‘Must I remember?’

Hamlet is a play profoundly preoccupied with objects’ revelatory power: above all, as containers, and as archives of change. The stage objects in Hamlet frequently seem like one thing, but in fact contain or bear another more determinative entity or significance. Early in Act I, costumes establish the precedent: Hamlet himself sets up this distinction in 1.2, forcing Claudius and Gertrude to look beyond the ‘inky cloak’ of apparently ostentatious, sulky mourning to his grief ‘within’. Greg Doran’s 2008 Hamlet made explicit the suggestion that Patrick Stewart’s Claudius misnamed ‘Rosencrantz, and gentle Guildenstern’ when thanking them, as Gertrude tactfully corrected them. Memory training in the Renaissance came, generally speaking, in two forms: through the use of memory places, such as memory theatres, and in reference to the commonplace book tradition, both of which Hamlet draws on in this scene.