SOURCE: “‘Nor th' exterior nor the inward man’: The Problematics of Personal Identity in Hamlet,” in University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 3, Summer, 1999, pp. 711-27.

[In the following essay, Levy charts Hamlet's probing of the nature of human identity and argues that the play conceptualizes an alternative to the usual inward/outward polarity.]

Hamlet begins with an urgent questioning of identity: ‘Who's there?’ A similar query is soon directed at the Ghost: ‘What art thou that usurp'st this time of night’ (1.1.49). The interrogation is complicated by the very nature of the problem. For identity in this context is not simple but polar. That is, it comprises a totality whose two aspects are public and private or what Claudius terms ‘th'exterior’ and ‘the inward man’ (2.2.4).¹ Therefore, if the question of identity is to be answered at the most fundamental level, the proper relation of the inward and outward dimensions of identity must first be determined. As we shall find, Hamlet profoundly critiques prevailing assumptions regarding this relation, and dramatizes an alternate conceptualization of human identity: ‘what is a man’ (4.4.33).

According to the conventional schema, inward and outward are construed as reciprocal modes of the same totality. In Hegel's succinct enunciation of this traditional schema, inward pertains to ‘essence’ or ‘identity with self’; outward pertains to ‘appearance’ or ‘what is manifested.’ In ideal configuration, ‘[t]he appearance shows nothing that is not the essence, and in the essence there is nothing but what is manifested’ (179). A medieval example of such agreement occurs in Abbot Suger's (d. 1151) celebrated description of the clergy assembled for the consecration of the Parisian basilica of St Denis: ‘their outward apparel and attire indicated the inward intention of their mind and body’ (113).² This schema of selfhood presupposes the primacy of inwardness, whereby inwardness is construed as the original or exemplar of which the exterior is at best a faithful copy and at worst a deliberate dissimulation. As such, inwardness has more reality than outwardness.

Implicit in this schema is the assumption that inwardness has privileged and unerring access to its own content. That is, just as outward, as a public manifestation, is by definition perceptible by others, so inward, as a private experience, is by definition uniquely perceptible by the subject to which it pertains. Gilbert Ryle elaborates: ‘Only I can take direct cognizance of the status and processes of my own mind’ (11). In other words, private confirmation of inward content is deemed analogous to public confirmation of outward content. The essential differences between them concern location and access. Public objects are situated in the world or the body, and can be perceived by any appropriately placed observer; private objects are situated ‘in the mind’ (Hamlet 3.1.57), and can be perceived only by that mind. Indeed, Hamlet invokes this assumption when distinguishing between outward display and inward feeling: ‘But I have that within which passes show, / These but the trappings and the suits of woe’ (1.2.85-86). Here, the private object (in this case, his own grief) is assigned a certainty of existence equivalent to that enjoyed by public objects. In fact, Katherine Eisaman Maus even claims that, in this example, the private object enjoys superior certainty: ‘For Hamlet the internal experience of his own grief “passes show” in two senses. It is beyond scrutiny, concealed where other people cannot perceive it. And it surpasses the visible—its validity is unimpeachable’ (4; original emphasis).³

THE CRITIQUE OF INWARDNESS

But Maus's claim regarding the primacy of inwardness is undermined in the world of the play, where the private object (that of which inwardness is aware) is notoriously problematic and in need of outward verification. Relevant examples include Polonius forgetting his own train of thought (‘what was I about / to say?’ [2.1.50-51]), and Ophelia uncertain of her own awareness, both before her madness (‘I do not know, my lord, what I should think’ [1.3.104]) and during it: ‘Indeed would make one think there might be thought, / Though nothing sure …’ (4.5.12-13). With respect to inwardness, Hamlet questions his own courage (‘Am I a coward?’ 2.2.566), and doubts whether commitment to his own purpose is really there, in the womb of interiority, when no outward action—not even verbal—to fulfil it is performed: ‘Like a John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause’ (2.2.563). Without external corroboration, there is no distinction between false and valid claims concerning inwardness. In these circumstances, the content of inwardness becomes radically problematic. An extreme example of this predicament concerns Hamlet's inventory of ‘that within which passes show’: ‘I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in’ (3.1.124-127). Here inwardness excludes all outwardness—even the acts of awareness (such as thought and imagination) by which interiority is expressed. Yet, in this situation, statements about inwardness are no more than empty attributions, with no possibility of either verification or refutation.⁴

The problem of inward verification can be clarified by reference to the critique of inwardness developed by Wittgenstein and the Oxford philosophers of ordinary language. The primary conclusion of this school is that, without outward criteria, we can never know what another person is experiencing, because we can never know what we ourselves are experiencing. To pursue the implications of this extraordinary conclusion, we must first clarify the concept of knowledge on which it is based.

