‘He waxes desperate with imagination’
‘He waxes desperate with imagination’
Or, re-reading “Hamlet” with Margreta de Grazia and Luiz Costa Lima
1.
There is a persistent irony lurking beneath the reception of Hamlet over the past four centuries. The central place of Hamlet in the Shakespearean canon, particularly in our popular consciousness, and the dominance of Shakespeare in the Western canon, tends to hide the often messy history of canon formation, and is at odds with the fact that for the first two hundred years of this history, Hamlet was often seen as a marginal play, peripheral to what was considered great elsewhere in Shakespeare’s work. Before 1800, there is little positive said about this play, and it was considered, if anything, as a problem to be solved, not in terms of its exploration of the mystery of the human heart, as we like to see it today, but as an editorial problem of how to include this troublesome play in editions of Shakespeare’s posthumously published works. The general condition behind this problem was a question of how, in a burgeoning Age of Reason, to approach a work that seems to resist reason at almost every point.
There are several historical moments we must consider, in order to re-orient ourselves to this situation. The first moment – and probably the most obvious – is the theatres being shut down for more than a decade during the English Interregnum of 1649–1660. But this explicit form of overt censorship should not distract us too much from the various forms of control that operated on either side of this period of theatre closures, which we shall return to shortly. Previously, I outlined the work of Luiz Costa Lima and his notion of the control of the imaginary. Let’s consider here how Costa Lima distinguishes this relationship between censorship and control:
Censorship is, above all, an act, wherever it may draw on for support. Control is, above all, a compromise with the dominant order and reason. Censorship hinders, prohibits, destroys. Control proposes a negotiation first: fiction is permitted as long as it respects certain limits – as long as it does not show itself to be fictional. . . . When a controller’s ideas coincide with those of the institution, control may change into outright censorship, and the postulation of a control may function at the same time as a prohibition. More often than not, however, control is better represented as the sword of Damocles, powerful because of what it threatens.
Following the lifting of the ban on theatre performance following the Interregnum, for example, plays were accepted, but only within certain proscribed limits. It is here that the ‘sword of Damocles’ may be considered.
The second historical moment to consider comes at the end of the 17th century – nearly a hundred years after Hamlet was first performed – and it coincides with the advent of Newtonian physics. It is the idea that if there are fixed and identifiable laws of nature, then there must be a corollary set of laws in the human heart; some fixed principle to character that can be discovered. As Gefen Bar-On Santor states, in his 2008 paper, “Looking for ‘Newtonian’ Laws in Shakespeare: The Mystifying Case of Hamlet”: ‘It is not surprising that the editors [of Shakespeare] were so disturbed by the heterogeneous, often self-contradictory, character of Hamlet. After all, if the science of editing in the eighteenth century could be summed up in one central idea, this organizing idea was the search for underlying principles that explain human behavior.’ And the newly founded Newtonian laws of nature were the ideal model for trying to establish a corollary set of laws in the human heart. ‘When the editors identify such a principle in relation to a character,’ Santor states, ‘they succeed in their role as the scientists of Shakespeare. It is for this reason that Hamlet frustrated the scientifically-minded editors: they were unable to find a principle that would explain his often contradictory and erratic behavior.’ Here Santor cites a critic writing in 1780, who observed that ‘of all the characters of Shakespeare that of Hamlet has been generally thought the most difficult to be reduced to any fixed or settled principle.’
In the second half of the 18th century – and this is the third moment to consider – the emphasis shifted slightly away from asserting an internal organising principle to the character of Hamlet (which had proven to be largely a failed enterprise), and more toward considering this character in terms of an expression of Shakespeare’s own biography, which had itself become a matter of editorial concern. Santor:
This was the idea that Hamlet was not an autonomous character, but the voice of Shakespeare himself. Hamlet, the argument goes, is incoherent and confusing because he is just like Shakespeare himself: a person of superior understanding but also of erratic and often morally questionable practices, and with a tendency towards nonsense and verbosity.
This only seems to have shifted the problem from the ‘play’ to the ‘author’ of the play, however; but it also opened the door to alternative paths – exterior to the work itself – which allowed critics to avoid the prickly problem of having to consider the play on its own terms, by now trying to explain the play through locating its historical and textual sources, its theatrical conventions, and so on.
