ABSTRACT
Hamlet shows his mother portraits of her rst and second husbands and asks her to compare the two (3.1. 56).1 e request seems to be rhetorical, however, because he gives her no chance to speak before he launches into a speech about his own impressions of the two images. For Hamlet, the dierent faces of his father and uncle indicate two contrasting personalities. is chapter will consider what it means for Hamlet to put such credence in these portraits, when he uses them as interpretive tools. How can he learn about a person simply by looking at their face, particularly a painted face, unable to speak and static in one expression forever? How much biography can Hamlet glean from a two-dimensional image? is chapter will begin with the task of situating this scene within the context of Reformation visual culture, demonstrating that in sixteenthand seventeenth-century England it was not uncommon to use portraits as interpretive tools rather than mere decoration. I will then consider what Hamlet learns by looking at portraits, and what he hopes to teach Gertrude by showing them to her. Finally, I will consider how the portraits provide a hermeneutic framework for Hamlet’s understanding of his father that even the father’s ghost fails to provide.
