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Shakespeare Quarterly 55.4 (2004) 379-419



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Hamlet's Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England

Books play a prominent role in Hamlet. In 2.2, the prince enters "reading on a Booke," according to a stage direction in the First Folio (TLN 1203 [2.2.167 s.d.]); and in 3.1, Polonius instructs Ophelia to "Reade on this booke" (TLN 1695 [3.1.43]).1 In the former scene, Gertrude comments on Hamlet's entrance, saying "looke where sadly the poore wretch / Comes reading" (TLN 1204-5 [2.2.168]). In the first quarto it is Claudius who says "see where hee comes poring vppon a booke," and here, as Margreta de Grazia notes, Hamlet is "reading a book at a particularly critical point: just before he delivers the most famous speech in the language, 'To be, or not to be.'"2 But perhaps the most important book in the play, both figuratively and literally, is that of memory.3 After seeing the ghost of his father, Hamlet says:

        Remember thee?
I, thou poore Ghost, while memory holds a seate [End Page 379]
In this distracted Globe: Remember thee?
Yea, from the Table of my Memory,
Ile wipe away all triuiall fond Records,
All sawes of Bookes, all formes, all presures past,
That youth and obseruation coppied there;
And thy Commandment all alone shall liue
Within the Booke and Volume of my Braine,
Vnmixt with baser matter. . . .
(TLN 780-89 [1.5.95-104])

Hamlet imagines his memory as an inscribed "Table" that can be wiped clean. This virtual table seems, however, to require the supplement of actual tables: "My Tables, my Tables; meet it is I set it downe, / That one may smile, and smile and be a Villaine" (TLN 792-93 [1.5.107-8]).

Stage directions in several other Renaissance plays show that Hamlet is not the only character to use tables onstage: "Draw[s] out his Table-booke" (Loues Labour's Lost); "Balurdo drawes out his writing tables, and writes" (Antonios Reuenge); "He drewe furth his writing tables" (The Cuck-Queanes and Cuckolds Errants); "Writes in his tables" (The Sparagvs Garden); "Pulls out a Table Book" (Pandora); "takes a Memorandum in his Table Book" (The Fair Example).4 Tables are also alluded to within the dialogue of the playtexts: "Draw your tables, and write what wise I speake" (Iames, slaine at Flodden); "Boy my Tables? . . . Your Tables are ready Sir" (Everie Woman in her Humor); "the author defies [his critics], and their writing-tables" (Euery Man Ovt of His Hvmovr); "Write you that in your table booke" (Apollo Shroving); "I will put all dow[n]e in my Table-book, and con it by the way" (The City Wit); "out with your Table-books" (The Guardian); "I'l note that down in my Table-book" (The Citizen Turn'd Gentleman).5

What exactly are these "tables," "writing-tables," or "Table-books"? If we accept that Hamlet supplements the metaphorical tables of memory with a stage-prop notebook, then what kind of book might an actor playing Hamlet on the [End Page 380] Renaissance stage have employed? The book that Hamlet refers to would need to have three material features: first, it must be small enough to be portable; second, it must be easily held so that it can be used while standing; and third, it must be erasable. To write with ink, the actor would need to hold a notebook, a pen, and an inkhorn at the same time. How would the actor playing Hamlet use two hands to hold the three pieces of equipment necessary to "set . . . downe" in ink that "one may smile, and smile and be a Villaine"?6 Even if the actor attached an inkhorn to his belt, he would still find it very awkward—and messy—to write while standing. While scribes and scholars did sometimes carry inkhorns, a prince (or, more to the point, an actor) would be...

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