ABSTRACT
In his third soliloquy, provoked by the First Player’s successful mimicry of the visible markers of emotional distress, Hamlet castigates himself, over the course of thirty-five or so lines, for his failure to act on the ghost’s instruction to avenge his father’s death. The speech ranges over a number of ways in which the actor’s performance outdoes Hamlet’s own demonstration of his commitment to his father’s memory and cause: Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul to his own conceit That from her working all the visage wanned, Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? 2.2.510–16 1 When we reach this section of the play in Richard Appignanesi and Emma Vieceli’s adaptation of Hamlet for SelfMadeHero’s Manga Shakespeare, we find the list condensed to one sign:
Is it not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction, could force his soul to tears in his eyes? What would he do, had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have? Yet I, the son of a dear father murdered, prompted to revenge by heaven and hell, must unpack my heart with words!
2007: 72, emphasis in original The statement is a return to one of the play’s central themes – the difference between external “seeming” and internal “being,” to use Hamlet’s terms (Hamlet 1.2.76). In the play, it reasserts Hamlet’s inability or unwillingness to externalize his grief at his father’s death, the revelation of his uncle’s hand in his father’s death, and his mother’s “overhasty marriage” to that same uncle (Appignanesi and Vieceli 2007: 50). In the manga, though, the statement is nonsensical. Readers of Appignanesi and Vieceli’s adaptation have seen Hamlet demonstrate his grief in precisely this way earlier in the book, during his initial confrontation with his mother and Claudius in 1.2, 70with five panels (including two close-up images of Hamlet’s eye) spread over two pages depicting Hamlet’s tears (17–18). 2