I

In 1842 Daniel Maclise exhibited The Play Scene in Hamlet (Figure 27). In the common practice of the time, authorised by the Royal Academy in 1798, the painting was accompanied by a passage of text, quoting Hamlet's words to Horatio;

1. There is a play tonight before the king,

2. One scene of it comes near to the circumstance

3. Which I have told thee of my father's death;

4. I prythee, when thou seest that act afoot,

5. Even with the very comment of they soul

6. Observe my uncle –

7. Give him heedful note,

8. For I mine eyes will rivet to his face

9. (3.2.65–72)

Some aspects of the image recall elements of recent performance. The posture of Hamlet recalls the famous ‘Kean crawl’, in which Edmund Kean slithered across the stage towards Claudius in his 1814 production, and the figure's high forehead perhaps recalls the physique of a more recent Hamlet, William Charles Macready. But the full complexity of the painting's operation is suggested in its relation to the quotation beside which it originally appeared, in drawing together temporally separate moments in the play to offer a subtle reading of its language and central concerns.

This fusion is largely achieved by the use of visual emblems to convey moral and historical concepts that link the play scene to the larger currents of the play as a whole. The tapestries shown at the rear are the major force in this, depicting at left the temptation and expulsion from paradise, and at right the sacrifice of Abel and his murder by Cain. The raised spears of the soldiers beneath them give visual direction to the scenes, leading the onlooker's eyes towards them in suggestion of their larger significance. Between these figures, framing the action of the murder of Gonzago, are a statue of a figure at prayer and the embodiment of justice. All contribute to the critical interpretation of the play. The temptation and expulsion extends the ghost's account of his poisoning by Claudius, which took place in the garden; the murder of Abel is an act of evil between kin, suggesting the fratricide of old Hamlet by Claudius, and also echoing Hamlet's ‘a little more than kin and less than kind’ and the general atmosphere of familial betrayal – ‘incestuous sheets’ – throughout the earlier part of the play.