Memory and Remembrance in Hamlet

• Hamlet promises to remember, not take revenge

  • The play is full of 'memory' and it cognates
  • From the very beginning, the play pauses to celebrate Old Hamlet
  • From John Kerrigan's Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon
• Ophelia remembering

  • In the nunnery scene, Ophelia recalls a lover whom we have never really known
  • "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown"
  • While she sings ballads in her madness, she remembers Polonius:
  • "His beard white as snow / all flaxen was his pole / he is gone, he is gone"
  • Dialectic-driven - slows the plot unlike Shakespeare's other tragedies and The Spanish Tragedy
  • From John Kerrigan's Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon
• Claudius remembering

  • Claims "the memory" of his brother is "green", but insists on "remembrance of ourselves"
  • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern accept from him "such thanks / as fits a King's remembrance"
  • From John Kerrigan's Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon
• Fortinbras remembering

  • Winds up the tragedy by saying:
  • "I have some rights, of memory in this kingdom / which now to claim my vantage doth invite me"
  • From John Kerrigan's Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon
• Hamlet remembering

  • Even before he sees the ghost, Hamlet remembers his father
  • Hamlet: My father - methinks I see my father
  • Horatio: Where, my Lord?
  • Hamlet: In my mind's eye, Horatio
  • From John Kerrigan's Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon
• Hamlet eludes the audience

  • It is clear that remembrance haunts Hamlet, even to the point of madness, and is the heart of his misery
  • That "heart", as he assures Guildenstern, can never be plucked out. In memory, Hamlet eludes us
  • However his words with Horatio reveal a degree of true suffering. Even when comfort is found in the past, that only makes the present more desolate, "An unweeded garden / That grows to seed
  • From John Kerrigan's Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon
• Psychologist John Bowbly

  • Observes in bereavement, "because of the persistent and insatiable nature of the yearning for the lost figure, pain is inevitable"
  • It is a measure of the prince's anguish that loss produces an exaggerated estimate of the "lost figure"
• Remembering Old Hamlet

  • Old Hamlet becomes "So excellent a king, that was to this / Hyperion to a satyr;... Heaven and Earth / must I remember?"
  • Claudius calls his nephew's dejection "unmanly", accusing him of "obstinate condolement"
  • However he is not two months bereaved of a noble father, buried and replaced in the queen's bed with scandalous dispatch
  • In any case, we know that Hamlet is, healthily enough trying to shake off at least part of the burden of his fathers memory
  • From John Kerrigan's Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon
• Affection to Ophelia

  • Since coming back for his father's funeral, Hamlet is trying to replace a dead love-object with a living one
• Costume

  • Coming back for his father's funeral, Hamlet wears a black cloak. This is a mark of respect for his father and also indicates his desire eventually to detach himself from him
  • Freud points out in 'Trauer and Melancholie' that mourning has a physical task to perform: to detach the survivor's memories and hopes from the dead
  • From John Kerrigan's Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon
• Hamlet and Helena

  • In All's Well that Ends Well, Helena (in a similar play of remembrance) achieves the idea of 'severance' before the action gets under way
  • Despite her Hamlet-like garb of mourning, her first soliloquy (reversing Hamlet's) admits that because of her devotion to Bertram "I think not on my father... I have forgot him"
  • From John Kerrigan's Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon
• Ophelia's rejection of Hamlet

  • One main factor in Hamlet's distress: by returning his letters and refusing him access she throws his love back onto his father, whom he had previously moved to her, and who had never emotionally betrayed him
  • From John Kerrigan's Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon
• Hamlet remembering Old Hamlet

  • Claudius does not let Hamlet go back to school in Wittenberg: this leaves the prince surrounded by places and people who remorselessly remind him of his dead father
  • Key to his remembrance of Old Hamlet is the injunction, "Remember me!" With the command the ghost condemns Hamlet to an endless, fruitless "yearning for the lost figure" (psychologist John Bowbly)
  • In the nunnery and closet scenes we see the affect on his sanity
  • From John Kerrigan's Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon
• Nunnery scene

  • Ophelia says, "My Lord. I have remembrances of yours / That I have longed long to redeliver. / I pray you now receive them" - this confirms Hamlet's suspicion - that he believes a woman's love is brief and unworthy
  • Moreover, Ophelia's gesture, "There, my lord" recalls an earlier situation: Old Hamlet, like Ophelia, had pressed on the prince's remembrances that were too much his already
  • In saying goodbye, Ophelia is forcing Hamlet to remember his father
  • From John Kerrigan's Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon