SOURCE: “‘Never Doubt I Love’: Misreading Hamlet,” in College Literature, Vol. 21, No. 2, June, 1994, pp. 19-32.

[In the following essay, Habib offers a close reading of Hamlet's love poem to Ophelia and argues that Hamlet deliberately intends his poetry to be misread. The critic further contends that misreading of all kinds is central to the action and meaning of Hamlet.]

Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.
O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers. I have not art to reckon
my groans, but that I love thee best, O most best, believe it. Adieu.
Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to him, Hamlet.(1)

Hamlet's love poem to Ophelia, which Polonius reads out to Claudius and Gertrude in 2.2.116-24 of Hamlet, is an awkward, doubtful business. The love relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia is, admittedly, a minor strand in this complex tragedy. But readers trained in resolving the balanced antinomies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English love poetry often reach for a generalized meaning in Hamlet's poem too quickly to notice the conflicts of its particular oppositions. The conventional response to the poem would be to regard it as a hyperbolic assertion of Hamlet's love for Ophelia in the tradition of Elizabethan and Jacobean syllogistic love poetry (as in Donne's “Go and Catch a Falling Star”). “Doubt the most believable things,” Hamlet's poem seems to say, “but never doubt that I love you.” To construct this sense from a close reading of the poem, however, involves one in considerable difficulties.

The problem centers on the variable relationship between the sense of “doubt” and the statements that are made to be the subject of that doubt in each of the poem's first three lines, and on the consequent uncertainty of the sense of “doubt” and of Hamlet's “love” in the poem's last line. There is an inversion of the meaning of “doubt” either in the second line or in the third or in both, depending on our taste in paradox. If “doubt” in the last line means what it seems to mean in lines 2 and 3, i. e., suspect, fearfully surmise, tentatively believe (O.E.D. 1: 616-17),² then the line amounts to a disavowal of love. Is Hamlet asking to be believed as a lover or disbelieved? Is the poem an avowal of love or a denial of it? No wonder that many modern European poets and writers in over a hundred attempts have had a hard time translating Hamlet's poem, as Alexander and Barbara Gerschenkron have shown.³

Among the critics who have noticed Hamlet's problematic poem and responded to it, Robert Bozanich in 1980 made the interesting suggestion that Hamlet's poem, with its semantic inversions, could be seen as a psychic mirror or “Rorschach blot” that is intended to mockingly reflect the assumptions of the poem's readers rather than those of its author. Thus, Claudius sees in Hamlet's lines ambition, Gertrude shame, Polonius frustrated sexuality, and Ophelia Hamlet's impending madness, which in turn reflects her own future madness (90-93). The Gentleman's comment in 4.5.7-13 that hearers interpret Ophelia's mad words to suit “their own thoughts” could apply to Hamlet's poem as well.

What is interesting about Bozanich's idea of seeing Hamlet's poem as a psychic mirror is that it seems to explain not just responses to the poem within the play but also those outside it, among its critical readers. Those comfortable in their assumptions about the poem's Petrarchan pedigree and about Hamlet's strained courtship of Ophelia have insulated themselves from the lurking discomfiture of Hamlet's lines by simply glossing over them (Meader 149-50; Doran 37-38; King 52; Blanke 22).⁴ Others, wanting to contain the poem and its disturbances, have attempted to domesticate the problem by minimizing the ambiguity of the lines and giving such ambiguity an incidental miscellaneous value: the poem is unquestionably an avowal of love although there is enough room for ambiguity in the lines (Jenkins 462-63; Hibbard 209). Still others have tried to defuse the problem by either apologizing for Hamlet (Levin 54), or for us (Skulsky 485).

Extending what Geoffrey Hartman has pointed out about the play's opening lines—“Who's there?”—we can say that Hamlet's cryptic poem seems to challenge all those who read it to declare themselves, i. e, to be read themselves (3-19; qtd. in Patterson 49).⁵ In its interrogative designs and subversive disturbances, the poem seems to lend itself naturally to phenomenological and deconstructive analyses, neither inappropriate perhaps for a play as concerned as Hamlet is with the reflexions of textuality and the dysfunctions of meaning. To grapple with the significance of Hamlet's cryptic love poem is to go beyond an exploration of any local Shakespearean improprieties and be caught in a network of subversive relations between Hamlet and the world. Hamlet's four-line poem is the text for a pervasive system of misreading that dominates the play, or, as Stephen Booth put it in an important discussion of the poem, it is “a model for the experience of the play as a whole” (173).⁶

