SOURCE: "Hamlet, 'A Man to Double Business Bound'," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer, 1983, pp. 181-99.

[In the following essay, Nardo notes the pervasiveness in Hamlet of the double-bind, a paradoxical situation that forces its victim to choose between impossible alternatives, and identifies it as the organizing principle of the play.

Alone in his private chapel, Claudius feels impelled by his guilt to pray. But, he laments,

    Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will:
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent;
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect.¹

Like so many passages in Shakespeare's most ambiguous play, Claudius' words apply less to himself than to Hamlet. In self-pity Claudius feels like a victim of a double bind. In reality he has a clear moral choice: to renounce "crown … ambition and … queen" and be freed to pray for forgiveness, or to keep "those effects for which [he] did the murder" and live with his guilt. He lacks the courage to choose and tries unsuccessfully to have it both ways, kneeling and hoping lamely that "All may be well." Hamlet, however, is a true victim of double binds. Thrust into a familial situation remarkably similar in its patterns of interaction to those of families which produce mad children, he is confronted with contradictory demands from which he cannot escape. Recent research by psychologists who have refined the double-bind theory since its first publication in 1956 makes it possible to define with some precision how both Hamlet and Ophelia are placed in double-bind situations and how their struggles to escape result in tragedy.²

I

Most previous psychological studies of Hamlet have been based on Freud's opinion that Hamlet represents a classic case of Oedipal conflict. Ernest Jones assumes that, like all male children, Hamlet must have experienced jealousy of his father's claim on his mother's love. As Jones reads the play, Hamlet's un-acceptable rage and his desire to murder his father were repressed until Claudius performed the very act he fantasized as a child: killing his father and marrying his mother. Claudius' deed reactivates Hamlet's repressed fantasies and renders him incapable of avenging his father's murder; to kill Claudius, Hamlet must kill himself, whose desires are no less vicious than Claudius' acts. Avi Erlich agrees that Hamlet suffers from the Oedipal dilemma, but he finds the source of Hamlet's tragedy not in his repressed desire to murder his father, but rather in his fruitless search throughout the play for a strong father figure. Hamlet needs a symbolic father powerful enough to stifle his son's Oedipal longings—one who could have prevented or who will now avenge the deceased king's victimization by a murderous brother and a castrating wife.³

Other psychoanalytic critics have contributed analyses of Hamlet's society. Theodore Lidz has focused on the interactions among members of the two central families in the play. Placing Hamlet at the center of inter-locking triangles of conflict, Lidz details Hamlet's predicament as the rival of two fathers for his mother's love, as an intruder into a stifling father-daughter bond, and as the opponent of his beloved's brother.⁴ Using Erik Erikson's theories about the stages of human development, Neil Friedman and Richard Jones have located Hamlet, despite his age, in late adolescence, the period in which one searches for a stable identity. In order to achieve fidelity to a central self, an adolescent needs people and ideas he can trust. But since Hamlet's world is a morass of infidelity and duplicity, he cannot attain a stable sense of self; instead he becomes a consummate actor, constantly shifting roles and never establishing a coherent identity capable of decision and action. David Leverenz has described the specific nature of Hamlet's duplicity, pointing out a number of "mixed signals" given to both Hamlet and Ophelia which result in "knots" (R. D. Laing's term) of contradiction that "separate role from self, reason from feeling, duty from love."⁵

All these revisions of the Freudian view have followed modern trends in psychoanalytic thought, emphasizing interpersonal and social interaction and de-emphasizing the intrapsychic focus. Freud's, Jones's and Erlich's Hamlet is a static portrait of a doomed man's anguish, whereas Erikson's, Lidz's, and Leverenz's Hamlet is a dynamic drama about a man's conflictual relationships within a broad social context.

One weakness of theories based on the Oedipal dilemma is that they must be based, in part, on speculations about matters the text does not mention, such as what Hamlet as a young child felt about his father. Such theories also lack precision in differentiating Hamlet's feigning from true madness. Nor do they account for his return from the sea voyage as a changed man.⁶ Finally, like many psychoanalytic studies of literature, such theories either ignore the language of the play or treat it as the manifest content of a dream to be decoded. Approaching Hamlet from the perspective of the double-bind theory avoids the pitfalls of reading beyond the text. And because the theory analyzes the nuances of social interaction in great detail, it necessitates close attention to the puns, paradoxes, and riddles in the witty verbal exchanges, and may even illuminate the perennial enigmas about how mad Hamlet is and what caused his sea change.

II

Psychologists who have tried to define the double bind have discovered the truth behind Polonius' verbiage: "for, to define true madness, / What is't but to be nothing else but mad?" (II.ii.93-94). Their efforts over the past twenty years have produced a term used to describe a pattern of communication often found in familes with a schizophrenic adolescent or young adult. The pattern occurs

1. When the individual is involved in an intense relationship; that is, a relationship in which he feels it is vitally important that he discriminate accurately what sort of message is being communicated so that he may respond appropriately.
2. And, the individual is caught in a situation in which the other person in the relationship is expressing two orders of message and one of these denies the other.
3. 3. And, the individual is unable to comment on the messages being expressed to correct his discrimination of what order of message to respond to, i.e., he cannot make a metacommunicative statement.⁷

The double bind resembles the kind of paradox epitomized in the classic anecdote about Epimenides the Cretan, who claimed "All Cretans are liars." Because the verbal message ("All Cretans are liars") invalidates the broader message conveyed by the situational context (the fact that a Cretan says "All Cretans are liars"), the statement can only be true if it is false. The kind of endless vacillation generated by such a message resembles the plight of someone ensnared in a double bind.

Unfortunately, in human behavior double binds are seldom as clear or as identifiable as verbal paradoxes, because they arise out of a total context of communication in a relationship over a long period of time and cannot readily be understood outside the relationship. The following example is often given to illustrate the double bind:

A young man who had fairly well recovered from an acute schizophrenic episode was visited in the hospital by his mother. He was glad to see her and impulsively put his arm around her shoulders, whereupon she stiffened. He withdrew his arm and she asked, "Don't you love me any more?" He then blushed, and she said, "Dear, you must not be so easily embarrassed and afraid of your feelings." The patient was able to stay with her only a few minutes more and following her departure he assaulted an aide and was put in the tubs.⁸

Here, while rejecting her son on the level of body communication, the mother demands affection on the level of verbal communication. Drawing tight the knot of the double bind, she makes it impossible for her son to perceive the contradiction; she blames him for being afraid and embarrassed at displays of feeling, but clearly she cannot accept such displays. The son is trapped: if he wants to keep his tie to his mother, he must not show her that he loves her, but if he does not show her that he loves her, then he will lose her.⁹ In families where double-bind patterns of communication predominate, escape from the field is blocked either by the individuals' mutual dependency or by a specific prohibition.¹⁰

Originally, the double-bind theory was formulated to explain the genesis of schizophrenia as a pattern of irrational perception and behavior learned by a child in his family. According to the theory, a family entangled in these paradoxical modes of communication may maintain a relative status quo until maturational and social pressures compel a vulnerable child to separate from the family. Typically, the attempted separation produces a schizophrenic episode in the child. There are only two ways for such a child to untie a double bind: (1) recognizing the incongruity of the two messages, or (2) giving a double message in reply. But not even these always forestall madness. Gregory Bateson, one of the originators of the double-bind theory, has noted that "The psychotic patient may make astute, pithy, often metaphorical remarks that reveal an insight into the forces binding him. Contrariwise, he may become rather expert in setting double bind situations himself."¹¹ Hamlet does both.