The fourth moment – and the most significant, as it includes a synthesis of these previous moments, and makes an advance upon them – comes in the nineteenth century, through a more positive approach to the play that was then happening in Germany – by Goethe, initially, and later the Romantics – drawing on the aesthetics of Kant and, then, Hegel. This came at the same time as a radical reappraisal of the play in England, albeit drawing on the same Kantian sources, particularly in the work of Coleridge. As Margreta de Grazia – who will be our guide for much that follows – states in her indispensable study, “Hamlet” without Hamlet: ‘Shakespeare, however, had understood what Coleridge had recently learned from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, that the imagination organises perception of time and space in accordance with its own a priori categories.’ More importantly, however, for Coleridge, is the way Shakespeare resisted such unities in his work – especially in Hamlet – and this provided an explanation, not only for why English critics until then had been unable to understand the play, but it also helped clear the ground to provide a fresh explanation for the play. De Grazia:
For Coleridge, Shakespeare’s indifference to the unities [of time and space] represented a radical departure from the ancients that it called for a new generic classification:. . . . the “romantic” . . . not to be confused with “romanticism,” the period concept (or intellectual movement) for which he himself would become a defining figure. The “romantic” that he applies to Shakespeare reverts back to the middle ages. It invokes the time of the fall of Rome to the humanistic revival of its culture . . . . a period in which cultural forms are free to develop without subscribing to ancient strictures.
And this sense of the ‘romantic’ clears the ground to explain Shakespeare’s apparent lack of method (that would otherwise be based on reason), which so confused previous English critics, by asserting an alternative method, which Coleridge called the ‘psychological’ (grounded in the imagination). ‘Unlike “romantic,” Coleridge’s “psychological” connected Shakespeare not to the bygone time of the Provençal troubadours but to the very contemporary present of German idealist philosophy, particularly that of Kant,’ de Grazia states: ‘As Coleridge allowed, it was Hamlet which drove him to “philosophical criticism”; only after reading Kant’s account of the primacy of mind in the Critique of Pure Reason did he recognize “Shakespeare’s deep and accurate science in mental philosophy” – what he termed his “psychological genius.”’
While Coleridge deployed German philosophy to provide a fresh approach to Hamlet, at the same time in Germany, philosophers – Hegel, for example, but in an idealist tradition launched by Kant, and adapted by the Romantics – were turning to Hamlet to provide fresh approaches to aesthetics.
2.
Luiz Costa Lima – who will be our other guide in much that follows – particularly in The Limits of Voice (1996), explores the more general conditions under which such Romantic aesthetics emerged. The starting point here is Kant’s third Critique, concerned with judgement, and its introduction of the positive role of the imagination in order to bring together the concerns of the previous two Critiques, understanding and reason. For Kant, this forms the basis of his aesthetics. But what Costa Lima discerns in his own reappraisal of the imagination in Kant’s work is an inherent tension that is not fully elaborated, but which pushes Kant’s thinking simultaneously in two opposite directions. The first direction is toward what Costa Lima calls aestheticisation, in which the imagination is delimited by the needs of the understanding, subjected to the dictates of reason. The other direction is toward what Costa Lima calls criticity. The translator of The Limits of Voice explains this term:
“Criticity” is a neologism – as is the Portuguese criticidade in the original – coined in order to distinguish the act of questioning from both the act of judging (“critique”) and the activity by means of which the act of judging is effected (“criticism”). The questioning, non-normative function is certainly already present in Kantian criticism, but the distinction was never captured by a contrasting pair of words, in English or in Portuguese.
Costa Lima argues that – following its origins in the ‘critique’ of Kant – and its rise and fall in the ‘criticism’ of Schlegel – this initial emergence of criticity – a form of non-normative questioning – is quickly subjugated under aestheticisation – the process by which this moment of criticity is tamed, linearised, and made subordinate to more dominant discourses. For the Romantics, for example, it was the burgeoning field of literary criticism – authorised by discourses of history and philosophy – that became the agent of this form of the control of the imaginary.
3.
From what we have already seen of de Grazia, however, it could be argued that a parallel process was taking place in Britain. In both countries, this process precipitated a renewed focus on the inner life of the Hamlet character, with these various approaches coming out of England and Germany informing and reinforcing each other. The result is a method of interpretation of Hamlet, dominant to this day, that inserts its protagonist into a Romantic tradition of individualism and interiority, and that – so the argument goes – is what makes this character so modern, and so misunderstood by Shakespeare’s own pre-modern contemporaries.