The text, in Wolfgang Iser's terms, is “a structured prefigurement … that has to be received, and the way in which it is received depends as much on the reader as on the text” (107). Furthermore, “the work interrogates and transforms the implicit beliefs we bring to it, disconfirms our routine habits of perception,” and rather than merely reinforcing our given perceptions, it “violates or transgresses these normative ways of seeing.” Thus, “The whole point of reading … is that it brings us into a deeper self-consciousness, catalyzes a more critical view of our own identities.”⁷ Transferred to the realm of interpersonal behavior, these functions of reading acquire strategic implications. To the extent that we can read others we can control others and vice-versa. We would, obviously, like to read others without ourselves being read. As Carol Cook has put it in the related context of her reading of gender differences in Much Ado About Nothing, “To read others is an act of aggression; to be read is to be emasculated. Masculine privilege is contingent on the legibility of women.” Reading as a subversive strategy of manipulation shades off into misreading: we would like to read others and want them to misread us. We would like to transmit false readings and receive none, and thus misreading shades off into misleading: we would like to mislead others but not ourselves be misled. In Cook's terms, “Beatrice alternately challenges others' misreadings of her humorist's masks and encourages them to take her as she appears” (186-91). Hamlet's poem is difficult to read because Hamlet, like Beatrice, does not wish to be understood satisfactorily, wishes to be misread.

Love, of course, is the primary location of the secret self and its primary point of vulnerability, and therefore of critical importance in the struggle for self-possession that defines human experience. It is going to be the first subject of concealment, for Hamlet as well as for Ophelia, Gertrude, and Claudius (as evidenced for the latter, for instance, in the densely equivocal announcement of his marriage to Gertrude in the third scene of the play). Patricia Fumerton has suggested that in Elizabethan cultural taste the little, privately circulated love poem with its curious mix of artifice and sentiment—like both the aristocratic Elizabethan country house with its stately rooms that also connect to private ones, and the miniature portrait that is at once displayed and hidden—is a representation of an impulse of self-revelation that is also implicitly an instinct of self-concealment, an invitation to a reading of the self that only yields a misreading of it (104-11). Paralleling Hamlet's love poem is Queen Elizabeth's own love poem, “On Monsieur's Departure”:

I grieve and dare not show my discontent
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate
I do and dare not say I ever meant,
I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate.
I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned,
Since from myself another self I turned. …

(1-6)

Hamlet's self-rescinding love poem is, then, at once a literary analog to a cultural attitude and a semantic code for the dramatized community in which it appears. It is a key to the historical world of Elizabeth as well as to the dramatic world of Elsinore. It is also an index to the (mis)representations of Hamlet's self in speech and behavior in the play.

The text of misreading that Hamlet's poem contains, it is worth noting, is of a particularly impenetrable quality. The poem's meaning is lost in the aporia between an assertion and its implicit opposite, which threatens to cancel it. The declaration that he loves Ophelia is infected by the possibility that he does not love her, the affirmation of the one merely passing into a validation of the other and an impersonation of it, and vice-versa. The deconstructive reflexivity of the unstable signifier “doubt” that creates this aporia is a perfect barrier against the intrusion of legibility into the poem. In a world of hidden intentionality the poem is a declaration of love that reverses and thereby conceals itself—a sign that announces itself by its disappearance. The self-canceling design of Hamlet's poem is replicated by the evasive movement of the last line of the letter that encloses it—“But that I love thee best, O most best, believe it”—a compulsive rhetorical gesture that directs attention away from the fact of his love to an assumption of it, and in doing so obscuring the fact and implicitly erasing it (Bozanich 91). The self-negation of Hamlet's statement happens on the verbal and cognitive level, on the level of speech and understanding. Hamlet is unmaking the word and with it, as we shall see later, the world.⁸ Irrespective of their precise circumstance (whether they were written before or after Polonius's injunction to Ophelia to rebuff Hamlet), the poem and the letter neither seek nor find any readership with Ophelia or with anyone else because, like the other human gestures in the play, love has become one more cipher in a text that refuses to, because it cannot, be deciphered. In being unable to exist except through and in its own annulment, Hamlet's declaration of love affirms subversion as the chief ideology of Elsinore and misreading as its principal text, and announces his mastery over both.

