ABSTRACT
Memories, in retention, suppression, erasure, and overlap, are fraught with complexities of scientific, personal, and archetypal dimensions, and in Hamlet and King Lear, Shakespeare ‘fools’ with those issues’ interaction in the tragic domain. Prince Hamlet, already troubled over the insufficiently honoured memory at the court of his father, Denmark’s recently deceased king, experiences a crisis when the revenant of that memory, in the form of his father’s ghost, appears, relates the account of his murder, charges Hamlet to revenge it, and entreats him to ‘Remember me’ (I.5.91). 1 In response, the prince, incredulous over the plea for remembrance, vows that ‘from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records’, including ‘all pressures past / That youth and observation copied there’: the entreaty ‘all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain, / Unmix’d with baser matter’ (I.5.98–101, 102–4). Hamlet does not, cannot hold to this hyperbolic oath.
