Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness

By Rhodri Lewis

An acclaimed new interpretation of Shakespeare's Hamlet

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness is a radical new interpretation of the most famous play in the English language. By exploring Shakespeare's engagements with the humanist traditions of early modern England and Europe, Rhodri Lewis reveals a Hamlet unseen for centuries: an innovative, coherent, and exhilaratingly bleak tragedy in which the governing ideologies of Shakespeare's age are scrupulously upended. Recovering a work of far greater magnitude than the tragedy of a young man who cannot make up his mind, Lewis shows that in Hamlet, as in King Lear, Shakespeare confronts his audiences with a universe that received ideas are powerless to illuminate—and where everyone must find their own way through the dark.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: May 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691210926

Book preview

HAMLET AND THE VISION OF DARKNESS

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness

Rhodri Lewis

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright ©2017 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press,

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Cover art: Piero di Cosimo (Piero di Lorenzo di Piero d’Antonio), A Hunting Scene, c. 1494–1500. Gift of Robert Gordon, 1875 / The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Cover design by Leslie Flis

Excerpt from Sprich auch du, Paul Celan, Von Schwelle zu Schwelle © 1955, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munchen, in der Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH.

Excerpt from Seven Types of Ambiguity copyright William Empson, 1930.

Excerpt from How It Is by Samuel Beckett, English translation copyright © 1964 by Grove Press, Inc. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. and Faber & Faber Ltd. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

Excerpt from Good Writers and Good Readers from Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov. Copyright © 1980 by the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

All Rights Reserved

First paperback printing, 2020

Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-20451-2

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

Names: Lewis, Rhodri, 1976– author.

Title: Hamlet and the vision of darkness / Rhodri Lewis.

Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017003227 | ISBN 9780691166841 (hardback : acid-free paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Hamlet.

Classification: LCC PR2807 .L47 2017 | DDC 822.3/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003227

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Miller

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

For Sarah, and for Max

quid dubitas quin omnis sit haec rationis potestas, omnis cum in tenebris praesertim vita laboret? nam vel uti pueri trepidant atque omnia caecis in tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemus interdum nihilo quae sunt metuenda magis quam quae pueri in tenebris pavitant finguntque futura. hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest non radii solis neque lucida tela diei discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque.

LUCRETIUS, DE RERUM NATURA

Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin—the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings—much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

GEORGE ELIOT, ADAM BEDE

Wahr spricht, wer Schatten spricht.

PAUL CELAN, SPRICH AUCH DU

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE PROXIMATE ORIGINS of the work before you lie in two seminar papers written in early 2011. The first was delivered in Oxford and comprised a preliminary version of what is now chapter 3. Uneasy with the emphasis I had placed on vocabulary drawn from the early modern psycho-physiology of memory, Simon Palfrey threw down a brilliantly awkward challenge: to demonstrate that the confused metaphors of memory on which I had dwelt belong to Hamlet and the dramaturgy of Hamlet, and not to Shakespeare himself. The second paper was delivered a few weeks later in Cambridge, and rehearsed some of the arguments developed towards the end of what is now chapter 4. In the Q&A session that followed, two colleagues confirmed one another in the view that as Hamlet speaks of such weighty matters in such lovely verse, it was self-evidently perverse of me to have argued that Shakespeare portrays him as poetically inept.

Each response left me somewhere between speechless and clutching at straws. How to establish that Shakespeare knew what he was doing when putting particular words and assumptions in Hamlet’s mouth? How, in the face of such indifference to the distinction between the poet and the mere versifier of which the early moderns made so much, to escape the conclusion that Hamlet has fallen victim to the Mona Lisa curse—that its celebrity has taken it beyond the scope of intelligent discussion? L’esprit de l’escalier is generally the cause of frustration or wryly amused regret. In this instance, it also served as an embarkation point. Initially, my destination was a study of Shakespeare’s works read alongside, and most likely against, early modern notions of psychology and cognition. As I researched the topic in greater detail, this destination began to shift. I was surprised to find myself returning again and again to Hamlet. Furthermore, to find that as I attempted to pursue my readings of Hamlet to their conclusions, many of them demanded that I fundamentally recalibrate my understanding not only of the play’s action, but of what its action might be said to mean.

Thus the idea of this book began to take shape. Certainly, it has been written with a view to introducing aspects of Shakespeare’s work that are unfamiliar or misunderstood—including his engagements with what one might call early modern cognitive theory. I also hope to have advanced by example the related methodological claim that reading widely, diligently, and imaginatively (and sometimes in languages other than English) is a good and necessary thing in approaching any work of early modern poetry or drama. But the governing preoccupations of Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness lie elsewhere: unabashedly, it is an exercise in literary criticism. Rather than constraining Shakespeare to furnish examples with which to illustrate or to challenge the history, theory, or politics of x, this book allows his writing to take precedence over the contexts in which it can be situated; even the worthiest and most arresting of them are admitted only when helping to explicate the poetic and dramatic phenomena of his work. The challenge—at times, it bears the weight of a paradox—is that without the curiosity and scholarly acumen required to sift the various contexts (cultural, social, intellectual, political, religious, economic, formal, etc.) with which Shakespeare’s writing intersects, it is impossible fully to appreciate the scale of his poetic and dramatic achievement. My readers will determine if and to what extent I have succeeded in meeting this challenge. I have sought to persuade, and sometimes to provoke, them into reconsidering much of what they think they know about this most familiar of plays.

