ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a set of conceptual links between William Shakespeare's Globe and the memory theatre, especially as manifested in that most famous memory theatre of the European Renaissance, Giulio Camillo's. Through his apostrophic exclamations, Hamlet articulates the sense of a vertically organized universe, divided into separate spheres; and, as in Camillo's theatre, they are three in number: heaven, earth, and hell. The fact that Hamlet's head is distracted and signalled within the first few lines of the soliloquy. In the end, then, the differences between Camillo's memory theatre and Hamlet's 'distracted globe' are as important as the similarities. Hamlet's 'distracted globe' is thus the ultimate embodiment of how the same locus can present multiple and conflicting images, not only for different people at the same time, but for the same person at different times, or even the same person at the same time.
