“The Mirror up to Nature”

Hamlet rejects both the ethics of revenge and the Ciceronian theatre of the world. He conjures the metaphysics of his own Pauline conscience in the poetics of soliloquy as justification for standing outside the borders of mimetic convention. Hamlet's metatheatrical description of drama is compared to the commonplace mirror metaphor in Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour. Jonson explicitly tethered his mirror metaphor about the aim of drama to Ciceronian tradition. Hamlet's intentionally opaque and entropic description of drama is here reinterpreted as a response to Jonson's neoclassical set-piece producing a metaphysical revolution in the purpose of playing. Complementing Hamlet's the mirror up to nature metaphor on drama, three further mirror and glass metaphors in the play enhance a Pauline interpretation of Hamlet's “antic disposition” (1.5.180).