Completing this book has led me to incur a large number of scholarly, institutional, and personal debts. It is a pleasurable duty to acknowledge them. Auden thought it likely that more nonsense has been talked and written, more intellectual and emotional energy expended in vain, on the sonnets of Shakespeare than on any other literary work in the world. With some trepidation, I wonder if that distinction doesn’t in fact belong to Hamlet. It’s just that as more seems to have been written on Hamlet than on any other work of non-religious literature, it can be tricky to disentangle the flimsy or the fanciful from the astute. Unable to locate the crown jewels, its students have frequently—far too frequently for comfort—surrendered themselves to the forgotten butterfly of revelation. Caveat scriptor. Although my notes and bibliography attest that I have learned from scholars and critics of many divergent approaches (and although my introduction maps the field of Hamlet studies more broadly), I must single out here the monographic studies of Hamlet by Martin Dodsworth and Margreta de Grazia. I differ from them as much as they do from one another, but they opened up a space for reassessing the play without which my own account of it would not have been able to develop. Behind them somewhere, if only in my mind’s eye, are Empson on Hamlet when new, Emrys Jones on Shakespeare’s Erasmian hinterland, Anne Barton on Shakespeare’s changing views of drama, and Joel Altman on the Tudor play of mind.

In Oxford, it is my good fortune to belong to a college and a faculty that take seriously their responsibility to sustain the slow burn of reading, thinking, and writing. There can also be no better place than Oxford in which to set about the task of embedding Shakespeare in the cultures of sixteenth-century learning—and few better in which to acquire an understanding of the disjunction between the ideals of the humanist vita activa and the reality of humanist negotium. On the other side of the world, I began writing this book at the Medieval and Early Modern Centre and the English Department at the University of Sydney in August and September 2013. I should like to express my gratitude to Liam Semler and his colleagues, not only for the invitation to visit them, but for the intelligence of their conversation and for hospitality that, throughout, was as open as it was generous. As I pushed to complete my typescript just over two years later, it was another privilege to enjoy the fellowship and exceptional resources offered by a Willis F. Doney Membership of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. My sincerest thanks must go to the staff of the libraries in which I completed my research: in Oxford, the English Faculty, St Hugh’s College, Bodleian, Taylorian, History Faculty, and Sackler libraries (especially the English Faculty Library); in Berlin, the Staatsbibliothek; in Edinburgh, the National Library of Scotland; in London, the British Library and the library of the Warburg Institute; in New York, the New York Public Library; in Paris, the Bibliothèque nationale de France; in Princeton, the Firestone Library; in San Marino (California), the Huntington Library; in Sydney, the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney and the State Library of New South Wales. When most of my writing had been completed, the chance to test-fly my arguments before seminar audiences at Duke, Princeton, Cambridge, Oxford (twice), and Harvard universities proved invaluable in establishing which parts of them were and were not airworthy. Doing so also reminded me of the important truth that one cannot hope to stay aloft without keeping in mind the relationship between airspeed and angle of attack. Grateful thanks for the invitations to speak, and for the useful questions asked of me on each occasion. Finally, serendipity. If I hadn’t stumbled across the magnificently peculiar Musée de la chasse et de la nature while exploring the Third Arrondissement of Paris—a discovery which in turn drew my attention to the existence of the Deutsches Jagd- und Fischereimuseum in Munich—chapter 2 would be a much poorer piece of work than it is.

Despite punishingly full schedules of their own, Marisa Bass, Dan Blank, John Kerrigan, Nick McDowell, Nam Rao, Sarah Rivett, and Quentin Skinner each read versions of this book in all but its entirety; Katherine Duncan-Jones, Kristine Haugen, Lorna Hutson, Seth Lerer, Nigel Smith, and Jessica Wolfe each read drafts of three or more chapters as they were being written; Rich McCoy, Liam Semler, and Richard Strier each read the introduction and chapter 1 as I got under way; Kathy Eden and Bailey Sincox each read drafts of chapter 4. I could not have wished for better interlocutors. All asked difficult questions; skewered arguments that were weak, imprecise, or tenuously relevant; offered vitally fresh standpoints from which to work; and reminded me of the need to maintain perspective. Quentin Skinner also shared with me a complete draft of what became his Forensic Shakespeare. I gained a great deal from it, and am beholden to the lectures on which it builds for setting me to think in detail about Hamlet and hunting. On a different but no less significant note, the late Malcolm Hyman provides this book with its ultimate point of origin. After a long Berlin evening hearing out my theories on Shakespeare’s intellectual eclecticism, he urged me to stop theorizing and start writing. Eventually, I did. I’m sorry that he can’t criticize the results.

My obligations to those I’ve taught are real. At the graduate level, my doctoral students—past and present—have enriched all parts of this book, as have the MSt cohorts who steered me through my course on Shakespeare and Early Modern Theories of Knowing in the Michaelmas terms of 2013 and 2014. At the undergraduate level, countless St Hugh’s tutees have prodded at the holes in my ideas, and have often provided me with the stimulus and materials with which to set about closing them up.