Predictably, the esoteric method of Hamlet's poem is not unlike the dubious style of the other letters that he writes in the play. On the way to England he re-writes Claudius's order for his execution in such a way that the meaning of the order is clear but not its manner: the justification he offers for the order is deliberately obscure and sarcastic (“As peace should still her wheaten garland wear / And stand a comma 'tween their amities, / And many such like as's of great charge” [5.2.41-43]). As Jonathan Goldberg has put it, “Hamlet's skilled hand insures the force of the document, but it does not reveal the writer” (323). Likewise, in the strange letter he sends Claudius announcing his return to England, it is unclear whether his message is contrition or defiance: the letter's reference to seeking “pardon” (4.7.46) is mocked by its stilted, artificial language of royalty. In both of these writings, as in his poem to Ophelia, content is distorted by the variability of intention. Hamlet's own remark to Horatio that, even though he used royal handwriting to re-write the execution order, he normally holds it “A baseness to write fair” (5.2.34), aptly describes his penchant not just for illegibility in handwriting but also for incommunicability in substance. The puzzling love poem, in other words, sets the pattern for Hamlet's enigmatic compositions elsewhere in the action.

The origin of this ideology of subversion and its text of misreading cannot be wholly situated, by Hamlet or by us, in a specific causal event—the murder of a King by his brother. For, even as the Ghost's radical tale of treachery rewrites, revises, and blocks other readings of Elsinore, it is itself a misreading. Its opaque ghostly authority, its manipulative implication of Hamlet in filial duty and an agenda of revenge, and the impenetrability of its ambiguities about Gertrude (who wavers in the Ghost's account between being a reluctant lover, an adulteress, and a murderess [1.5.42-57]) are all dubieties that undermine the validity of its text. The very strength of the Ghost's reading of Elsinore makes it a misreading since excessive magnification will always blur the total picture. As Harold Bloom has put it, a strong “[r]eading is always a misreading” (3). Hamlet's difficulties with the Ghost's account are implicit here in the lament with which he ends the scene, “The time is out of joint—O cursed spite! / That ever I was born to set it right!” (1.5.88-89), and later in his momentary revaluation of the Ghost's words in his decision to put on the play-within-the play (2.2.594-605).

That is, all readings are tainted with the suspicion of misreading, become misreadings. True readings remain inaccessible, uncertain and unknown. One of Roland Barthes' comments is pertinent here:

To read, in fact, is a labor of language. To read is to find meanings and to find meanings is to name them; but these named meanings are swept towards other names; names call to each other, reassemble, and their grouping calls for further naming; I name, I unname, I rename; so the text passes; it is a nomination in the course of becoming, a tireless approximation, a metonymic labor.

(11)

To this we may perhaps add the observation that causality is the last human illusion. To be able to ascribe reasons to phenomena is to be able to know them, and if knowledge is power a belief in the causality of phenomena is implicitly a desire for one's ability to control phenomena. These are goals as human as they are philosophically elusive. In the endless chain of cause and effect we may discern local connections and even learn to contribute to them, but to uncover the first cause—the original reason why the world is the way it is—that is surely beyond human fathoming. This is to say that in the short range the world is decipherable but in the long range, in terms of origins, it is unknowable. Thus, the misreadings of Elsinore are both intentional and inexplicable: as Hamlet cannot read the world so he will not let the world read him.

To Hamlet, the death of his father, by natural or unnatural causes, is the inexplicable cue for the extinction of a rational civilization. It is the occasion for the rise of a King whose namelessness in the play (Claudius is the only Shakespearean King never addressed either by his official title [Calderwood xv] or by his name [Goldberg 326]), matches the equivocal blankness of his speech (as for instance, in 1.3). That death is the setting for the rise of a world in which a celestially angelic Gertrude, a “Niobe” in her “tears,” can be with the “satyr,” Claudius, as readily as she was with the “Hyperion” that was her husband (1.2.140-49). This is a world in which, from behind the pomp and glitter of a coronation ceremony, the riddle of incest decouples things from their names, thoughts from their expression, and ideas from their representation.⁹ But this event—the death of his father—cannot be given any status save that of a desultory event. It cannot be afforded any attribute of causality because causality has the legibility of logic that is denied by the world that Hamlet confronts. The subversion and misreadings of Elsinore are, in other words, causeless, a random phenomenon in the dynamics of chaos. For reasons unknown, Elsinore and the world have become unreadable to Hamlet, and with that Hamlet has become unreadable to others and to himself. In this sense, the text of misreading that Hamlet affirms in his poem is his horrible practical joke, his real gruesome revenge upon the world for the incomprehensibility of its text. This, we note, is a revenge that Hamlet's audience would relish, for, as Stephen Orgel has recently pointed out, “the Renaissance often found in incomprehensibility a positive virtue” (436). Indeed, in his poem Hamlet exemplifies Montaigne's words from “On the Inconsistency of Our Actions”: “I have nothing to say about myself absolutely, simply and solidly, without confusion and without mixture, or in one word” (242).

