SOURCE: Kastan, David Scott. “‘His semblable is his mirror’: Hamlet and the Imitation of Revenge.” Shakespeare Studies 19 (1987): 111-24.

[In the following essay, Kastan asserts that Hamlet tries to persuade himself that revenge is a means of restoring the past, but ultimately rejects vengeance, both because it is futile and because it entails replicating the crime that incited it.]

Through the streets of Jerusalem at the present day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his shoulders. He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation.

—Oscar Wilde

What replication should be made by the son of a king?

—Hamlet, IV.ii.11-12

I

Hamlet is not alone in attending to the compelling voice of a ghost; Shakespeare himself apparently remembered the “ghost which cried so miserally [sic] at the Theator, like an oister wife, Hamlet, revenge.”¹Hamlet's source, almost certainly, is the play that Lodge recalls, the Hamlet for which Henslowe records a performance at Newington Butts in June of 1594, and Hamlet, too, shares a name with a prior Hamlet. Both the play and the prince seek their individuality in their complex relationship with the past, relations obscurely inscribed in the name each takes from its forebear.

Hamlet worries about the “wounded name” he will “leave behind” (V.ii.346-47), but it is a name previously left to him, already “wounded,” except perhaps in Hamlet's idealizing imagination. “This is I, / Hamlet the Dane” (V.i.257-58), he claims in his most determined assertion of self, but in naming himself he must echo his earlier act of naming as he stood before the ghost: “I'll call thee Hamlet, / King, father, royal Dane” (I.iv.44-45). He cannot name himself without simultaneously naming his father, and the shared name asserts his inescapable filiation. He is his father's son and namesake, and thus is he “bound to hear” and finally bound “to revenge” (I.v.7, 8), bound to his father and his father's cause.

For Hamlet, however, to accept the filial obligation sounded in his name is to disregard and dismiss all other relations he has established. His filiation becomes a diminution. He would be only the son, sworn to remember and revenge his father.

Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter.

(I.v.99-104)

The complex intertextuality of the “book” of Hamlet's brain is denied as he subordinates himself to the authority of his father. What has been diligently “copied there” would be quickly erased. He hopes “with wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love” to “sweep to his revenge” (I.v.30-32), though “meditation” and “love” would both suggest a less bloody course. Hamlet, however, commits himself to a “commandment” that other commandments, now readily forgotten, would supplant, to a text that more humane texts would censure if not suppress. He commits himself to his father, to being a son, to represent, that is, old Hamlet in both senses of the word—as the child who re-presents the father and as the agent who represents the father's interests—and his representation is confirmed as, for the first time, the ghost addresses him by name immediately following Hamlet's eager acceptance of his charge. “I find thee apt,” the ghost says:

And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed
That roots on Lethe wharf
Wouldst thou not stir in this. Now, Hamlet, hear.

(I.v.32-35)

The ghost does not speak their shared name until he is confident of their shared purpose. He demands the radical identification of son with father that their undifferentiated name suggests.

To be Hamlet, to deserve the name, at least as far as the ghost is concerned, is to be a revenger. The ghost would turn Shakespeare's play into the old play Lodge remembered, echoing the earlier ghost's command, “Hamlet, revenge”; yet what differentiates Hamlet from the Ur-Hamlet, as well as what differentiates Hamlet from old Hamlet, is that Shakespeare's prince can never fully credit the impulse to revenge.²

He is never quite as “apt” a revenger as either he or the ghost would like, puzzling both of them, as well as generations of critics, with his inability to act. Revenge, however, makes action problematic, for, though it would insist upon the singularity of the villainy it would punish, inevitably it duplicates the crime, dissolving all difference that could effectively motivate action in its inescapable imitative nature.³ John Bereblock understood exactly this watching Progne, which was played before the Queen in 1566: “It is wonderful how she longed to seek vengeance for the blood of her sister. She goes about therefore to avenge wrongs with wrongs and injuries with injuries; nor is it at all reverent to add crimes to crimes already committed.”⁴ Revenge is, as Hamlet reluctantly discovers, a desperate mode of imitation, avenging wrongs with wrongs. The revenger is prevented from originating an action. He is allowed only to re-act to—and to re-enact—the original crime; Hamlet's delay may be understood as his resistance to accept his imitative relation either to the ghostly simulacrum of his father who urges him to revenge, or to the smiling villain of an uncle who would be its object.

