Hamlet Without Hamlet

by Margareta de Grazia

• Real crux of the play is that Hamlet is disposed - this is viewed as legitimate in the eyes of the courts
• in a hereditary monarchy like England this would be unthinkable
• (maybe Hamlet's behaviour is so unfitting to a royal prince because he feels dispossesed)
• 'For I must hold my tongue'
• If he protested would be guilty of treason
• Claudius 'popp'd in between th'election and my hopes' 5.2.65
• Under antic disposition Hamlet no longer needs to hold his tongue
• refers to self as 'naked' and 'alone'
• he refers to himself in terms of lack - thankless beggar,trapped prisoner, hollow reed
• importance of land
• gionzago and lucianus fight over the 'bank of flowers' or the 'estate'
• Laertes and Hamlet fight over flower strewn pit of Ophelia's grave
• Flesh and earth linked like Adam when Hamlet says 'piece of work' (2.2.303) and 'quintessence of dust' (2.2.308)
• 'scholarship has been content to treat the plot as an inert backdrop to the main character'
• (Perhaps Hamlet delays because he can do nothing, stripped of all his power etc)
• Heraldry - Pyrrhus, Laertes calls for heraldic panel after father's death, allusions to classical and biblical women (Niobe, Hecuba, Jepthath's daughter) relating to cutting off of progeny or lineage
• Hamme early german word for home
• hamlet is a cluster of homes: a kingdom in miniature

Kronborg Castle, Denmark

• 'identified with the beginning of the modern age'
• depends on Senecan formula of murder, madness and revenge
• 'in the first decades of the play Hamlet's signature action may have been not paralysing thought but frenzied motion'
• plays pipes and dances jig after success of play, leaping into Ophelia's grave
• hyperactivity linked with 'roustabout clown of medieval folk tradition'
• Pope compared Shakespeare's word to 'an ancient, majestic piece of Gothick architecture'
• Thomas Robertson 'Hamelt in his sole person, predominating over and almost eclipsing the entire action of the drama'
• Coleridge sees 'Shakespeare as heaping one provocation after another in order to dramatize his protagonist's utter indifference to them'
• what need for plot/action 'among such as have a world within themselves'
• Hamlet's inwardness a dramatical counterpart of Martin Luther's 'introversion' of the soul upon itself/turning faith inwards
• Hamlet's anachronistic futurity

• Before Freud Hamlet had been compared to Orestes rather than Oedipus
• For Freud Hamlet's conflict is unconscious rather than conscious
• Jacques Lacan 'From one end of the play to the other, all anyone talks about is mourning'
• Hamlet's problems one of modern society - the truncated and furtive rites of mourning in the play - King Hamlet's death without final unction, Polonius's 'hugger mugger' bburial, Ophelia's abbreviated service
• Present abandonment of rites and ceremonies which compensated loss
• Death when not repaired by rituals triggers the male 'scar of castration' which mourner tries to fix with imaginary projections or mirages
• Nicolas Abraham - Hamlet's guilt in father's crimes but because of appending of sixth act where revealed tha Old Hamlet killed Old Fortinbras wih poisoned sword - 'phantom effect'

• Horatio to grounded in 'scholar' knowledge' to speak to ghost properly
• Harold Bloom thinks play reveals the 'internalization of the self'

• death as great leveller - discussion of class in graveyard
• more desirable to buried in a church
• plague meant problems with consecrated ground
• labourers descendants of adam
• shovels might have recalled protests against land enclosures
• gravediggers lack of respect for those who were higher than him in life
• hamlet realising own position as well as criticising court
• hamlet  on 'receiving end of antic disposition'