That misreading is the principal Elsinorean activity, and a phenomenon that precedes the Ghost's disturbing revelations, is in fact evident from the play's very beginning. The characters of Elsinore are all trying to impose their reading of events and phenomena on others while blocking those of others (Payne 100-11). Hartman has suggested (in the reference given above), that the whole plot of the opening scene with its play of murky happenings and confused identities enacts the phenomenology of readings that challenge the reader. The principal element in that phenomenology is the riddling apparition that resists the semantic probings of the skeptic philosopher, Horatio. The nocturnal visitor affords neither him, nor Barnardo, Francisco, or Marcellus, any more sense than the vague discomfort that “it bodes some strange eruption” to the state (1.1.69), or, as Marcellus articulates it later, that “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (1.4.89). The blocked reading merely renews the desire to read, with the hope that the “dumbness” of illegibility may give way to the legibility of “speech” with a changed reader—“young Hamlet” (1.1.170-71).¹⁰ But the request for a reading privileges a legibility in that reader himself that cannot pass unchallenged by him. The aim of Hamlet's canny cross-examination of Horatio and the guards is to flush out any hidden agendas they may have in inviting him to read the specter as his father:

Ham: Arm'd say you?
Hor: Arm'd, my lord.
Ham: From top to toe?
Hor: My lord, from head to foot.
Ham: Then saw you not his face? …
Ham: His beard was grisl'd, no?
Hor: It was, as I have seen it in his life, a sable silver'd.

(1.2.226-40)

Of course, Hamlet's attempt to read Horatio and the guards' failure to read the spectral phenomenon have both been preceded by Claudius's and Gertrude's attempt to read him earlier in the same scene. There, Claudius's Kingly reading tries to situate him as “a cousin” and “son” and thereby demands, by executive and filial privilege, to know the source of “the clouds” of melancholic despair that plague him. Hamlet counters this with a defensive misreading of himself as someone who is neither “kin” nor “kind,” and who is not at all under the weather but in fact “too much in the sun,” the punning between “son” and “sun” obscuring both the content and the intent of his reply. The attempted precision of Claudius's reading of Hamlet is neatly dissipated by the brazen ambiguity of Hamlet's misreading of himself, with the particular diagnosis of behavior of the one being silently replaced by that of the other. In this tense verbal thrust and parry, readability, i. e., knowability, is established as the besieged site of a fierce Elsinorean tactical struggle for dominance.

Unsurprisingly, as is the state so is the family. The most developed family depicted in the play, Polonius's, merely replicates within itself the pattern of interaction within the court. The cute scenario in the third scene of the play, of a cocky elder brother and an officious father fussing over the danger of a young commoner girl's liaison with royalty, is also an attempt to govern a young girl's mind. Laertes' prognosis of “the chariest maid['s] … prodigal[ity] … If she unmask her beauty to the moon”—otherwise “the shot and danger of desire” (1.3.35-38)—is a notion of Ophelia's sexuality that he is implicitly seeking to validate. Likewise, Polonius's inquisitorial suggestion, a few lines later, of a busy affair between her and Hamlet is a reading of her behavior that Polonius intends to confirm: “What is between you? Give me up the truth” (1.3.98). The teasing maidenly reticence with which Ophelia instinctively sidesteps such testing preserves her sovereignty over her own decipherability and with that, her options of personal freedom. The same struggle to regulate behavior permeates the relationship between father and son, as for instance when Polonius facetiously advises Laertes about the necessity of behaving duplicitously with the world while remaining true (“above all”) to himself (1.3.58-80). Later, he instructs Reynaldo to spy on his son by using “indirections [to] find directions out” (2.1.38-63). Both speeches exemplify a technique of understanding others while withholding understanding from them—a technique, in short, of reading others while remaining unread or misread oneself. It is in this context of the pervasive misreadings of Elsinore that Hamlet's quizzical love poem is inscribed.

