Hamlet and Memory Functions in the Play

Above the river splitting through campus, I stop for a moment, resting my arms upon the bridge’s cold, iron railing. Spring reaches out from skeleton trees in buds of leaves and wildflowers, hovering over a river reflecting whatever light the moon has left to give. With eyes open to the cloudless sky, I notice the rhythmic flicker of the streetlights, reminding me that it is almost midnight. And taking in their light, the sprouting trees, I’m reminded of a lecture I attended for my psychology class last year.

The topic of the lecture is memory. How memory crafts our identity. Our professor steps aside, shutting off the harsh fluorescent lights to give space for a video sprawling across the five hundred person hall. It is a documentary of a man who has lost all recollection of the past as well as the ability to craft new memories. His name is Clive Wearing, a former pianist and conductor. On screen his wife re-enters a room with old sheet music, just as she said she would, and it is as if Clive is seeing her again for the first time in decades. He then forgets the food he’s eating before he has even swallowed. Fiddling with my pencil, I stop taking notes. I’m haunted by Clive’s journal entry. A short phrase sketched a dozen times, “I am alive. I am alive. I am alive.”

In Shakespeare’s tragic play, Hamlet, memory functions as a duality that both highlights the mortality of man while also allowing man to continue on in the memory of the living, while also crafting our specific identities as humans.* In the play, Hamlet is haunted by the memory of his murdered father. And while existentially tormented and bordering on a nihilistic outlook for most of the play, Hamlet and the other slaughtered characters live on in the memory of Horatio after the final scene which ends in a blood bath. Memory also mobilizes the identity of Hamlet’s characters, and influences a course of action for the characters in regards to handling conflict interpersonally and within themselves.

At the beginning of the play, Marcellus, Bernardo and Horatio are standing watch on a castle courtyard. In the late hours of the night, they are shocked to see an airy figment, something nonhuman though hauntingly familiar standing before them. Marcellus is the first to connect the identity of the ghost to that of the king. The two others affirm this, as a few of Horatio’s memories of the king further establish the ghost’s identity. “As thou art to thyself: Such was the very armour he had on when he the ambitious Norway combated; so frowned he once, when, in an angry parle, he smote the sledded Polacks on the ice” (Hamlet 1.1.75) In this scene the visage and characteristics of the late King are reflected in the “mind’s eye” of those who witness him. And because they, through their memory, are able to recall and establish his identity, are motivated differently in terms of their response. Because they know his identity, they are able to respond according to how they see the circumstance appropriate. And so decide to alert Hamlet of his father’s strange reappearance after his death. After alerting the spirit’s son, Hamlet, they are able to receive the information they need from the apparition. Their actions are therefore motivated by their memory, and its ability to mobilize and construct a course of action in their lives.

Similarly, memory haunts the guilty conscious of newly kinged Claudius, who murdered his brother in order to assume the throne and to wed his widowed wife. In order to reveal the murderous actions of his uncle, Hamlet carries out a play with actors who portray the same course of action that Claudius is assumed of in order to observe a reaction that would prove his guilt. After witnessing the play, Claudius retreats alone and falls down in guilt due to his own remembrance of his wicked deed. His memory motivates him to find forgiveness by falling into an act of prayer, as he recalls the horror he partook in. His identity, too, is shifted in this scene. The memory of his actions causes him to view himself as something unclean. He questions whether his own hand could be “washed white as snow” (Hamlet 3.3.2328). The memory of his “sin” is triggered by the plan, which consequently alters his view on himself and motivates him to find forgiveness. He speaks on the past in desperation that his guilt may be forgiven. “My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer can serve my turn? 'Forgive me my foul murder'?” (Hamlet 3.1.2333) Though it be in the past, it is still profoundly affecting his present in terms of his mental wellbeing.

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Also, at the prompting of his late father’s spirit, Hamlet’s course of action is altered by a memory he swears not to forget. “Remember me,” (Hamlet 1.5.829) his father says. Hamlet promises that “thy commandment all alone shall live (Hamlet 1.5.840). This is perhaps the beginning of Hamlet’s descent into madness. He promises not to remember the pleasant things he experienced in youth, the many books he read all “trivial fond records” (Hamlet 1.5.837). And in doing so, the memory of his father’s murder rises to the front of his mind, eternally reopening a wound from the past that is affecting his present, leaving him with eternal grief and vengefulness and depression. In rejecting pleasant memories, his embodiment is left with the unspeakable pain of his father’s murder. This embodiment affects his relationships, as he makes those around him weary and unable to effectively communicate and interact with the increasingly unstable Hamlet. Due to this memory, so too his identity is warped by those who are witnessing this decline.

