• 1 Tanya Pollard, ‘What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?’, Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 5, no 4, Winter 2012, p (...)
• 2 E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1978 [1972 (...)
• 3 All quotations are taken from Hamlet: Prince of Denmark, New Cambridge Shakespeare, 3^rd ed., eds. H (...)

1‘What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?’, Tania Pollard asks in her provocative article on the Queen of Troy in early modern English tragedy. Requalifying Shakespeare’s long under-estimated Greek sources, she uses the tragic potential of Hecuba as a bereaved mother who seeks revenge to show that in the Renaissance ‘Hecuba’s suffering was also perceived as a potent threat to unjust male rulers’,¹ thereby offering a female mirror for Hamlet’s action, adding yet another portrait to the play’s mythological gallery. Pollard seems to follow Ernst Gombrich’s methodology discussed by Yves Peyré who explains that Gombrich’s ‘principle of intersection’ is ‘a method to decipher early modern mythological symbolic images through the relationships between their subject, their style and their genre’.² She selects several mythical components of the avenging Trojan figure to construct a coherent metatheatrical reading of Hecuba’s portrait in Hamlet. Thus, to interrogate Hamlet’s puzzled question to the Player, ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?’ (2.2.511‒12),³ invites both to challenge male tragic characterisation in Hamlet by using a powerful female figure as a dramatic tool to think about grief and revenge, and to lure the audience into watching the play’s many mythological portraits in relation to each other, rather than as set emblematic representations.

• 4 As early as 1914, Gilbert Murray argued that Orestes could be a potential double for Hamlet. Gilber (...)

2The focus of this article is on act 3 scene 4, which presents the two mythological (male) portraits Hamlet shows to Gertrude; we will show that the scene necessarily resonates within a larger system of allegorical portraits within the play, and within the more global system of references to the Trojan epic. This pivotal scene opposes Hamlet’s idealised characterization of his father and his condemnation of his regicide uncle, while declaring himself inadequate: ‘no more like my father than I to Hercules’ (1.2.152–3). Yet a broader pattern of interpreting regal mythological portraits in a theatrical dynamic appears when this scene initiates a retrospective reading for the audience and harks back to the Player’s portrait of Hecuba, the Trojan Queen (in 2.2). First, the reference to the tragedy of the Trojan war in this earlier scene had set the mythological context of revenge, and second, the closet scene activates the imaginary presence of a Euripidean Orestes, a potential matricide, punisher of Clytemnestra — the epitome of the unfaithful wife for the audience.⁴ What’s Clytemnestra to Gertrude and Hamlet? Classical mythology brings power and tension to our understanding of Hamlet’s deadly intra-familial violence because it taps into a vast classical epic matrix and reconfigures these elements to create its own digested humanist antiquity. We will first define the code of the early modern allegorical princely portrait and see how Hamlet uses it to question Gertrude’s attitude as a grieving spouse in the closet scene. Then we will analyse how by holding up several mythological mirrors to his mother, Hamlet uses the humanist portrait as an unexpected laboratory for compassion, while briefly suggesting a matricidal impulse for the learned audience.

• 5 See Erwin and Dora Panofsky, ‘The Iconography of the Galerie François I^er at Fontainebleau’, Gazett (...)
• 6 Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, https://www.pinacotecanazionalesiena.it/portfolio/ritratto-di-elisabet (...)

3Portraits of rulers are far from mimetic in the early modern period; instead, they follow the precepts of allegory and testify to a deep knowledge of classical culture for artists, patrons, as well as their spectators. Based on his study of French royal iconography, Panofsky defines ‘the rules of “allusive correlations”’ and explains how the system of comparison functions for the audience as ‘they permit both partial and multiple comparisons’.5 English royal iconography relies on such allegorical representations to celebrate the Kingdom of England as a powerful empire. The ‘Sieve Portrait’ of Elizabeth I, by Quentin Metsys the Younger (1583), offers an interesting case-in-point: the Queen is seen as both Tuccia (the Roman virgin who successfully cleared her honour by carrying water from the Tiber to Vesta’s temple in a sieve) and a victorious Aeneas thanks to the decorative pillar behind her, on the left.6

• 7 See for instance Frances Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (Harmondsworth (...)

