The Tablets of the Law: Reading Hamlet with Scriptural Technologies

Abstract

This chapter explores how the material formats of books and digital reading devices inflects Hamlet’s thematizing of reading, writing, memory, inscription, and commandment. In a physical “book and volume” that deploys strong archival connotations of its own, the images of erasure and covenantal inscription in Hamlet carry a force in the 1623 Folio they would not have in another book. Like the received Bible, which Northrop Frye described as “more like a small library than a real book” (The Great Code, xii), the cultural and material contexts of reading construct Shakespeare’s gathered plays as a textual unity corresponding to the codicological unit of the Folio itself. While there is a clear connection between the folio as an archival format and the reception of Shakespeare’s texts, this chapter argues that the connection between the Folio’s form and content is more complicated than that of simple analogy to folio Bibles. This chapter argues, then, that it is not the case that Shakespeare’s Folio appears biblical, but rather that both books in folio format become scriptural technologies that restructure originary acts of writing within a new archive. The chapter concludes by arguing that the idea of scriptural writing tropes, along with the metaphor of the book as archive, has reentered the cultural imagination through tablet-style digital reading devices such as the Kindle—for which Amazon.com markets a “Kindle Edition” of Hamlet, echoing the First Folio’s enabling fiction of the unity of received text and material format.