“Shapes of Grief”: Hamlet ’s Grammar School Passions

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is famous for its attempt to adumbrate an inward passion that transcends outward expression, best seen in Hamlet’s insistence that he has “that within which passes show” and lacks the necessary “art to reckon [his] groans.” This essay argues that the text’s subtle and widely overlooked echoes of grammar school pedagogy demonstrate the harmony of inward states and outward expressions in the play, contrary to Hamlet’s own protestations. By tracing the passions of its characters in the terms of the grammar school (as in Polonius’s discussion of the “declension” of Hamlet’s melancholy), the play reveals that passions are not ineffable inward states, but instead expressive practices that abide by social rules and conventions. In advancing this argument, the essay draws on recent Wittgensteinian approaches to Hamlet and the new historiography of the grammar school.