III

Hamlet opens in darkness and confusion with "Who's there?" It employs question, doubt, and irony as its most common rhetorical modes. And it involves almost everyone in duplicity. One is thus not surprised to find its characters in double-bind situations. Although unaware of the double-bind theory, many previous literary critics have described Hamlet's paradoxes in ways that are consonant with it: Maynard Mack and Harry Levin see Hamlet's world as cast in an interrogative or ironic mood; John Lawlor, Norman Rabkin, Nicholas Brooke, Nigel Alexander, and Bernard McElroy articulate the irreconcilable oppositions in roles, choices, and even world views that structure the play at every level; and Paul Jorgensen, Maurice Charney, and Lawrence Danson analyze the verbal mystification that blankets Elsinore with such a fog of lies, flattery, preciosity, puns, and feigning that words become whores.¹²

From the moment when we first see Hamlet, his black clothes implicitly rebuking the mirthful court's disrespect for his dead father, he is evading traps set by Claudius. With hypocritical oxymorons ("mirth in funeral … dirge in marriage") and pointed reminders to the courtiers that they approved his hasty marriage to his brother's widow, the King delivers an unctuous speech commencing a public ritual in which all must legitimize his dubious act by their tacit assent. Because Hamlet nonverbally refuses to participate, Claudius tries to force either public sanction of the marriage and his kingship, regardless of Hamlet's personal feelings, or public opposition, in which case Claudius could remove him in the interest of national security. When Claudius asks metaphorically why his stepson is still in mourning, Hamlet correctly perceives the real message and translates "How is it that the clouds still hang on you?" (I.ii.66) as "Sanction my marriage to your mother by dressing appropriately." He evades the trap by declining to respond to either the explicit or the implicit message. Instead, he pretends to take Claudius' cloud metaphor literally and answers with a punning riddle—"Not so, my lord; I am too much in the sun" (I.ii.67)—that could mean any of several things: too much out of doors, too much in the sun of Claudius' favor, too much of a son to Claudius. This first exchange firmly establishes Hamlet's remarkable skill at recognizing and manipulating levels of communication. By shifting to the literal level, he does more than evade Claudius' trap; he delivers a multiple insult which epitomizes his anger and opposition to his stepfather, but which Claudius cannot answer. Like his mourning clothes, Hamlet's puns allow him tacitly to oppose Claudius' regime without fear of retribution and without betraying "that within which passeth show" to hypocritical "seems" (I.ii.76-86).

IV

Ironically, not the crafty Claudius but the weak-willed and naive Gertrude succeeds in trapping Hamlet in a double bind. Neither the veiled threats in the insulting terms the King uses to describe Hamlet's grief ("obstinate condolement … impious stubborness … unmanly grief … "), nor the bribe of being "most immediate to [the] throne" impels Hamlet to stay in Elsinore, "in the cheer and comfort" of Claudius' watchful eye (I.ii.87-117). Hamlet assents only to his mother's modest plea, which, in the context of their whole relationship, is anything but simple.

When his father died—a father he idealized as "Hyperion"—his mother, instead of leaning on her son for comfort, rejected him by immediately remarrying. Making the rejection even more painful, she chose her husband's brother—a "satyr" by comparison to Hamlet's father. These actions have given her son an unequivocal message: "I am not an asexual madonna, but a carnal woman with desires you cannot fulfill. You must separate yourself from me emotionally and make your own life." If matters had rested here, Hamlet might have been disillusioned, but he would not necessarily have been trapped; he might have returned to Wittenberg and resumed his studies. But now Gertrude delivers a verbal message in contradiction to the message conveyed by her behavior: "Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet: / I pray thee; stay with us" (I.ii. 118-19). In the total context of the court scene, where her husband has staged a public ceremony of assent to his sinful marriage and his new regime, she asks for much more: "Love me, condone my incest and rejection of your father's memory, and treat this man, whom you seem to despise, as a loving father." Her plea that Hamlet stay in Elsinore, markedly contrasting with the leave granted Laertes, is the demand that closes the trap, because it blocks any escape from the contradiction in her messages.

Eluding Claudius' ploys only to fall into a double bind imposed by his mother, Hamlet reveals in his first soliloquy just how trapped he feels. His intense disillusionment with Gertrude breaks out in a tirade against her hypocritical tears, her sensuality, and the "weary, stale, flat and unprofitable … uses of this world" (I.ii. 133-34). But the son's love for his mother surfaces, albeit fleetingly, in the vignette he paints of the love between Gertrude and the father he emulates:

So excellent a king …
                   … so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly …
              … why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on.
                             (I.ii. 139-45)

Poignantly, his final words reveal both his love and his trap. He cries "But break, my heart" because, despite his disgust, his heart yields to his mother when he promises to obey her wishes. But he must contain his swelling anger and grief: "I must hold my tongue" (I.ii. 159). He cannot leave; he cannot love his mother and accept her husband; he cannot openly condemn her and Claudius; and he cannot, and be true to himself, lie. The only escape he sees is "self-slaughter," against which "the Everlasting … [has] fix'd / His canon" (I.ii. 131-32). He is bound.

