The first observation a Serresian critic might make about Almereyda’s Hamlet is that the viewing experience most of us have of the film is not, in fact, cinematic. Most readers of this essay will have watched the film—if they have at all—on VHS or DVD, forms that begin to simulate something like a print-based experience that allows for non-linear reading, replay, and even (in the case of DVD) delivers the text in chapters. This point may seem a quibble. In fact, it is an important instance of the polychronic needs we bring to any representational form (and not incidentally, an important element of Almereyda’s mise-en-scène). As a medium, film exists largely as an experience in memory. For all the phenomenological richness and collective social experience of the cinema, we tend to view films only once in this way, only to return to this experience in memory: in later conversation, commentary (as in this essay), or classroom analysis. Unredacted, uncited, unrehearsed films do not have a robust existence. For those with access to video and DVD, the loss of the social and aesthetic impact associated with cinema may balanced by the more quotable and rehearsable experience supported by video replay.

To pursue the polychrony of film and video further, however, we need a fuller account of the earlier memory arts that these media inherit and renovate. For a film like Hamlet, this means looking back not only to some of its film predecessors (for a sketch of the form and uses of film in Shakespearean adaptation), but also to Shakespeare’s text and the memory arts it invokes. Recent work on Shakespeare and film has tended to leave the text behind in order to move beyond the limitations of the fidelity model of adaptation (how faithful is the film to the play being the only question the text seems to answer). This reasonable impulse effectively obscures the ways older practices of memory persist in and shape our uses of the newer forms. The same impulse makes it harder for us to see how Shakespeare's own plays allegorize their relation to media that were both new and old at the time of their earliest performance and publication. Almereyda adapts an allegory of earlier memory technologies worked out in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As an experiment in polychronic reading, then, this essay begins with those early technologies, sketching the multimedia practices of early modern memory as illustrated in John Willis’s 1621 manual, The Art of Memory, and as evoked (much more anxiously) in Shakespeare’s play.

Memory was understood in early modern Europe as a cognitive and social discipline that marshals past knowledge and experience for present uses. In this model, recollection satisfies present needs by means of—rather than in spite of—technologies of representation that "sift," "sort," and otherwise manipulate the matter of the past. This view, essentially technophilic, emphasizes the different kinds of cognitive leverage different forms of representation and remembering environments provide. Early modern memory arts draw on theatrical environments and practices, writing and printing, painting and emblem books, religious observance, and so on. John Willis relies on all of these media when he sets out to popularize the classical memory arts. Willis translates his own earlier treatise in Latin to English, so as to expand its potential audience: anyone aspiring to the status of civil gentleman but lacking, perhaps, the classical education that might sustain civil subjectivity. The arts Willis describes are accessible in part because they depend on familiar technologies of representation and storage. These include an anachronistic mix of classical and early modern technologies: the tablets (Hamlet’s "tables") in which ideas may be cognitively inscribed; pamphlets; books ("tables" again, but also books for collective reading like missals); emblems; the mental house or theater in which ideas can be placed until future need, often as moving and audible scenes (Willis 1621: 13)."Idea" is Willis’s technical term for the visual metaphors in which we commit matter (events, information) to memory. Willis describes several orders of memory ideas, including scenes of human figures in motion—a Smith working, a "duell fought between two combatants"—and important sayings inscribed on "tables" and hung on the wall (Willis 1621: 12-15).

For Willis, writing and mise-en-scène are not just metaphors for cognitive activities but practical constraints on such activity. The mental memory theater Willis describes has precise dimensions and optical limits. For example, how we store ideas depends on where our mind’s eye is positioned as we face our mental theater. Imagine your mental house or theater "wide open to our view," he advises, with a stage "one yard high above the level of the ground whereon we stand" (Willis 1621: 3). "Such a fashioned Repositorie are we to prefix before the eyes of our mind, as often as we intend to commit things to memory, supposing ourselves to be right against the midst therof, and in the distance of two yards there from" (Willis 1621: 8).

Figure 1. Design for a mental memory theater (Willis 1621: 6)

Willis’s memory arts depend on modes of visual perception that combine theatrical spectation with reading. He is specific about the material conditions of mise-en-page, or layout, as well as architecture, in ways that may seem extraordinary to modern readers. For example, he takes pains to explain the proper shape of letters, line spacing, marginal citation conventions, and capitalization involved in mental writing—as well as the materials involved. Your table should be plain, sturdily framed (of broad oak), and the right size for what you write on it. Most importantly, your letters should "be all of such bignesse as that they may plainly be read by him that standeth on this side of the Repositorie; like unto the writings which we see in Churches." Thus, when remembering important sayings—sententiae—it is best to inscribe them on the tables of your brain using large initials, that can be clearly seen by your mind’s eye as they hang on the wall:

A single word and quotation, must be written in a tablet one foote and an halfe broad, and a foote high; and their first letter must be a great Romane capitall letter of extraordinary bignesse above the rest, and the transcendencies of the small letters also, if there be any must be drawne much higher or lower than is usuall in common writing. For by this meanes they are the more easily attracted by the visuall facultie, and transferred to the memory. (Willis 1621: 33-35)

