ABSTRACT
In Hamlet William Shakespeare transforms a revenge tragedy into a play of cathartic remembering. He stages the working through of the immemorial until it yields peace. This transfiguring of melancholy – or what is called ‘impossible memory’ – into epiphanic mourning is powerfully expressed in Hamlet’s final acceptance of the reality of mortality. So much so that one has good reason to suspect that if the Ghost were to return in the last act, he would be given short shrift by his son. Indeed, were this to happen, the mature and illusion-less Prince would, logically, neither hear nor see the spectre. Why? Because his mourning would have been activated. It is Hamlet’s final passage from melancholy to mourning that not only enables him to face death but to preserve life. And if not his own life then at least that of others after him.