V

To make matters worse, Hamlet is now confronted by a second and even more constricting double bind, this one imposed by the Ghost, who speaks in the name of the father Hamlet loves, not by the duplicitous stepfather who sets snares for him. The Ghost tells Hamlet a story that is even more shocking than the forbidden secrets of his prison house, a story to

  harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their
  spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand an end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
                                   (I. v. 16-20)

By calling Claudius "that adulterate beast," the Ghost suggests that Gertrude herself is an adulteress, a woman who has forsaken the celestial bed of the elder Hamlet and now preys on garbage.¹³ By cursing Claudius' "traitorous gifts" to her, the Ghost implies that Gertrude is a whore. Without clarifying whether or not Gertrude was party to the murder, the Ghost describes the circumstances of the elder Hamlet's death in gruesome detail. Into his ear, Claudius poured a "leperous distilment," whose "sudden vigour … doth posset / And curd, like eager droppings into milk, / The thin and wholesome blood," covering his body "Most lazar like, with vile and loathsome crust" and sending his soul to torments so horrible that he must leave it to Hamlet's overwrought imagination to picture them (I.v.59-80). After this bloodcurdling tale, the Ghost delivers a multiple command to Hamlet:

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest.
But, howsomever thou pursues this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught: leave her to
  heaven.
                               (I.v.82-86)

As critics have often noted, the Ghost demands the impossible.¹⁴ His complex injunction is actually two sets of contradictory demands: "Avenge my murder and your mother's incest," and "Neither allow your character to become depraved, nor punish your mother." If Hamlet believes the Ghost's horrific story and becomes a bloody avenger, he cannot avoid taint. The corruption in his own family that he has been forced to contemplate so graphically will have already tainted his mind; and his deed will entail defying the Christian prohibition against vengeance and embracing the pagan code of retribution.¹⁵ Furthermore, to avenge the crimes against his father, Hamlet must punish Gertude—if not directly, at least indirectly, by exposing to the nation the fact that she has married her husband's murderer, whether or not she was privy to the murder itself. If Gertrude remains unscathed, however, Hamlet will not have completely dealt with the one sin we know her to be guilty of, namely incest, which she has knowingly committed. Hamlet is again trapped in a double bind. His love and respect for his father, his awe before a ghost who has returned from the grave to reveal a buried truth, and the terror of the night make escape from the contradictory commands impossible. To the Ghost's surperfluous parting words, "remember me," Hamlet answers, "O all you host of heaven! O earth! what else?" (I.v.91-92).

VI

The only escape from a double bind is either to recognize and label the incongruity of the messages or to respond with a double message in turn. Lacking any emotional ties to Claudius that might blind him to the duplicity of his stepfather's words, Hamlet slips through the King's nets by answering in double and triple puns. But his love for his mother and his deceased father renders the usually quick-witted Prince unable to recognize their doubleness; and because he cannot articulate the contradiction, the strain of their demands almost breaks him.¹⁶ Before announcing his plan to assume an "antic disposition," he seems on the brink of madness: he makes tautological jokes ("There's ne'er a villain dwelling in all Denmark / But he's an arrant knave"), mouths chitchat which Horatio dismisses as "wild and whirling words," and turns the horror of following the Ghost's subterranean voice around the battlements into macabre comedy by calling his tormented father's spirit "truepenny," "this fellow in the cellarage," "old mole," and "worthy pioneer" (I.v.118-81). But Hamlet is not driven mad by the double binds he faces, because he plays mad instead.

By its very nature, play is double, and therefore a possible response to a double bind. When a monkey playfully bites another monkey, the bite conveys the message, "This bite does not signify what a bite normally signifies." The bite is obviously still a bite, but it is not really a bite, because play creates a context in which actions both are and are not real, both are and are not serious. Players of poker and chess, spectators of football and tragedy, prizefighters and stamp collectors are all intensely serious, but they can also dismiss their acts as "just play," as somehow set apart from everyday reality. According to the philosopher Eugen Fink, "We play in the so-called real world, but while playing there emerges an enigmatic realm that is not nothing, and yet is nothing real. … The play-world is not suspended in a purely ideal world. It always has a real setting, and yet it is never a real thing among other real things, although it has an absolute need of real things as a point of departure."¹⁷ This paradoxical quality is particularly evident in the higher forms of play, such as drama or ballet. As Johan Huizinga, Gregory Bateson, and other play theorists have marveled, Falstaff is "not nothing," but he is "nothing real," and the ballerina who dances in Swan Lake both is and is not a swan.¹⁸

Hamlet knows a great deal about play. He loves drama, heartily rejoices at the arrival of the players despite having "lost all [his] mirth" (II.ii.307), begs a speech on the spot (which he half recites), and instructs them wisely in their trade. In the tears of the actor who recounts the misery of Hecuba, he is struck by what every playgoer knows but often takes for granted: how

         this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function
  suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for
  nothing!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?
                                (II.ii.577-86)

The paradox of play, its way of transcending the rigid distinction between reality and illusion, allows the player to be present at the fall of Troy while simultaneously displaying the skills of his trade thousands of years later in a land far to the north of the Mediterranean.

Because of the inherent doubleness of play, when Hamlet's sanity is threatened by maddening double binds he can play mad and therefore in some sense both be and not be mad.¹⁹ Playing the role of madman allows him, moreover, an even greater freedom to play: to play with words, to play with people's ignorance, to play the part of chorus in "The Murder of Gonzago," to play with others' feelings for him. Since not only Claudius but also his henchmen Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, with Ophelia and Gertrude as dupes, all bait traps for Hamlet everywhere, he desperately needs the freedom available in play. When his school-fellows chide him for offending Claudius with "The Murder of Gonzago" and reject his riddling response with "Good my lord, put your discourse into some frame" (III.ii.320), they suggest why Hamlet must play. If he provides stable contexts, reliable frames, for his words and actions, his pursuers may succeed in pinning him down. But because all his messages are within the paradoxical frame of play, and can, therefore, be taken as true and not true, serious and "just play" simultaneously, no one will be able to "pluck out the heart of [his] mystery"—a term that alludes both to Hamlet's enigmatic ways and to his trade as a player par excellence.

VII

Playing is also how Hamlet attempts, albeit futilely, to escape from the Ghost's double bind, a trap so devastating that it precipitates the tragedy. When confronted with the impossible demand to avenge the murder and incest without tainting his mind or punishing his mother, Hamlet gives, by his actions, a double response: he plays at being an avenger. Under the cloak of madness, he requites his father's murder precisely—by pouring poison into the ears not only of the poisoner himself but of all who are guilty by association with his regime. With biting sarcasm, salacious puns, brutal satire, and diseased imagery, he assaults his enemies without actually performing the act of vengeance.²⁰ Netted around with the intrigues of Claudius and company, and the double binds imposed by his parents, Hamlet plays for both his life and his sanity.²¹

Playing the madman for the benefit of the court, and playing the avenger out of his own need to obey his father, Hamlet gleefully takes every opportunity to attack Claudius by exposing his minion, Polonius, as an old fool with "eyes purging thick amber and plumtree gum" and "most weak hams" (Il.ii. 198-202). Hamlet says that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would "play upon me; you would seem to know my stops … you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass" (III.ii.380-83); but it is actually Hamlet who plays them, and as skillfully as a musician plays a recorder. After barely five minutes of greetings and conversation, he has them confessing themselves Claudius' spies. Still, these sallies of wit against un-worthy opponents are only practice thrusts to prepare him for the duel with Claudius himself—a duel which is, however, "just play."²²

After being struck by the power of drama in the player's passion for Hecuba, Hamlet formulates his plan: "the play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king" (II.ii.633-34). "The play's the thing" in at least two senses. First, Hamlet uses the play to play avenger by tormenting Claudius with the knowledge that Hamlet knows all the details of the crime. He even threatens Claudius with death: the King's own nephew boldly informs the audience that the murderer, Lucianus, is the player-king's nephew. Second, Hamlet uses the play to do what he believes the player, who was so moved by the illusory Hecuba, would do if he had Hamlet's real "cue for passion":

Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.
                            (II.ii.590-92)

He prepares to madden Claudius and shock the court by mixing art with life.