I’ve been similarly lucky that a small army of friends and colleagues has not stinted in offering encouragement, in sharing references, or in helping me to reflect on what does and doesn’t happen in Shakespeare’s Denmark—to say nothing of the territories that surround it. With apologies to those I’ve almost certainly overlooked (and in addition to those named above), many thanks to Sharon Achinstein, Gavin Alexander, Hannah Arnold, Laura Ashe, Yanoula Athanassakis, Reid Barbour, Leonard Barkan, Teresa Bejan, Mathilde von Benckendorff, Matt Bevis, Sophie Butler, Karen Collis, Bradin Cormack, Jackie Cowan, Raine Daston, Tania Demetriou, Nat Din-Kariuki, Jeff Dolven, Rupert Elderkin, Ellen Ellis, Lizzy Emerson, Lukas Erne, Moti Feingold, Lindsey Fitzharris, James Franklin, David Galbraith, George Garnett, Sophie Gee, Kantik Ghosh, Rudolph Glitz, Tony Grafton, Margreta de Grazia, Paul Hammond, Nick Hardy, Peter Harrison, Rachael Hodge, Sarah Howe, Katherine Hunt, Bronnie Johnston, Jill Kraye, Laurie Maguire, Noel Malcolm, Laura Marcus, Alex Marr, Meredith Martin, Emily Mayne, James Maynell, Helen Moore, Subha Mukherjee, Kylie Murray, Eric Nelson (who also suggested the epigraph to chapter 2), David Norbrook, Richard Oosterhoff, Simon Palfrey, Jon Parkin, Nick Perkins, John-Mark Philo, Will Poole, Anne Sophie Refskou, Debora Shuger, James Simpson, Emma Smith, Tiffany Stern, Alan Stewart, Anne Thompson, Tiffany Werth, Roy Westbrook, Leah Whittington, and Katharina Wiedemann. Returning for a moment to Oxford (specifically, to the Oxford that I inhabited between 2011 and 2015), I must register my gratitude to Kate Gear at the English Faculty, and to John Miles, Pádraig O’Connor, and Richard Sykes at the Humanities Division; especially to Kate and Pádraig. Their supreme professionalism—never very distant from their tolerance, good judgement, or sense of the absurd—did much to free up the time and energy required for writing.

Finally, thanks to my editor, Ben Tate; to Hannah Paul and Mark Bellis for guiding me through the production process; and to Princeton University Press as a whole. From my first discussions with them, they have been unfailingly supportive and helpful, and have made things as straightforward as any author might wish them to be.

All errors of fact and lapses of sense or taste are attributable to me, and me alone.

R. L.

Oxford

October 2016

NOTE ON THE TEXT

I WORK FROM Harold Jenkins’s Arden 2 edition of Hamlet, cited parenthetically within the main body of the text.¹ At the same time, I relatively frequently make reference to alternative readings in the 1604/5 Second Quarto (Q2) and 1623 Folio editions. Less frequently, I refer to those in the 1603 First Quarto (Q1). In so doing, I use textual variance or ambiguity to emphasise, and occasionally to mitigate, points whose force is predominantly critical.

Since the unediting Shakespeare movement began in the 1980s, and various forms of it assumed positions of orthodoxy a decade or so later, we have learned a great deal about the textually contingent nature of Shakespeare’s plays. We have also been reminded that editorial decisions have too often been based on criteria of taste or ideology or critical preoccupation, not those of textual scholarship.² The fruits of this change in editorial approach have been several. In particular, the Oxford Shakespeare (based on the Folio) and Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor’s Arden 3 Shakespeare (based on Q2) have been constant points of reference for me.³ Likewise, Bernice Kliman’s Enfolded Hamlets prints the Q2 and Folio texts alongside one another, and made things a lot less challenging than would otherwise have been the case.⁴ On a related tack, we have learned that Shakespeare may well have tweaked, corrected, interpolated, or amended his works over time, and that there is a case to be made for suggesting that the Folio Hamlet is Shakespeare’s later revision of Q2. And yet it has also been proposed that the Folio is chiefly derived from a playhouse copy (or reconstruction) of a text that is independent of the one printed in Q2, and that this copy (and/or text) may have shared a measure of consanguinity with (the earlier?) text of Q1.⁵ The truth is that we do not know the order of priority in which the two most authoritative surviving versions of Hamlet stand in relation to one another. We should not be too put out by this state of affairs. In Paul Menzer’s helpful summation, the knowledge that plays were built to be broken (both theatrically and textually) provides an escape route from a paradigm that views texts as indivisible and autonomous with precise provenances and discernible genealogical relations.⁶ To recognise the circumstances of transmission and production that generally sit behind the printed versions of early modern plays—in other words, their textual contingency—is to recognise the sterility of some arguments for insisting on their poly-textual representation: of course there is textual difference between different printings of early modern plays. And? In contrast to the avowals of most recent Hamlet editors, I have come to believe that the Q2 and Folio texts authoritatively witness the same Shakespearean work, and that a critical edition of the play should therefore take account of them both.

For many recent theorists of the Shakespearean text, this constitutes impressionistic conflation, as no objective assessment of the textual record of the sort associated with W.W. Greg and the so-called New Bibliography is possible. I take a more sanguine view. No edition can aspire to the mathematical or demonstrative certainty implied in Greg’s calculus of variants, but as textual criticism is a stochastic art, this could hardly be otherwise.⁷ Which is to say that just as the arts of navigation, medicine, rhetoric, politics, archery, hunting, warfare, and literary criticism are not always able to accomplish their intended or desired ends, so following the rules of textual criticism (howsoever formulated) does not always lead to conclusions of unassailable clarity. An editor’s goal can only be to arrive at the best possible reading of a text, not at the right one; the criteria for so doing belong to probability and reasonable conjecture, not analytical abstraction.⁸ As A.E. Housman insists, a textual critic engaged upon his business is not at all like Newton investigating the motions of the planets: he is much more like a dog hunting for fleas.⁹ What matters is that one lays out one’s editorial procedures transparently, that they are equal to the particularities of the task at hand, and that one’s readers have access to the materials needed to interrogate one’s editorial judgements for themselves. It might be objected that the Oxford and most recent Arden editions do something of the kind by providing variant readings from Q2 and the Folio in appendixes, and—in the case of the Arden—by printing the Q1 and Folio texts in a separate volume; certainly, and despite the supposition that unedited texts present their data unencumbered by one sort of normativity or another, these decisions are an expression of editorial judgement about both the conditions of early modern textual production and the form that critical editions of a text should take.¹⁰ But in devolving editorial decision-making onto readers who are far less expert in textual matters than they are, it seems to me that such editors abdicate their cardinal responsibility, and that they thereby risk a textual free-for-all that is unwarranted, uninteresting, and potentially corrosive. These, however, are discussions for another place. Suffice it to say that Jenkins’s eclectic text best suits my purposes here.