Explication can begin with Socrates, for whom knowledge implies infallibility (Plato, Theaetetus 152c). Otherwise, it would not be knowledge but error. Hence, perception of external objects cannot yield genuine knowledge, since the perceiver is always subject to fluctuation: ‘Are you not sure that it [that which is perceived] does not even appear the same to yourself, because you never remain in the same condition?’ (Theaetetus 154a). Though without acknowledging the similarity, Wittgenstein applies a variation of this argument to the notion of the private object (that which exists only in experience of the inward man). There can be no knowledge of the private object (e.g., pain), because in this context, there is no criterion by which truth and falsehood, accuracy and error, can be distinguished. The point here is not that there are no inward feelings, but that statements regarding them are incorrigible; that is, they cannot be verified by any objectively valid principle of verification, and hence are subject to no evaluation of correctness (Malcolm, ‘Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations,’ 101).

If the subject alone has access to his own feelings, by what criterion can the accuracy of his own perceptions or reports concerning them be verified? That is, how can the content of inwardness be validated? In Wittgenstein's epigram, ‘An “inner process” stands in need of outward criteria’ (i.e. standards of measurement and identification which are independent of their referents) (Philosophical Investigations, 580). Indeed, Hamlet himself refers to the need for outward criteria in order to prove that his perception of the Ghost in Gertrude's closet was not merely an inward process or private object: ‘Bring me to the test / And I the matter will reword, which madness would gambol from’ (3.4.144-46). Wittgenstein epitomizes the problem of inwardness in an example: ‘Always get rid of the idea of the private object in this way: assume that it constantly changes, but that you do not notice the change because your memory constantly deceives you’ (Philosophical Investigations, 207e). To reformulate this problem in the language of the play, what if, unknown to the subject, the same private object (‘that within which passes show’) changes its appearance (or magnitude, intensity, etc.) according to the mood or condition of the subject perceiving it—just as the same cloud ‘seems’ (1.2.76) spontaneously to change shape (‘camel,’ ‘weasel,’ and ‘whale’ [3.2.368, 370, 372]), according to Hamlet's shifting perceptions of it?

The consequences of this problem are profound. To begin with, the assumption that knowledge of others is derived from analogy with oneself must be abandoned. For if, in oneself, it is impossible to verify objectively whether a given sensation or feeling is the same as that felt at some period in the past, then a fortiori it is impossible to determine whether what someone else feels is the same as that which one feels oneself. In the realm of privacy, there is no criterion for correct use of the term ‘same’—whether in reference to oneself or another. Thus, to borrow Norman Malcolm's phrasing, ‘the illusion of the priority of [one's] own case’ is exploded, together with ‘the mistaken assumption that one learns from one's own case what thinking, feeling, sensation are’ (‘Knowledge of Other Minds,’ 380, 378; original emphasis). Hence, first-person experience is no longer valid as the paradigm in terms of which third-person experience is explained.

But without this paradigm, how is knowledge of other minds possible, or, to put the question less formally, how can the privacy of one individual be interpreted and made intelligible to another? For as Justus Hartnack indicates, ‘[t]he belief that states of mind or mental events are experienced by others is an inference based on analogy from one's own inner experience’ (111). A pertinent version of this inference occurs in Plato's Gorgias: ‘if mankind did not share one common emotion which was the same though varying in its different manifestations, but some of us experienced peculiar feelings unshared by the rest, it would not be easy for one of us to reveal his feelings to another’ (481c).

According to this critique of inwardness, the only adequate criterion of verification regarding the private object is outward behaviour. The ‘I’ is not in a better position than others to confirm statements about his or her innermost processes, because verification requires an invariable criterion, not one that is itself an inward process whose variation might not be noticed by the subject applying it. To adopt Ryle's formulation, the subject does not enjoy ‘Privileged Access to the so-called springs of his own actions’ (91). Hence, as Terence Penelhum indicates, properly to attribute traits to character is ‘to refer not to private episodes, but to dispositions which manifest themselves in predominantly public performances’ (227). It is to posit, not properties independent of expression, but what Place terms ‘capacities, tendencies … to behave in a certain way … if certain circumstances were to arise’ (211).