VIII

During the time intervening between the Ghost's appearance and the players' arrival, Hamlet has been coping with the double bind imposed by the Ghost. His efforts have been restricted to playing mad and playing avenger; he has now discovered another escape route as well. If the Ghost is not in fact his father's spirit, but a devil tempting Hamlet to perdition, as he fears, or to madness and suicide, as Horatio originally feared, then Hamlet is freed from its contradictory demands.²³ To determine the truth, he stages an illusion to test Claudius and the Ghost. If the Ghost's tale, the matter of the play, proves true, then Hamlet will feel bound by the Ghost's impossible commands, which he will assume to be his father's. In the meantime, the play itself will become part of the vengeance the Ghost requires. Like the patient whose years of receiving incongruent messages have made him expert at setting double binds for others, Hamlet imposes on Claudius a double bind that will torment him for his sins. The son thus repays the uncle equal measure for confining the father "to fast in fires" for his "foul crimes" (I.v. 11-12).

When asked the play's title, Hamlet answers, "The Mouse-trap. Marry, how? Trapically," with a pun on "tropically" (III.ii.247).²⁴ The humor of the pun conceals the truth that the play is both a trope, a figurative expression, and a trap. Indeed, Hamlet can turn the play into a trap precisely because it is a trope. Drama is a kind of figurative expression, a metaphorical rendering of life, in which the players, as Hamlet says, "hold … the mirror up to nature" (III.ii.26). And drama, like other tropes, is inherently double. Just as Falstaff both is and is not real, the poet's lady both is and is not a red, red rose. While watching a play, an audience can allow its deepest emotions to be aroused because they can be safely contained in the context, "This is only a play, a metaphor for life and not life itself." Paradoxically, viewers are moved to real emotions precisely because the play itself is not really real. Except for Don Quixote, driven mad by reading chivalric romances, the passions aroused by poetic or dramatic illusion do not ordinarily threaten the everyday world. If they do, the audience withdraws its un-defended emotional involvement, for life has usurped art.²⁵

When Claudius comes to "The Murder of Gonzago," he expects to enjoy a trope, a kind of entertaining and innocent duplicity. Instead he finds a trap. By inviting Claudius to a play, Hamlet conveys the message, "This is fiction, a harmless diversion." He tries to sustain this message as long as possible by dismissing Claudius' suspicions after the opening scene with "No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest; no offense i' the world" (III.ii.244-45). That Claudius approaches the play in this context is clear from his pleasure and relief when he learns that Hamlet is amusing himself with the players. The King will attend the dramatic soiree, he tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,

With all my heart; and it doth much content
  me
To hear [Hamlet] so inclin'd.
Good gentlemen, give him a further edge,
And drive his purpose into these delights.
                                (III.i.25-28)

But when Claudius sees and hears the details of his own crime portrayed on stage and narrated by Hamlet's choral asides, he receives another order of message that violently contradicts the first: "This is the truth and a threat to your life." The incongruity of the two messages is so shocking that it cracks the deceitful mask Claudius has successfully worn since the murder.

Although no soliloquy reveals his thoughts at the moment he rises, calls for light, and summarily dismisses the festive gathering, surely we are led to infer that Claudius is perplexed in the extreme. How on earth could Hamlet be aware of the details of a murder known only to the murderer and the victim? And if Hamlet does not know these details, how could a fiction possibly portray the exact truth? Having no ties of emotional dependency to Hamlet, Claudius can and does physically escape from the field. But he is bound nevertheless, because his flight acknowledges that he has been, at least momentarily, maddened by the paradox of a true illusion. And his madness reveals his guilt. By recognizing and manipulating the doubleness of drama—so that "The Murder of Gonzago" is not, like most plays, both true and not true, but true and true—Hamlet has cunningly prepared a double bind to "Make mad the guilty."

IX

Unfortunately, he helps make mad the innocent as well. In his callous treatment of Ophelia, Hamlet adds to the double binds that drive her not momentarily mad, like Claudius, nor playfully mad, like himself, but mad indeed. If the view of Polonius' family presented in Acts I and II is representative, Ophelia has been reared in a very confusing atmosphere. Her father always "With windlasses and with assays of bias, / By indirections find[s] directions out" (II.i.65-66). Nor does he see any contradiction in outlining the tactical deceptions that produce worldly success (such as "Give thy thoughts no tongue" and "the apparel oft proclaims the man") in the same breath with the counsel,

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
                                (I.iii.59-80)

With his spying, his love of policy, and his propensity, he admits, "To cast beyond ourselves in our opinions" (II.i. 115), Polonius ensnares his own daughter in double binds.

While warning her to beware of Hamlet's "tenders / Of … affection," he chides,

          think yourself a baby;
That you have ta'en these tenders for true pay,
Which are not sterling. Tender yourself more
  dearly;
Or … you'll tender me a fool.
                                          (I.iii. 105-9)

Here and throughout this scene, he delivers contradictory messages to Ophelia: (1) you are a baby, an innocent, whose virginity must remain undefiled, and therefore you must reject Hamlet's attentions; (2) you are capable of having a baby ("you'll tender me a fool"), of attracting a 30-year-old heir apparent, and perhaps of winning a queenship if you "Tender yourself more dearly" and "Set your entreatments at a higher rate I Than a command to parley" (I.iii.107, 122-23). In his repeated imagery of buying and selling, and in his later willingness to use his daughter as bait to catch Hamlet, Polonius becomes in truth what Hamlet calls him in jest—"a fishmonger," a bawd. His language and actions implicitly convey to Ophelia the message that she should be a whore, while at the same time he explicitly warns her to remain pure. She cannot comment ment on the incongruity of her father's messages because, despite the glimmer of perceptiveness she shows in teasing Laertes about following his own advice, her father and brother have usurped her right to think. When Polonius scornfully asks if she believes Hamlet's professions of love, she meekly murmurs, "I do not know, my lord, what I should think" (I.iii.104). So Polonius immediately tells her what to think. Finally, unlike her brother, who leaves for France, Ophelia cannot escape from the field. In her world daughters must obey fathers, even if—like Jephthah, to whom Hamlet compares Polonius—the fathers choose to sacrifice the daughters.