A word on Q1. Is it the text of something like the Q2 and Folio Hamlet as reconstructed from the memory of one or more of those who acted in it? A text reconstructed from the notes taken by one or more of those in the audience at early performances of something like the Q2 and Folio Hamlet? An early Shakespearean attempt at a play on the theme of Hamlet, whether written singly or in collaboration? Perhaps even the elusive Ur-Hamlet itself? Faced with competing and, in default of compelling new evidence, likely irresolvable claims about the place and status of Q1, this book has no dog in the fight.¹¹ Q1 is manifestly important to aspects of the history and interpretation of Shakespeare’s writing, and is an intriguing problem in its own right. It offers little help in comprehending the textual difficulties of Q2 and the Folio.

Although Shakespeare does not seem to have written Hamlet with the familiar five-act structure (imposed on it by the early eighteenth-century editor, Nicholas Rowe) in mind, for ease of reference I cite the play according to the conventional divisions of act, scene, and line number.¹² When citing the Folio, I make use of the through line numbers (TLN) pioneered by Charlton Hinman.¹³ I frequently refer to Hamlet’s soliloquies with ordinal numbers. For the avoidance of ambiguity, let me state that in what follows the first soliloquy comprises the lines spoken by Hamlet at 1.2.129–59; the second those at 1.5.92–112; the third those at 2.2.543–601; the fourth those at 3.1.56–89; the fifth those at 3.2.379–90; the sixth those at 3.3.73–96; the seventh those at 4.4.32–66.

One final, if only quasi-textual, point is that I take Hamlet, now as at the beginning of the seventeenth century, to be a work that is at once literary (written to be read) and dramatic (written to be performed). There has been a welcome turn towards re-exploring the performance history of Shakespeare’s works—and towards understanding Shakespeare’s works as a function of his status as a man of the theatre—in the past three decades, of which the Oxford edition and Arden 3 series are impressive monuments. More recently, this has been complemented by the research of Lukas Erne and others on Shakespeare’s determined cultivation of a print readership—both in the literary marketplace of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and in posterity.¹⁴ Paraphrasing Horace rather freely, William Webbe avowed in 1586 that Poets are either such as desire to be liked of on stages, as Commedie and Tragedie wryters: or such as would bee regestred in Libraries. Those on stages have speciall respect to the motions of the minde, that they may stirre bothe the eyes and eares of their beholders. But the other which seeke to please privately with[in] the walles, take good advisement in the workes, that they may satisfy the exact judgments of learned men in their studies.¹⁵ One of Shakespeare’s many virtues is that he puts such lazy dichotomizing to bed. At all times, this study attempts to remain mindful of Hamlet’s identities on the page, on the stage, and in the innumerable spaces between.

Beyond Hamlet, I by and large make use of the Shakespeare texts in the Arden 3 series, occasionally emending readings that seem to me in error. When quoting from non-Shakespearean early modern sources, I refer to modern scholarly editions wherever possible. Where these do not exist, I cite and quote from early modern printed works—highlighting textual plurality, difficulty, or ambiguity where necessary. (While cleaving to the particularities of early modern punctuation and orthography, I have modernized u/v and i/j, normalised the long s, and expanded the remnant of the scribal thorn—initial y—to the digraph th.) Though by no means all of my readers will have access to the rare-books collection of a major research library, the wide availability of accurate facsimiles on Early English Books Online, Gallica, and similar databases means that those with a mind to do so can further investigate my readings with comparative ease. When citing or quoting from the Bible and from classical works, I use the standard reference numbers (chapter and verse, section and line, etc.). Unless otherwise stated, all translations from languages other than English are my own.

1. Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London, 1982).

2. See, e.g., Randall McLeod, UN Editing Shak-speare, Sub-stance 33–34 (1982), 26–55; Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London, 1996), esp. 132–76. On the theory and practice of editing Shakespeare over the past three decades, see Gabriel Egan, The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text (Cambridge, 2010), 190–230.

3. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, 2nd ed., ed. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells (Oxford, 2005), 681–718; Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London, 2006). See also Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London, 2006). Likewise, I have learned a great deal from Hamlet, ed. G.R. Hibbard (Oxford, 1987); Hamlet, 2nd ed., ed. Philip Edwards (Cambridge, 2003); and Hamlet: Englisch/Deutsch, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. Holger Klein (Stuttgart, 2014).

4. The Enfolded Hamlets: Parallel Texts of and {Q2}, Each with Unique Elements Bracketed, ed. Bernice W. Kliman (New York, 2004). See also The Three-Text Hamlet: Parallel Texts of the First and Second Quartos and First Folio, 2nd ed., ed. Paul Bertram and Bernice W. Kliman (New York, 2003).

5. See Paul Menzer, The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts (Newark, DE, 2008), esp. 88–110; Grace Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 134–46; John Jones, Shakespeare at Work (Oxford, 1995), chap. 3. See also James J. Marino, Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and Their Intellectual Property (Philadelphia, 2011), 75–106.

6. Menzer, Hamlets, 93. Cf. the thoughtful analysis in Zachary Lesser, Hamlet after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (Philadelphia, 2015), esp. 207–22.

