Hamlet deplores
the histrionics of mourning, the performative engagement in a grief that
Laertes rightfully possesses. His subsequent hyperbole is equally abusive and
painfully intolerant of Laertes' passionate display. Hamlet appears to realize
his dramatic relapse when he apologizes to Horatio for "forgetting
himself." Indeed, Hamlet's problem is not the "forgetting of
himself," a forgetting which allowed him to craft his trenchant eulogy for
Yorick, but rather a constant remembering of himself and of his self-conscious
language that threatens to conflate him and Laertes into an interlarded plot.
Like Yorick's skull, Laertes's hyperbole presents itself as a rhetorical shape that Hamlet characterizes by its "emphasis": "What is he whose griefe/ Beares such an emphesis, whose phrase of sorrow/ Coniures the wandering starres" (TLN 3449-51). Hamlet's prologue in the graveyard and his acceptance of the fine death to which we all return allows him this initial dismissal of Laertes's grief and its excessive melancholia, for it hauntingly evokes his own progress through the initial four acts of the play. Hamlet's recognition that Laertes is a dramatic counter becomes possible for him only in retrospect: "by the image of my Cause, I see/The Portraiture of his" (F1-only line).
Like Yorick's skull, Laertes's hyperbole presents itself as a rhetorical shape that Hamlet characterizes by its "emphasis": "What is he whose griefe/ Beares such an emphesis, whose phrase of sorrow/ Coniures the wandering starres" (TLN 3449-51). Hamlet's prologue in the graveyard and his acceptance of the fine death to which we all return allows him this initial dismissal of Laertes's grief and its excessive melancholia, for it hauntingly evokes his own progress through the initial four acts of the play. Hamlet's recognition that Laertes is a dramatic counter becomes possible for him only in retrospect: "by the image of my Cause, I see/The Portraiture of his" (F1-only line).
If you liked this extract, the whole essay is available online--though you may find it difficult to understand at first, as it is very scholarly in its approach. Worth persisting with, though.
On this subject, if you want to find the whole text of 'Poisoned Ears and Parental Advice in Hamlet', where I got those quotations we considered last lesson, you can also find it online here.
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