When Hamlet told the players to hold a “mirror” up to nature, Shakespeare was using a metaphor for multiple personality in his search for truth

Hamlet tells the players to be true to reality in their play-within-a-play by holding a “mirror" up to nature. But is using a mirror an apt metaphor for getting at the truth? Are not mirrors where vain people see what they want to see? Don’t mirrors reverse right and left? Would not a person searching for truth hold up a lamp, not a mirror?

To urge the players to show the real nature of life, a more apt metaphor would have been portrait. Hamlet might have told the players to paint, as ‘twere, a portrait of life. After all, a great portrait artist can show a person’s true character even better then a photograph. I appreciate that portraits can be flattering rather than truthful, but I am speaking of portraits at their best. Since a person is more likely to see the truth about others than about himself, a portrait is more likely than a mirror to tell the truth.

In a previous post on Hamlet, I asked why Shakespeare used the metaphor of a ghost, when a superior metaphor for his purposes might have been dreams. It turned out that the “ghost” was Hamlet’s alternate personality. Now in this post I ask why Shakespeare used mirrors as a metaphor for getting at the truth.

Perhaps the best-known multiple personality story in regard to mirrors is Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson,” but in this blog I have discussed mirrors and multiple personality mainly in connection with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story “Dialogue with a Mirror” and his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. I also mention mirrors in my essay arguing that Freud, himself, probably had multiple personality. The easiest way to access those posts is to search “mirror” in this blog.

Mirrors are a metaphor for multiple personality for two reasons. First, the image of a person in a mirror is like a “double” of that person, a second self. Second, in multiple personality, mirrors may be problematic, because when alternate personalities look in a mirror, they may or may not see a person who corresponds to their own self-image; for example, if a woman’s male alternate personality looks in a mirror and sees a woman, or if an adult’s child-aged alternate personality sees an adult.

In short, Hamlet features two metaphors for multiple personality: ghosts and mirrors. Shakespeare is saying that multiple personality is how he and other fiction writers find the truth.