Hamlet as Historian

Abstract

This chapter evaluates Hamlet's memory and accomplishments as a historian. It begins with the “rights of memory” that Fortinbras asserts as he seizes power at the end of the play, and suggests that they reveal the expedience with which William Shakespeare's Danes relate to their past(s). The chapter then considers the vulnerability of memory, and the concomitant ease with which people forget. It also looks at how Hamlet might have seen his father in his “mind's eye,” and draws on the traditions of moral philosophy and Aristotelian psychology to explain how, throughout Hamlet, Shakespeare distinguishes memory (and imagination) from “discourse of reason.” Finally, the chapter turns to the most famous mnemonic lines in English literature: Hamlet's response to his father's ghost in his second soliloquy. Much of the dramatic charge carried by these lines depends on the Aristotelian distinction between remembering and recollecting, and on the ambiguous metaphors on which early modern mnemonic discourse depends. Both enable Hamlet to pursue a fantasy of mnemonic erasure in which his father's commandment lives “all alone” within the “book and volume” of his brain.