7. W.W. Greg, The Calculus of Variants: An Essay on Textual Criticism (Oxford, 1927). On the stochastic (from the ancient Greek στοχαστικός, capable of hitting a target) or conjectural arts, see James Allen, Failure and Expertise in the Ancient Conception of an Art, in Scientific Failure, ed. Tamara Horowitz and Allen I. Janis (Lanham, 1994), 81–108.

8. On this point, see Anthony B. Dawson, Correct Impressions: Editing and Evidence in the Wake of Post-Modernism, in In Arden: Editing Shakespeare; Essays in Honour of Richard Proudfoot, ed. Gordon McMullan and Ann Thompson (London, 2003), 31–47.

9. A.E. Housman, The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism, in The Classical Papers of A.E. Housman, 3 vols., ed. J. Diggle and F.R.D. Goodyear (Cambridge, 1972), 3:1058–69, here 1059. See also John Jowett, Shakespeare and Text (Oxford, 2007), 115–29.

10. See Jowett, Shakespeare and Text, 158–69.

11. See Menzer, Hamlets, 111–76; The Hamlet First Published (Q1, 1603): Origins, Form, Intertextualities, ed. Thomas Clayton (Newark, DE, 1992); Tiffany Stern, "Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers: Hamlet Q1 as a ‘Noted’ Text", Shakespeare Survey 66 (2014), 1–23; Terri Bourus, Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet: Print, Piracy, and Performance (New York, 2014). On unwarranted presumptions about the Ur-Hamlet, see Marino, Owning Shakespeare, 75–79.

12. See Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford, 1971), 66–70, 79–81.

13. The First Folio of Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. Charlton Hinman and Peter Blayney (New York, 1996).

14. Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge, 2003), esp. 136–39, 177–83, 230–41; Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge, 2013). See further Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge, 2008), 203–33.

15. William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetrie (London, 1586), sigs. K4v–L1r. Cf. Horace, Epistulae, 2.1.

INTRODUCTION

Hamlet within Hamlet

ANTHONY ASHLEY COOPER, third Earl of Shaftesbury, was no fan of Shakespeare. Surveying the development of English drama from the vantage of the early 1700s, he lamented Shakespeare’s natural Rudeness, his unpolish’d Stile, his antiquated Phrase and Wit, his want of Method and Coherence, and his Deficiency in almost all the Graces and Ornaments of this kind of Writing. And yet Shakespeare was not to be dismissed out of hand: "the Justness of his MORAL, the Aptness of many of his Descriptions, and the plain and natural Turn of several of his Characters" meant that he could help to nurture the self-examination and self-discourse on which Shaftesbury believed moral knowledge must be based. Hamlet was particularly noteworthy in this respect, and was to be viewed as "almost one continu’d Moral: a Series of deep Reflections, drawn from one Mouth, upon the Subject of one single Accident and Calamity, naturally fitted to move Horrour and Compassion. It may properly be said of this Play, if I mistake not, that it has only ONE Character or principal Part".¹ Faced with such comments, one might respond that Shaftesbury was a woefully bad reader of vernacular literature, and that his over-fastidious tastes are precisely the sort of thing that Shakespeare enjoyed turning on its head. But a disconcerting fact remains: Shaftesbury was the first, or one of the first, to delineate an approach to Hamlet that has held the field since the second half of the eighteenth century. Within this, the emphasis is placed squarely on Hamlet the morally and philosophically significant character at the expense of Hamlet the ambiguous and frequently bewildering work of drama. Just as directors have felt compelled to cut—and sometimes to rearrange—in order to stage Hamlet successfully, so scholars and critics have neglected those aspects of the play that have threatened to hinder their interpretations of its central character.

William Kerrigan identifies a slightly later starting point for modern Hamlet criticism: it all begins with the Romantic Germans.² Which is to say that as an object of critical attention, Hamlet only comes to life with the tragedy of thought, thwarted self-realisation, and philosophical yearning imagined by Goethe, A.W. Schlegel, and their English epigone, Coleridge. To any student of the play, Kerrigan’s view is familiar and widely confirmed. Shaftesbury may have laid the egg, but it took the Romantic sensibility for it to hatch. Hamlet emerged as an epoch-making figure, an enigma through whom Shakespeare dramatized the struggle of the modern subject to find a path through the suffocating thickets of moral, personal, and political existence. At the same time, there has been little or no consensus as to how this enigma should be decoded. Hamlet has played host to an unusually diverse, though only seldom antipodal, range of interpretations. As Harry Levin put it in the late 1950s, Polonius’s response to Hamlet’s ink-blot test—his agreement that the cloud resembles now a weasel, then a camel, now again a whale—succinctly foreshadows the process of interpreting the play evinced by its modern students.³ On this reckoning, Hamlet criticism is a literary Rorschach test in which pretty much anything goes—one in which critics project their own theories, preoccupations, or neuroses, or in which they vie to offer perceptions of the play that are calculated to display their creative virtuosity, or in which they seek to confirm their methodological or ideological fraternity. Analogously, David Bevington estimates that "the staging, criticism and editing of Hamlet … from 1599–1600 to the present day … can be seen as a kind of paradigm for the cultural history of the English-speaking world".⁴ One might regret the narrowness of Bevington’s focus (not least because Murder Most Foul ranges some way beyond the confines of the Anglosphere), but it would be hard to dissent from the tenor of his judgement. The only sticking point is the suspicion that if the history of Hamlet criticism sheds so much light on those who wrote it, then those who wrote it might not always have put themselves in a position from which to offer revealing criticism of the play.