Given the dense inexplicability of Elsinore, Hamlet's feelings for Ophelia can only be the occasion for his riddling equivocation and paradoxical behavior, with her and with others. His visit to her in her closet, which Ophelia describes in 2.1.73-97 is an act that is simultaneously an affirmation and a denial. He goes to her but does not speak to her. He goes to her in an instinctive gesture of communication but ends up in a silent scrutiny of her face. He stares at her, reads her, without letting her read him, or, making sure that she misreads him and encouraging her misreading of him (as transmitted through Polonius) as mad. The uncertainty of what he reads in her is matched and cloaked by the uncertainty of what Ophelia and Polonius, and we with them, can read in him. Each reading—that he is mad, that he is love-sick, that he is testing her through an “antic disposition”—is instantly challenged by the others and thus ends up as no more than a misreading of him.

Again, he flaunts this same riddling behavior before her in the “nunnery” scene in Act 3. He did and did not love Ophelia, he says (3.1.114-18)—playing again on the compulsive verb “believe,” but this time in a direction opposite that of the letter. If she “believed” he loved her, he asserts bluntly that he loved her not—imposing his belief on hers and blocking it. The instability of the signifier “nunn'ry” with which he ends his tirade (3.1.129)—poised as it is between its formal sober connotation as a retreat of sanctity and its bawdy popular Elizabethan denotation as a brothel (O.E.D. 1: 264; Jenkins 282)—masks perfectly the sense of his feelings for her, now or in the past. His insistence later, in the grim verbal and physical scuffle with Laertes in Ophelia's grave, that he “lov'd Ophelia” (5.1.269), declares his rights over the politics of intentionality. If Laertes' love for his sister allows him to rant against Hamlet for causing her death, then Hamlet's love for Ophelia allows him to vent his fury at Laertes for blackening his name. Hamlet will not let his feelings for Ophelia become Elsinore's vehicle of legibility into him, a foreground of its mastery over him. What he will give up, to Ophelia, Polonius, Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, and to us, is only the misreading of incoherence. The more anyone tries to read Hamlet the more he will be misread.

The desire to be misread is the desire to be mysterious, and to be mysterious to the world is to confuse it. Hamlet traps Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when they come to him in 2.2 as robotic extensions of Claudius's probing of his mind, to demonstrate his ability to deflect Elsinore's attempt to plumb him back upon itself. Somewhat Iago-like, Hamlet offers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern not a paucity of motives for his melancholic behavior but a plethora of them—thwarted ambition, love sickness, depression. In this bag of motives the dilemma of choice transforms visibility into inscrutability and sense to confusion, as Guildenstern later reports to Claudius:

Nor do we find him forward to be sounded
But with a crafty madness keeps aloof
When we would bring him on to some confession
Of his true state.

(3.1.7-9)

To preserve the sovereignty of the self, it must not be allowed to have a text because a text invites reading. The “angelic action” and “God[-like] apprehension,” and the “quintessen[tial]” dust of man, in Hamlet's speech to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the nature of man (2.2.303-10), are free signifiers in Hamlet's unmaking of the text of the self of man. Hamlet's unmaking of the text of the self has affinities with what Michael F. McCanles has described as Shakespeare's deconstructive character analysis,

the notion of … textuality put forth by Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva: a text without a centered self or substantive origins, a fluid melting of multiple texts thrown up momentarily, coalescing, then disappearing, to be replaced by still other texts.

(201)

The unmade text of the self is what Hamlet describes, both to Guildenstern at the end of the play scene when he forces him to play the recorder, and immediately after to Polonius when he forces him to decipher the shape of a cloud that looks like a weasel and like a whale. The chaotic self of man in Hamlet's unmaking of it, cannot be “play[ed]” and “sound[ed],” and the “heart” of its “mystery” cannot be “pluck[ed] out” (3.2.364-71). And the text of the self of man must be unmade if the world is to be unmade. If sense—the logical connected arrangement of units of meaning, i. e., a readable text, or what Terence Hawkes in a related context has described as “the unity, progression, coherence” that are “part of the [world's] ruthless and rigorous process of domestication [and control]” (324)—if this is what holds the world together, then confusion is what will unmake it. If the world has already become an unreadable text, then, Hamlet's text of misreading will accelerate that unreadability. Behind the text of misreading that Hamlet affirms lies a grim malevolence towards a malevolent world.