5Hamlet’s spoken description of the portraits of Old Hamlet and of Claudius, along with their use on the early modern stage as stage properties, is thus topical and inscribes act 3 scene 4 in the tradition of allegorical portraits of rulers. Early modern audiences would have been familiar with these types of representation through official portraits, but also dramatised royal entries, and civic pageants.7

• 8 Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven-London: Y (...)

7Hamlet’s portrait of his father uses mythology to conjure up a glorious world of stability in which, as in a political pageant, his father is the rightful king, making the prince the rightful heir. He borrows from classical and humanistic mythology to celebrate order and the iconography he uses suggests his father’s military power. By using the pro-contra structure, an operative trope in Renaissance culture to describe the agôn, Hamlet unveils in his myth-making scene the oppositions he feels and he illustrates what he perceives as a universal break in the cosmos, due to Gertrude’s choice to back up Claudius, causing the end of a peaceful age. Leonard Barkan insists on this natural function of pagan mythology which is to ‘place the individual in a context of universal harmony’.⁸ Yet there is an inherent tension in the use of such classical material to evaluate Hamlet’s own current situation, as Lisa Hopkins notes:

• 10 Lisa Hopkins, Greeks and Trojans on the Early Modern Stage, p. 12.
• 11 The proliferation of artistic categories is one of the running metatheatrical jokes in Hamlet: ‘tra (...)
• 12 See Sarah Hatchuel’s article in this volume.

8Hopkins rightly stresses that the first lesson of humanist learning is that later generations could never equal earlier ones, as ‘humanity progressively degenerated and moved inexorably further away from its original Golden Age’,¹⁰ a nostalgia for a lost past, which was already voiced by Horatio’s use of the Roman motif in 1.1. Hopkins shows that some early modern humanist visions of historical changes reveal present anxieties and that using echoes of Greece, Troy, and Rome creates a sense of doom and decay, summoning the tempus edax topos. This is especially meaningful in the context of revenge tragedy. This nostalgia for an idealised past, I am suggesting, is furthered by the use of the two mythological portraits in 3.4 which function as hermeneutic tools for the audience: just as the allegorical portrait is a mute icon which belongs to a system of shared cultural references, perceived and understood by some members of the audience thanks to their knowledge of mythography and emblems, these portraits help to comment on what is seen on stage using the classical frame. Hamlet uses the rhetorical device of hypotyposis to portray his visual experiences through words so as to make them perceptible to the viewers’ eyes. The mythological portraits then become dramatic ciphers to describe the murderer and his brother and it works on several levels in the plot: they have a foreshadowing and a cohesive function (linking several distinct moments within the play); they signal to the spectator a hermeneutic pattern (inducing one to follow the Herculean reference throughout the script for instance); and they amplify the repercussion of the scene by playing on the visual memory of the spectator. Finally, the closet scene dramatises artistic self-consciousness with its insistent use of framing devices:¹¹ the curtains at the back of stage (Polonius mentions them in 2.2.161), the portraits (in most modern productions), and even the onstage audience (Polonius — briefly — and Gertrude). Nowadays directors have suggested several options for staging these portraits: full-length portraits, miniature portraits, photographs, mimes, always playing on conscious intermediality.¹²

• 13 On the Herculean imagery in Hamlet, see Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Sh (...)
• 14 Hercules is used to praise French princes from King Henri II as the Hercules Gallicus (in 1549) to (...)

9By the time Shakespeare’s Hamlet was performed, the mere reference to Hercules immediately brought up the European cultural image of the brave and competent prince in the English audience’s mind,¹³ as Andrea Alciati’s well-known emblem exemplifies, to illustrate a government with eloquence superior to strength (‘Eloquentia fortitudine praestantior’)¹⁴. Yet Hamlet’s excessive idealisation of his father deconstructs this topical mythological celebration. Instead it leads to his own devaluation as he perceives himself as a diminished and altered copy of a lost original. When Hamlet criticises Claudius, he also implicitly refers to Hercules as the emblematic model for the perfect prince:

• 15 On the Nemean Lion, see Peyré, La Voix des Mythes, pp. 219–20; on Laertes, another of Hamlet’s doub (...)