By contrast, Margreta de Grazia insists that we start again. For her, the Romantic and post-Romantic emphasis on the inexpressible mysteries of the Prince’s mal du siècle have led to the unwarranted and misleading abstraction of Hamlet from the play of which he is a part; even the most historically minded of Hamlet’s critics have expended their reserves of learning and ingenuity in attending to questions whose origins lie nearly two centuries after the play itself, and that are largely besides the point. After demonstrating beyond reasonable doubt that the problem of Hamlet’s character only became a critical concern in the course of the eighteenth century, de Grazia sets herself the task of illustrating "what happens when what has been overlooked [in the last two centuries of Hamlet studies] is brought back into view".⁵ This is not, and could not be, an exercise in simple historical retrieval. Other than that Hamlet is the palimpsest of an earlier revenge play on the same subject (the lost work known as the Ur-Hamlet), that something in it appealed to what Gabriel Harvey called the wiser sort, and that the Prince’s performed mania left a vivid impression on early audiences, next to nothing is known of the ways in which Hamlet was initially regarded. Likewise, the later seventeenth century has little of note, and almost nothing positive, to say about the play. Even the striking depiction of the First or Second Folio—open at the beginning of Hamlet—that appears in Anthony van Dyck’s ca. 1638 portrait of the courtier poet, Sir John Suckling (see figure 1), owes its existence to Shakespeare’s uncertain reputation. Suckling, in line with the motto from the Roman satirist Persius superimposed on the rock in the lower right (ne te quaesiveris extra, do not look beyond yourself or do not look to any opinion but your own), seeks to advertise his freely independent cast of mind. Neither Shakespeare in general nor Hamlet in particular may meet with the approval of those in thrall to neoclassical decorum, but they are caviar to the well-bred connoisseur. The first sustained critical engagement with Hamlet would have to wait until 1736.⁶

In the face of this silence, de Grazia reconstructs a play about the unhappy plight of an early modern prince who believes himself to have been dispossessed of his birthright.⁷ This malcontent has been wronged by his dead father (who did not nominate his son as heir to his kingdom), by his uncle (who guilefully assumed the kingship after the death of his brother the king), by his mother (whose public re-marriage to her first husband’s brother elevated the claims of her former brother-in-law above those of her son), and by the court of which he is a prominent part (whose other members were responsible for settling on his uncle as the best candidate for the kingship). Furthermore, as Claudius is the legitimately elected king of Denmark, this Hamlet cannot voice his grievances without committing high treason; these grievances, not the existential commonplaces of critical tradition, are that within which passes show (1.2.85). For Shakespeare, the revenge plot thus becomes a medium through which Hamlet can act out what would otherwise have remained unspoken, and is secondary to the personal-political dynamics animating the play. Hamlet’s much discussed delay in effecting the revenge demanded of him by his father’s ghost is not the result of epistemological, philosophical, or religious scruples any more than it is an expression of cowardice or melancholy or the unbearable lightness of being. Rather, Shakespeare had to work with the grain of the materials he had chosen: his sources—Saxo Grammaticus, Belleforest, and the Ur-Hamlet—had Hamlet stay the hand of vengeance, and so therefore did he.⁸ Shakespeare made the best of the dramaturgical situation by having Hamlet riff the stock theatrical roles of the Clown, madman, Vice, and devil—all of which figure his feelings of disenfranchisement. What might look like the revenger’s madness (qua insanity rather than rage) is, in fact, literally antic: ludic, grotesque, and self-consciously metadramatic. When the time comes to take appropriate vengeance on Claudius, Hamlet is ready and willing to strike.

FIGURE 1. Anthony van Dyck, portrait of Sir John Suckling (1638). Copyright The Frick Collection, New York.

There is much that is manifestly and importantly right in de Grazia’s account. Yet in circling her wagons in so determined a fashion—in seeking to defend Hamlet by uprooting the critical traditions that have grown up around its title character—de Grazia sequesters the relationships between personal and political existence that animate so much of the play. Finally, something about the way in which Hamlet speaks and acts (whether on his own, in company, or under the guise of his antic disposition) is surely meant to be unusual and arresting. To neglect this is significantly to diminish Hamlet’s capacity to challenge us. Generations of the play’s students may have distorted the Prince in their own likenesses, but the difficulties their work identifies and seeks to address cannot easily be defined away or written off to the curiosities of Elizabethan theatrical convention.

My contention is that there is no need for us to do anything of the sort, and that Hamlet can be read as a profound meditation on the nature of human individuality without relying on conceptual frameworks drawn from the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Just as historical discourses beyond those of Hamlet itself provide a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the political and dynastic forces shaping life in Shakespeare’s Denmark, so what might be called Hamlet’s character appears in unfamiliar and revealing relief when read against the textual contours of the psychological, rhetorical, and moral-political theorizing that lay at the heart of sixteenth-century humanism.⁹ Stephen Greenblatt gets it right: Shakespeare’s characters have a rich and compelling moral life, but that moral life is not autonomous. Instead, it is in each case intimately bound up with the particular and distinct community in which the character participates.¹⁰ For Shakespeare and the culture of which he was a part, the personal or moral could no more remain private than the political could remain the province of public life alone.

