| Sumario: | 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 eighteenthcentury 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.
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