Under different circumstances, a marriage to Hamlet might have freed Ophelia from the prison of being her father's puppet.²⁶ But like a dutiful daughter, she rejects her potential rescuer and allows herself to be used by his enemies. Consequently, she confirms Hamlet's harsh judgment: "Frailty, thy name is woman!" (I.ii.146). After concluding that Ophelia has betrayed him to the spies behind the arras, Hamlet deliberately sets psychological traps for her. Arousing her tender feelings by confessing "I did love you once" (III.i.115), he then scorns her bitterly as false and lewd. Because, like all women, she will deceive men with her "paintings" and will surely cuckold her future husband, he banishes her to a "nunnery"—whether he means a convent where she will not "be a breeder of sinners" (III.i.123) or a whorehouse where she can continue the trade taught her by her father. In this pun he telescopes the double messages which assault her: she must be both a virgin and a whore.

Later at "The Murder of Gonzago," Hamlet's traps for Ophelia become more vicious. In the following exchange, he flirts with her in bawdy language, then condemns her for having salacious thoughts:

Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
                [Lying down at Ophelia's feet.]
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country
  matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That's a fair thought to lie between
  maids' legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.
                                   (III.ii. 118-28)

After she chastely rejects his initial lewd request, Hamlet ridicules her for mistaking his supposedly innocent question for ribaldry. If she had not understood his remark and had answered "Yes," he could have embarrassed her by treating her reply as a sexual proposition. She will be punished regardless of her answer, and she is punished for understanding his meaning. When she tries to escape from the dilemma by refusing to understand ("I think nothing, my lord"), he makes even her retreat an insulting sexual innuendo: "thing" and "nothing" often refer to the genitalia that "lie between maids' legs." Throughout "The Murder of Gonzago," Hamlet both acts madly to divert the court spies from his real endeavor and vents his anxiety over the plan to test Claudius and the Ghost by using Ophelia, whom he now considers a traitoress, as the unwilling straight man in his comedy routine. Although the game he pursues is Claudius, the results for Ophelia are jarring double messages, in which his bawdry simultaneously arouses and damns her nascent sexuality. Her pitiful attempts to laugh away his cruel jests reveal her confusion. Both her father and her former lover have prepared her for madness by demanding that she be virginal while treating her like a whore, and by discouraging her from thinking for herself, in which case she might perceive the incongruity of their demands.

X

The vehemence of Hamlet's assault on Ophelia indicates that his interim solutions to the double bind he faces have failed. Playing mad to preserve his sanity, playing avenger to satisfy his obligation to avenge his father's murder, and directing a play to test the Ghost and punish Claudius have not fulfilled his father's three impossible demands. Despite his exultation over the success of "The Mousetrap," which, he brags, will "get me a fellowship in a cry of players" (III.ii.288-89)—when he comes upon his enemy alone and defenseless in the chapel, he shirks the command to avenge (in earnest, not play)—the murder and incest. In the next scene, he kills the wrong man instead. In his longing for death, in his insulting treatment of Ophelia, and in the foul imagery he uses to condemn his mother's lust, Hamlet reveals that his thoughts have become as "rank and gross" as the "unweeded garden" of the world around him, despite the Ghost's injunction to taint not his mind.²⁷ Furthermore, he does punish Gertrude. Answering the summons to her closet, he physically restrains her; he makes her call out in fear lest he become a matricide like Nero, whose soul he must consciously expel from his bosom; he forces her to compare her two husbands; and he appalls her with the filthiness of her sin:

          Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making
  love
Over the nasty sty.
                                   (III.iv.91-94)

Instead of leaving her to heaven, he pours these poisonous words that feel like daggers into her ears until she begs, "No more, sweet Hamlet!" Emphasizing what this and the two previous scenes have clearly shown—Hamlet's failure to obey any of his father's commands—the Ghost reappears at this moment and reiterates their contradictory nature: do not forget your "almost blunted purpose" of revenge, and have pity on your mother's weakness (III.iv. 110-16).

In the midst of playing avenger, however, Hamlet has finally glimpsed the truth. An aficionado of the drama, he knows that he has been merely acting the part of the stock Elizabethan/Jacobean stage avenger. After seeing the passion of the player for Hecuba, he whips himself into a frenzied speech that might have won applause for Kyd's Hieronimo or Marston's Malevole or Tourneur's Vindice:²⁸

I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal: bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless
  villain!
O, vengeance!
                                (II.ii.607-10)

But immediately he steps down from the stage to become the audience and critic of his own performance: "This is most brave, / That I … Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words" (II.ii.611-12, 614). Instead of doing the deed, which he cannot perform because of the Ghost's contradictory commands, he continues, despite his self-realization, to play the role of the doer, an expedient that provides only fleeting moments of relief. Perhaps his excuse for not killing Claudius in the chapel can best be described in terms of his posturing as a ruthless avenger. Right after staging an abortive revenge tragedy and just before finding Claudius alone, Hamlet mediates,

'Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself
  breathes out
Contagion to this world: now could I drink
  hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.
                            (III.ii.406-10)

Here he seems more like a stage character—Lucianus or the brutal Pyrrhus on his way to slaughter Priam—than the intelligent but deeply disillusioned Prince who speaks Hamlet's other soliloquies. Elation over his successful revenge play has encouraged him to bring to life the attitudes of art. When confronted with Claudius' real throat to cut, of course, he balks. But he turns even his hesitation into a sentiment worthy of the most sinister stage avenger:

Up, sword; and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is … about some act
That has no relish of salvation in 't;
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.
                                   (II.ii.88-95)

Hamlet both surpasses his father's command and avoids obeying it by planning to kill Claudius' soul with his body—at some unspecified future date. Once again, then, playing the remorseless avenger has freed him from the double bind—but only momentarily.

Soon all his evasions fail, and when he is arrested in Act IV, his behavior becomes careless and chaotic. The double binds in which their families have ensnared them have finally pushed Hamlet and Ophelia to the breaking point. After failing to discharge his duty, Hamlet is cornered by the Ghost; after inadvertently killing Polonius, he is cornered by Claudius. Unable to play his way out of these corners, he drops all disguises, threatening Claudius with the story of "how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar" (IV.iii.32-33) and telling him cleverly, but clearly, to go to hell. Hamlet's grisly jokes about the odor of decay and the "politic worms" which will fatten themselves on Claudius' minister of policy are no longer merely feigned madness; they resemble the astute perceptions often associated, by Shakespeare's contemporaries as well as by modern psychologists, with the truly mad.

In fact, Hamlet is not finally maddened by the double bind, because he is forced into the escape he could not choose for himself. Claudius, fearing for his own life, banishes Hamlet from his "prison," as the Prince once called Denmark.