THE CRITIQUE OF OUTWARDNESS

As we have seen, the primacy of inwardness is problematized by the need for outward confirmation of its content. But outward verification of inwardness is itself notoriously problematized in the world of the play, where the exterior man functions as an actor or ‘player’ (2.2.545) whose role and character are contrived by the inward man in order to manipulate the response of the ‘audience’ (5.2.340): ‘'Tis too much prov'd, that with devotion's visage / And pious action we do sugar o'er / The devil himself’ (3.1.47-49); ‘one may smile, and smile, and be a villain’ (1.5.108); ‘A face without a heart’ (4.7.108). Hence, outwardness is now associated with the concealment or shamming of inwardness, while inwardness is associated with the manipulation of outwardness. Indeed, much of the action in Hamlet concerns the elaborate strategies by which one party attempts to hide, behind a false exterior, its own attempt to probe behind the presumedly false exterior of another. For example, Polonius and Claudius hide behind an arras in order to detect the inward cause of Hamlet's madness, which, in turn, is but an outward simulation designed to enable Hamlet to probe the inward secret of Claudius.⁵

This situation epitomizes the notorious discord between inward and outward during the Renaissance. According to Maus, the period ‘produces a distinctive way of thinking about human subjectivity that emphasizes the disparity between what a person is and what he or she seems to be to other people’ (210). According to Stephen Greenblatt, ‘in the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process’ (2). The locus classicus of Renaissance preoccupation with self-presentation is, of course, Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier (completed in 1516), where the ideal of the gentleman is the sprezzatura or nonchalance that enables him ‘to conceal all art and make whatever is done and said appear to be without effort and without almost any thought about it’ (43). The obverse of this emphasis on self-presentation is suspicion concerning authenticity. For outward is now associated with the concealment of inward.

Yet the reliability of outward expression as a criterion of inward verification is problematized, not only by deliberate manipulation undertaken for personal advantage, but also by mandatory conventions governing outward presentation. Indeed, the opening dialogue foregrounds such conventions: ‘Who's there?’ / ‘Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself’ (1.1.1-2). Here, knowledge of identity follows not from direct expression of private feeling (as when Francisco, after dismissal, refers to feeling ‘sick at heart’) but from outward behaviour modelled according to performative convention (1.1.9). That is, the guard confirms his identity not by outward expression of his inward state, but by a password whose utterance presupposes a shared ‘custom’ of usage: ‘Long live the King!’ (1.4.15; 1.1.3).

THE THEATRICAL MORALITY

But the watchmen are not the only figures expected to adhere to performative convention. According to the dominant morality in the world of the play, when certain external circumstances are present, an appropriate state of inwardness must be prominently indicated by the appropriate outward behaviour. If a character does not display the expected emotion in response to these external circumstances, he risks disgracing his ‘honour’ (5.2.242, 244).⁶ For, as the most coveted of possessions, honour is primarily a measure of ‘performance’ (4.7.150) or ‘showing’ (5.2.108), and hence can be gained only through appropriate public ‘behaviour’ (2.1.4)—to adopt a term introduced by Polonius, who uses it in the contrary sense: to indicate the actions which Laertes would not want his father to see, lest his own ‘dishonour’ (2.1.21, 27) result. But in obeying the imperative regarding appropriate emotional display, each consigns ‘the inward man’ to an inconsolable isolation by ensuring that ‘th'exterior’ man—the self presented to others—is seen, by those constituting the audience, to act according to their moral specifications, evincing only those thoughts and feelings deemed suitable to the situation.⁷

An unexpectedly apt account of the theatrical imperative appears in T.S. Eliot's celebrated—but by now antiquated—essay ‘Hamlet’ (1919). There Eliot develops the notion of the ‘objective correlative,’ wherein the inward emotion expressed by a character must be correlated with external elements evoking it: ‘in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events … shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked’ (145). Hamlet unwittingly cites the objective correlative when comparing the Player's emotional performance with his own shameful reticence: ‘What would he do / Had he the motive and the cue for passion / That I have? He would drown the stage with tears, / And cleave the general ear with horrid speech …’ (2.2.554-60).

Of course, Hamlet is unaware here of the deeper implications of his own query. But in spontaneously proposing this hypothetical case, where a professional actor exploits his skill to express emotions that for him are compellingly real, Hamlet unknowingly critiques the theatrical imperative, as brief analysis shows. His assumption that sincerity enhances the public expression of feeling presupposes another: that one is already adept at feigning what he does not feel. The primary requirement is to be an actor, ‘[t]h'observ'd of all observers’ (3.1.156)—someone, that is, skilled at simulating the emotions deemed appropriate to the ‘situation’ or ‘chain of events.’ In a world where the suddenly sincere Player is the ‘paragon’ (2.2.307) of the behaviour appropriate to the situation in which Hamlet now finds himself, sincerity has no place. For it can no longer be distinguished from its contrary, false show or deception. Whether the individual actually feels the passion he displays is irrelevant because unverifiable.⁸ Similarly, were the Player abruptly to intensify his acting during a performance, the audience could not tell whether the change were due to a spasm of sincerity or simply a surge of professional talent.

