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

Dina Ackerman, Ann Blair, Markman Ellis, Joe Farrell, Juliet Fleming, Margreta de Grazia, Joan DeJean, Rachel Doggett, Jim Green, Andrew Honey, Richard Kuhta, Michael Mendle, Barbara Mowat, Cyrus Mulready, Karen Nipps, Dever Powell, Nan Ridehalgh, Don Skemer, Germaine Warkentin, Henry Woudhuysen, Laetitia Yeandle, and Georgianna Ziegler. Peter Blayney, Jessie Ann Owens, and Bill Sherman are everywhere in this piece through their generous sharing of materials and suggestions. No acknowledgment could repay our debt to them. 1 Unless otherwise noted, quotations of Hamlet throughout this essay follow The First Folio of Shakespeare, prep. Charlton Hinman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), a facsimile edition of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), as do quotations from all other plays by Shakespeare. Citations include both Hinman’s through-line numbers and act-scene-line numbers keyed to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Translations of foreign-language quotations are our own. 2 The tragicall historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke by William Shake-speare . . . (London, 1603), sig. D4v; and Margreta de Grazia, “Soliloquies and Wages in the Age of Emergent Consciousness,” Textual Practice 9 (1995): 67–92, esp. 73–74. 3 See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990); and Lina Bolzoni, La Stanza della Memoria: Modelli Letterari e Iconografici nell’Eta della Stampa (Turin: Einaudi, 1995). Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England