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Time, Memory, and Consciousness in Hamlet: A Bergsonian Study

Corresponding Author : Talukdar Mohammad Misbah Uddin (misbah.eng.uddin@gmail.com)

Authors : Talukdar Mohammad Misbah Uddin (misbah.eng.uddin@gmail.com)

Keywords : Hamlet, Time, Memory, consciousness, Bergson

Abstract :

Memory plays a crucial role in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy Hamlet in which Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, finds himself in a situation where his mother gets married to his uncle within two months of his father’s ‘Unusual” death. Hamlet’s memory of his deceased father turns into an obsession and controls and defines his actions and inactions and the destiny of many other characters in the play. Moreover, Hamlet’s memory of his father, experience of the Ghost, and his actions and inactions throughout the play create a larger memory for Hamlet that he wants to be continued through and narrated by Horatio even after he dies. This continuation and extension of memory along with how Hamlet perceives his temporal and spatial existence work in a way that time loses its chronological segmentation: the past, the present, and the future seem to work simultaneously in Hamlet’s thoughts and actions. Although existing critical literature focuses on various aspects of Hamlet’s memory and actions, there has not been much exploration regarding bow and what kind of time works in Hamlet’s psyche and how it is related to his memory and consciousness. Henry Bergson, one of the most prominent French philosophers, has vastly explored how time, memory, and consciousness can be understood from a whole new perspective and how they interact with each other in his notable philosophical works Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896), and The Creative Mind (1946). Consulting the existing critical works on Hamlet’s memory and Henry Bergson’s idea of time, memory, and consciousness, this paper examines to what extent the Bergsonian idea of time, memory and consciousness is present in Hamlet’s thoughts and actions in particular and in the play Hamlet as a whole.

Published on July 1st, 2021 in Vol 32, No 1, Humanities