Only when he can persuade himself that revenge is a mode of restoration rather than reprisal can Hamlet move toward its execution, but always he is reminded of the inescapable relatedness of victim/villain/avenger. Examples, both gross and fine, exhort him to the uncomfortable knowledge of the repetitions and resemblances that revenge effects. Like the defensive literary theorists of the English Renaissance, Hamlet values literature for its mimetic and didactic functions, its abilities to generate moral exempla that will “show virtue her feature, scorn her own image” (III.ii.22-23), and guided by his idealist mimetic principles, he recalls “the rugged Pyrrhus” (II.ii.450), a son who readily avenges his father's death, as an example that might animate his own revenge. Pyrrhus, however, serves only to confirm the disturbing resemblances Hamlet needs to deny.⁵ As the example of Pyrrhus forecasts the future, it represents, of course, Hamlet himself pausing momentarily before he revenges his father's death; as the example recalls the past it represents Claudius killing the true king. Pyrrhus, then, becomes a figure both of the avenging son and of the father's murderer, subverting any moral distinction in the single example which shows at once “virtue her feature” and “scorn her own image.”

Hamlet turns to a classical model hoping to clarify his obligation and confirm his resolve, but instead he discovers in the disturbing alignments of the example of Pyrrhus further inhibition of his ability to act upon his “motive and cue for passion” (II.ii.561). In his faulty recollection of the first line of the remembered speech, he unconsciously reveals his knowledge that Pyrrhus, as object of imitation, cannot stimulate and direct his energy:

The rugged Pyrrhus, like th'Hyrcanian beast—
'Tis not so. It begins with Pyrrhus—
The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms. …

(II.ii.450-52)

Hamlet's misremembered line, of course, “begins with Pyrrhus” exactly as the corrected line does; the error comes in the second half. Hamlet anxiously misreads his text. In projecting Pyrrhus as “th'Hyrcanian beast,” Hamlet betrays his unwanted awareness that revenge is an inhuman and pointless activity. The tigers of Hyrcania were proverbial for their ferocity, and they are apt images not only for the fury of revenge but also for its self-destructive nature. Barnabe Riche's Friar Sebastian laments how “beastly” soldiers are, preferring the far more sensible behavior of actual beasts:

the bruite beast by naturall instinct doe daily eschew the inconvenience that folowe them: and have an eye to that whiche may profite them. Contrariewise, these Souldiers like to Hircan Tigers, revenge themselves on their owne bowelles, some Parricides, some Fratricides, all Homicides.⁶

Pyrrhus is, then, “like th'Hyrcanian beast,” even if Vergil does not himself provide the simile. Pyrrhus is a parricide no less than Paris. He kills Priam as Priam's son killed Pyrrhus' father, and the symmetry and reciprocity mock the moral authority the revenger would claim. In a world where a son can only revenge (rather than prevent) his father's murder, and revenge him only by becoming the murderer of another father whose son will in turn seek his revenge, it is clear that revengers do “revenge themselves on their own bowelles,” accomplishing nothing but a concatenation of hatred and death.

Hamlet, however, has not invented the figure he mistakenly if appropriately applies to Pyrrhus. His language recalls Vergil's, or rather Dido's, identification of Aeneas with the Hyrcanian beast as he prepares to leave Carthage.

No goddess was your mother, false Aeneas,
and Dardanus no author of your race;
the bristling Caucasus was father to you
on his harsh crags; Hyrcanian tigresses
gave you their teats.

(IV.497-501; trans. Mandelbaum)

These are not thoughtless insults spat out in fury, but are carefully calculated to deny the pietas Aeneas claims, and which she—and even he—feels as bitter loss.

