The Memory of Hamlet
KENT CARTWRIGHT
Buy Now “Revenge [my] foul and most unnatural murder,” the Ghost of Hamlet’s father insists, as he begins to tell his story to young Hamlet. With that, the trajectory of a revenge tragedy becomes the course that the play will follow (although it may, paradoxically, turn into something of an anti-revenge tragedy). But the very last words of the Ghost to Hamlet, after he has exposed the details of his death, are not “revenge me”; they are, rather differently, “Remember me.” And it is to that final injunction that Hamlet immediately answers: “Remember thee! / Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat / In this distracted globe.” To talk, inside the Globe Theater circa 1600, about memory holding a “seat” in the “globe” is to suggest, of course, that Hamlet’s act of memory will become the common business of this theatre-event. And, indeed, like an Elizabethan spectator who jots down the best lines of the play in a writing tablet, Hamlet proclaims that he will retain only the Ghost’s words in “the table of [his] memory.” Ultimately, as we know, Hamlet will exact his bloody revenge, killing King Claudius twice over with poison and sword and becoming partner to the deaths of many others, guilty or innocent. But how will Hamlet have fulfilled that other, less definite and more disturbing injunction: “Remember me”?For Hamlet, to be called to remember is to be called back to life. Before his encounter with the Ghost, Hamlet had lurked in the shadows of Claudius’ big court spectacle, cloaked in black, eyes downcast, visage dejected, drawing himself up only to make acid comments. Wearing “the trappings and the suits of woe,” he is a figure of grief somehow still beyond the expressive power of signs: nothing, he says, “can denote me truly.” Hamlet, as we first meet him, proclaims a deep interior reality that seems fundamentally inaccessible to language; he shows himself detached from life and consumed by death. By contrast, the encounter with the Ghost reawakens him to kinetic and expressive vitality, as his subsequent physical agitations, expansive metaphors, “wild and whirling words,” and hinted “antic disposition” make evident. The Ghost’s return from the dead sets in motion Hamlet’s return from dejection. Indeed, for Hamlet, the efforts to remember the Ghost and to express himself will become deeply and tragically intertwined. This relationship between father and son is unsettling and a little bit spooky. Hamlet recalls his father variously in the course of the play, as if his special mission were not so much to revenge him as to revivify and recreate his image, often in hyperbolic terms. Railing against his mother in her closet, Hamlet will compare his deceased father to the gods—Hyperion, Jove, Mars, Mercury—in contrast to the living Claudius, a “vice of kings,” “a king of shreds and patches.” Indeed, Hamlet’s recollection of his father here will be so intense that it seems literally to call forth and make manifest once more the Ghost, who enters the scene in order to remind Hamlet not to “forget” his “almost blunted purpose.” Gertrude cannot see the Ghost, though it dominates Hamlet’s perceptions. The image of Hamlet the Father also haunts Claudius, who, in his opening lines, declares that, though “the memory [of his brother] be green,” he will repress his “natural” recollections in favor of “remembrance of ourselves.” This almost compulsive need to mention his brother makes clear that what Claudius wishes not to recollect, the brother whom he has murdered, is exactly what persists most vividly in his memory. If, for Hamlet, the remembrance of Hamlet Senior stands for a vague, lost ideal beyond recovery, for Claudius that memory stands for a guilt beyond redemption. Thus, the Ghost—embodying,
as it were, the irrepressible presence of the absent king and father—comes to represent what is psychically imminent but what cannot be acknowledged or spoken. The ghost of memory is the frightful fear, the hideous crime, the unmentionable desire, the indescribable longing that gives form and motion to every thought and deed but that is so outstretched in the imagination that it is beyond any character’s capacity to utter in words, as if nothing can denote Hamlet or Claudius—or us—truly. Just as Hamlet is a play about secrets and spying, it is a play about remembering, and these two aspects intertwine. Hamlet watches the court and broods; Claudius and his deputies Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spy on Hamlet, seeking to “pluck out the heart of [his] mystery,” to learn his stops and sound out his notes as one would a recorder. In this regard, the memory of the Ghost reflects a political dimension of the play, as suggested by Michael Neill, who sees in the figure “all that has been erased by the bland narratives of King Claudius” and his