XI

Ophelia, meanwhile, can only retreat into madness. But why now? Everyone who had assaulted her with contradictory messages is gone: her father is dead, her brother has not yet returned from France, and her erst-while lover is banished. Why is she not now freed to grow into a sexual woman who is neither a child nor a whore? The answer is that she has already been stunted and is now too weak to cope with this forced separation from her family. Surely, Polonius being who he is, the audience can assume that the double binds imposed on Ophelia by her father are of long standing. After years of experiencing the confusing patterns of communication characteristic of this reverend counselor, she has learned not to think, and has settled into a family homeostasis which, although irrational, is stable. Separation from a family in which double-bind patterns prevail often introduces instability and thus produces madness in young adults. This is, in part, Ophelia's plight. The double binds that threaten Hamlet's sanity may be more terrifying, but they are extraordinary and have occurred only recently; those that destroy Ophelia's prove more devastating because they have been insidious and constant for most of her life.

The overtly sexual references in Ophelia's mad ramblings strike every amateur Freudian as indications of the repressions imposed by her father and her society. Less obvious, but no less significant, the nowin position of the heroine depicted in her valentine song epitomizes the double-bind situation fostered by Ophelia's almost exclusively male world. The naive lass in the song (IV.v.47-66) wants to assure herself of being her lad's valentine. So, counting on the belief that he must choose the first girl he sees on Valentine's Day morning, she innocently goes to his window. With a proposal of marriage, he seduces her, then rejects her as unfit to be his wife because she is no longer a virgin. If she refuses his sexual offer, she will jeopardize her marriage proposal; but because she accepts the offer, he withdraws the proposal. Like Ophelia, the lass is simultaneously treated like a whore and told to be a virgin; she is tempted and then damned as lewd. Ironically, the narrator in the song, like the audience to Ophelia's plight, perceives the incongruity in the demands of such young men: "By cock, they are to blame." But even though her song recalls and clarifies her own situation, Ophelia has lost all clarity of vision herself, and her mad actions dramatize her paralysis between child-like innocence and adult sexual knowledge. Gently singing and smilingly passing out flowers, "She turns," says her brother, "Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself … to favour and to prettiness" (IV.v. 188-89). But each flower accurately characterizes the vice of its recipient, and the garland she chooses for herself is made of

          long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call
  them.
                               (IV. vii. 170-72)

Instead of being "tumbled" in her lad's bed like the lass in her song, Ophelia, along with her coronet of penile flowers, tumbles into a brook to become a cold maid indeed. The gravedigger may have been correct in labeling her death self-defense: it defends her from the intolerable contradictions of her life.

XII

Hamlet's defense is, for a time, more fortunate. With the onset of true madness forestalled by his banishment, he is forcibly removed from the scene of his contradictory obligations long enough to achieve a new perspective on them. Although the audience does not see the events that precipitate this change, it does see a different man as Hamlet approaches the graveyard in Act V. For the first time in the play, Hamlet, once the master of repartee, is bested in a game of wits, and that by a "clown," a worldly-wise grave-digger. Once the mordant court jester to Claudius, Hamlet now sees in the skull of an earlier jester the truth that not even the "gibes," "gambols," and "infinite jest" of such madcap rogues as Yorick can elude death. Once the actors' actor, Hamlet so disdains Laertes' histrionic rendition of the grief-stricken brother that he cannot forbear parodying the latter's extravagant mourning. In the face of death, Hamlet has discovered the futility of his past playing—playing with words, playing the fool, and playing the avenger.

Later, when Hamlet tells Horatio of his adventures, the audience learns what has jolted him into this new perspective. By the guiding hand of Providence, he believes, he could not sleep at sea, so he rashly stole his captors' letters and thereby discovered Claudius' plot against his life.

Being thus be-netted round with villanies,—
Ere I could make a prologue to my brains,
They had begun the play.
                                 (V.ii.29-31)

Hamlet no longer upbraids himself as an actor who avoids real action by unpacking his heart with words; yet he remains a player. Before "some craven scruple / Of thinking too precisely on th' event" (IV.iv.40-41) can intervene, his brain begins to enact a drama not of his own devising. After experiencing what seem to him to be Providential coincidences—having with him his father's signet ring to seal the execution order for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and escaping on a pirate ship whose brigands willingly serve him instead of slitting his throat—Hamlet comes to believe in "a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will" (V.ii.10-11). He will be a player who waits in the wings for Providence to give him his cue: "The readiness is all" (V.ii.233). This shift in perspective releases him from both the fear of Claudius' traps and the double bind of the Ghost's contradictory commands—because a higher power than either an earthly king or an apparition from beyond the grave has written the play and determined who will be punished and who will be spared, who will play the role of avenger and when the catastrophe will come.

No longer needing to play either the madman or the avenger to defend his life and sanity, Hamlet goes calmly to the duel, telling Laertes that he "will this brother's wager frankly play" (V.ii.264). But Hamlet is unaware that the fencing match and its accompanying wager are a deadly game he cannot win. Because of Laertes' unbated, poisoned sword and Claudius' poisoned congratulatory cup, he will die either way—by the sword if he loses the match, and by the cup if he wins. The duel recalls the double-bind patterns that have snared Hamlet and Ophelia throughout the drama. To ensure justice, however, Providence reverses the bind. As Hamlet and Laertes "play" (a word the stage directions use four times), Claudius unwittingly prepares the perfect setting for the damnation of his soul with his body. Hamlet finally encounters Claudius amid a carousal with drink, drums, trumpets, and cannons like the one Hamlet had earlier blamed for soiling Denmark's reputation, and "At game … about some act / That has no relish of salvation in't" (III.iii.91-92). Claudius' clever game has become the means of a fitting vengeance, and he enacts his own punishment in the last scene of Providence's larger play. In his hesitation to murder the King in his chapel, Hamlet has been an unknowing player in a revenge drama superseding the one he had planned. By sparing Claudius' body, Hamlet has allowed the King to damn his own soul.

Laertes and Claudius arrange a game that Hamlet cannot win. But Providence stages a larger play that binds Laertes, Claudius, and Gertrude to their sins. As Hamlet realizes before he agrees "to play" the fatal wager, death will eventually net one and all: "If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come" (V.ii.231-33). In the end, everyone is trapped by death. But, in death, what is the state of those souls less guilty than Claudius'?

