On ‘a certain convocation of politic worms’ (Hamlet)

How might repertoire be thought of through Hamlet’s image of ‘a certain convocation of politic worms’ (4.3.19-20)? That is, through a metaphor of what lives on in the dramatic corpus, nourishing theatricality with its bodies of words in the changing present of the past? Metaphor, as is exemplified by Hamlet, says more than plot, after all, especially when that is reduced to exposition or an interpretative ‘post-mortem’. Indeed, how are the ‘politic worms’ of repertoire themselves eaten in their own turn, becoming the supper of interpretative fish that ‘show you how a king may go progress through the guts of a beggar’ (4.3.30)? In this essay, repertoire is considered as a rehearsal for the (re-)creation of theatrical canons, constantly tested as a representational medium, through the production of new meaning within – and for – cultural memory. As Yuri Lotman, for instance, writes of Hamlet: ‘Nowadays Hamlet is not just a play by Shakespeare, but … also the memory of all its interpretations’.