In a world where the suddenly sincere Player is the ideal—‘the card and calendar of gentry’—to be oneself is to be a public likeness or ‘semblable’ (5.2.119-20, 118) of oneself, whether the emotions expressed by speech and action are sincere or not. For to be oneself is to be construed and evaluated in terms of expectations and criteria regarding exterior self-presentation—just as we found earlier with respect to the sentries standing ‘watch’ on the ‘platform’ (1.2.197, 214). But as a result of the requirement regarding outward ‘showing’ (5.2.108), the inward man is denied the power of expression, just like the dead: ‘That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once’ (5.1.74).

The predicament of identity uncovered thus far in the world of the play can now be recapitulated. On the one hand, inwardness requires outward expression for verification. Without external ‘showing’ (5.2.108), the existence of an inward trait (‘that within which passes show’ [1.2.85]) is no more certain than is the existence of the Ghost without corroboration by multiple witnesses. On the other hand, outward expression—the necessary criterion by which inwardness is verified—is an unreliable index of identity, for it is subservient to both inward manipulation and prevailing convention.

POSTHUMOUS EXISTENCE AS METAPHOR FOR INWARDNESS

In the course of the play, the plight of inwardness, isolated from authentic and intelligible outward expression, is powerfully symbolized by the Ghost, for whom death involves an intensity of private suffering that if disclosed to the living would occasion not comprehension but horror: ‘I could a tale unfold whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul …’ (1.5.15-16). For Hamlet, in his ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, death putatively involves a sleep wherein the mind is forever tormented by appalling ‘dreams’ (3.1.66) from which it never awakens—and of which, by implication, it can never speak. Moreover, with his four last words, ‘the rest is silence’ (5.2.363), Hamlet again associates death with the incommunicable privacy of that centre of interiority which he elsewhere terms ‘my heart's core, … my heart of heart,’ and ‘my dear soul’ (3.2.73, 63).

The linkage between the inward man and death is strengthened by a correlative association between Hamlet's inwardness and the motif of the Ghost. Hamlet's sudden visit to Ophelia's closet—his initial appearance after the dialogue with the Ghost—is the first of these occasions. To Ophelia, who receives him unexpected, Hamlet appears ‘As if he had been loosed out of hell / To speak of horrors …’ (2.1.83-84)—a condition like that of the Ghost who, loosed from Purgatory, speaks of similar things: ‘O horrible! O horrible! most horrible!’ (1.5.80). Later, on the second occasion when Hamlet is associated with the Ghost, Polonius and Claudius exploit Hamlet's habit of walking ‘in the lobby’ (2.2.161), and direct Ophelia to stand in his path while they eavesdrop behind an arras. The decision of these two characters to send out a third who will converse with an enigmatic figure regularly appearing in a part of the castle duplicates the plan of Horatio, Bernardo, and Marcellus to invite Hamlet to speak to the Ghost. Moreover, in both conversations the enigmatic figure concludes with redundant valediction: the Ghost by repeating ‘Fare thee well’ (1.5.88) and ‘adieu’ (1.5.91); Hamlet by repeating ‘Farewell’ (3.1.134, 139, 142).⁹

The third linking of Hamlet with the motif of the Ghost occurs at the moment of death. Hamlet's invocation of the astonished ‘audience’ (5.2.340) of courtiers who have witnessed the carnage at the end of the play (‘You that look pale and tremble at this chance’ [5.2.339]) repeats almost verbatim that spoken by Bernardo to Horatio after sighting the Ghost (‘You tremble and look pale’ [1.1.56]). Similarly, the Ghost's aposiopesis (‘I could a tale unfold whose lightest word’ [1.5.16]) is echoed in Hamlet's version: ‘O, I could tell you …’ (5.2.342).

This motif of the secondary ghost (that is, the ghost implied by the duplication, in one character, of attributes or utterances associated with the primary Ghost) constitutes the supreme symbol of the plight of the inward man in the world of the play. Analysis of the first example of the motif, that is, Hamlet's visit to Ophelia's closet—will position us to probe the problematics of personal identity more deeply.