XIII

The play repeatedly raises the question: what are the results in the next world of actions performed in this one? But the play gives no answers, portraying the realm beyond the grave as unknowable. The Ghost is "forbid / To tell the secrets of [his] prison-house" (I.v.13-14). Indeed, this very initiator of the play's action is itself a "questionable shape"—either "spirit of health or goblin damn'd" (I.iv.43, 40). The play never confirms which. Not even the Mousetrap resolves the issue. It confirms that the Ghost has told the truth about Claudius' treachery; but as we know from Macbeth, devis may tells truths do damn souls.²⁹ Hamlet's meditation on the results of human action, "To be, or not to be," confronts the blank wall of "something after death, / The undiscover'd country" (III.i.78-79). The state of Ophelia's soul is as "doubtful" as her death. Is she a damned suicide, as the skeptical gravediggers and the legalistic priest imply, or a "minist'ring angel" (V.i.250, 264), as her loving brother prophesies? Even the eternal fate of Rosen-crantz and Guildenstern is ambiguous. Although Hamlet sends them to their deaths, "Not shriving-time allow'd" (V.ii.47), for their part in Claudius' murder plot, do they die in mortal sin? Did they knowingly conspire with Claudius or have they been dupes to the end?

These questions about the results in the other world of actions in this world climax at Hamlet's death. In accomplishing the providential revenge, is he God's approved "minister" or His "scourge," an already damned soul used to accomplish divine retribution?³⁰ When he doubts the Ghost, Hamlet fears damnation if he does kill Claudius (II.ii.627-32); but when he returns from his voyage, he fears damnation if he does not (V.ii.67-70). Will his slayings of Polonius and Laertes, his role in the executions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his indirect part in Ophelia's death, and his revenge against Claudius send him to hell? Although critics answer this question in various ways, the play itself is significantly silent.³¹ And Hamlet knows the eternal unknowableness of what lies beyond the grave: "since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is't to leave betimes" (V.ii.233-35).

This final perspective releases Hamlet from the Ghost's crippling double bind, because it reveals that for Christians life itself imposes what appears to be a double bind. God's commandments require man, in a world of deceptive appearances, to take moral responsibility for his actions, the results of which he cannot know; but God's omnipotence shapes these actions to His own inscrutable ends no matter what choices a person makes; and no one can escape from the field, even through "self-slaughter." In Act I, Horatio and Marcellus unknowingly articulate the poles of this paradox. The scholar counsels patient non-action in response to the Ghost's revelation of rottenness in Denmark: "Heaven will direct it." The soldier urges immediate, responsible action: "Nay, let's follow" the desperate Hamlet and the silent Ghost (I.iv.91). For three intervening acts, maddening confusion plagues Hamlet, and only when he returns in Act V does he transcend the original double binds by recognizing—philosophically, if not familially—the basic incongruity at the heart of human life.

As psychologists, literary critics, and theologians all observe in their different disciplines, paradoxes and double binds precipitate creative leaps to higher levels of insight as often as they bring about psychotic episodes.³² Hamlet takes one of these creative leaps beyond the double bind when he decides that he must act in "perfect conscience" and quickly—"the interim is mine" (V.ii.67, 73)—allowing Providence to shape his rough hewing and recognizing that he cannot know what judgment his actions will receive beyond the grave. His last earthly acts are to ensure that the truth be told and that Elsinore have a ruler—acts that secure the future of his "name" and his country in this world. Unlike Horatio, he has nothing to say about "flights of angels" singing him to a heavenly reward in the next world. All he knows is that "The rest is silence" (V.ii.371, 369).

Notes

¹Hamlet, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, rev. ed. by Hardin Craig and Craig and David Bevington (Glenview, I11.; Scott, Foresman and Company, 1973), III.iii.38-43. All quotations from Hamlet follow this edition. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Louisiana State University Research Council in completing this project.

² Tony Manocchio and William Petitt, in Families Under Stress: A Psychological Interpretation (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 56-101, have noted that Hamlet and Ophelia are trapped in double binds, but the authors use the play to illustrate the theory more than they use the theory to illuminate the complexities of the play.

³ Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (1949; rpt. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954), p. 78. Avi Erlich, Hamlet's Absent Father (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 260-62.

⁴ Theodore Lidz, Hamlet's Enemy: Madness and Myth in Hamlet (New York: Basic Books, 1975).

⁵ Erik Erikson, "Youth: Fidelity and Diversity," Daedalus, 91 (1962), 5-27; Neil Friedman and Richard M. Jones, "On the Mutuality of the Oedipus Conflict: Notes on the Hamlet Case," in The Design Within: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare, ed. Melvin D. Faber (New York: Science House, 1970), pp. 121-46. See also

⁶ Paul A. Jorgensen uses Freud's theories of mourning and melancholia to account for Hamlet's calm in Act V. Because he vents his anger on its proper object, his mother, when he visits her after the Mousetrap, Hamlet in Act V is no longer plagued with the melancholy which his repressed rage had caused. See "Hamlet's Therapy," Huntington Library Quarterly, 27 (1964), 239-58.

⁷ John H. Weakland, "The 'Double Bind' Hypothesis of Schizophrenia and Three-Party Interaction (1960)," in Double Bind: The Foundation of the Communicational Approach to the Family, eds. Carlos E. Sluki and Donald C. Ransom (New York: Grune and Straiten, 1976), p. 24. See also

⁸ Bateson, et al., "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia," in Double Bind, pp. 14-15.

⁹ Ibid., p. 17.

¹⁰ Many revisions of the original double-bind theory emphasize that an observer ought not to isolate a "binder" and a "victim" in families where double-bind patterns of communication predominate. Generally, the binds are mutually imposed, and assigning blame to one family member for beginning the pattern has little relevance to the present situation. Although living beings in human families are too complex for such labels, families portrayed in art may more clearly reveal the source of the double bind.

¹¹ Bateson, "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia," in Double Bind, p. 18.

¹² For the interrogative mode of the play, see C. S. Lewis, "Hamlet: the Prince or the Poem?" in Modern Shakespearean Criticism: Essays on Style, Dramaturgy, and the Major Plays, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970), pp. 301-11, and Maynard Mack, "The World of Hamlet," Yale Review, 41 (1952), 502-23. For irony see Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet (New York: Viking, 1964), and Thomas F. Van Laan, "Ironic Reversal in Hamlet," Studies in English Literature, 6 (1966), 247-62. For irreconcilable oppositions, see John Lawlor, The Tragic Sense in Shakespeare (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960), pp. 9-16, 45-73; Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press, 1967), pp. 1-13; Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare's Early Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1968), pp. 163-206; Nigel Alexander, Poison, Play, and Duel: A Study in Hamlet (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1971), pp. 8-9, 14; Bernard McElroy, Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 29-88. For verbal mystification, see Paul A. Jorgensen, Redeeming Shakespeare's Words (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1962), pp. 100-120; Maurice Charney, Style in Hamlet (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969); Lawrence Danson, Tragic Alphabet: Shake-speare's Drama of Language (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 22-49.

¹³ Although some critics have argued that "adulterate" did not have such a specific meaning, the Ghost's word at least implies that Gertrude may have been an adulteress—an implication sufficient to taint Hamlet's mind. For opposing views, see John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1935), pp. 292-94, and McElroy, Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies, p. 53.