In trying to destroy the text of the self and of the world, Hamlet's text of misreading is also intended to disallow the very idea of a text itself. The textlessness of his soliloquies matches the textlessness of the play he puts on to rewrite both the play he has inherited from the Ghost and the play he himself is set in. His soliloquies seem to show transparently the processes of thought and decision-making but actually give us only their opaque results. For instance, in the “Rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy (2.2.550-605) and in the “To be or not to be” one (3.1.55-88), the tortuous self-analyses that Hamlet conducts have little connection to the conclusions he quickly reaches for—deciding to put on a play in the former and choosing inaction in the latter.¹¹ This is identical to the way that the signifiers of an anti-text have ineffectual links with the signifieds they couple with, the result in both cases being a refusal to communicate with a reader.

So too, “The Murder of Gonzago” rewrites the text of the Hamlet play and the Ghost's in a manner that pretends to speak with the audience, but in fact, in its deliberate conflation of the roles of brother and nephew, killer and revenger, in the figure of Lucianus, and in its incompleteness (it stops midway and we do not know how much of it, if any, was left to be performed), declines to do so. If Claudius's angry exit is provoked by his uncertainty and suspicion of the staged play's intentions, this fuels our uncertainty about precisely what Claudius finds suspicious (the spectacle of regicide, the murder of a brother, the manner of the killing, or the murderer's quick wooing of the victim's widow), and about what he understands of the staged play (does he see the dumb show, and, if he does, why does he ask what its “argument” is?). Both uncertainties, Claudius's and ours, combine to make the entire episode resist the cohering control of textuality. In denying textuality Hamlet is not so much destroying a textuality that the world still has as he is participating in, and deliberately contributing to, its rampant anti-textuality.

In making the staged play episode resist a textuality, its author is himself resisting the textual authority of the larger play of which he is a part. Just as the staged play refuses to make full sense Hamlet himself refuses to make full sense, his exuberance at the performance's end being but a deceptive signifier of his authorial conclusions about the success of his staged text. (If Claudius has seen the dumb show and failed to respond to it, then the Ghost's words cannot be taken “for a thousand pound” [3.2.286]).¹² Hamlet's deliberate collapsing of selfhood and textuality begins the disintegration of Elsinore and the Hamlet play, both of which become sites of defiance of form and meaning.

To be unable to read is to die, misreading is dying. The disappearance of a text of self and of textuality itself can only be a prelude to the world's slide into the random incoherence of death. With no textuality to hold them, lives crumple, characters fall and are expunged. Polonius's “sudden, rash, intruding” death at the hands of Hamlet, the first of the play's many deaths, is without explanation or apology because it belongs to no script. Unsupported by any role in family or state because of his inability to read and domesticate either his wayward daughter, her dangerous lover, or the “transformed” Prince, Polonius falls—a miscellaneous end to a life suddenly become miscellaneous. Cast adrift by the illegibility of her lover and the dubiety of her father, Ophelia's slide into madness perfectly replicates her textual redundancy. Her disjointed songs in 4.5, with their conflation of the texts of sexual betrayal and elegiac lament for the loss of a loved one in death, are as contextless as her own death, in Gertrude's evocative description (4.7.166-83), by a drowning closely observed but not prevented.

As royal order breaks in Elsinore, first signalled by Claudius's disruptive exit from the dramatic performance, the King's assassins are themselves assassinated. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern die quietly off-stage as the game of cheap espionage in which Claudius had cast them is terminated, literally in Hamlet's re-writing of his assassination orders on board ship to England. Baffled by the wild behavior and hallucinatory antics of her son in her bed chamber and caught by his “wild, whirling words,” some of which strike home in the direction of her wedded Queenly bliss, Gertrude's notions of maternality, wifedom, and Queenliness are at once confused. She floats in a tide of seeping self-sickness, dreading to face the mad Ophelia and seeing her death in the accents in which perhaps she would like to see her own (in the passage cited above). Her intervention on Hamlet's side in his graveyard scuffle with Laertes prefigures her fatal, albeit unwitting, intervention in Claudius's design of the poisoned wine cup intended for her son and she dies a blundering death marginally lamented by husband and son. Displaced by Ophelia's death from the scenario of strutting protective brotherhood, and impelled by his father's murder into a desperate revenge plot, Laertes falls in the play's last scene, caught in the cross-pull of Hamlet's sincere sportsmanship and Claudius's manipulative stratagem of hidden retribution, unable to read fully or relate to either.