Margreta de Grazia, however, argues explicitly against inserting Shakespeare, in general, and Hamlet, in particular, into this Romantic tradition of individualism and interiority. The process of doing so, she argues, is predicated upon this nineteenth century abstracting of Hamlet (the character) from the context of Hamlet (the play). Hence the title of her work, “Hamlet” without Hamlet. As she concludes:
It is now that Hamlet or rather Hamlet (and it is easy to see how the former has been subsumed under the latter) might be called “modern” in its present sense: that is, in possession of interiority or subjectivity, whether imagined in terms of Coleridge’s psychology or Hegel’s consciousness. Accounts of the play’s reception have assumed that an interiorized Hamlet had been in the wings for two centuries, waiting to be discovered, postponing his debut until around 1800 when the right audience came along. Yet when situated in the context of the effort to distinguish the modern from the ancient, the emergence of his interiority seems less a critical discovery than a final solution to the problem of how to clear a critical space for Shakespeare. For two centuries, Shakespeare’s dramas had been deemed unruly and wild by the biases of the ancients. While the category of the “romantic” allowed for an alternative genealogy, it is that of the psychological which lifted Shakespeare out of the dramatic contest with the ancients altogether, and primarily through the character of Hamlet. The focus of the play moved inward, and expressed itself not by the action primary to ancient drama, but by the withdrawal from action into the depths and interstices of character. With the tie to the past dissolved, Hamlet was newly opened to the future.
Against this dominant trend, de Grazia’s work reinserts the character back into the context of the play. I shall consider some of the consequences of this reappraisal shortly. For now, what is significant for the purposes of the current discussion is the broader argument: that we can discern a distinct process across the first three centuries of Hamlet’s reception, which has informed its increased canonicity within the last century, that has seen the play subjected to various approaches – from the Newtonian, to the historical, to the psychological, to the philosophical – with each approach predicated upon an increased abstraction of the character of Hamlet from the context of the play; which, in effect, proceeds by domesticating the character – literally, making him a home within various theoretical constructs – and taming the play itself, as a work of literature, a work of imagination, by containing and marginalising those aspects of the play which otherwise defy these explanatory frameworks.
Initially, this should strike us as strange, if only we consider the fact that the premise of the play is that the character, Hamlet, loses his place within his home; basically, it is the story of a man who has lost his kingdom. And so, any critical practice that proposes to domesticate the exiled Hamlet, to provide him with an alternative home, therefore goes against the play itself. And this is de Grazia’s basic thesis:
In order for Hamlet to appear modern, the premise of the play had to drop out of sight. The premise is this: at his father’s death, just at the point when an only son in a patrilineal system stands to inherit, Hamlet is dispossessed – and, as far as the court is concerned, legitimately.
The promise of the patronymic is broken. . . . Hamlet’s bereavement at the play’s start has been considered in light of his father’s sudden death and his mother’s hasty remarriage, but without acknowledgement of how both events have left him disentitled.
I will consider the consequences of this later. For now, this is perhaps enough upon which to make the suggestion that the persistent irony lurking beneath the popular reception of Hamlet over the past four centuries – that it is predicated upon this long process of domesticating the character and taming the play – is the result of the play being subjected to the control of the imaginary.
4.
It may be useful to linger here for a moment on this idea of control – but in the current context. Because I want to argue not just that Shakespeare is subject to such a control, but that there is an intuitive self-awareness of this in his work, resulting in the presence of in-built strategies to resist – though not terribly successfully, texts being inherently defenseless against the intentional reader – its complete imposition.
Such control during the period under which we are examining – Hamlet was on the cusp of the year 1600 – operated under the auspices of mimesis translated as imitatio – or imitation – that was instrumentalised under such concepts as decorum and verisimilitude. This effected a control over the imagination to the extent that it reduced the impetus for diversity and variety, and subordinated it under approved models of both discourse and behaviour.
Peter Holbrook – in his Literature and degree in Renaissance English (1994) – identifies the outward consequences of this process. He states:
If the urge toward variety is an aspect of much Elizabethan writing, it exists alongside an “artistic” commitment to regularity and order, particularly generic order. One could construct a literary history of the progressive classical humanism, a naive taste for variety gradually gives way to an inchoate ideal of formal order: such a history would trace a transition from a perceived formless or barbarous medieval literature toward a modern sense of generic order and consistency. . . . A feature of this dialectic between order and variety in literature of Renaissance England is that it is replicated in the political culture.
