Rhetoric, mimesis and Elizabethan acting: lessons from Hamlet

This paper provides an introduction to my monograph The Players’ Advice to Hamlet, the publication of which followed a few weeks after the 2020 SFS conference, and it illustrates the argument of my book by focusing on Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”. I propose that the debate about Elizabethan acting within the domain of “original practices” or “OP” needs to escape from its present cul-de-sac by focusing upon rhetoric as accessed through the Latin sources, for these give more serious attention to questions of performance than English recensions. Ciceronian rhetoric was an approach to reading and performance in which the whole body was invested. Modern practitioners have been reluctant to move beyond the literary concept of rhetoric as a tool for constructing figures of speech, and to think how it relates to questions of character and identity. I demonstrate how the soliloquy in the Second Quarto, derived from Shakespeare’s autograph, is strategically punctuated (probably building on indications in the manuscript) in order to divide up the text with an astonishing symmetry on the basis of the breath, the prevailing emotions and the argument. This symmetry and logic are entirely obscured by punctuation for syntax.