11Peyré concludes that Hamlet’s rhetoric turns himself into a victim, as Renaissance mythological treatises define the Nemean lion as a metaphor for fury, anger, pride and cruelty. Thus Hamlet debases himself as he praises his father, thereby immediately undermining the audience’s confidence in his valour as a potential ruler.¹⁵

• 16 See the Cambridge edition, ed. Philip Edwards, note to l.133.

12Hamlet’s revenge thus seems doomed from the beginning of the tragedy, reduced to a dry metatheatrical joke (2.2.358) as the emblem of the Globe theatre is supposed to have been Hercules carrying the celestial globe on his shoulders,¹⁶ and the prince seems to dissociate himself constantly from a heroic Herculean model. As the audience witnesses a breaking of the family bonds, Hamlet’s world is torn between two opposites: ‘what a piece of work is a man!’ (2.2.286), he is a god ‘in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!’ (2.2.288–9) and a piece of clay: ‘this quintessence of dust’ (2.2.290). In a way, Hamlet, just like Pyrrhus in 2.2, revenging his father Achilles, perfectly encapsulates the Renaissance itself, aware of past greatness but also aware that he himself is inadequate and unworthy in comparison.

• 17 Olivier Theatre, National Theatre, 2010 (2:01:35), recorded through National Theatre Live on 9th De (...)

13In the closet scene the two mythological portraits act as stage properties to epitomise and further play out Hamlet’s self-criticism and his undue glorification of a long dead ‘noble father [that he seeks] in the dust’ (Gertrude, 1.2.71). Contrasting the portrait of Old Hamlet, ‘the majesty of buried Denmark’ (Horatio, 1.1.48), an object of nostalgic idealisation, with Claudius’ present portrait, an object of disgust is yet another means of visualising the broken succession line in the royal family (even if Denmark is an elective monarchy). In Hamlet, as directed by Nicholas Hytner¹⁷ in 2010, Rory Kinnear (Hamlet) presents Clare Higgins (Gertrude) with a miniature portrait (a photograph) he takes from his own wallet, on the sofa, before violently taking down Claudius’ full-scale portrait from the backstage wall and throwing it down on the floor, front stage. In this production, as in the script, there is a sense that references to the pagan gods, inherited from classical times, are associated with a glorious past and connote a time when there was respect of the sacred bonds: a staged mythological reference immediately decoded by Hytner’s audience, as well as Shakespeare’s. This sense of an ending of a period of mythological grandeur is also present in the antiquated mode of indicating the time in the play-within-the-play, in one of Shakespeare’s explicitly classical moments:

• 18 Colin Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 70‒1

14Colin Burrow makes clear that when Shakespeare is framing what he calls these ‘classical moments’, ‘it does not mean that he had a “humanistic” awareness of historical anachronism’ but ‘that he had a pragmatic sense of the emotional and the theatrical power that he could generate by creating the effect of distinct temporal and stylistic layers within his own works’.¹⁸ Here the beautified Antiquity, a time of love and mutual respect, is clearly in tension with the negative modernity.

• 19 For further analysis of Jupiter tonans, see Peyré, La Voix des Mythes, p. 207.

15Building on the well-established mythological rhetoric of reigning monarchs, drawing from emblematic celebrations, Claudius, from the start of his reign, tries to pass himself off as Jupiter Tonans (‘Thundering Jove’), one of the epithets celebrating Jove:¹⁹

• 20 See also Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Cambridge Shakespeare (2019), p. 171 (footnote). The OED states (...)

16In Hamlet’s eyes, this explicit analogy, meant to underscore that Claudius is entitled to reign, is not valid since ‘this realm dismantled was, / Of Jove himself’ (3.2.256‒7): Claudius is no Jupiter, only a ‘pajock’ (3.2.258), whatever that means.²⁰

• 21 Robert Kilburn Root, Classical Mythology in Shakespeare, 1903, p. 85, cited by Peyré, La Voix des m (...)