¹⁴ See Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, pp. 44-50; M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (London: Methuen, 1957), pp. 117-18; Irving Ribner, Patterns in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1960), pp. 72-73; and Alexander, Poison, Play, and Duel, pp. 45-46.

¹⁵ See Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 2nd ed. rev. (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 5-10, 135-37.

¹⁶ Although he attributes Hamlet's confusion to unstated scruples about taking revenge, John Lawlor (The Tragic Sense, pp. 45, 66, 72) agrees that Hamlet does not understand himself, and that his lack of self-knowledge is what makes his soliloquies pose unanswerable questions.

¹⁷ Eugen Fink, "The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play," from Oase des Glücks, trs. Ute and Thomas Saine, in Game, Play, Literature: Yale French Studies, 41 (1968), 23-24.

¹⁸ Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), p. 25. Gregory Bateson, "A Theory of Play and Fantasy," Psychological Research Reports, 2 (1955), 39-51; "The Message 'This is Play,'" in Transactions of the Second Conference on Group Processes, ed. B. Schaffner (New York: Macy Foundation, 1956), pp. 145-242; "Metalogue: Why a Swan?" in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), pp. 33-37.

¹⁹ For similar views, see Brents Stirling, Unity in Shakespearian Tragedy: The Interplay of Theme and Character (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 86-110; and McElroy, Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies, p. 61.

²⁰ See Roy W. Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969) p. 236; and McElroy, Shake-speare's Mature Tragedies, pp. 63-64. For the traditional Freudian interpretations of the poisoning and Hamlet's "oral aggression," see Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, pp. 193-94, and Melvin D. Faber, "Hamlet, Sarcasm and Psychoanalysis," Psychoanalytic Review, 55 (1968), 79-90.

²¹ For less positive approaches to the motivations for Hamlet's playing, see Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 129-43; and Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 255-58.

²² Nigel Alexander analyzes duel as one of the three crucial symbolic actions in the play (Poison, Play, and Duel).

²³ Similarly, a schizophrenic will often try to escape from double-bind interactions by insisting that either he or the other person is really someone else or is not really present. See Bateson, et al., "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia," in Double Bind, p. 9. Eleanor Prosser argues that the Ghost is, in fact, a "goblin damned" who urges Hamlet to commit the mortal sin of murder (Hamlet and Revenge, pp. 108-22).

²⁴ Although the Craig-Bevington edition prefers the reading "Tropically," the Ql reading is "Trapically."

²⁵ See Simon O. Lesser, Fiction and the Unconscious (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 135, 262, and Jay Haley, "Paradoxes in Play, Fantasy, and Psychotherapy," Psychiatric Research Reports, 2 (1955), 52-58.

²⁶ Nigel Alexander discusses Hamlet's failure to love Ophelia (Poison, Play, and Duel, pp. 119-52). Hamlet calls her a puppet in III.ii.257. In Grigori Kozintsev's Russian film of Hamlet (1966), Ophelia is being given dancing lessons when the audience first sees her, and her puppet-like movements are repeated in her mad scene. Before "The Murder of Gonzago," she is laced into an inhumanly restrictive bodice of a black dress with a prominent wire collar.

²⁷ Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, p. 213.

²⁸ For discussions of Hamlet's playing avenger, see Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, p. 192; Charney, Style in Hamlet, p. 318; Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 255-56; Danson, Tragic Alphabet, pp. 44-45; Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence, pp. 134-36. Hieronimo, Malevole, and Vindice are the avengers in three popular revenge tragedies of the period: Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (ca. 1587), John Marston's The Malcontent (1604), and Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy (pub. 1607).

²⁹ Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, pp. 111-12.

³⁰ See III.iv.175. Fredson Bowers argues that the two terms, scourge and minister, had these distinct meanings in sixteenth-century England; "Hamlet as Minister and Scourge," PMLA, 70 (1955), 740-49. R. W. Dent, however, cites contemporary evidence of scourge bearing no implication of taint or need for eventual punishment: "Hamlet: Scourge and Minister," Shakespeare Quarterly, 29 (1978), 82-84.

³¹ Critics have gathered into opposing camps on the issue of Hamlet's regeneration or degradation. S. F. Johnson, of the former camp, rehearses the debate up to 1952, in "The Regeneration of Hamlet," SQ, 3 (1952), 187-207. Since then, the most prominent sup-porters of the view that Hamlet becomes God's redeemed agent of revenge are Maynard Mack, "The World of Hamlet," pp. 520-23; Bowers, "Hamlet as Minister and Scourge," pp. 748-49, and "The Death of Hamlet: A Study in Plot and Character," in Studies in the English Renaissance Drama, eds., Josephine W. Bennett, Oscar Cargill, Vernon Hall (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 28-43; Ribner, Patterns in Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 80-83; Sr. Miriam Joseph, C.S.C., "Hamlet, a Christian Tragedy," Studies in Philology, 59 (1962), 119-40; B. L. Reid, "The Last Act and the Action of Hamlet," Yale Review, 54 (1964), 59-80; Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, pp. 219-40; and David Bevington, Introduction to Hamlet, in The Complete Works, pp. 899-903. Of those who maintain that Hamlet is tainted in his revenge, the most prominent are Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 152-55, 250-65; Alan C. Dessen, "Hamlet's Poisoned Sword: A Study in Dramatic Imagery," Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), 53-69; and John F. Andrews, '"Dearly Bought Revenge': Samson Agonistes, Hamlet, and Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy," Milton Studies, 13 (1979), 81-107.

³² See Gregory Bateson, "Double Bind (1969)"; Lyman C. Wynne, "On the Anguish, and Creative Passions, of Not Escaping Double Binds"; and Richard Rabkin. "Critique of the Clinical Use of the Double Bind Hypothesis"; in Double Bind, pp. 237-50, 287-306. Bateson (pp. 241-42) describes an experiment with a porpoise that, as odd as it seems, may illuminate Hamlet's transformation in Act V. The female porpoise had been trained to expect a whistle followed by food when she raised her head above the water. She had learned a context for behavior. But her trainer wanted her to present a new piece of behavior each time she entered the tank. Thus she must learn the context of the first context. Naturally on her second entrance into the tank, she futilely raised her head above the water. Only by accident did she produce a new piece of behavior, a tail flap, and receive a reward. For fourteen sessions the confused porpoise continued to perform the most recently rewarded behavior, producing new behaviors only by accident. Before the fifteenth session, however, she was visibly excited, and when let into the tank "she put on an elaborate performance including eight conspicuous pieces of behavior of which four were entirely new—never before observed in this species of animal." Like the porpoise who had learned how to learn, Hamlet has transcended double binds by leaping to a higher level of insight.