The imperative to keep ideas at the right size positions the memorial subject simultaneously as a reader and spectator-participant, as the allusion to Church writings suggests. Here the differences between Willis’s plain-style memory theater and the more elaborate, multi-roomed memory houses of his classical sources show clearly. Willis’s remembering subject takes the position of a fixed spectator: never turning to view his other rooms (coded by color) but apparently substituting each one into the same spatial configuration in front of him, as needed. The optical constraints of this fixed spectatorial position are particularly evident in the case of remembered objects (in general, Willis emphasizes memory for idea/things—res—over memory for text—verba). Objects that are too big to fit on the mental stage or too little to be seen need to be metaphorically reduced or enhanced. To remember a pearl, for example, you’d have to mentally pile a bushel of pearls on your stage (Willis 1621: 16). To remember something enormous or sublime, like a city or mountain—"whose Idea in the full bigness, cannot be contained in a place of the Repositorie"—you’d have to paint it in small on the wall in your theater (Willis 1621: 17-18). Such formal techniques for manipulating remembered things help to optimize their retrieval. Retrieval typically means, for Willis, recombining the matter in memory to suit the needs of a given occasion, not playing it back sequentially. Prodigious artificial memories were distinguished by the degree to which they could recombine and reverse the matter in memory. Familiar examples include the monks who could recite any Psalm backwards, or run through the sequence starting anywhere, or redact random verses as you call out their numbers (Carruthers 1990: 82).

The point to be taken here is the profound shaping force that early modern technologies of representation—architecture, theatrical performance, written texts—were understood to have on cognitive processes. Like other Renaissance arts, memory arts were distinguished from the "natural" memory of an embodied mind shaped by outside forces, both physical and social. With practice, a civil gentleman might use such arts to discipline and improve his natural faculties (Willis 1621: A4). These arts protected against both inordinate environmental pressures and the organic failures of memory intrinsic to humoral cognition—vulnerable to environmental impressions from the outside and unruly humors within. The immediacy and force of humoral affections were understood to be such that forgetting past impressions might be as difficult as remembering them. The ability to filter and forget impressions—as well as to train the memory to sort significant matter—was a requirement for successful remembering as critical as retention (Sullivan 1999).

The interplay of impressions in this material psychology seems especially fraught in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The question of whether internal disciplines actually work—and the ways in which technical supplements support or fail them—turns out to be a critical problem in the play. The problem is most acute, I would suggest, precisely at a moment in which the polychronic nature of one dominant technology—writing on tables—shows most clearly. That is, when Hamlet formally accepts the Ghost’s charge, "remember me:"

…Remember thee?

Yea, from the table of my memory

I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,

All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past

That youth and observation copied there,

And thy commandment all alone shall live

Within the book and volume of my brain,

Unmix’d with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!

O most pernicious woman. (1.5.97-105)

Much critical attention has been paid to these lines. They serve here briefly to emphasize three points. First, the "pressures past" recorded in Hamlet’s memory are simultaneously bodily and immediate (fond, youth) and deliberate (observation). Second, immediacy is here an obstacle to true memory rather than—as for Nora—its privilege. Hamlet needs to forget the combined impressions of his natural and artificial memory—which he cannot quite succeed in doing, as the pun on "baser matter" makes clear. Matter implies, of course, both the rhetorical matter—"trivial fond records"—of early modern education, and the physical matter of the affections and humors, their frailties conflated with mater. The spontaneous break of memory in line 1.5.104 which recalls Hamlet’s mother to mind suggests it may be as difficult to wipe away artful impressions (the Latin of a classical education or of Roman Catholic observance) as natural ones. Indeed, the pun suggests it is impossible to distinguish the two.

The third point to be taken here returns us to question of the historicity of memory technologies like writing on tables. Scholars have tended to gloss the figure as either a reference to the ancient technology (and memory metaphor) of tablets or a concrete object (like ivory writing tablets) that Hamlet carries. Significantly, as Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier remind us, the word "table" in the early modern period denotes a range of book technologies, from archaic to cutting edge. Recent discoveries by Stallybrass, Chartier and several collaborators suggests a third referent, a new form of portable notebook with treated, eraseable leaves. They invite us, accordingly, to read this passage as an exploration of the strengths and limitations of different kinds of writing-on-tables in the period. Ancient wax tablets were reuseable but somewhat challenging to erase, and they never entirely lost impressions—a fact that Shane Butler reminds us made them a formidable source of forensic evidence for scholars like Cicero (Butler 2002: 66-67). In the context of Hamlet’s pun on matter, it is tempting to associate this form of storage with the weaknesses of a humoral memory: not easily wiped of impressions in a way that permits reordered priorities of recall. In response, Hamlet reaches for the latest technology to redress the failures of an earlier one. He looks to a portable repository, invitingly separable from the matter of an embodied mind and more easily wiped. If, as Stallybrass and his coauthors urge, we resist the temptation to collapse "table," "book," "volume," and writing into a single kind of technology, Hamlet seems to be groping through a variety of storage forms here, seeking the one that best serves the functions of sorting and reordering the matter of the past. Judging by the force of spontaneous recollections that follow—his mother’s affections, sententiae about smiling villains—the attempt is at best a partial success.

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