These broadly contextualizing reflections gesture towards something at the core of this book’s interpretative strategies: the conviction that only to read Hamlet isn’t even to read Hamlet. My belief is that anyone proposing to read the play closely needs to do so alongside fine-grained analyses of the numerous discursive traditions in which it has such a considerable share, and that these traditions include but extend far beyond the territories of dramatic and theatrical history. To speak in such terms is to get an inkling of just how exhilaratingly difficult a play Hamlet can be: apprehending it in even an approximation of its full complexity demands stereoscopic vision, and comprehending it demands the patience to explore it in the formal, cultural, intellectual, and historical round. To cast this thought a little differently, the reason Hamlet has been able so successfully to transcend the historical moment of its production is that William Shakespeare was responsible for writing it, not the spirit of the late Elizabethan age. The hard task is that we cannot hope to be conversant with how and why Shakespeare wrote Hamlet as he did without seeking to reconstruct aspects of sixteenth-century life as he is likely to have encountered them. That is to say, the materials, language, ideas, beliefs, assumptions, orthodoxies, and constraints with which he worked, and which he transforms through the demands of his dramatic art. Sometimes, such reconstructions can be straightforwardly historicist. More often than not, they require the exercise of the historical, scholarly, moral, aesthetic, or theoretical imagination. Further, and as this emphasis on imagination is intended to suggest, they should never be understood as singular or fixed: Hamlet is anything but a unicursive text, and there are many paths both through and around it. At all times, my guiding principle has been that in selecting the languages through which to interpret her objects of study, the literary critic must be able to exploit the disciplines of the scholar without being limited by them. No matter how hard-won or historically sensitive a contextual reconstruction might be, its literary critical value depends on its ability to furnish the reader with some form or other of expository or interpretative payoff. It has to pass the so what? test.

As will become apparent over the course of the next several hundred pages, I take it that my approach not only better locates Hamlet within Hamlet, but that it offers to rehabilitate a coherent and intensely challenging work of tragedy—albeit one in which Shakespeare steadfastly disregards the rules of Aristotelian and humanist poetics. (Many of the troubles in reading Hamlet come from the determination to align it with a tragic paradigm by which Shakespeare set only the slightest store; in fact, as I argue in my concluding chapter, Shakespeare’s tragic model resembles the more flexible notion of tragic sublimity expounded by the Pseudo-Longinus.) In Stephen Booth’s aptly irreverent phraseology, critics have too often been prepared "to indulge a not wholly explicable fancy that in Hamlet we behold the frustrated and inarticulate Shakespeare furiously wagging his tail in an effort to tell us something".¹¹ Throughout, my working assumption is that Shakespeare was neither frustrated nor inarticulate, and that he carefully crafted Hamlet with particular effects and purposes in mind.

Here as elsewhere, Joel Altman’s Tudor Play of Mind offers much of value. For Altman, humanist drama functioned as a medium of intellectual and emotional exploration for sixteenth-century minds that had been taught to think in the rhetorical tradition, and that were accustomed to examine many sides of a given theme. Meaning of one sort or another "could be discerned only through the total action of the drama. Thus the experience of the play was the thing".¹² Altman goes on to place Hamlet and Hamlet on the edge of Elizabethan humanism, marking the point at which many of its governing assumptions can be said to have died.¹³ Justifiably so. But to anyone seeking to understand Hamlet, his emphasis on attending to the total action of the drama remains exemplary. It’s just that doing so is tough, the more so if we are to experience the play in anything like the manner of those who encountered it in and around the year 1600. Furthermore, and as Lorna Hutson has outlined with astute clarity, Shakespeare’s dramaturgy is unusually inferential. Rather than spelling out how, where, when, or why the action is unfolding, Shakespeare presents his audience with the circumstantial data required for them to infer or deduce its causes for themselves; and, on many occasions, to question the processes through which their inferences or deductions have been reached.¹⁴ No matter how creative or well-read or assiduous a twenty-first-century Shakespearean one might be, this manner of proceeding can result in bafflement. What is more, although this perplexity frequently does the work of Aristotle’s primal wonder, it just as often leaves one feeling adrift. All the more reason that we should neither baulk at nor fetishize the interpretative challenges posed by Hamlet, much less attempt to negate them by seizing upon one aspect or other of the play in order to refashion its entirety in the image of our own interests. The need to take pains, like the need to respect indeterminacy or irreconcilability, might just be the point. We frequently hear versions of the claim, most prominently voiced by Laurence Olivier, that Hamlet is the tragedy of a young man who cannot make up his mind. I would prefer to describe it as a tragedy in which Shakespeare confronts his audiences with the realization that they have no fixed points of reference with which to help them make up theirs.¹⁵ It begins with Barnardo, on watch but deprived of the light with which to see. Hearing a noise and sensing that others are around, he calls out: Who’s there? (1.1.1). He never receives an answer. Throughout the play, Shakespeare compels us to grapple with his question for ourselves—unaided, and alone.

When thinking about Hamlet as an architectonic whole, it can thus be useful to recall that Hamlet belongs to a larger dramatic entity: though he dominates the play that shares his royal patronym, he only exists in relation to those on stage around him. Yes, Hamlet speaks more and more powerfully than any other character. Yes, his soliloquies allow us to witness him thinking out loud in a way that is unprecedented, and that continues to provide those playing him with a form of cadenza through which to exhibit their actorly skill.¹⁶ But as Frank Kermode rightly emphasizes, Hamlet’s dramatic presence is framed by his interactions with his fellow characters—interactions that are typified by deliberate pairing, or doubling.¹⁷ If we accept Shakespeare’s numerous direct and indirect invitations to compare him with Horatio, Laertes, Fortinbras, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Ophelia, or his father’s ghost, he appears just as problematically flawed as they do; further, it becomes clear that his flaws, weaknesses, and blind spots stand in continuous rather than contiguous relation to theirs. Hamlet is emphatic but unconvincing, given to philosophizing but philosophically incoherent, conscience-stricken but capable of the utmost cruelty without a second thought, and self-interested without being able to determine where that interest, or that self, might lie. Despite Hamlet’s professions to the contrary, these pairings do not consist of opposites, whether mighty or mismatched. Instead, their component parts exist in contrapuntal relation to one another, and draw attention to discomfiting similarity where none would seem to exist. Their effect is that of a moral and dramatic fugue. To be sure, Shakespeare has a certain amount of fun with the indistinguishability of courtiers like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (as, e.g., at 2.2.33–34), and gestures back to works like The Comedy of Errors in so doing. But Elsinore is no Ephesus: there is a sense in which all those constrained to exist within the moral economy of Hamlet are interchangeable. All are bluffing their way through the dark.