18Old Hamlet was the solar king, as Hyperion is the Greek sun god ‒ sometimes named Helios or Apollo ‒, a powerful soldier like Mars, and as swift as Mercury, the Roman messenger of the gods: mixing Latin and Greek names only insists on the antiquity of the pagan gods evoked. The reference to Mercury may provide another link with the Trojan War cycle in Hamlet’s characterisation of his father. Hamlet sees him full of an airy grace: ‘New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill’. This phrase, according to Robert Kilburn Root, is the intertextual trace of a rewriting of the Virgilian evocation of ‘the herald Mercury’ landing on Mount Atlas before he gets to Aeneas to tell him to leave Dido in book 4 of The Aeneid:²¹

• 23 About Hamlet’s uniting of Mars and Mercury, see R. M. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Resp (...)

20What is more, in the emblems celebrating the Renaissance Prince, Mars and Mercury are often associated, ‘Tam Marti, quam Mercurio’ (As Mars, As Mercury).²³ It is the union of the qualities of rash power attributed to Mars and the grace and intellect attributed to Mercury which transform the warlike impetuosity of the soldier and the intellectual qualities into a happy discordia concors which marries thought and wise action: ‘a combination and a form indeed / Where every god did seem to set his seal’ (3.4.61–2). The hendiadys indicates it is a happy fusion of disparate, or even conflicting, emblematic qualities when Ophelia could only lament Hamlet’s lack of harmony: combining a portrait uniting ‘the courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword’ (Ophelia, 1.3.145) is uneasy to achieve in the harsh realities of Hamlet’s life.

• 24 https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/dual.php?type1=1&id1=FSAa081&type2=2&id2=sm429_h4r (acces (...)
• 25 The only occurrence of ‘satyr’ in the Shakespearian corpus.
• 26 https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/dual.php?type1=1&id1=FALa105&type2=2&id2=sm23b_p2v (acces (...)
• 27 https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/dual.php?type1=1&id1=FALb066&type2=2&id2=sm33_f7v (access (...)

23Indeed, several Renaissance emblems document allegorical associations of the pagan gods with man’s qualities: Jacques Grévin in Les emblemes du signeur Iehan Sambucus. Traduits de Latin en François (1567) offers an interesting illustration of such humanist readings of ‘Partes hominis’.²⁴ Hamlet regrets that these qualities have disappeared since his father’s death. Even as he offers an idealised vision of his father’s upper body (his eyes, his forehead, his bright curls), he makes a sordid depiction of his uncle, reduced to his lower parts, ‘a satyr’ (1.2.140).²⁵ The periphrasis ‘Hyperion’s curls’ in 3.4 is anticipated by Hamlet’s earlier soliloquy, which already pits Hyperion as a solar King against a satyr, that is to say a half-human, half-animal companion of Bacchus. The satyr, routinely associated with Pan and cowardice in Andrea Alciati ‘In subitum terrorem’ (sudden terror) in Livret des emblemes (Paris, 1536),²⁶ is also associated with Lechery, in a personification of one of the seven Deadly Sins, in his later Emblemes (1549) (‘Luxure’).²⁷ This classical opposition thus encapsulates Hamlet’s own reflexion on the complex nature of man, half-beastly and half-divine. There is no transition from the angel to the beast ‘stewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty.’ (3.4.93‒4).

• 29 Hamlet, Arden 3, p. 16.
• 30 I thank Nathalie Rivère de Carles for her suggestion to read this passage as an incoherent mytholog (...)

25As Mars and Vulcan are the only deities mentioned, the humanist dimension of the play is toned down. ‘An eye like Mars’ in this version reads ‘Mars himself’. Vulcan, the blacksmith of the Roman gods, is usually thought to be sooty — Hamlet complains that “[his] imaginations are as foul/As Vulcan’s stithy” (3.2.73‒4). In their introduction, Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor note that this version is ‘fast, plot-driven and far less ruminative than the other texts’²⁹ and I believe that this is illustrated by the treatment of the mythological portraits. Further, in Q1, mythological coherence is not privileged: the oppositional reference to Mars and Vulcan implicitly conjures up Venus’ presence; both gods, Venus’ lovers and her husband, are subdued by Venus’ powerful presence, turning Old Hamlet’s eulogy into Gertrude’s condemnation and Hamlet’s father and Claudius are associated rather than opposed.³⁰

• 31 See Dieter Mehl, The Elizabethan Dumb Show: the History of a Dramatic Convention (London: Methuen, (...)
• 32 On metadramatic functions of the dumb shows, see Yves Peyré, ‘“Excellent dumb discourse”: le symbol (...)
• 33 On modes of dramatic insertions, see Georges Forestier, Le Théâtre dans le théâtre sur la scène fra (...)