What is the painful vision that absorbs Hamlet as he stares at Ophelia while thrice nodding his head and sighing in dismay?¹⁰ The most striking element here is that, throughout their silent meeting, Hamlet seems completely unaware of Ophelia's ability to see his behaviour, but acts instead as if he were somehow still alone. He is dishevelled, but seems wholly unconcerned with his appearance. He gazes at her with prolonged and anguished attention, oblivious to her response. In fact, instead of regarding Ophelia as a separate person, Hamlet seems ultimately to see in her something which concerns only himself—almost as if he were contemplating his own reflection. And in a way, he is. To look at Ophelia is to confirm his own inescapable isolation. Perhaps this is the deepest meaning of Ophelia's comparison of Hamlet to a ghost released from hell to speak of horrors. Private pain propelled Hamlet into Ophelia's closet, but that pain only intensifies the longer he stays. Yet when he leaves, there is only one place he can go: back to his hell of silence. Hamlet's agony in Ophelia's closet is the recognition that he can never speak. More precisely, he can speak but only to hide what he can never say. As if he were already dead, Hamlet becomes the ghost of himself—a manifestation of his own absence, the living embodiment of his own dying words: ‘The rest is silence.’

This encounter with Ophelia reveals Hamlet in the grip of the play's central paradox: to be is not to be. In a society founded on deception and the fear of disgrace, to live as a person is to live as a ghost. In public, each is encouraged to present himself as a sheer appearance which renders invisible the reality within; in private, each risks suffering pain that must remain dumb. More profoundly, each risks the pain of having to remain dumb: ‘Give thy thoughts no tongue’ (1.3.59); ‘But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue’ (1.2.158). Thus, through the need to maintain ‘th'exterior’ by words and actions, the secrets of ‘the inward man’ are as removed from communication with the living as are the dead.¹¹ But, as was suggested near the outset of our study, without outward expression the content of inwardness becomes problematic—even to the subject experiencing it—and is as much in need of verification as the testimony of the real Ghost.

OVERCOMING THE FIRST-PERSON PARADIGM

No character is more implicated in this predicament than Hamlet. But neither is any character more motivated to transcend it. To understand his efforts in this regard, it is useful first to review his predicament. However acutely he perceives falseness (‘To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand’ [2.2.178-9]) and however adroitly, through the ruse of madness, he exploits it, Hamlet cannot readily separate his own sense of identity from the exteriority he reviles. For his very concept of himself is grounded in concern for the exterior man and the reputation pertaining to it: ‘O God, Horatio, what a wounded name, / Things standing thus unknown, shall I leave behind me’ (5.2.349-50). Conversely, the more Hamlet withdraws from exteriority into inwardness, the more his view of the world is influenced by the first-person paradigm, such that everything he sees is interpreted by analogy with his own experience. This is evident in Hamlet's initial two soliloquies, where he defines both himself (‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’ [2.2.544]) and the future (‘It is not, nor it cannot come to good’ [1.2.158]) in terms of his own immediate situation.

Many critics conclude that Hamlet achieves no more than an unpredictable oscillation between the poles of ‘psychic opposition’ (States, 127) or identity, however defined. As a result, his character is frequently labelled as incoherent.¹² But the ‘yeasty collection’ (5.2.188) of contraries constituting Hamlet's character undergoes leavening whose consequence is a genuine—though incomplete—integration of opposites. Or, to deploy a more active metaphor, in a labour equivalent to those of ‘Hercules’ (1.2.153; 5.1.286). Hamlet realigns what is ‘out of joint’ (1.5.196), and so achieves heroic individuation.

The process of rectification can be completed only through overcoming the first-person paradigm, for through it there is no genuine knowledge of identity, only a self-preoccupation that construes everything external by analogy to itself. In the play, of course, the first-person paradigm is often taken for granted, as when Polonius interprets Hamlet's presumed love-sickness in terms of his own experience (‘And truly in my youth I suffered much extremity for love, very near this’ [2.2.189-90]), Ophelia's auditors interpret, in terms of their own thinking, her mad utterances (‘And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts’ [4.5.10]), and Hamlet interprets Laertes' predicament in terms of his own (‘For by the image of my cause I see / the portraiture of his’ [5.2.77-78]).

In conjunction with this emphasis on the first-person paradigm, Hamlet also dramatizes the confusion created by its absence. For the advent of the Ghost obviously constitutes an instance when the first-person paradigm is temporarily suspended. By his tendency ‘[s]o horridly to shake our disposition / With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls’ (1.4.55-56; my emphasis), the Ghost literally localizes an inward experience which exceeds the relevance of the first-person paradigm and the attempt to interpret experience in terms of one's own case. Ironically, that very paradigm is invoked when Horatio compares the resemblance of the Ghost to the late King with Marcellus's resemblance to himself: ‘As thou art to thyself’ (1.1.63).