Aeneas is identified with the Hyrcanian beast when he rouses himself to fulfill the destiny the gods have chosen for him, not, as one might expect, when he rouses himself to vengeance after witnessing Priam's slaughter. There, confronted with the “hated” Helen, he reveals his own passion for revenge: “it will be a joy to fill my soul with vengeful fire, / to satisfy the ashes of my people” (II.791-92). But his mother, Venus, quickly extinguishes the flames of his vengeance, resigning him to the will of the gods who would have fallen Troy not revenged but refounded at Rome.⁷

My son, what bitterness has kindled thy
fanatic anger? Why this madness? What
of all your care for me. …
.....                                                  you must not fear
the orders of your mother; do not doubt,
but carry out what she commands

(ll. 802-04, 820-22)

Hamlet in seeing Pyrrhus “like th'Hyrcanian beast” thus at once registers the beastliness of revenge and represses an alternative course suggested by the example of Aeneas. To revenge, he fears, is to be a beast; but his need to revenge, determined (even over-determined) by the identification with his father, denies him full consideration of any alternative, so that not to revenge is also to be a beast.

                                                            What is a man
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.

(IV.iv.33-35)

To be or not to be a beast? Perhaps that is the question, but not for Hamlet, whose imitative poetics have denied him the choice.

Hamlet's consideration of “Aeneas' tale of Dido” (II.ii.446) leads him neither to accept nor to reject the ghost's charge. The example of Pyrrhus neither confirms Hamlet's commitments to revenge nor dissuades him from it. Indeed, Pyrrhus is soon passed over for Hecuba's grief. “Say on, come to Hecuba” (II.ii.501), Hamlet urges, eager for a correlative of his own self-pity. He resists any identification with Pyrrhus, even in Pyrrhus's frozen moment facing Priam when he “stood, / And like a neutral to his will and matter, / Did nothing” (II.ii.480-82); but, quickly, faced with the player's skillful imitation of Hecuba's passionate suffering, Hamlet stands self-convicted of failure.

                                        What would he do
Had he the motive and cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing—

(II.ii.560-69)

Oddly, Hamlet wishes to imitate the player rather than Pyrrhus. He envies the player's dramatic technique, his ability to

                    force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit.

(II.ii.553-57)

Hamlet is angry that he, unlike the player, is incapable of acting expressively, rather than angry that, unlike Pyrrhus, he is incapable of acting effectively; the problem he admits is not that he can do nothing but that he can say “nothing.”

It is hardly a charge anyone else would dare bring against Hamlet, who speaks over 1,400 lines, or three hundred more than even the most defiantly vocal of Shakespeare's other characters.⁸ But Hamlet here believes he has at the very least said nothing memorable, nothing, that is, that an actor, in the Senecan revenge play in which the ghost would cast Hamlet, can wrap his tongue around. Admittedly he gives it a try:

I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal. Bloody, bawdy villain!
Remoreseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!

(II.ii.579-81)

Here he struts and bellows with the impassioned theatricality of the stage revenger, but he cannot sustain his belief in the conventional role:

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must like a whore, unpack my heart with words. …

(II.ii.583-86)

No longer is he concerned that he “can say nothing.” In fewer than twenty lines he has reversed himself completely, deciding now that to say anything is to say too much, is to allow speech to substitute for the revenge he has been charged to enact. No longer would he be a player “in a fiction” (II.ii.552), prompted by some stage manager; now he would be an actor in truth “prompted to [his] revenge by heaven and hell.”

Even this resolve, however, fails finally to motivate his action, for again Hamlet's moral imagination generates a disabling symmetry. Hamlet is “the son of a dear father murder'd,” and prompted by heaven alone, he would be God's avenging minister. “Avenge not yourselves,” St. Paul, of course, had warned the Romans, “for it is written, vengeance is mine: I will repaye” (Romans 12:19, Geneva Bible); but in the next chapter Paul writes that the prince “is the minister of God to take vengeance on him that doeth evil” (Romans 13:4). As an agent of God's vengeance Hamlet, then, could act, and his revenge would have the authority and finality of God's judgment; but prompted by “heaven and hell,” revenge cannot sustain the moral differentiation that would make it justice. The copulative does not effect an addition but enforces a substraction. Coupling heaven and hell does not double the authorizing pressure; it cancels the essential difference between moral alternatives necessary to permit his revenge.