As Elsinore's texts disintegrate and characters collapse, its center, and its chief reader and author, Claudius, begins to deconstruct, losing his authority over both language and action. Within the arranged self of majesty in Claudius the memory of criminal instinct stubbornly intrudes, stirred by Polonius's chance remark about the perfidy of necessary deceptions when they are rehearsing Ophelia's entrapment of Hamlet before the “nunnery” scene:

O 'tis too true!
How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!
The harlot's cheek, beautied with plast'ring art
Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it
Than is my deed to my most painted word.

(3.1.48-52)

Reinforced by the experience of Hamlet's subversive play, such insistent memories erode self-authority in Claudius, dividing thought from action, speech from intent, and driving them up against each other, so that as he prays his “words fly up” but his “thoughts remain below” (3.3.97-98). The loss of self-authority releases hardened and hidden desires in Claudius—for the “crown,” the “ambition,” the “Queen”—that he cannot forsake (3.3.55), and for the violence by which he acquired them. Claudius's Kingship begins to die in the “pestilent” public speeches of an uncontrollable Laertes demanding redress for a father's murder that “Like … a murd'ring piece” gives Claudius “superfluous death” (4.5.91-96), and this death signals the release of the cold-blooded killer in him. In fact, by this time the practiced killer in Claudius has already emerged, in his compulsion for the purging of the “hectic in [his] blood” by the killing of Hamlet (4.3.65-68).

The loss of authority in the Kingly self can only reflect the loss of authority in the state, the textual subversion of the one merely compounding that of the other. As the secret assassination of Hamlet goes awry and the assassins are themselves assassinated, so the killing of Hamlet in the duel fails to hold true and instead also kills the killers. The physical death of Claudius in the play's last scene recalls the textual death of King Claudius earlier in the scene of Laertes' riotous entry into the castle and replicates in its savagery the ferocity of the killer Claudius's own compulsive violence.

Claudius's death is both textual and textless. It is textual in that it completes the object of the revenge text—the retributive killing of the killer. It is textless in the sense that the manner in which it is accomplished destroys that textuality. Hamlet kills Claudius in a frenzy of spontaneous action that has little to do with premeditated vengeance, particularly of the sort stipulated by the Ghost's text. If it is vengeful at all, that vengeance is an immediate response to the local plan of Claudius to poison him, and has little to do with his father's murder. Claudius falls in a welter of confused violence that the court can only misread as “Treason!” (5.2.323). Somewhat as Hamlet's declaration of love in his riddling poem had announced itself by its own disappearance, the revenge text of Hamlet completes itself by its own erasure. The litter of bodies that fills the play's last scene is not just conventional. It is uniquely a function of this play's compulsion to consume itself.

For Hamlet the greatest problem in his dramatized life is the desirability and danger of communication in an indecipherable world. To have a text of living is to be read and destroyed. Yet not having a text is to die. One can live, then, only by subverting life. By extension one can speak only by not speaking. Through one's silences one can understand by not understanding. One can live—triumph over death—by having a text that cannot be read. One can meet the indecipherability of the world by destroying the world as one is destroyed by it. This compound apocalyptic ethic can only be grounded in a celebration of silence as the sole good in a meaningless “unknowing” universe where “readiness” is but “all” (5.2.222). Horatio doesn't fail Hamlet's dying request “to tell [his] story.” As Hamlet himself erases meaning from his instructions to Horatio about what his text should contain—by his dying gesture of deferral, “the rest is silence” (5.2.358)—so, Horatio's bare account of “unnatural acts,” “accidental judgments” and “purposes mistook / Fall'n on the inventors' head” (5.2.380-86), is the prologue to an unfulfilled text—one that the play's physical end elides from our view.¹³

Thus Hamlet's play, like his poem, is built on a system of misreading that subverts meaning in the very process of its communication, that conceals as it reveals, and that exists only in its self-cancellation. As the poem subverts its own Petrarchan tradition by asserting love through the process of denying it, the play hides its literary lineage by accomplishing revenge through the process of destroying its textual framework (Waller 27; Hawkes 330). Just as Hamlet's struggle in his poem to find an original voice against the burden of a literary tradition leads him to his discovery of silence as a form of speech, Shakespeare's struggle to achieve a unique play amidst the pressure of a burgeoning copycat literary culture produces a text that de-textualizes itself to preserve its own integrity.¹⁴ Just as the origins of Hamlet's love letter are mysterious and hidden (exactly when was it written, is it authentic or a forgery? [Goddard 40; Ferguson 308 n. 21]), so the dramatic origins and models of Shakespeare's play are uncertain and unknown (who wrote the Ur-Hamlet and when?). As the subject of Hamlet's letter and poem—his love for Ophelia—is lost in its own doubts, the subject of Hamlet's play—the tragedy of his life—is buried in its own deletions, trapped in our endless misreadings of it. If Hamlet is a deconstructive play (Patterson 47; Calderwood xv), the enigmatic love letter to Ophelia, tucked away in one small corner of the play, contains much of the energies of such a modality and helps in executing it.