This history, of course, is one that Costa Lima has been working on for the past forty years; that is, a history of the control of the imaginary, where this ‘dialectic of order and variety’ operates within a suppressed definition of mimesis as both similarity and difference, a definition reduced – via imitation – to similarity alone. So it is interesting that one of the aspects of this history, which Holbrook alludes to – and which Costa Lima identifies in European discourses generally during this period – that of decorum as an instrument of control – is also present in England, during this same period. For Costa Lima this goes to the heart of the control of the imaginary, represented historically and culturally, in the deformation of mimesis as imitatio. As he states: ‘Among the thinkers of the Renaissance, in contrast, the position of the possible would come to be occupied by the category of the verisimilar, which, of course, depended on what is, the actual, which was then confused with the true.’ And the corollary concept to this rational notion of verisimilitude is the moral precept of decorum. Costa Lima argues ‘that verisimilitude refers back to the principle of decorum, a category that has the peculiar feature of combining the ethically good with the verisimilar.’
Referring back to England, Peter Holbrook points out one contribution to this process, with the Homily of Obedience. Holbrook show how, from 1547, this Homily was
read by decree in all the churches of the land, [and which] does indeed suggest that the keynote of Tudor political discourse is obedience. . . . and that the end of official discourse is always what the Homily calls “right order.” This stress on order seems to have had a simultaneous life in political, religious, and aesthetic discourses, which were themselves, probably, not as rigorously distinguishable then as now. . . . So aesthetic and social conservatism seem to run hand in hand. . . . [in which] a concern for the right order of stage plays, from the demand that they not be seditious or scandalous to the concern that they observe canons of propriety, decorum, and generic coherency, was part of a larger preoccupation with the right ordering of society.
Or – as Shakespeare states in Sonnet 66 – this could well be described as a state of being ‘tongue-tied by authority’.
5.
In order to further contextualise Shakespeare within the historical argument of the first (on Montaigne) and second (on Kant) chapters of Costa Lima’s The Limits of Voice, within which Shakespeare himself historically sits – but also as a point of entry into looking more closely at the play itself, in terms of its nascent fictionality – I want to emphasise some points of difference between Shakespeare and Montaigne, both otherwise operating against similar cultural backgrounds, both prefiguring Kant.
I will only focus on a few salient points from the first chapter of The Limits of Voice, where Costa Lima shows that Montaigne was operating in a context which had seen the decline of the previously dominant cosmological order that provided a single interpretation to each event, thus providing a unity to subjective experience. When the limitations of this Christian law started to become clear – and this unity gave way to a diversity of experience – Montaigne reoriented his understanding by bringing the role of subjectivity into the centre of his own thinking – what Costa Lima calls the consecration of the individual – as articulated in the development of a new literary genre – the essay – a move, upon which, modernity would eventually be erected.
But we shouldn’t overstate the importance of Montaigne in this regard, for as Costa Lima also shows, he was still too much of the old order to see the imagination as anything other than a corrupting influence. And this is the main point of difference, I would argue, between Montaigne and Shakespeare – where, for the latter, the imagination is not something to be wary of, but rather something to be openly embraced and enacted in dramatic form.
On the surface of his Essays, Montaigne questions the homogeneity of experience, thus revealing an underlying diversity, with the individual at the centre of this diversity, trying to make sense of it. So far so good. But in questioning this process of establishing homogeneity Montaigne turns to the imagination, and deflects his judgment there. It is this distrust of imagination, which feigns reason, and produces ghosts where really there is nothing, that undergirds Montaigne’s private scepticism – and his necessary public conservatism. One way this is expressed is in his respect for a new category of experience – that of facts. As Costa Lima states: ‘Montaigne, the consecrator of the individual, is also the champion of the fact, of what seems to be independent of judgment. Devotion to the fact is forced on the individual as the index of a Law, the testimony of a homogenising principle...’ More importantly, the valorisation of facts occurs in the absence on an overarching organising principle, but in the name of one to come. Over the next century, this new homogenising principle will appear in the form of Reason, predicated upon the accumulation and organisation of such facts.
