ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses on a category of hand prop familiar to many Early Modern playgoers both as theatrical spectators and commercial consumers: the miniature portrait. In Early Modern culture, portraits were demonstrably key to dynastic negotiations and ‘diplomatic exchanges’, whether in Holbein’s portrait of Anne of Cleves or Elizabeth I’s portrait, sent to Edward VI in 1549 with the wish that the original were ‘oftener’ with him. The truth Hamlet seeks to convince Gertrude of is her transgression in remarrying: both quartos and the folio text of Hamlet see him do so by contrasting the portraits of Old Hamlet and Claudius. Old Hamlet is deified as Hyperion, Jove, Mars, and Mercury, likened to golden corn and a ‘fair mountain’. Claudius, meanwhile, is a ‘mildewed ear’ and ‘moor’. Hamlet’s final ‘abstract’ of the play is what brings the King to his feet rather than staged action: a miniature can be more potent than its full-sized equivalent.