“The counterfeit presentment of two brothers”

The portraits seen onstage in Hamlet 3.4 are the prince's didactic tools, objects that are valued as reliable sources for insight into the personalities of the two kings. Hamlet uses the portraits successfully to influence his mother's opinion of her first and second husbands. In being forced to reflect on the men's faces and appealing to principles of physiognomy, she comes to see them, and herself, differently (“Thou turns't my very eyes into my soul” ¹ ). This essay, however, will set aside how Hamlet and Gertrude see and understand the pictures in favor of a discussion of how an audience sees the objects. Directors of the play choose from a variety of staging options, all of which have the potential to make new meanings for the spectators. A director who chooses to look backward toward earlier stage practices in order to inspire the blocking of their contemporary production will doubtless encounter the long-standing debate that has dominated discussion of how to perform this moment of the play: are the portraits miniatures or large-scale images? While it may seem like a triviality, the size of the portraits onstage determines whether or not the audience is able to see the faces that Hamlet shows to Gertrude, and therefore can have a profound impact on how an audience interprets the action. This essay will consider the stage history of the moment in the play where Hamlet asks his mother to “Look here upon this picture” (Hamlet, 3.4.51) with the aim of demonstrating the relative importance (or, indeed, unimportance) of the audience's ability to see the faces of the kings that are depicted in the props.