What is culturally significant of Hamlet, however, is that this new principle of Reason had not yet been firmly established. Twenty years after Hamlet was first performed, for example, King James I told the Commons that they ‘should retain what by law and precedents were due unto them, but touching reason, it was so variable according to several humours that it were hard to know where to fix it.’ Unlike the historical Montaigne, the fictional Hamlet lives in a world devoid of stable facts – other than the central literary fact that he has become disentitled, homeless, and that this is the one fact that he does not agree with, cannot accommodate himself to, and so rebels against.
6.
It is against this background that we can now, finally, turn to the play itself. In this, I want to focus on one essential feature of Hamlet scholarship, and that is the question of Hamlet’s supposed delay, his inaction, his procrastination. Here I am once more guided by the work of Margreta de Grazia, particularly her thesis that there is actually no delay or inaction or procrastination in the play. There is, instead, a very particular sequence that the play follows. What I am adding to this thesis is the argument that, by critics importing this idea into the play – or rather, by imposing upon the play this narrow frame of interpretation – that is, by focusing on what Hamlet is supposedly not doing or putting off doing, it diverts the attention of its auditors (and readers) away from what he actually is doing.
There are two moments in the play upon which this question of delay hangs. The first is at the beginning of the play – in Act I – after the ghost tells Hamlet to avenge his death; Hamlet swears, but then delays in carrying out his promise, for another four acts. The second is in Act III, when Hamlet stumbles upon his Uncle alone, at prayer, a perfect opportunity to enact avenge; he even draws his sword, but then declines to follow through.
It is significant to note, however, that this idea of Hamlet’s delay does not surface until the beginning of the 19th century. Before then, it was not considered an issue. What was an issue, however, was what Hamlet was doing, but even here this was judged under the twin dictates of genre and decorum. In terms of genre, for example, Hamlet is a stock standard revenge play. That he doesn’t avenge his father’s murder swiftly after Act I was not considered due to some question of delay in the character of Hamlet, but only a weakness of the play itself, at the level of plot; the blame for this failing, lies not with the character but with the author. In short, as revenge plays go, Shakespeare wrote a bad one.
What’s worse is that in doing so, not only did Shakespeare violate the dictates of genre, but also that of decorum, and in a most remarkable way. In Act III, for example, the prayer scene, the reason that Hamlet did not kill his Uncle when given opportunity to do so was precisely because he was at prayer – actually, repenting for his crime – and Hamlet fears his death would see his Uncle’s soul go to heaven, and Hamlet wants, rather, to damn it to hell:
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,
And that his soul may be as damn’d and black
As hell, whereto it goes.
To appreciate the significance of this, we need to consider this once more in its historical context. As de Grazia states:
Hamlet’s desire in the prayer scene to damn a soul to eternal pain is the most extreme form of evil imaginable in a society that gave even its most heinous felons the opportunity to repent before execution. By a tradition dating back to the early Church, the desire belongs exclusively to devils; consigning souls to eternal damnation is their business in this world as well as the next’ (188)
What is also remarkable about this scene is that Hamlet is not possessed by a devil at the time, and so is perhaps the first secular character on the English stage to willingly adopt a position that hitherto had been the preserve of devils. That is, to willingly violate all the bonds of decorum or ‘right order’ that prevailed in society.
One of the consequences of this is that, following the reopening of the theatres in the late 17th century, these lines from the prayer scene – that his soul may be as damn'd and black as hell, whereto it goes – were omitted from performance. Often enough, the whole scene was omitted, and it was so right up until the mid-19th century; that is, for over 200 years. In his edited publications, however, it generally couldn’t be removed (although in some instances it was). But largely, this aspect of the play was subject to editorial condemnation. So, for example, in 1765, Samuel Johnson states, in his edition of the play, states: ‘This speech, in which Hamlet, represented as a virtuous character, is not content with taking blood for blood, but contrives damnation for the man that he would punish, is too horrible to be read or to be uttered’ (italics added).
What is interesting here is how the consequences of this 17th century prohibition still prevailed enough in the subsequent centuries that its readers still needed to be protected from what Hamlet actually does within the context of the play. It’s upon this idea that it is what he is not doing, or putting off doing, that the question of the delay developed in the 19th century as perhaps the most salient point of the play. Only then – through the interposition of philosophy into literature – were they able to develop theories to explain why he is not doing what he is supposed to be doing. This question of delay is central to the interpretations of Coleridge and Schlegel. Hegel, for example, saw the back and forth movement of this apparent procrastination as illustrating the movement of the dialectic toward self-realisation. Late in the 19th century, and into the 20th century, we have Freud grounding his own theories of dream interpretation upon his own variation of this question, and through him we have since suffered Lacan and Derrida’s reinterpretation of this question, and so on. So pervasive is this feature of control that even today such interpretations of Hamlet are still operating within the limits imposed by 17th century decorum.