26In the scene as given in Q2 and F, Hamlet’s onstage ekphrasis of the portraits opposes him to his uncle, and links him with his father, establishing his pride of and his love for him; conversely, this depiction is made to Gertrude as an onstage spectator: as she listens to her son, she becomes a living portrait, a form of tableau vivant. Her countenance has now to be deciphered: is she another Hecuba, the portrait of a grieving mother, or another Clytemnestra, the guilty wife? While in 3.4 mythological portraits seemingly focus on the two kings, the recipient of the portraits, Gertrude, is also modified by their presentations. Portraits, be they metaphorical or stage properties, like dumb shows, offer dramatic moments at the interplay between text and spectacle. The analogy with the Elizabethan dumb show³¹ proves particularly useful in this scene, as it is also used earlier in the play: in the early modern period it was used as an allegorical moving picture outside the acts and scenes (and could function as a chorus)³² or as a pantomime intimately woven into the dramatic structure, as in The Mousetrap. The closet scene stages Gertrude as an almost completely mute spectator of her son’s ekphrastic soliloquies and his portraits, and thus her spectatorial activity calls in turn for our spectatorial interpretation in a mise en abyme reminiscent of Hamlet’s comments on Hecuba’s grief in 2.2.³³

• 34 https://www.theatre-contemporain.net/video/Hamlet-a-l-imperatif-Ep-1-Un-point-c-est-tout; Olivier P (...)

27‘[…] till I’ll set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you’ (3.4.19‒20), the son accusingly tells his mother, wishing to cause her compassion. Yet the audience is left with Gertrude’s momentary silence as to whether she will help him or not, in a strong plot-twist before she finally promises to help him (3.4.198–200) — in Q1 there is no such suspense as she promises to assist him. This ‘glass’ (3.4.19), I argue, is double: it is Hamlet’s father’s and uncle’s portraits and Gertrude tells Hamlet that he turns ‘her very eyes into [her] soul’, where she sees such ‘black and grieved spots / As will leave there their tinct’ (3.4.87–9). The closet scene is one of the play’s cruxes as it stages the tense relationship between mother and son, a scene which has become a topos of Freudian criticism, happily mocked in Olivier Py’s reinterpretation entitled Hamlet à l’impératif (2021).³⁴ Yet, when considered from a mythological perspective, the scene connects with another classical model of bereaved spouse: Hecuba in the Player scene.

• 35 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 13.399‒575.
• 36 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 20.

29Hecuba’s story, notably in its Ovidian version,³⁵ constitutes a set piece to explore female grief in the early modern rhetorical classroom.³⁶ The icon of the bereaved mother and spouse, she witnesses the horrific and sacrilegious murder of her husband at the Gods’ altars and was used to help early modern students’ emotional identification:

• 38 Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University (...)
• 39 Robert S. Miola, ‘Aeneas and Hamlet’, Classical and Modern Literature 8 (1988): pp. 281–6, p. 284. (...)

30Thus Hecuba comes to embody a poetic strategy of empathy. Yet, this has two consequences in Hamlet. First, it may minimise Hecuba’s impact on the play, relegating her to the role of a cliché, a minor and silent character.³⁸ Second, when Hamlet finally compares the effect of Hecuba’s sorrow on the actor (that is to say on himself as he is playing a role at court), he indirectly indicts his mother, Gertrude, who does not know how to mourn. Indeed, as Robert Miola had already noted, ‘Hecuba is an affront to Gertrude’s own failure to mourn properly in Hamlet’s eyes’.³⁹

• 40 The editor to the Cambridge edition makes clear that to him ‘this passage unmistakably indicates th (...)

