or three tymes, with sundrie partes and . . .
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