In seeking further to understand what Hamlet feels and why he is reluctant to acknowledge it, chapter 17 of Machiavelli’s Prince offers some important clues. that of an actor”, but also connotes an actor’s ability to play his part with the requisite skill and conviction. Gravedigger: Cannot you tell that? His narrowness of moral vision propagates a culture of suspicion and deceit that he is ill-­equipped to navigate, within which he—along with his luckless family—will shortly find himself consumed. Hamlet needs to hear a coherent, plausible, clearly articulated, and affecting version of events—exactly what the techniques of humanist rhetoric offer to provide. This is because he gets to put one over on someone of a far higher social and educational status than himself, and who has presumed to question his work. The exchange between Hamlet and the Gravedigger is animated by exactly the same cultural dynamics. What does all of this tell us about Hamlet’s age? Following Aristotle’s lead, the early moderns arranged philosophy under two principal headings: first, speculative or contemplative philosophy (that is, theory); second, practical or moral philosophy. Hamlet even excludes the possibility that he holds out the prospect of dying for something in the fashion of a Laertes (“Let come what comes, only I’ll be revenged / Most thoroughly for my father” [4.5.138–39]) or a Feeble (for the sake of his bravery and commitment to King Henry’s cause). In this regard, however, their efforts are overshadowed by those of a courtier who is older and pushier by far, and who becomes convinced that he can give Claudius and Gertrude the intelligence they desire. Although recollection (the two standard Latin terms for which are reminiscentia and recordatio) resembles memory in that it works through the medium of images, it entails the discovery or re-­discovery of an object, made possible through either the ordered arrangement of a data set or some sort of similitude or association between ideas. Accordingly, and just as Machiavelli recommends in his Il Principe, the appearance of virtue is exploited to manipulative ends by ambitious and powerful men like Claudius, Polonius, Laertes, and Hamlet. They also open up an interpretative space that Hamlet himself will shortly, and disastrously, set himself to fill. If we attempt to judge other people by their actions alone, we will be led astray—but “whosoever considereth what he doth, when he does think, opine, reason, hope, feare, &c, and upon what grounds; he shall thereby read and know what are the thoughts, and Passions of all other men, upon the like occasions”. For Burrow, Shakespeare plays on the “context of the speech in Virgil . . Both characters enjoy feeling like the cleverest person in any conversation; both will say anything to ensure that they get to feel like this; in the culminating skirmish of their wits, neither shows more than the most rudimentary notion of how to compute numbers in general, or of how to use numbers to compute time in particular. Whatever else might be true of Hamlet’s poetic and dramatic interests, they are not wholly current. When data thus disposed were in due course called to mind, rhetorical performance “became a kind of calculating play”. Brother gives condescendingly imperative advice to sister in an attempt to assert (to himself as much as anyone else) his worldly authority before heading off on an overseas adventure; sister intuits what is happening, dodges, and fondly but firmly turns the tables; father arrives, and holds forth at ponderous length in attempt to assuage his anxieties of about the conduct of his soon-­to-­be-­departed son; son sees what is happening, dodges, and adapts his father’s language in assuming a quasi-­paternal (and therefore reassuringly mature) posture towards his sister; sister, safe in the knowledge that her brother is about to depart, artfully adapts the treasure-­house-­of-­memory metaphor to promise that she will not forget his advice unless he tells her she can; brother rushes off to catch boat. Claudius seems thrown, and Hamlet continues with reference to angling: “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm” (4.3.27–28). One might reasonably debate whether Shakespeare’s Danes drink to forget or are prone to forgetfulness because they drink, but if Hamlet’s description of their drinking habits is justified, it is no wonder that they have such an uncertain relationship to their pasts. If seeking to rescue Hamlet’s philosophy of humankind from this toxic dualism, one might argue that his remarks to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern issue from beneath his antic disposition; that they are deliberately confused in order to be confusing. I also hope to establish that the De consolatione is crucial to an appreciation of the dramatic and philosophical dynamics of Hamlet as a whole—that Shakespeare engages with its elegant Latin complexities as creatively and as critically as he does with Virgil, Seneca, Ovid, or Marlowe; further, that he engages just as closely with the local detail of its language as he does with its animating doctrines of fortune, pretence, providence, and philosophy. Instead. Although Horatio’s words are theologically unsound, it seems reasonable to cut him some slack: he speaks in the middle of an episode that is as difficult as it is traumatic. The question depends as much on Hamlet’s purpose as on its form, and is made yet more difficult by Shakespeare’s habitual capaciousness of mind. We might, with Boethius and the Stoics, reasonably discuss whether being imprisoned should be understood as a good, bad, or indifferent thing. . Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes? (3.2.336–38). It was an effective means of observing and approaching one’s intended prey at very close quarters before shooting it, generally with a crossbow. Lady Philosophy cites Aristotle’s Physics as the authority for her definition of casus, but although the Physics contains the disquisition on chance and luck that shapes her remarks, her attribution is in error. First, although Hamlet’s response to the Ghost does try to exploit a hierarchy of information storage, moving from tabular to bibliographic metaphors of memory, his claim that his father’s “commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain / Unmixed with baser matter” is predicated of his mistaken notion that this “book and volume”, like the “tables,” can be subject to erasure at his decree. Providence, by contrast, belongs to the eternal order of things. I’ll have thee speak out the rest of this soon” (2.2.515–18). Claudius the regicide knows that the providentially guarded nature of kingship rests on pretence, but he also grasps the place of such fictions within efficient statecraft. If one’s true self is framed by the exercise of honestas and decorum, then its manifestations will be honourable and seemly. The speaker is not suggesting that he inadvertently walks into doorframes. But if those thynges be true whiche are wryten, namely that death is a departure into those regions, which all they inhabite, that are departed out of this life, then do I accoumpte my chaunce farre better, for that, after that I have escaped the handes of you, whiche syt here in place and name of judges, I shall then come to them whiche are the true judges, Minos, Rhadamanthus, Aecus, and Triptolemus, & shall there have the companye and communication of them whych have lived upryghtly in the faythe and feare of god. Formulaic pronouncements—what a later age would call clichés—­enable him to do so with ease. Wentworth’s record of unconstitutional tyranny was such an abomination that he had rendered himself unworthy of due process: “we give law to Hares and Deeres, because they be beasts of Chase; It was never accounted either cruelty or foul play to knock Foxes and Wolves on the head, as they can be found, because these be beasts of prey: The Warrener sets traps for Powlcats and other Vermine, for preservation of the Warren”. But in most iterations, adolescence has a different aspect. The question that I have posed above is misleading. For one thing, he claims to “have been in continual practice” since Laertes departed for France, and is confident in his preparedness (5.2.206–7). Birdlime was an adhesive substance that a fowler would produce from mistletoe berries or by boiling down the bark of holly trees. These pronouncements stand in stark contrast to the attitudes to suicide voiced by Hamlet when he first finds himself alone on the stage. And yet after working his way through the soteriological implications of his predicament, Claudius opts to disregard them. But Hamlet gives no indication of feeling troubled. Hamlet aims to use his adaptation of The Murder of Gonzago as a device with which to surprise Claudius and to force his “malefactions” and “conscience” out into the open. Versions of his conflicted Manichaeism recur throughout the play. “Cry” was a standard collective noun for hunting dogs, and Hamlet implies his belief that in performing the Mousetrap, the Players had joined with him in hounding the guilty man. . Which he stood seiz’d of to the conqueror; Was gaged by our King, which had return’d, Had he been vanquisher; as, by the same cov’nant. . One might just as well conclude that those observing the action of a play, like those observing its observers, are predisposed to “botch the words up fit to their own thoughts” (4.5.10). This visitation / Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose” (3.4.108–111). What it does not do is to make the relationship between “to be, or not to be” and that which follows it any less oblique. Roscius was ­Cicero’s contemporary and was often held up by him as an example of what the would-­be orator should imitate in his manner of delivery. If it were not for what Hamlet says next, we would have no way in which to determine what sort of augury he has in mind, or indeed whether he has any clear picture of augury at all. Laertes, Hamlet insists, is so variously excellent that “to divide him inventorily would dozy th’arithmetic of memory” (5.2.113–14). Furthermore, no “greater destruction of mans life can be founde, than of a wylinesse [malitia], falsely to dissemble ones understanding”.

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