Thus it is that Hamlet returns to his fictions. “The play's the thing” (II.ii.605) with which he will search for the singularity his revenge requires. “The Murder of Gonzago” is a simple mimetic plot. It is “the image of a murder done in Vienna” (III.ii.236) which Hamlet, through the addition of “a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines” (II.ii.541), transforms into the image of a murder done in Denmark. Hamlet's play is designed to imitate Claudius' crime in order to “catch the conscience of the king” (II.ii.607), but Hamlet's imitative practice, conflating his moral desire and his psychological need, denies the play the clarity he presumes. He wants to see Claudius and himself as “mighty opposites” (V.ii.62), but the play reveals their disturbing similarity. If Lucianus serves as an image of Claudius, murderer of the king, he serves more openly as an image of Hamlet, “nephew to the king” (III.ii.242). In holding the mirror up to degenerate nature Hamlet unwittingly establishes the symmetry that revenge must deny.

Claudius, of course, does rise, “frighted with false fire” (III.ii.264), but Hamlet and the audience of his play cannot know, unlike the audience of Shakespeare's, if Claudius rises maddened by the moving image of his crime or appalled by the audacity of his nephew. In unnecessarily identifying Lucianus as “nephew to the king,” Hamlet allows his play to imitate both Claudius' guilty secret and his own: his desperate desire to kill the king. The play becomes at least in part, then, a murderous threat which establishes how thoroughly the revenger becomes “soil'd i'th working” (II.i.40), obscuring the differences Hamlet desires between the villain and the agent who would avenge the prior crime.

If, throughout, Hamlet is prevented from enacting his revenge by the discomforting ratios that his literary imitations generate, he is equally prevented from repudiating his revenge by his inability to emancipate himself from his father, to be other than an imitation of what has generated him. Caught in this double bind,⁹ between an inescapable psychological obligation to revenge and unavoidable moral abhorrence of it, between a certainty that he must revenge and a certainty that he cannot, when he finally kills Claudius, appropriately he does so to avenge not his father's murder but his own. “The King—the King's to blame,” Laertes confesses; and Hamlet turns on Claudius in fury: “The point envenom'd too! Then, venom, to thy work” (V.ii.324). Laertes dies, relating his and his father's death, but Hamlet dies with no word of the father he has sworn to “remember.” The act he finally commits is more reflex than revenge.

In his reflexive killing of Claudius, Hamlet acts for himself not for his father, but it is still a reaction rather than an original and originating act. Mortally wounded, he retaliates against his murderer, but even in his death he cannot escape the imitative relation to his father that is figured in their shared name. Like old Hamlet, Hamlet too dies poisoned by Claudius' treacherous hand, and, also like old Hamlet, he dies urgently demanding to be remembered.¹⁰ “Absent thee from felicity awhile,” he begs Horatio, “And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story” (V.ii.349-51). What is different, however, is that old Hamlet demands to be remembered in (violent) action: “Revenge [my] foul and most unnatural murder” (I.v.26); Hamlet demands to be remembered in (violent) language: “Tell my story.” Remembering old Hamlet leads to death; remembering Hamlet leads to drama.

Imitation is effective for Hamlet neither as a mode of action nor as a mode of knowing. “Imitari is nothing,” Holofernes asserts in Love's Labor's Lost: “so doth the hound his master, the ape his keeper, the tired horse his rider” (IV.ii.125-26). The familiar metaphors of imitative theory reveal that Imitari is, as Hamlet discovers, to be a beast, to be less than fully human. However, for “the soul of great article,” Hamlet understands that

his semblable is his mirror and who else would trace him, his umbrage, nothing more.