7.
Sidelining this question of delay, then, stepping outside the limits of a defunct decorum, the question that remains is: so what is Hamlet actually doing? There are three points to consider in this regard. Fortunately, these three points coincide with the plot of the first three acts, respectively. Not an insignificant point to note, if only we can consent to reading the play on its own terms. In what follows, I will be relying on the readers’ familiarity with the play, while at the same time trying to provide an unfamiliar hue.
Again, we can take as a starting point a contrast between Shakespeare and Montaigne. Montaigne places the individual in the centre of a world unguided by an overarching homogenising principle, and he does so through reifying facts and denigrating the imagination. For Montaigne, the imagination, feigning the voice of reason, produces ghosts where in reality there is nothing. Hamlet opens with the personification of such a ghost, and one that takes the form of his dead father – whose death, we will recall, has disentitled Hamlet from the throne, making him homeless, both socially and spiritually. In other words, Act I thematises what for Hamlet is most absent: the King, his organising principle. But unlike Montaigne, Hamlet engages with this ghost and dramatises the consequences of this absence. Despite initially swearing allegiance to the ghost, Hamlet almost immediately questions the validity of what he has just been told, spurred on by his companions. He cannot automatically trust the ghost – does it come from heaven or from hell? Is it telling the truth or is it telling a lie? He has no proof, no facts, upon which to legitimate his actions. He cannot openly accuse the King of murder without evidence – because this would be treason, an executable offence (and indeed in the final scenes of the play when Hamlet does vocalise publicly his accusation at Claudius, the chorus of Treason! Treason! is immediately raised). Disentitled, lifted out of a world of stable facts, where a standard of true or false can be readily applied to experience, Hamlet is pushed toward the realm of the imagination.
In short, Hamlet, in Act I, as Horatio says of him, waxes desperate with imagination.
ACT II is notable for the absence of Hamlet for the main, although he is very much the topic of conversation amongst those who dominate this Act – Polonius, Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – and when towards the end of the Act we meet Hamlet again he is – reading.
Now only a philosopher could interpret such an act as being a form of procrastination, an inactivity.
But if what Hamlet is doing is considered more closely, it will be seen that Act II actually inverts the perspective of Act I. Previously, Hamlet thematised the absent; now it thematises what is present, but with an added critical dimension afforded to it by being opened up to questions of the imagination. Hamlet now has a new perspective: it is here that he talks about this goodly frame the earth being a sterile promontory, about what a piece of work is man . . . this quintessence of dust, and so on. Far from procrastinating, Hamlet is actively deploying his new perspective in order to make sense of his world. All he needs now is an opportunity to enact it more concretely. Act II ends with the arrival of the players, and Hamlet’s course – as well as the course of Hamlet – is set.
First, Hamlet considers the nature of the actor – and we should bear in mind that already before now Hamlet himself has adopted an antic disposition – so this description is also a self-description. In particular, he points out how in a fiction, in a dream of passion, a player could force his soul to his own conceit. . . . his whole function suiting with forms to his conceit. Thomson and Taylor, editors of my Arden edition of Hamlet, note that conceit in this context refers to a person having everything about their expression and demeanor matching ‘what he is imagining’ – ‘whole function means all his actions and his emotions’; that is, operating under the form of his imagination. Second, from this, Hamlet decides, of course, to write a play – wherein he’ll catch the conscience of the King. Here, once more, Hamlet inverts the activity of the previous Act, from reading to writing.
Now only a literary critic could interpret the writing of a play as being an example of procrastination, an example of delay.
Act III is framed by the performance of the play itself – of the play within the play – but already Act II has set up what Hamlet hopes to be executed here, so that when it does, we, the audience of the frame play, become involved – just as Hamlet involves Horatio (wittingly) and Claudius (unwittingly) in the audience of The Mousetrap: it is here that we are offered an early, unique perspective on the inner workings of fiction and its reception. Now what is remarkable here is that the play itself – this work of fiction – does not in itself establish any facts; it doesn’t in itself prove the King’s guilt. But what it does is what all good fiction does, and that is that it elicits a response in its reader, audience, or receiver – in this case, Claudius himself – and it forces upon him a critical perspective on his own actions. In other words, it creates an affect that reveals what lies beneath his demeanor.