According to philosopher John Locke’s theory of personal identity, the way we see ourselves is directly connected to memory. From his piece An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke argues that “so far as consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now as it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done”(Piccirillo para 4). It is arguable that our identity is therefore supported by our ability to recall our past selves and our past experiences which influence the way we view ourselves and construct a sense of self. Locke argues that personal identity relies on the memory, which is consistent with the identity of Hamlet’s characters which are both altered and motivated through their respective memories. The humanness of possessing a memory drives Shakespeare’s characters to alter their perceptions of reality, as seen through the darkened mood of Hamlet. Memory glitches the once powerful self esteem of Claudius into something far more wicked. An unchangeable memory haunting him for eternity. The memory of the king’s identity through his apparition, while arguably something of fantasy by today’s standards, establishes kinship bonds between characters and mobilizes the trajectory of the character’s movements and decision making. One of Hamlet’s actors in his play proclaims that “purpose is but the slave to memory,” (Hamlet 3.2.2080) meaning that our memories, though past, are the fuel that drive our actions in the future. Memory is therefore the building block of reality. The cause being memory and the effects being the embodiment of our interpersonal relationships as well as what drives the choices which influence the trajectory of our lives.

Memory also functions as a duality in the play. It is a deeply painful feature of the human experience, a feature which both highlights the inevitable mortality of man but also functions to preserve, and therefore make immortal, those who have passed into the memory of the living. This dichotomy is most prevalent in the scene featuring the memory of Hamlet’s jester he knew growing up as a young boy, the jester’s skull now rotting in Hamlet’s hands twenty seven years later. Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow

of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? your songs?” (Hamlet 5.1.3520). The pain of Yorick’s death is highlighted by Hamlet’s memory of Yorick while he was still living. Had he not a mind that encapsulates the living Yorick, perhaps his death and the knowledge of what will never be, would not sting as profoundly. Hamlet holds the skull in his hands and experiences his mind’s reimagining of the Yorick who is now never to return. His living memory of Yorick is now returned to dust, which for Hamlet emphasizes the ephemeral and insignificance of living. He alludes to Julius Caesar, and how it is possible that “dead and turn'd to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away” (Hamlet 5.1.3541). He is arguing the absurdity that a once powerful man, in death, has no better function than to plug holes against the wind.

Memory exaggerates the ever present threat of death in the play. How the unforgettable understanding of our mortality follows humanity like a shadow in our highest moments and in our most sorrowful moments. And yet, in Shakespeare’s play, memory also serves as a source of immortality for its characters. Though he has past, Hamlet’s father lives on in the minds and mouths of the living. King Hamlet’s essence prevails when his son speaks of him in mourning or in tentious moments between he and his mother. And after the bloodbath at the end of the play that leaves all but Horatio dead, Horatio is able to tell their truth to a world that is still ignorant on the occurrences that have lead to their death. At the end of the play, Horatio promises a dying Hamlet that he will tell the world his truth. And in doing so, they become immortal in the minds of those who carry their memory with them.

The night I stood upon the bridge, I knew summer was coming because I have the memory of leaves bursting from the trees in the recesses of my mind. The warmth and longer days that followed. I knew that I liked these days because of the memories of joy they carry with them. I knew that I was twenty one because I remember the night I turned twenty, nineteen, seventeen, eighteen. I knew myself intimately because of the memories I possess which continue to craft a self that is profoundly unique and unreproducible. At the same time, in that moment, I was able to recognize that time is also running out. As was Hamlet, his body coursing with poison. I remember another phrase from Clive’s journal that read something to the extent of, “Today I am alive.” I knew that night that I would someday die. And while all of humanity is haunted by this looming remembrance of our inevitable return to oblivion, perhaps it is this knowledge that mobilizes our ability to positively utilize whatever time we have left. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, memory reminds us of who we are, who we are no longer, and who we can be in the future. In the play, memory drives extreme action from our working knowledge of extreme circumstance through prolonged consciousness and, finally, memory gives space for the immortality of man to exist within an ultimately ephemeral existence.