Critics

Kerrigan - Memory and remembrance

The extract highlights the prominence in Hamlet of memory and acts of remembrance of various kinds. This mainly refers to the ghost of Hamlet’s father which is the personification of the past causing Hamlet to feel loss and a duty to commemorate.

Key points and their relevance to remembrance and memory:

  • Old Hamlet represents “the lost and epic age in which political issues were decided by fierce, single combat, an age unlike that in which take power by poison” - Therefore remembrance of a better monarchal time

  • Memories and references to the past divert the storyline of the play, giving it a slower and eddying pace which contrasts to the movement of Shakespeare’s other tragedies

  • Ophelia’s recollective impulses are more selfless contrasting to Claudius - EXAMPLES - “though he admits that his ‘memory’ is ‘green’, Claudius insists on ‘remembrance of ourselves” + Gertrude says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “such thanks | As fits a king’s remembrance” which is his way of getting them to serve him as his remembrance of their kind actions is valuable. Therefore their obedience is a selfish wish for Claudius’ remembrance.

  • Hamlet’s words (“‘A was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again”) ‘advertise a privacy which remains his throughout the play’ which suggests that the audience and characters will never know Hamlet’s true perception of and relationship with his father, the man that he was in the eyes of Hamlet is forever unknown and not fully understood. This highlights Hamlet’s loneliness as it suggests that the understanding of his father consists of only him, especially being an only child, which adds to his mental distress/grief, further conveys the mystery of his character,. - perhaps feels misunderstood + his memory of his father can never be understood which adds a layer of mystery.

  • His memory becomes distorted due to his grief which causes him to exaggerate his virtue and glorify him.

  • Freud points out in ‘Trauer and Melancholie’, mourning has a physical task to perform which is detach the survivor’s memory and hopes from the dead.