ABSTRACT
When Hamlet, giving his famous advice to the players, defines ‘the purpose of playing’ as ‘to hold [...] the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image’, he is merely repeating the ancient and traditional moral justification of fiction in general as a source of ethical examples to be imitated or avoided. But when he adds the last item that it is the purpose of playing to show, he is being startlingly and metaphorically original: ‘and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (3.2.20-24). The present moment of time is personified; it has a past (its age) that is visible in its body, whose shape (form) is being altered by forces (pressure) impinging upon it. The originality seems appropriate for the dramatist who after all perfected a genre of drama new in his time, the history play. Generalized by Hamlet to embrace all drama, this form of art is to show us how the present is both shaped by the past and being shaped by the pressures that will produce the future.