Notes

1. All citations from Shakespeare use the Riverside edition unless otherwise noted.

2. Examples of this usage from the O.E.D. include: “I havying doute of harmes of my body … dyd assemble these persones,” 1411, Rolls of Parliament, III, 650/2, and “The pinne or web is likewise to be doubted to happen in that year,” 1574, Hyll, Conject. Weather, ii. Also see Shakespeare's own use of this word earlier in the same scene, in Gertrude's words in line 56, as Stephen Booth has pointed out (174). For instances of this use of the word elsewhere in Shakespeare see King Lear 5.1.6 and Timon of Athens 1.2.155. Jonson in Volpone 3.7 has Bonario say of Mosca: “I do doubt / this fellow.”

3. The article is cited by the editors of Harold C. Goddard's posthumously published book Alphabet of the Imagination (57 n. 9).

4. Also see John J. Murray's “mathematical” resolution of the problem. For examples of nineteenth-century dismissals of Hamlet's letter see Furness 2: 209.

5. That the poem “reads” its readers is also the substance of Goddard's trenchant comment (43). Goddard also argues that the poem is a partial forgery by Polonius (48-52; qtd. in Taylor 51 n. 9).

6. Booth's analysis, which is dependent on the concept of complementarity popularized by Norman Rabkin in his book Shakespeare and the Common Understanding, has affinities with the phenomenological and deconstructive argument I am using. My essay explores some of the implications of Booth's discussion. In a general sense, I have also profited from the critical methods and ideas of James Calderwood in To Be and Not To Be.

7. Paraphrased by Eagleton in his summary of Iser's theories (79).

8. On the use of negation in Hamlet see Calderwood's incisive discussion: “If poetic negation is positive then Not this exists on an equal footing with This. The absent is present, the denied affirmed, the forbidden consummated in the verbal act of negation itself” (61). On the breakdown of language generally in Shakespeare's tragedies, see also Danson, and Hawkes (Shakespeare's Talking Animals).

9. On the connection between incest and riddles see Levi-Strauss (34-39; qtd. in McAlinden 59 and Calderwood 205 n. 14).

10. On the greater importance of speech than of sight for producing meaning in phenomena, particularly here in the scenes of the Ghost's appearance before the guards and before Hamlet, see Don Parry Norford's essay. Norford says “Only when [the Ghost] speaks to Hamlet does the meaning of its appearance become known” (567).

11. That the conclusions of the soliloquies seem to arise from the context of the soliloquies but actually do not, may be less readily evident in the latter of these two soliloquies than in the first. That inaction is going to be Hamlet's choice in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy is indicated from the very beginning by the way it is associated with, and thereby valorized by, “being,” despite conventional expectations that “being” will mean living well and acting heroically, i. e., being active. Partly perhaps to hide this inversion in values, Hamlet, after setting out “being” and “non-being” in the first four lines as items in a particular series, switches their order and proceeds to discuss the latter item—non-being—first. He returns to “being” only afterwards, as a preferable alternative (3.1.59-68). In other words, what appears to be a debate really isn't one—Hamlet has already made up his mind about inaction before the speech begins and in the soliloquy he is only looking for ways to justify that decision. This is like his having suddenly decided, in the earlier soliloquy, to put on a play and then merely looking for reasons to do so (2.2.598-605). Harold Jenkins provides a good discussion of the hidden inversions in Hamlet's “To be or not to be” soliloquy in his edition of the play (484-91).

12. For an effective discussion of the dubieties of what the play-within-the-play “proves” about Claudius, see Brent Cohen (235-37). Stanley Cavell has offered a sophisticated Freudian rejection of what Hamlet's play actually proves about Claudius's guilt (179-91).

13. Calderwood, of course, says that this is a moment of termination as well as a beginning. Horatio's story is the text for the play's next performance before another audience (182-84).

14. I am referring, of course, to the busy, competitive production of sonnets, history plays, and romances, as well as revenge plays, in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In Stanley Cavell's words, in Hamlet Shakespeare “is writing the revenge play to end revenge plays” (181).

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