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Theatrical Tristram: Sterne and Hamlet Reconsidered

Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is one of many examples of how, throughout the eighteenth century, theatre exerted a tremendous influence on the rising novel. To examine this relationship at mid-century, I reconsider Sterne’s references to Hamlet. In Tristram Shandy, allusions to Shakespeare help Sterne highlight the theatre as a tool for memorialization. Not satisfied with the memorial capabilities of print, Sterne invokes Hamlet in his novel to explore how re-enactment, a strategy dependent on the very ephemerality it overcomes, could offer the author of a novel the immortality he craved. Tristram Shandy’s reliance on this particularly theatrical strategy of re-enactment exposes as anachronistic a now intuitive opposition between print and performance and testifies to the deeply integrated nature of eighteenth-century novels and plays. It also explains why, while Sterne may have written Tristram Shandy as a novel, he made sure that it was such a theatrical one.