But a transcending in the first-person paradigm is achieved in Hamlet's third soliloquy, where ‘grief’ (1.2.82) over his father's death eventually deepens into awareness of the implications of mortality for ‘us all’ (3.1.83). Death is life-terminating but also life-enlarging, because awareness of it focuses thought on the ultimate purpose of this life which will end: ‘What should we do?’ (1.4.57). Though in the ‘To be’ soliloquy that ultimate purpose is not yet evident and the only goal of life is to endure until the end, at least the sufficiency of self-reference has been questioned. The ‘sea of troubles’ is far more vast than any ‘single and peculiar life’ can contain (3.1.59; 3.3.11), and the ‘sleep of death’ is far too enigmatic for any living individual to fathom.

After the performance of The Murder of Gonzago, movement ‘beyond the reaches’ (1.4.56) of the first-person paradigm is more pronounced, with the result that inward and exterior are redefined. When he unexpectedly corners his quarry at prayer, instead of killing him on the spot and finally satisfying his own immediate and painfully frustrated purpose, Hamlet defers revenge to a more opportune occasion: ‘No. / Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent; / When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage … or about some act / That has no relish of salvation in't’ (3.3.87-92). Were Hamlet still confined within the preoccupations of his own case, he would not defer action at this moment of intensely aroused desire whose immediate analogue is the yearning, in the ‘To be’ soliloquy, for the ‘consummation’ (3.1.63) of death. Both in that soliloquy and in the scene with the praying Claudius, Hamlet's rejection of ‘action’ (3.1.87) stems from speculation about posthumous experience inexplicable in terms of the first-person paradigm.

Analysis of Claudius's synchronous meditation will clarify the implications of this rejection.¹³ Here the King contrasts the accuracy of divine judgment, where ‘the action lies / In his true manner,’ with the fallibility of human judgment, prone to be fooled by ‘shuffling’ (3.3.61-62, 41). In one case, the moral value of the inward man behind the action of the exterior one is revealed; in the other, dissembled. But, ‘[i]n the corrupted currents of this world’ (3.3.57), a more insidious shuffling occurs than intentional deception—one that concerns the inadvertent confusing of two antithetical concepts of the inward man. According to the first, here represented by ‘Christian’ (5.1.1) eschatology, the inward man is in principle corrigible, and can therefore be evaluated in terms of ‘better, and worse’ (3.2.245), if an infallible criterion of judgment is applied. But according to the second, the inward man is incorrigible, for no criterion of verification pertains. In this context, the inward man enjoys the same unverifiability as the ‘shapes’ (1.2.82) of ‘camel,’ ‘weasel,’ and ‘whale’ indwelling in the cloud which Hamlet indicates to Polonius (3.2.368, 370, 372). Those shapes are what they are said to be, and have no status apart from the awareness formulating them. Hence, to interpolate Malcolm's account of the incorrigible private object, statements about them are neither ‘in error [nor] not in error’ (‘Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations,’ 103; original emphasis).

Whereas at first the problematics of personal identity in the play concerned the relation between the exterior and the inward man, they now concern the corrigibility of the inward man, regardless of his exterior manifestations. Is the inward man, like a sensation or thought, logically and existentially indistinguishable from first-person awareness of it or is the inward man intact and separate in its own right? The question can be deepened: is the inward man accountable or, like Hamlet in his madness, exempt from the very notion of responsibility?

These questions undergo profound examination during the scene in Gertrude's closet. Here Hamlet suggests two means by which to verify that his sighting of the Ghost pertains to a real presence, and not a mere hallucination: comparing his pulse-rate with Gertrude's and rewording the entire incident coherently. But this problem of verification becomes the analogue of another: verifying the moral condition of Gertrude's inward man (or woman): ‘You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you’ (3.4.18-19; my emphasis). Unlike a first-person sensation or thought whose very existence is inseparable from awareness of it, the inward man or ‘inmost part’ is here construed to exist behind the arras of Gertrude's unawareness, just as Polonius is soon discovered behind the real arras. But by what criterion can the presence of this ‘inmost part’ be verified and not dismissed, like the Ghost, as ‘the very coinage of [Hamlet's] brain’ (3.4.139)?

Explicitly, that criterion is Gertrude's own behaviour, as described to her by Hamlet: ‘Nay, but to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed’ (3.4.92-93). She sees her ‘inmost part’ in the verbal picture or mirror of her behaviour which Hamlet has constructed: ‘Thou turn'st my eyes into my very soul, / And there I see such black and grained spots / As will not leave their tinct’ (3.4.89-91). But once Gertrude thus witnesses her ‘inmost part,’ it is no longer a private object, but a public or objective one, just as on the ‘platform’ (1.2.214) at the beginning of the play the ‘apparition’ is no longer construed as a mere ‘fantasy’ (1.1.31, 26) after Horatio, as supplementary witness, confirms its reality.