(V.ii.118-20)

Hamlet's parody here of Osric's affected praise of Laertes is an aggressive appropriation of Osric's imitative courtly discourse, and is itself an attack on the value of imitation. More significantly, however, Hamlet reveals his knowledge that “the soul of great article” will not be forged imitatively. It will be an original; and “who else would trace him,” that is, imitate him, can be no more than his “umbrage,” merely his shadow.

Hamlet, once “the glass of fashion and the mould of form, / Th'observed of all observers” (III.i.156-57), the object of other's anxious imitation, becomes in his commitment to revenge an imitator rather than the imitated. He becomes the “umbrage,” or rather the umbrage of an umbrage, “a shadow's shadow” (II.ii.263), in Rosencrantz' phrase, reduced to tracing patterns rather than providing them. Hamlet, on the other hand, is not content to trace its models. Shakespeare is not “bound” as his hero is to the imitation of revenge. Shakespeare's Hamlet refuses servilely to imitate the revenge play—not least in its hero's refusal to take revenge—and in that refusal it creates the imaginative space for tragedy.¹¹

II

In his commendatory poem to the 1640 edition of Shakespeare's Poems, Leonard Digges enthusiastically if improbably asserts:

Thou shalt find he doth not borrow
One phrase from Greekes, nor Latines imitate,
Nor once from vulgar Languages Translate,
Nor Plagiari-like from others gleane,
Nor begges he from each witty friend a Scene,
To peece his Acts with, all that he doth write,
Is pure his owne. …

(II. 12-18)

Obviously nothing that Shakespeare writes is “pure his owne.” The sedimentation of language and of writing itself would deny the radical originality that Digges claims for Shakespeare, and, of course, scholarly activity, beginning with Langbaine's Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691), has doggedly tracked Shakespeare's reading as it is inscribed in his writing. Even with the Ur-Hamlet unavailable for comparison, Hamlet reveals itself as a text in its etymological sense, as a web of indebtedness to prior texts.

Perhaps predictably in an age that defined itself in the language of recovery and rebirth, Renaissance literary theory gave prominence to imitation in its understanding of literary creativity.¹² Castiglione advises: “take diligent heede to following [Thomas Hoby's translation of imitazioni], without the wiche I judge no man can write well”;¹³ and the thought is often echoed in England. Thomas Wilson, for example, writes: “All men of any understanding seeke to follow someone unto whom they desire to be lyke, or if it may be, to passe him.”¹⁴ Poets are to seek, embrace, and, in Wilson's remarkably unanxious phrase, “if it may be,” surpass the literary model “they desire to be lyke.” The past is a repository of literary authority and cultural value to which imitation grants success. Certainly, as Jonson writes, the poet is “not, to imitate servilely, as Horace saith, and catch at vices, for vertue: but, to draw forth out of the best, and choisest flowers, with the Bee, and turne all into Honey.”¹⁵

If the prominence of imitation in Renaissance literary theory is unsurprising, so too is the resistance to it that surfaces. However much the authority of the model is sought and welcomed, inevitably it generates significant anxieties. Jonson uncomfortably acknowledges his fear that imitation will always leave the writer subordinate to the model: “never no Imitator ever, grew up to his Author” (8, 590); but Jonson recognizes an even more disturbing danger: not that imitation might fail but that it might succeed, for successful imitation threatens the independence and integrity of the writing self. “I have considered,” writes Jonson, “our whole life is like a Play”:

wherein every man forgetfull of himselfe, is in travaile with expression of another. Nay, we so insist in imitating others, as we cannot (when it is necessary) returne to our selves: like Children, that imitate the vices of Stammerers so long, till at last they become such; and make the habit to another nature, as it is never forgotten.

(8, 597)

The imitator runs the risk of being overwhelmed by his model, trapped in and by the excellence he admires. Though Jonson usually emphasizes the transformative aspect of poetic imitation, occasionally the threat is unmistakably voiced. The poet, he says, is

To make choise of one excellent man above the rest, and so to follow him, till he grow a very Hee: or so like him, as the Copie may be mistaken for the Principall.