We don’t actually know how the actual murder of the King, Hamlet’s father, was performed – the Mousetrap play only enacts what the ghost tells Hamlet, and there is no other textual evidence in the play to support this either way. But Hamlet observes Claudius, and he also asks Horatio to observe Claudius, too, and only through this dual process – where both our judgments join in censure of his seeming – do they come to know what Claudius now knows: that he is not at home on the throne. Only then does Hamlet realise that it is not a damned ghost that led him to this point and that his own imaginations are not foul as a Vulcan’s stithy.
But even here, the play is not itself a verification of fact. This only comes afterwards, from overhearing Claudius at prayer confessing to God and asking forgiveness. And yet, as we have seen, Hamlet decides not to act immediately, because he wants to compound Claudius’ newfound homelessness, by ensuring he has no home in the afterlife as well – that his soul may be as damn'd and black as hell, whereto it goes. It is significant, when considering Hamlet's refusal to give facts their due, that this process of verification, at the heart of the play, comes in the form of an imposter King confessing to God, to the old organizing principle that Hamlet himself no longer recognises.
8.
Act II is also remarkable for another point – and on this I will conclude – and that is, between the realisation of fiction at the end of Act II, and its concrete enactment in the performance of the Mousetrap, in Act III, there is a scene between Ophelia and Hamlet, where he condemns her to a nunnery. Well, Hamlet goes on to admit:
I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at
my beck than I have thoughts to put them in;
imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.
Here he admits to his situation, of being both disentitled and yet ambitious, and so revengeful; but then he states an important sequence, between thoughts and action, there is the necessary link of imagination, to give his thoughts shape, and to transpose them into action.
This also describes the movement of the plot over these first three acts, the necessary sequence that the play must follow – without delay.
This movement – not coincidentally, as I have been arguing – also matches the description of Costa Lima’s key points, and their development within the history of the control of the imaginary. First, there is the emergence of the imaginary, as the thematisation of absence – which we saw enacted in Act I. ‘I take the imaginary to be one of the two forms of thematisation of the world,’ Costa Lima states. ‘Whereas the other form, the perceptual, locates things as present, the imaginary annihilates (néantise) them, thematising them as absent. (I perceive what surrounds me, but I can imagine only what is absent.)’ Then, there is the negation of that negation, the critical use of the imaginary, which characterises the emergence of fiction – which we saw enacted in Act II. Costa Lima: ‘As Wolfgang Iser would say, because the fictional concretises in a text that materializes in a signifying organization, the fictional negates the negation of the imaginary on which it is based. The fictional is a critical use of the imaginary.’ Finally, this critical use of the imaginary is concretised in a particular work of literary fiction – which we saw enacted in Act III, in The Mousetrap. ‘Product of mimesis, actualized by the thematisation of the imaginary, nourished by the negation of the negativity of the latter, the fictional takes on the appearance of a “game” that does not contain the choice between true and false,’ Costa Lima states. ‘That does not mean, however, that it does not touch upon truths (pragmatic, religious, and so forth) but rather only that it is a game that puts truths into question; that is, it is a game that does not so much expand or apply truths as interrogate them.’ As Hamlet, for example, deployed The Mousetrap to interrogate Claudius. This creates, for the remainder of the play, a new role for the audience (or reader) of the play, a fresh perspective that puts in our hands certain tools of inquiry, of questioning.
How we use them is up to us.
But what 19th century critics of the play chose to do, however, is effectively remove this link – this role of the imagination within the play – without which action can’t take place, and then they have reinterpreted this as inaction, and so develop the erroneous question of Hamlet’s delay. However, I would argue that the only delay associated with Hamlet is not one inherent to the play itself, but is one ever present in critics of the play over the last 400 years – and that is a delay in coming to grips with the question of the emergence of fictionality – not as a false discourse, but as one which operates outside of the standard of true or false, one which questions – ultimately one which questions our place in the world, and how much we feel we are at home in it. Raising the question of Hamlet’s delay, in other words, or the ‘meaning’ of Hamlet, effectively operates through suppressing Hamlet’s questioning of us.
And it is that questioning that we keep, endlessly, deferring.
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