THE ROLE OF CATHARTIC ACTION IN REALIGNING INWARD AND OUTWARD

But, according to Hamlet, behaviour does more than confirm the inmost part. It can also modify or transform it. After the influx of pity encouraged by the Ghost (‘O step between her and her fighting soul’ [3.4.113]), Hamlet stops castigating Gertrude, and instead exhorts her to ‘reform’ (3.2.38): ‘Assume a virtue if you have it not’ (3.4.162). Here, the assuming of virtue signifies, not false appearance, but a sincere imitation of virtue in order to overcome ‘habits evil’ (3.4.164).¹⁴ If Gertrude acts virtuously for the sake of becoming virtuous (and not for the sake of seeming so), she will eventually succeed: ‘For use can almost change the stamp of nature, / And either lodge the devil or throw him out’ (3.4.170-71; my emphasis).¹⁵ This kind of cathartic action, undertaken for moral cleansing or ‘the purging of the soul’ (3.3.85), is the moral contrary of the ‘actions that a man might play,’ prescribed by the theatrical imperative; for its end or purpose is not to simulate outwardly a given moral state but inwardly to achieve it.

Rectification of the relation between inward and exterior is consummated through Hamlet's eventual faith in end-shaping divinity—in a way clarified by analysis of the ‘ends’ shaped: ‘There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will’ (5.2.10-11). On the one hand, the ‘ends’ shaped refer to the outcome of individual striving. Indeed, the Player King employs the term ‘ends’ with this meaning: ‘Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own’ (3.2.208). On the other hand, the ‘ends’ shaped refer to the purposes of the agent intending action, not to their result.

The profundity of Hamlet's insight now emerges. In shaping ends, divinity is not simply equivalent to the influence of fate whose intervention renders consummation of individual purpose impossible or irrelevant: ‘Our wills and fates do so contrary run’ (3.2.206). Instead, by causing a particular purpose to fructify in a particular result, divinity shapes the meaning of that purpose.¹⁶ For the result achieved qualifies the purpose conceived. For example, when groping ‘[r]ashly’ (5.2.6) in the dark to extract the diplomatic ‘packet’ (5.2.15) purveyed by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet does not yet know the full implication of his purpose which is revealed to him only by its result. Here the inward man is clarified—one might accurately say constituted—by the actions of the exterior one. But conversely, this clarification by means of the exterior man depends on the initiative (what Hamlet terms ‘rashness’ [5.2.7]) of the inward one.

But Hamlet's anagnorisis implies more than this. Identifying through a purpose beyond himself enables him to achieve authentic self-assurance: ‘This is I, / Hamlet the Dane’ (5.1.250-51). His sense of identity is no longer bounded in the nutshell of the first-person paradigm. To be himself is no longer to interpret everything else by analogy with his own case, as when, in his former melancholy, he viewed the world as a ‘sterile promontory’ overlooking ‘a sea of troubles’ (2.2.299; 3.1.59). A corresponding change has also occurred with respect to his conception of the exterior man. In the course of the play, he advances from regarding the suddenly sincere player as the ‘paragon’ (2.2.307) to be emulated in the presentation of oneself to attacking Laertes for emulating, in ‘the bravery of his grief’ (5.2.78), precisely that ideal.

Yet, though Hamlet deepens his expression of both the inward and exterior man, he cannot unambiguously reconcile their reciprocal estrangement in the world of the play. The pathos of his death illumines the dilemma of his life: ‘Now cracks a noble heart’ (5.2.364). Unlike Gertrude, who, when confronted with her own moral identity, can simply ‘throw away the worser part of it / And live purer with other half’ (3.4.159-60), Hamlet must strain to reconcile incompatible halves, without the option of discarding one. Yet no matter how heroically he struggles, his task must end in failure. For the relation between inward and exterior is not under his exclusive control.

Consider the ‘transformation’ (2.2.5) which Hamlet's own exterior man or ‘name’ (5.2.349) begins to undergo as soon as Hamlet himself dies. In outlining the explanation which he intends to provide of the events leading to Hamlet's death, Horatio inadvertently sounds like an impresario drumming up interest in his repertoire: ‘So shall you hear / Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, / Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, / Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause … All this can I / Truly deliver’ (5.2.385-91).¹⁷ His diverse inventory recalls that enunciated by Polonius on introducing the Players: ‘The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral … scene individable, or poem unlimited’ (2.2.392-96). This emphasis on exaggerated theatrical display culminates in the last words of the play, when Fortinbras orders the exposition of Hamlet's corpse on a ‘stage’ (5.2.401; my emphasis) or bier. Yet, the more Hamlet is eulogized in these ‘terms of honour’ (5.2.242), the less his rejection of theatrical exaggeration is understood.

