Introduction: Busting the Hermeneutical Ghosts in the Hamlet Machine

Abstract

Considering the title page of the Second Quarto, which reads The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, (2) claims to be an enlargement and correction of the First Quarto, it is curious to note that the main role that Hamlet plays throughout the play is in keeping with the description of his childhood mentor, Yorick, the court jester. When the gravedigger unearths Yorick's skull Hamlet immediately recalls how Yorick "poured a flagon of Rhenish on [someone] once" and refers to the old jester as a "mad fellow" and "mad rogue"(V.i.155-159). (3) In this respect, Hamlet's "antic disposition" or mask of madness seems to be a 'chip off the old block.' More specifically, considering the fact that the jester made a profession of playing with, poking at, and exposing others peoples' vices, errors, mistakes, faults and general human foibles, Hamlet's biting wit continues in this tradition. In fact, the central plot of the play consists in Hamlet trying to reveal what others, whether it be his mother, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and of course, Claudius, wish to hide away. Hamlet also balances his polemical attacks against everyone, by including himself, not unlike the medieval court jester. For example, during the Play scene, after indicting the king via the dumb play, and his mother via the Player Queen who will "keep her word"(III.ii.219), Hamlet, like a jester who does not wish to cause the royal family to feel that the jester feels superior to them, indicts himself with his reference to Lucianus; thus rounding out his claim that the players do merely "poison in jest"(III.ii.221). In this respect, like many medieval and Renaissance jesters who learned the hard way, often becoming a meal for the king's hungry dogs after offending their royal and cankerous master, Hamlet must carefully monitor his behavior, juggling/judging when to 'let go' and 'hold on' to his satirical thoughts. In relation to this jester like aspect of Hamlet's behavior there have been two recent pieces of scholarship, namely, "Hamlet", Without Hamlet (2007) by Margreta de Grazia and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003) by Harold Bloom. Curiously, both explore Hamlet's playfulness but in two divergent ways. On the one hand, Bloom re-addresses Shakespeare's most enigmatic and memorable character by qualifying in the preface that the present volume is a postlude to his earlier work Shakespeare: Invention of the Human. In deriving the present thematic title, Bloom cleverly quotes Polonius, "The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy ... or poem unlimited"; and asserts that "There is no end to Hamlet or to Hamlet, because there is no end to Shakespeare." (4) Accordingly, Bloom ends his new volume by noting: "We want to hear Hamlet on everything, as we hear Montaigne, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud. Shakespeare, having broken into the mode of the poem unlimited, closed it so that always we would go on needing to hear more." (5) Essentially, Bloom asserts that meaning for the "hero of consciousness," (6) who also "knows that he knows more" (7) than his audience, is that "Hamlet discovers that his life has been a quest with no object except his own endlessly burgeoning subjectivity." (8) In contrast, Margreta de Grazia argues that Hamlet, the "icon of consciousness," has been mis-read and over-stated within the context of the overall play. (9) In fact, whereas Bloom exalts in Hamlet's subjectivity, De Grazia asserts that it is virtually non-existent, a mere addendum supplanted onto the character by modern criticism. In response to de Grazia's earlier essay titled, "Hamlet's Thoughts and Antics, Juliet Fleming writes: "This is a critical move that many will resist, for it severs in one blow the axiom according to which much Shakespearean criticism currently proceeds." (10) She adds: "... in contemporary Shakespearean criticism it is often developed according to a process of historical inversion that attributes to Shakespeare's plays the capacity to "speak to"--indeed to originate a conversation with-the present moment. …