36This is much less intriguing than in the Q2 and F versions of the play. What did Gertrude know? When did she know it? These are questions that remain open in these versions, even if the ghost meekly tries to defend her: ‘[He] won to his shameful lust / The will of my most seeming virtuous queen’ (1.5.45–6).⁴⁰

• 41 Schleiner, ‘Latinized Greek Drama’, p. 37.
• 42 Schleiner, ‘Latinized Greek Drama’, p. 30.

37What other theatrical precedent could prepare the audience for such a scene? Louise Schleiner makes a particularly enlightening case that the closet scene in Hamlet is prompted by some lines in Euripides’ Orestes (ll. 287–91).⁴¹ Schleiner studied the influence of Latinised Greek drama in Shakespeare’s plays — as in early modern England, indirect circulation of Greek material was more frequent via Latin translations — and she argues that ‘at least some passages of Euripides’ Orestes and Aeschylus’ Oresteia (in the latter namely the graveyard and matricide scenes of the Libation Bearers) by some means influenced Hamlet’.⁴² Orestes declares that

• 44 About these plays see ‘The lost plays database’, see Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle, Agammemnon (1 (...)
• 45 David McInnis, Shakespeare and Lost Plays. Reimagining Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Ca (...)

38Schleiner speculated that Euripides’ Orestes may well have been known to Shakespeare via the Admiral’s Men’s staging in 1599 of what she argues are two lost companion plays: Agammemnon and Orestes’s Furies,⁴⁴ a theory recently resisted by David McInnis arguing for a lack of historical records.⁴⁵ Yet, according to Schleiner, one of the sources for the play may derive from a double-column volume printed in Paris and whose circulation is attested in England. This edition of Aeschylus presents a Greek text by Adrien Turnèbe and a Latin translation by Jean de Saint-Ravy (of Montpellier), providing a common Latinised source for the two-play Oresteia (Agamemnon and Eumenides).

• 46 The War of the Theatre (also known as the ‘Poetomachia’) refers to a competition between theatre co (...)

39Shakespeare, as he constructed the player’s antiquated revenge-tragedy speeches on Pyrrhus and Hecuba that so fascinate Hamlet, was perhaps alluding to earlier revenge tragedies and perhaps also parodying the Admiral’s Men bombastic lead tragedian, Edward Alleyn, who would, Schleiner assumes, have played the role of Orestes in the 1599 lost twin plays, Agamemnon and Orestes’s furies. The reference to Orestes and Clytemnestra would also then help place Hamlet in the War of the Theatres.46

• 48 The Auncient Historie of the Destruction of Troy, London, Thomas Creed, 1597, STC (2nd ed.) / 15379 (...)
• 49 The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, Written in French by Raoul Lefèvre, Translated and Printed (...)

43The (early modern) edition of the 1474 translation from the French poet, Raoul Lefevre’s Recoeil des histoires de Troyes (c. 1464) by William Caxton intituled The Recuyell of the historyes of Troye, is reprinted as The Auncient Historie of the Destruction of Troy (1597) and gives the account of Pyrrhus slaying ‘the king Priamus before the high altar, which was all be-bled with his bloud’.⁴⁸ Arrestingly, the story of Pyrrhus is to be found only twenty pages before Orestes’ story: ‘CHAP. XXIX. How Horestes sonne of King Agamemnon cruelly auenged himselfe of the death of his father’49. Caxton’s translation thus presents both Pyrrhus and Orestes’ stories, clearly referring to them as avengers of their fathers’ treacherous murders:

• 53 Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven-London: Y (...)

49In The Gods Made Flesh, Leonard Barkan reminds us that ‘[a]ll the verbal and pictorial imagery in which the world of the pagan gods is revived soon becomes three-dimensional in the spectacle’.⁵³ This mythological scene fully benefits from the aesthetics of dramatic representation, as complex tensions derive from the previous scene in the play, from the dialogue between Hamlet and Gertrude and from the interplay between script and spectacle; as such this allows for a subtly ambiguous scene, leaving Hamlet momentarily in doubt about his mother’s responsibility, inviting playgoers to appreciate the performance and to look through it.