(8, 638)

Imitation writes the tensions of Renaissance England small. The ambivalence that Jonson betrays is the ambivalence of a culture that socially and politically attempts to contain, if not resolve, the conflicts between the duty of submission and the desire for autonomy.¹⁶ Just as the aggressively self-assertive political voice could not always successfully be silenced, so too the aggressively self-assertive literary voice is heard. In spite of its central position in the Humanist educational and literary program, imitation by some is felt as limitation; thus, Thomas Nashe “will proudly boast,”

that the vaine which I have (be it a median vaine or a madde man) is of my owne begetting, and cals no man father in England but my selfe. …¹⁷

Somewhat like Milton's Satan, Nashe asserts his autogenesis, accepting, or at least acknowledging, no literary patrimony. Nashe's self-assertion is only in part defensively motivated by Harvey's accusation of his borrowings; at least as important as the personal quarrel is a literary environment in which the precepts and practice of imitation have become not an invitation to creativity but an evasion of it:

It is a common practise now a daies amongst a sort of shifting companions, that runne through every arte and thrive by none, to leave the trade of Noverint, whereto they were borne, and busie themselves with the indevors of Art, that could scarcelie latinize their neck-verse if they should have neede; yet English Seneca read by candle light yeeldes manie good sentences, as Bloud is a begger, and so foorth; and, if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning, hee will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speaches.¹⁸

The Ur-Hamlet serves Nashe here as a convenient sign for both the theatrical excess of the conventional revenge play and the “servile imitation” that produces it; nonetheless, Shakespeare, in naming his play Hamlet, pointedly calls attention to its relation to the imitations of “English Seneca” that Nashe derides. Even in an age where plots, characters, and even “handfuls of tragical speaches” were readily borrowed, it seems strange that with the infinite number of available names for a play and an eponymous hero Shakespeare would choose one already claimed, and one so familiar that Nashe can use it for an easy joke about defective literary practice.

If Shakespeare's purpose were to exploit the popularity of the revenge play, any name other than “Hamlet” would better serve his needs. One does not climb aboard a bandwagon by announcing a new contribution as a mere replica of what has already been done. Marlowe's Tamburlaine spawned numerous imitators of the conqueror drama, but not one thought to exploit the popularity of that form by calling a new play Tamburlaine. (The anonymous Tamer Cham comes close, but the example, in fact, confirms my point, as does Marlowe's own sequel, Tamburlaine, Part II.) For Shakespeare, then, to call his play Hamlet is not to follow in the tracks of his precursor but to obliterate those footsteps. It is not a gesture of respect toward a worthy model but a revisionary proclamation ostentatiously announcing its own originality.

Shakespeare, who is called by his first editors as “happie imitator of Nature,” is revealed to be a no less happy imitator of his literary precursors,¹⁹ free of the ambivalence that marks the theory and practice of his contemporaries. Harold Bloom exempts him entirely from any anxiety of influence; what we see in his relations with prior texts, Bloom writes, is “the absolute absorption of the precursor.”²⁰ Certainly Hamlet reveals exactly this full and confident appropriation (and even more literally than Bloom intends, as the text of the Ur-Hamlet no longer exists). Shakespeare borrows, parodies, quotes, echoes—imitates, in its various senses—but always to make something that meaningfully can be said to be “pure his owne.” In shaping a play that interrogates rather than merely enacts the rhythms of revenge, Shakespeare creates something that is more than a revenge play—a play finally that is neither an imitation nor one that is imitatable, something whose semblable, as Hamlet might say, is its mirror.