smiling, silencing, authoritarian and repressive regime. Memory constitutes, furthermore, an omnipresent layer of the play’s experience: Polonius would inscribe precepts in the memory of Ophelia, who will later attempt to return remembrances to Hamlet and who will herself then become trapped in the maddening memory-loop of her slain father and faithless lover. At the end, Fortinbras will claim some “rights of memory” in the kingdom of Denmark. The words memory, remember and remembrances occur almost 30 times in the play, buoyed by a constellation of other repeated terms such as forget, record, book and recoveries. Objects wash across the play as virtual memories: portraits of kings, love-letters, bones and skulls: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.” Additional and more metaphor acts of remembering also animate the play, as in mimickings (Ophelia’s mimicking of Hamlet’s mimicking an unrequited lover, for example), in quotations (as in Hamlet’s and then the First Player’s remembering of a theatrical speech on the fall of Priam), or in reports of characters’ words and actions (as in Hamlet’s recollection of his sea-escape). It is especially in Hamlet’s soliloquies that we often seen the complex and animating power of memory. In his very first soliloquy, for example, the through-line of Hamlet’s recollections becomes disrupted by psychic bursts from within: “O God, God”; “nay, not so much not two”; “Heaven and earth, / Must I remember?” The energizing pain, anger and grief of remembering, rising up like a force from within, create the hallmark impression of Hamlet’s conflicting surface and depth, of deceptive exterior and explosive interior life. Hamlet’s acts of remembering thus induce the play’s readers and spectators to see in him the prototype of a new sense of Renaissance interiority, of driven but ineffable psychic life. They likewise suggest, for critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and Richard McCoy, the sense of a lost world of metaphysical certainty and reassurance that had disappeared with the Protestant Reformation. The Protestants denied the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, denied the present possibility of miracles, denied the intervention of saints, denied the veneration of relics, denied the existence of Purgatory, denied the value of intercessory prayer for the dead, denied, indeed, the imminence of the ghosts of our ancestors and the world of spirits. Hamlet’s conflict about the Ghost’s reality and the play’s nostalgia for the “King that’s dead” may thus trace a larger cultural longing for a lost past in which the material world could be crossed with divine grace, a past in which we were not alone. When the past carries so much weight, when it becomes for us so idealized, so enlarged by longing and blurred by time, so absent yet so present to emotion and feeling, then one begins to see how the act of remembering can disable the possibility of a straightforward and unmediated act of revenge. Under those conditions, to define what Hamlet accomplishes in the end is not an easy task. He walks into the duel with a willful blindness that can seem suicidal. Certainly, he rises up to dispatch Claudius, but he does so only after the king has already become metaphorically dead, since Claudius has just witnessed his own inadvertent poisoning of Gertrude, who is so “conjunctive to [his] life and soul” that he could not live without her. Indeed, Hamlet turns avenger only after he recognizes himself as already murdered. In his final moments, he seems to speak almost from beyond the grave: “I am dead, Horatio.” Yet what Hamlet achieves in this scene and in these final moments is his fullest engagement with the life around him. He dies straining for words by which to denote himself, prophesying Denmark’s future, calling out to those witnesses who “look pale and tremble,” demanding that Horatio tell his story. In these moments, Hamlet in his thought and diction resembles nothing so much as the King that’s dead, the ghost of his father. In this eerie play of the uncanny and the half-remembered, Hamlet gives us here perhaps that sense of the preternatural, of the possession and wonder that we associate with tragedy. The play has hinted from the beginning that the past is “prologue,” yet heeding its call can ultimately be as mysterious and animating as it is decentering. Such reflections take us beyond the play as the characters perceive it, of course, for they call upon the peculiar knowledge of events that only the audience, and not Horatio, possesses, so that finally the Ghost of the play, the thing of “woe or wonder,” the poignant memory of struggle, discovery and loss resides only in Hamlet’s true witnesses and successors: us. Kent Cartwright,
Professor of English
University of Maryland
5/21/2007
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