Gertrude’s Shoes

Hamlet’s mention of his mother’s shoes in his opening soliloquy is part of a family of references in the play which direct attention to the stage--and specifically the dedicated stage of the London playhouses--as a stable medium for theatrical performance. In Hamlet, what had been considered the limitations of that stage are for the first time reconceived as assets: its flatness, its blank neutrality help shape Shakespeare’s conception of Denmark as a place of transition, of serial occupations and abandonments. The persistence of that stage in comparison to the mutability of all it contains marks a new development in Shakespeare’s understanding of the play as a metaphor for the evanescence of being.