SOURCE: Kerrigan, John. “Hieronimo, Hamlet and Remembrance.” Essays in Criticism 31, no. 2 (April 1981): 105-26.

In the following essay, Kerrigan discusses the connection between revenge and remembering in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, with special reference to The Choephoroe of Aeschylus. Preoccupation with the past is a hallmark of both Elizabethan tragedies, Kerrigan notes, but he points out a significant difference: Whereas Kyd's protagonist Hieronimo avenges his son by slaying his murderers, Hamlet, believing that vengeance is futile, honors his father's memory but does not kill Claudius expressly in revenge for his father’s death.

As The Choephoroe, the second play in Aeschylus's Oresteia (458 B.C.), begins, Orestes stands beside his father's tomb, thinking about the past. He offers Agamemnon a lock of hair and laments that he was not in Argos to mourn at his father's funeral. He seems to be sunk in passive grief. But his...