Without exterior expression, the inward man undergoes an analogous ‘transformation’ (2.2.5). As long as inwardness passes show and remains bounded in the nutshell of interiority, there is no criterion by which to distinguish accurate predications concerning it from those that are merely ‘bad dreams’ (2.2.256). Ironically, with his last four words, ‘the rest is silence’ (5.2.363), Hamlet not only refers to interiority but seems almost to withdraw into it, as if preparing to begin the posthumous experience which has already been associated many times with precisely that pole of personal identity. But this possibility—and, of course, it is no more than a possibility—also suggests that, since now Hamlet really is dead, his interior experience entails judgment by the infallible criterion ‘above’ (3.3.60). For in the play divinity is the ultimate transcendence of the first-person paradigm.

We reach the double bind in the problematics of personal identity in Hamlet. Without exterior expression, the content of inwardness cannot be confirmed, except by divinity for whom there is no ‘shuffling’ (3.3.61). But with exterior expression, inwardness is equally problematized. Conventions and expectations regarding exterior manifestation distort or misconstrue the inwardness made manifest. Moreover, as we have also seen, application of the first-person paradigm leads the witnesses of outward expression to ‘botch’ it up ‘fit to their own thoughts’ (4.5.10). Hamlet cannot overcome this problem. For his task is a tragic hero's, not a ‘Saviour's’ (1.1.164). He can only, through his dramatic agon, transpose the problem to larger contexts where its conflicting terms of reference—inward and exterior—can in principle be resolved. He accomplishes this first in Gertrude's closet, where, through the notion of cathartic action, outward expression becomes the means of effecting inward reform. He further reconciles the conflicting poles of identity by his recognition of the end-shaping divinity through whose influence, as we have seen, the inward purposes of individual agents are not only expressed but widened and transformed by outward action.

Notes

1. Cf States: ‘There are two dimensions in which a character behaves and exists before us: as body, as acter, do-er and speaker of things, as entity in physical space; and as “spirit,” as judgment, sensibility, thought, and imagination’ (187).

2. For background, see chapter 3, ‘Suger of St.-Denis,’ in Von Simpson, 61-90.

3. For a recent elaboration of Maus's thesis, see Finkelstein.

4. Solipsism, of course, assumes the verifiability of the private object in the absence of outwardness. A succinct formulation of this position is provided by Windelband: ‘Each individual mind has certain, intuitive knowledge only of itself and of its states, nor does it know anything of other minds except through ideas which refer primarily to bodies and by an argument from analogy are interpreted to indicate minds’ (2: 471).

5. Several critics take Hamlet's madness far more literally. See, for example, Lidz, 222, and Codden. Regarding the influence of gender on madness, see Findlay.

6. As C.L. Barber has copiously demonstrated, the word ‘honour’ was not used univocally but acquired a wide range of meanings during the seventeenth century.

7. Cf Hobbes, Leviathan Parts I and II, 87: ‘Desire of praise disposes to laudable actions, such as please them whose judgment they value.’

8. For an existential discussion of related notions, see the chapter ‘Sincerity and the Actor’ in Ilie, 78-90. For a sociological analysis, see the chapter ‘Performances’ in Goffman, 17-76.

9. For an earlier account of Hamlet's spectral side, see Robert F. Wilson, Jr.

10. A traditional answer is that Hamlet is confirming sadly to himself that Ophelia is too weak to help him. See Chambers, 188. Similarly, J. Dover Wilson argues that Hamlet, though wounded by Ophelia's rejection of him, urgently seeks ‘some comfort or help in her company’ (111-12). Kirschbaum suggests that Hamlet ‘may not see Ophelia the individual as much as Ophelia the symbol of everything in life that pains him’ (386). For emphasis on Ophelia's moral ambiguity, see Patrick, 139-44; and McGee, 138-53.

11. Goddard argues that Ophelia's report concerns her own hallucination of Hamlet.

12. For representative criticism on these grounds, see Bartels; Barker, 37; Eagleton, 73, and Belsey, 41-42.

13. For a discussion of Claudius's abortive repentance in the context of Church of England theology, see Frye, 239-42.

14. The belief that virtue is acquired through good moral habit derives ultimately from Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 2.11032a14-26, as Jenkins in his edition of Hamlet (520) and others have noted.

15. However, according to Adelman, Hamlet's purpose here is to ‘divorce’ (33) Gertrude from her sexuality, in order to protect ‘the boundaries of his selfhood’ (31) from inundation by it.

16. Cf Cornford: ‘the most important element of personality—individual purpose’ (21). Contrast Herold: ‘The self one performs in order better to know oneself turns out not to be one's self at all’ (131).

17. On Horatio's role in confirming Hamlet's intrinsic honesty, see Halverston.

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