Hamlet hears Marlowe; Shakespeare reads Virgil

Abstract

The excerpt from Aeneas' tale to Dido which Hamlet elicits from the Player is based in part on Marlowe's Dido Queen of Carthage. As a melodramatic description of the culmination of the Trojan war with the slaughter of Priam, the Player's speech appears to be specified by Hamlet because it recalls Old Hamlet's preceding account of his own murder — a report which figures Old Hamlet's body as an assailed citadel. These two accounts, with other Virgilian and contemporary allusions, associate the action and apparent inaction of Hamlet with the manoeuvres and stalemates of an extended siege war. Elizabethan land warfare was chiefly siege campaigning, and there was an extensive contemporary literature on this mode of conflict. Marrying Virgil's account of Troy to Renaissance siegecraft theory, Shakespeare makes the Aeneid and elements of contemporary warfare an entelechy of Hamlet.