Hamlet originates in a revision of the revenge tradition, but a revision, unlike Hamlet's own, that demonstrates, indeed advertises, the difficulty but also the possibility of escaping the reduction of belatedness. Hamlet does not repeat the Ur-Hamlet but re-imagines and revises it, performing a humane, if not humanist, act of imitation. Hamlet does not become “a very Hee” in spite of taking the name of its precursor. Like his hero, Shakespeare responds to the words of a ghost demanding to be remembered, but Shakespeare's revisionary act of remembrance recognizes and transcends (what is for Hamlet, anyway, literally) the deadening effects of imitation.²¹

Notes

1. Thomas Lodge, Wits Miserie (1596), in The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge (n.p.: Hunterian Club, 1883), 4, 56.

2. James L. Calderwood has a suggestive account of these relations in his To Be and Not to Be (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), esp. pp. 27-28.

3. See Rene Girard, “To Entrap the Wisest: A Reading of The Merchant of Venice,” in Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Edward W. Said (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), esp. pp. 104-07; and his recent extension of the argument in “Hamlet's Dull Revenge,” Stanford Literary Review 1 (1984), 159-200.

4. Quoted in Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 1587-1642 (1940; rpt. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), p. 81.

5. Clifford Leech speculatively discusses these relations in his “The Hesitation of Pyrrhus,” in The Mortality of Art, ed. D. W. Jefferson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 41-49.

6. The Second Tome of the Travailes and Adventures of Don Simonides (London, 1584), Sig. C. See also 3 Henry VI, I.iv.154-55.

7. Gregory des Jardins, “The Hyrcanian Beast,” Notes and Queries, 228 (1983), 124-25, also notes the transposition of the simile from Aeneas to Pyrrhus, though he focuses his attention on Hamlet's responsibility for “the care of the city.”

8. According to the analysis on p. 31 of William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), Hamlet speaks 1,422 lines. Richard III has the next longest role: 1,124 lines. Iago speaks 1,097; Henry V, 1,025, and no other character more than 820.

9. Anna K. Nardo, in “Hamlet, ‘A Man to Double Business Bound,’” Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983), 181-200, suggestively explores the application of recent psychological theories of the double bind to the play.

10. See James P. Hammersmith, “Hamlet and the Myth of Memory,” ELH 45 (1978), 597-605, though Hammersmith equates the efforts of Hamlet and the ghost each to be kept alive through memory.

11. See Howard Felperin's chapter, “O'erdoing Termagant: Hamlet” in Shakespearean Representation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 44-67.

12. For a masterful account of imitative theories and practice in the Renaissance, see Thomas Greene's The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1982). See also the important studies of Renaissance imitation by Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials of Desire (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1983), esp. pp. 18-53; G. W. Pigman, III, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980), 1-32; and Marion Trousdale, “Recurrence and Renaissance: Rhetorical Imitation in Ascham and Sturm,” English Literary Renaissance, 6 (1976), 156-79.

13. The Book of the Courtier, trans. Thomas Hoby (1561), ed. J. H. Whitfeld (London: Dent, 1974), pp. 52-53.

14. The Three Orations of Demosthenes (London: 1570), Sig. *4.

15. “Discoveries,” in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947), 8, 638-39. Additional citations from this volume will be cited parenthetically in the text.

16. See Richard C. McCoy's discussion of these cultural tensions in his Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1979), esp. pp. 1-68.

17. “Strange News of the Intercepting of Certaine Letters” (1592), in Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1910), 1, 319.

18. Thomas Nashe, preface to Greene's Menaphon (1582), in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (1904; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), 1, 311-12.

19. The distinction between imitatio and mimesis that some modern critics would make to differentiate imitations of literary models from imitations of nature was not regularly observed in the Renaissance. Indeed Scaliger, in Stephen Orgel's paraphrase, observes that “we can best imitate nature by imitating Virgil.” Orgel's essay “The Renaissance Artist as Plagiarist,” ELH 48 (1981), 476-95, is another of the extremely important contributions to our understanding of Renaissance theories and practices of imitation.

20. The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 11.

21. I would like to record my thanks to the friends and colleagues whose comments helped in the preparation of this paper, especially Richard Corum, Margaret Ferguson, Peter Travis, Nancy Vickers, and Marguerite Waller; and thank Donna Hamilton and the seminar of The Shakespeare Association for whom an early version of this essay was prepared.