t_--that his mind will lose the message
entrusted to it. Instinctively, then, he feels that, if he _is_ to
remember, he must wipe from his memory everything it already contains;
and the image of his past life rises before him, of all his joy in
thought and observation and the stores they have accumulated in his
memory. All that is done with for ever: nothing is to remain for him on
the 'table' but the command, 'remember me.' He swears it; 'yes, by
heaven!' That done, suddenly the repressed passion breaks out, and, most
characteristically, he thinks _first_ of his mother; then of his uncle,
the smooth-spoken scoundrel who has just been smiling on him and calling
him 'son.' And in bitter desperate irony he snatches his tables from his
breast (they are suggested to him by the phrases he has just used,
'table of my memory,' 'book and volume'). After all, he _will_ use them
once again; and, perhaps with a wild laugh, he writes with trembling
fingers his last observation: 'One may smile, and smile, and be a
villain.'

But that, I believe, is not merely a desperate jest. It springs from
that _fear of forgetting_. A time will come, he feels, when all this
appalling experience of the last half-hour will be incredible to him,
will seem a mere nightmare, will even, conceivably, quite vanish from
his mind. Let him have something in black and white that will bring it
back and _force_ him to remember and believe. What is there so unnatural
in this, if you substitute a note-book or diary for the 'tables'?[258]

But why should he write that particular note, and not rather his 'word,'
'Adieu, adieu! remember me'? I should answer, first, that a grotesque
jest at such a moment is thoroughly characteristic of Hamlet (see p.
151), and that the jocose 'So, uncle, there you are!' shows his state of
mind; and, secondly, that loathing of his uncle is vehement in his
thought at this moment. Possibly, too, he might remember that 'tables'
are stealable, and that if the appearance of the Ghost should be
reported, a mere observation on the smiling of villains could not betray
anything of his communication with the Ghost. What follows shows that
the instinct of secrecy is strong in him.

It seems likely, I may add, that Shakespeare here was influenced,
consciously or unconsciously, by recollection of a place in _Titus
Andronicus_ (IV. i.). In that horrible play Chiron and Demetrius, after
outraging Lavinia, cut out her tongue and cut off her hands,