“Apparel oft proclaims the man”: Visualizing Hamlet on the Early Modern Stage

Abstract

Hamlet is replete with references to visual culture. Apparel, cosmetics, color, and accoutrements appear in the dialogue and stage directions of virtually every scene in Shakespeare’s longest play. These references are significant, for they hint at the way Shakespeare’s original production was staged, seen, and understood in the early modern English theatre. Considering how Hamlet would have appeared on the Globe stage, this essay argues that the play establishes a strong, martial aesthetic with its opening scene. The Ghost, “Armed at point, exactly cap-à-pie,” represents the ideal of this aesthetic. Neither Claudius nor Hamlet visually fit this martial ideal, a fact which highlights each character’s shortcomings as a potential leader of the warlike state. Following the play’s visual logic, only Fortinbras, a nobleman who shows promise as a military leader, is ultimately the appropriate leader of Denmark. Dressed in the apparel of mourning, Hamlet would have been visually aligned with Horatio who almost certainly also wore black when Hamlet was first performed. Following common theatrical convention, Horatio would have appeared in the black academic gown of a scholar and been visually connected to the melancholy Dane on sight. In composing Hamlet for the stage, Shakespeare established a complex visual world that had consequences for how meaning was established and received in production.