Hamlet’s Book

Abstract This chapter turns to a play written in the wake of Shakespeare’s anthologizing, and published in 1603 by the same stationer as many of the anthologies: Hamlet. The play’s prehistory is marked by its associations with commonplacing, from Seneca’s sententiae to the ‘manie good sentences’ Thomas Nashe associated with an earlier version of the play. This chapter shows that sententia also had a longer history within tragic theory, tracing back to Aristotle’s Poetics, where (in Latin translations) it denotes the thinking contained within drama. Shakespeare’s play is preoccupied with how to stage thinking. Yet it maintains a pronounced ambivalence towards the sententiae that were its standard form, an ambivalence that registers not just Shakespeare’s reflections on his own anthologizing, but the filiations his play negotiates with the tragic tradition. The chapter reads Hamlet’s avoidance of sententiousness in his soliloquies, and finds Shakespeare experimenting with a new representation of thinking onstage.