What sets Hamlet apart from the remainder of the dramatis personae is the degree to which Shakespeare explores through him the insight that the insufficiency of received ethical and political wisdom does not just have public consequences. Transposed onto the person of Hamlet, it calls into question the fundamentals of who and what a human individual might be said to be. By revealing that even Hamlet, discontent as he is with the prevailing moral order, is bound by cultural circumstance to use his intelligence as his accomplice rather than his guide, Shakespeare discloses something of the plight faced by every inhabitant of his Danish playworld. In a sort of double synecdoche, the part speaks for the whole just as the whole represents the part; all are cut off from the resources through which they might understand themselves or make their existences meaningful. As I explore in my discussion of hunting language in chapter 2, this dynamic is one of the things that separates Hamlet from the revenge tragedy tradition of, for example, Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. Here, the revenger is bound to find a way in which to act virtuously when the civic space has been corrupted by the actions of those at the top of the social and political hierarchy. Generally speaking, this proves to be impossible. In seeking the wild justice that his heart demands, the revenger is moved to disregard morality and legality, and must therefore die. Even so, as circumstance rather than an inherently defective moral orthodoxy is to blame for the predicaments in which these revenge protagonists find themselves, a version of order is reasserted at the end of the play—after, that is, the villains and their revengers have been removed from the scene. But in Hamlet, the actions of those at the top of the social and political hierarchy (including Claudius, Old Hamlet, and Hamlet himself) are a symptom of whatever it is that’s wrong, not its cause. There is no discernible framework of right and wrong; no epilogue affirming that all will be well if only princes conduct themselves virtuously. Humanist orthodoxy as dramatized in Hamlet is instead a set of doctrines that distorts reality and constrains all human beings to obscure their true natures—from themselves as much as from others. In being preoccupied with obtaining and asserting power of various kinds, this orthodoxy only pretends to be concerned with either virtue or veracity. Just as it forces us to play at being ourselves, it prevents us from assuming truly meaningful roles in the public, private, intellectual, or artistic spheres.

Hamlet thus offers a representation of the cultural dynamics shaping human existence that is rich, sustained, compelling, and completely at odds with early modern convention. Its moral universe is an unyielding night. One that self-exploration, inwardness, honour, loyalty, love, poetry, philosophy, politics, moral scruple, military force, and religious belief are powerless to illuminate. The owl of Minerva has been and gone.

This book has five substantive chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 lay the foundations on which chapters 3 to 5 build. Chapter 1 establishes the place of Hamlet in relation to the humanist moral philosophy of the long sixteenth century. This was principally developed around the writings of the Roman rhetorician, lawyer, politician, and moral theorist Cicero, for whom one of the governing metaphors of civic existence was derived from the stage. Chapter 2 explores Shakespeare’s repudiation of this Ciceronian-humanist model through Hamlet’s pervasive (and hitherto all but ignored) discourse of hunting, fowling, falconry, and fishing. Within the world of the hunt, the notion of acting—of performing a particular role—is just as important as it is within a stage production. But here the roles one plays are not measured by reason, virtue, propriety, verisimilitude, or even the pleasure they might give to an audience. Instead, one acts to mislead one’s predators or one’s prey and, just as frequently, to mislead oneself about the appetitive nature of one’s existence.

The remaining three chapters consider how Hamlet the character should be read as part of a work of drama shaped by the assumption of roles that claim the authority of nature, morality, tradition, or religious belief, but that turn out to be corrosively inadequate. In framing these chapters, I have used as something between a heuristic and a structural principle the three partes of the human understanding categorized by Francis Bacon in the second book of his Advancement of Learning. These consist of memory, imagination, and reason. In their turn, they correspond to the three chief products of human learning: history, poetry, and philosophy.¹⁸ Following Bacon’s lead, chapter 3 examines Hamlet’s memory and accomplishments as a historian; chapter 4 examines Hamlet’s imagination and his accomplishments as a poet; chapter 5 examines Hamlet’s reason and his accomplishments as a philosopher. Each chapter consists of a series of commentaries on the passages in which Hamlet evinces the persona in question, often reading Hamlet’s performances alongside those of others in the play. Of course, these commentaries can be read simply as commentaries. Taken together, however, they in each case cohere into an argument about Shakespeare’s dissatisfaction with various forms of late-sixteenth-century humanist convention.

Each of these three chapters is concerned more with what Hamlet says than with what he does. I defer to nobody in my attachment to Wittgenstein’s doctrine that words are in and of themselves deeds, but talking about revenge is not an act of the same sort as vindictively cutting off someone’s head.¹⁹ Hamlet’s foremost domain is that of linguistic action, and it is my contention that Shakespeare makes him speak as he does in order to suggest certain things about (i) the qualities of his mind and disposition and (ii) the nature of the parts he seeks to play. At risk of repeating myself, I should stress that my goal here is in no sense to indict Hamlet’s character or intelligence: although generations of critics have claimed otherwise, I do not take him to be any worthier of praise or blame than the remainder of those in Shakespeare’s Denmark.²⁰ It is just that by giving us more access to Hamlet than to the play’s other characters, Shakespeare allows us to observe the intermingling of humanist doctrine not only