# Shakespearean Tragedy/Note D

Layout 2
London: Macmillan, pages 409–412
NOTE D.
‘MY TABLES—MEET IT IS I SET IT DOWN.’
This passage has occasioned much difficulty, and to many readers seems even absurd. And it has been suggested that it, with much that immediately follows it, was adopted by Shakespeare, with very little change, from the old play.
It is surely in the highest degree improbable that, at such a critical point, when he had to show the first effect on Hamlet of the disclosures made by the Ghost, Shakespeare would write slackly or be content with anything that did not satisfy his own imagination. But it is not surprising that we should find some difficulty in following his imagination at such a point.
Let us look at the whole speech. The Ghost leaves Hamlet with the words, ‘Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me’; and he breaks out:
The man who speaks thus was, we must remember, already well-nigh overwhelmed with sorrow and disgust when the Ghost appeared to him. He has now suffered a tremendous shock. He has learned that his mother was not merely what he supposed but an adulteress, and that his father was murdered by her paramour. This knowledge too has come to him in such a way as, quite apart from the matter of the communication, might make any human reason totter. And, finally, a terrible charge has been laid upon him. Is it strange, then, that he should say what is strange? Why, there would be nothing to wonder at if his mind collapsed on the spot.
Now it is just this that he himself fears. In the midst of the first tremendous outburst, he checks himself suddenly with the exclamation ‘O, fie!’ (cf. the precisely similar use of this interjection, II. ii. 617). He must not let himself feel: he has to live. He must not let his heart break in pieces (‘hold’ means ‘hold together’), his muscles turn into those of a trembling old man, his brain dissolve—as they threaten in an instant to do. For, if they do, how can he—remember? He goes on reiterating this ‘remember’ (the ‘word’ of the Ghost). He is, literally, afraid that he will forget—that his mind will lose the message entrusted to it. Instinctively, then, he feels that, if he is to remember, he must wipe from his memory everything it already contains; and the image of his past life rises before him, of all his joy in thought and observation and the stores they have accumulated in his memory. All that is done with for ever: nothing is to remain for him on the ‘table’ but the command, ‘remember me.’ He. swears ​it; ‘yes, by heaven!’ That done, suddenly the repressed passion breaks out, and, most characteristically, he thinks first of his mother; then of his uncle, the smooth-spoken scoundrel who has just been smiling on him and calling him ‘son.’ And in bitter desperate irony he snatches his tables from his breast (they are suggested to him by the phrases he has just used, ‘table of my memory,’ ‘book and volume’). After all, he will use them once again; and, perhaps with a wild laugh, he writes with trembling fingers his last observation: ‘One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.’
But that, I believe, is not merely a desperate jest. It springs from that fear of forgetting. A time will come, he feels, when all this appalling experience of the last half-hour will be incredible to him, will seem a mere nightmare, will even, conceivably, quite vanish from his mind. Let him have something in black and white that will bring it back and force him to remember and believe. What is there so unnatural in this, if you substitute a note-book or diary for the ‘tables’?
But why should he write that particular note, and not rather his ‘word,’ ‘Adieu, adieu! remember me’? I should answer, first, that a grotesque jest at such a moment is thoroughly characteristic of Hamlet (see p. 151), and that the jocose ‘So, uncle, there you are!’ shows his state of mind; and, secondly, that loathing of his uncle is vehement in his thought at this moment. Possibly, too, he might remember that ‘tables’ are stealable, and that if the appearance of the Ghost should be reported, a mere observation on the smiling of villains could not betray anything of his communication with the Ghost. What follows shows that the instinct of secrecy is strong in him.
It seems likely, I may add, that Shakespeare here was influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by recollection of a place in Titus Andronicus (IV. i.). In that horrible play Chiron and Demetrius, after outraging Lavinia, cut out her tongue and cut off her hands, in order that she may be unable to reveal the outrage. She reveals it, however, by taking a staff in her mouth, guiding it with her arms, and writing in the ​sand, ‘Stuprum. Chiron. Demetrius.’ Titus soon afterwards says:
Perhaps in the old Hamlet, which may have been a play something like Titus Andronicus, Hamlet at this point did write something of the Ghost’s message in his tables. In any case Shakespeare, whether he wrote Titus Andronicus or only revised an older play on the subject, might well recall this incident, as he frequently reproduces other things in that drama.
Footnotes