what is hamlet's response to the ghosts request?

The Ghost then concludes by echoing the “Mark me” with which it began, and by reinforcing the close connection it has worked to establish between memory and revenge. Without such guidance, the Boethian sage and Christian moralist are just two more of the roles through which he mediates his interactions with himself and with others, be they friends (Horatio) or enemies (Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Claudius, Laertes). What does all of this tell us about Hamlet’s age? After describing his escape from the ship taking him to England through an encounter with pirates, Hamlet’s letter to Horatio promises that of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he has “much to tell” (4.6.26). As Linda Woodbridge has recently observed, one might even amplify Augustine’s notion of divinely ordained killing and comprehend a planned act of vengeance in providential terms. It outlines all it says it can of its purgatorial sufferings and announces that if Hamlet did ever his “dear father love”, then the tale it is about to tell will bind him to “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” (1.5.23–25). As they wink at one another, “Faith, her privates we” (2.2.224–34). The peculiarity here is that Hamlet quotes from a slightly primitive Elizabethan revenge tragedy in order to introduce the prospect of revenge to a play that, on the evidence of its titles and dumb show, has no act of vengeance in it. The readiness is all. Pocock has written powerfully of the Greek tradition in historiography helping to define history writing as “an exercise in political ironies”, of telling “an intelligible story of how men’s actions produce results other than those they intended”. If one only acts under a persona, one need never acknowledge one’s actions as one’s own—much less examine the disposition and desires that underlie them. To venture anything more precise is guesswork or special pleading, and to maintain that he is thirty—perhaps with reference to the age of Richard Burbage when he played him for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, or perhaps by suggesting another nod to the uncouth Danes evinced in Nashe’s Pierce Pennilesse—is unsustainable. Not enough art. The joke is that Hamlet is the one whose critical ideas have expired: Polonius may be pompously verbose, but he at least grasps the sort of thing that one ought to say in order to assert one’s currency as a man of the theatre. It will already be apparent that Shakespeare was more alert to the tensions between these two positions than Cicero himself, and that Cicero’s arguments—however conventionally humanistic they had become—do not emerge from Hamlet in good health. This is why Polonius speaks as he does. He continues by declaring that he will remember his father for as long as memory “holds a seat / In this distracted globe”. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes? Likewise Claudius: after figuring out that neither virtue nor objective truth are anything more than words, he resolves to treat moral orthodoxy not as a constraint but as something to be remade in his own image. Horatio reaches for the optative consolation of the pre-­Reformation funeral liturgy, the In paradisum, but—like the liturgy itself—affects not to remember that angels take care of the souls of the dead, not the dead in their ante-­mortem entirety. All the more striking then that Laertes chooses to foment a rebellion from which Claudius easily dissuades him, to vow vengeance before he knows how and why his father has died, and to connive at Hamlet’s death by playing him false at fencing. Claudius is accordingly on his guard, and resolves to dispatch Hamlet to England—though not, yet, to have him killed there. When composing a speech that needed to be impassioned in order to accomplish its goals, students were taught that they could do no better than to imagine themselves in Hecuba’s position as Troy and her family were destroyed before her. In the sphere of moral philosophy, cunning is more than an agent of consuming decay. The more so as the poisoner soon wins the fickle heart of the widowed Duchess? Persuasive though it may be, the Archbishop’s reasoning proves misguided. On the other hand, he worries about the realities of human nature in its non-­rational manifestations—greed, avarice, pride, the urge to one-­upmanship, and the seemingly natural proclivity to deceive in order to achieve one’s desired ends. Early modern natural philosophers and metaphysicians worked with traditional learning in mind. It furnishes Hamlet with the opportunity to put such anxieties to bed by acquiring externally verifiable proof of the Ghost’s truthfulness, and by acquiring this in virtue of his skills as a forensic huntsman. His audiences will thereby have their everyday assumptions raised to a loftier pitch, and the horizons of their consciousness expanded. In Empsonian terms, we might think of it as a version of pastoral. We will never know whether or not Shakespeare was directly familiar with the Metaphysics, but it is certainly possible. As a woman in thrall to her blood, Hamlet implies, she is like the young men whom Aristotle and Shakespeare’s Hector take to be incapable of moral philosophy, and who are a danger to the common good. Therefore is the Memorie compared to a Picture. Their articulated forms are affecting but nonsensical. Should his exercise in forensic drama fail to provoke the desired response, it would be better to have to hand an explanation with which to save both his own blushes and those of the humanistic theory of drama to which he professes himself attached. In its place, the discursive faculties are controlled by appetite alone. (We find here a clue as to the status of graphic memory aids like commonplace books. Hamlet’s suggestion that the table of his memory is inscribed with “records” thus makes excellent sense. Although the events you narrate may be truthful, if your account of them lacks the ability to make your audience “see” the things, events, persons, or places you are describing as if they were directly before them, they will want for credibility. Now, as he half-­serendipitously grabs the Danish throne, Fortinbras confirms this understanding of how things have, for him, come to pass: “I embrace my fortune” (5.2.393). There is, in brief, no theatrum mundi. most horrible!” (1.5.75–80). In each case, conniving to harm one’s neighbours or to undermine the established order makes the offender equivalent to one who falls into the concealed pit with which he has tried to trap wild animals. a dream of passion” (2.2.546), it entails the actor being able to “force his soul . . . Instead, Shakespeare uses Hamlet’s lack of engagement with the substance of what he says to explore the distance that humanist poetics unwittingly puts between res and verba. The first point to make is that aides-­mémoire like the Ghost’s commandment to “remember me”, or like the material objects found in other sixteenth-­century revenge plays, only aid the memory by stimulating acts of recollection. And yet, while the “tongue giveth a certain grace to every matter and beautifieth the cause”, it could only do so to the extent that “a sweet-­sounding lute” could improve “a mean-­devised ballad”. He has therefore turned to different weapons in seeking to give Hamlet his due. Taking his crudely Manichean dualism to its logical end point, he then concludes that anything spiritually and intellectually impure is simply material. But to style oneself the “scourge and minister of God” after an impulsive stab at what might have been vengeance, and after accidentally killing the wrong man, goes beyond special pleading. In the godless space of life in Shakespeare’s Elsinore, it is a version of divinity at least as compelling as any other. For instance, he on several occasions discusses the “five wits”—incidentally showing the prudent good sense not to specify which five he had in mind. Rosencrantz’s response is typically Boethian. Something of the sort is hinted at in the preceding references to Kyd, Marlowe, Chettle, and the two lost Aeschylus plays, but much literary excavation remains. (3.1.84–88). Take the prisoner’s self-­pitying lament at 1.met.5, to which Hamlet nods in his complaints about “Th’oppressor’s wrong” and 
“the proud man’s contumely”. But given the world in which Hamlet is confined, I also want to suggest that this could not be other than it is. It is not that he has forgotten his father, that his memory of him has changed in character, or that his vindictive ardour has in any sense diminished. In a lucid but brief aside, Adorno notes of Germany in the later 1930s that although most people took Nazi propaganda (such as the endlessly repeated mantra of “Blut und Boden”, or “blood and soil”) to be laughable, they were willing to repeat it anyway. His brain’s “book and volume” is his memory, the contents of which, unlike those of a waxed writing tablet, are presumably meant to be printed rather than handwritten. That I must be their scourge and minister. Yorick’s soft tissue has not yet fully putrefied. Accordingly, he returns to his struggles with Boethian Fortuna—they offer indubitable proof that he is, in fact, at the centre of his world. The dramatic potential of this state of affairs had long since been exploited by Marlowe (who frequently has his characters grasp at numbers in the ineffectual effort to show themselves in control of a situation), and Shakespeare was not slow to turn it to his own ends. Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme. His efforts at evasion and diversion seem to succeed: Laertes’s rebellion turns out to be a squib. In what follows, I want to steer this critical discussion in a new direction. Although the existence and longevity of these metaphoric traditions hardly qualifies as news, they demand our attention for one very pertinent reason: in addition to being used to plot the virtual spaces of the ars memoriae, they were employed to discuss both memory and recollection. Imperceptive of the poet-­playwright’s role in general, unconcerned that he has not taken the trouble to represent the most arresting likeness of Claudius’s crime, and content to adapt instead a roughly comparable play called The Murder of Gonzago. He concludes that these likenesses are not the creations of the deity, but projections of the observer’s imagination. Nonetheless, her humanistic training—committed to the useful learning of the vita activa—did not take in the speculative, and possibly abstruse, matters with which Boethius is here concerned; her translation distorts them accordingly. But in another sense, Shakespeare marks them as delusional. (2.2.337–42). When Ophe­lia has gone mad, it is such Ciceronian beliefs that animate Claudius’s diagnosis: “poor Ophe­lia / Divided from herself and her fair judgment, / Without the which we are pictures, or mere beasts” (4.5.84–86). The pretty balance of Hamlet’s antimetabole (“me with this and this with me”) works to occlude his spite: the “this” in question is Polonius, at whose bleeding corpse Hamlet now gestures. The implications of these views are nicely brought out by another passage whose presence can be felt behind Hamlet’s “what a piece of work is man”. The insignificance of the Polish outpost that the Norwegians plan to attack is a sign that Fortinbras’s ambition is divinely whole unto itself: a contra-­teleological something that is realised by the simple fact of being asserted, and to which a substantial desideratum is incidental. Having reminded the players that they should take care to respect “the modesty of nature”, he continues that, anything so o’erdone is [removed] from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. And as La Primaudaye opines in a Christianized reworking of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, such physical manifestations of wrongdoing were no accident. To Hamlet’s “Didst perceive?” he answers, “Very well, my lord”, adding no more than that “Upon the talk of the poisoning”, he “did very well note of him” (3.2.269–84). He insists that his mother resembles a ruminant (a cow, perhaps) who has given up grazing on the pastures of “this fair mountain” in order to “batten on this moor” (3.4.66–67). The moral is repeated in Proverbs 26:27, and cognate forms of it appear in numerous biblical texts. God must have something in mind, and we should wait patiently until his plans coincide with our desires. Working from the conceit that if death is a sleep, one might expect to be afflicted by dreams, some of them bad, Hamlet contends—in a obscurely evocative formulation—that the fear of what might happen “When we have shuffled off this mortal coil / Must give us pause”, and enables one to put up with the miseries of human existence. First, we have the boilerplate of Gertrude’s attempts to reason Hamlet out of his disaffection, apparently on account of his father’s death, at the start of the play. Hamlet has acted “without consideration, regard, or good grounde”, but has succeeded despite doing so, not in virtue of it; his saviour has in reality been the randomness of human events over which Fortuna presides. were never so truly turned over and over as my poor self in love. And yet that vision cannot penetrate the darkness it apprehends.

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