SOURCE: Simon, Bennett. “Hamlet and the Trauma Doctors: An Essay at Interpretation.” American Imago 58, no. 3 (2001): 707-22.

[In the following essay, Simon reviews the major trends in the psychoanalytic analysis of Hamlet, and interprets both the play and Hamlet's character on the basis of trauma theory.]

In the 400 years of Hamlet interpretation, psychoanalysis is a relative newcomer, only a century or so old. During that century, there have been notable shifts in the mode of interpreting the play, both in the critical world at large and in the narrower psychoanalytic world. In part, changes in the psychoanalytic interpretation of the play have had to do with shifts in dominant psychoanalytic paradigms—a process even more striking in the history of interpretation of Oedipus Rex than of Hamlet.¹ In part, however, changes in the dominant mode of literary critical interpretations of the play have set the stage, as it were, for new psychoanalytic approaches.²

I would like, in this essay, to review several broad trends in the history of interpretation of the play and to locate within those trends some dominant themes in psychoanalytic interpretation. In that context, I then want to offer my own late-twentieth-century psychoanalytic interpretation—both of Hamlet and Hamlet—based on trauma theory.

My fundamental thesis is that psychoanalytic interpretations, particularly those of individual characters in the play, rely on a long-standing “medical model.” This is most prominent in regard to the question of Hamlet's insanity—whether it is real, feigned, or both. The medical model goes back at least to 1778, according to the New Variorum edition, when a certain Dr. Akenside is said to have been the first physician “to assert that Hamlet's insanity is real” (Furness 1877, 195).³ Much energy has gone into diagnosing the precise nature of Hamlet's melancholy and Ophelia's madness. Like King Lear and Lady Macbeth, both characters gradually became exemplars of derangement for clinical medicine to the point where a nineteenth-century asylum doctor could write that he had admitted “many Ophelias” to his ward (Showalter 1985, 86).

Apart from illustrating the crossover between the medical and literary (or theatrical) realms, this kind of diagnostic effort is important for my purpose because it tends to locate the problem within the individual. Hamlet, in other words, is thought to be a certain way because that is the way melancholics are. This kind of medical diagnosing shortcircuits literary and social questions, such as how much Hamlet is affected by the external rottenness in Denmark and how much is due to his innate disposition. I suggest that even psychoanalytic interpretations, which in principle can address the interplay between individual temperament and social circumstances, have a propensity for fixing, even freezing, the character into a mold. The moral onus is, as it were, placed on the individual character, and not on the world of other actors and agents who surround him or her. Hamlet's alleged Oedipus complex is thus sufficient to explain Hamlet's problem. But the risk of this approach is registered both in the play itself when Hamlet attacks Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern for seeking to “pluck out the heart of my mystery” (3.2.355)⁴ and by critics such as Bertrand Russell (1954), who described Hamlet's nightmare as that of being psychoanalyzed. When I come to offer my own formulation about the play and its eponymous hero, I shall propose a theory that is at the crossroads of clinical diagnosis and psychodynamic analysis, while trying to assess the risks and benefits of this approach.

The ensuing highlighting of trends in literary and theatrical analysis of the play is extensively indebted to Gary Taylor's Reinventing Shakespeare (1991). I should preface my remarks by making the obvious disclaimer that they are not intended to be a definitive review. What is more, nothing dies in Hamlet criticism; the same insights found in older paradigms recur under a different guise in the newer paradigms that have apparently superseded them.

During the Restoration and through the mid-eighteenth century, Hamlet was generally interpreted as an unambivalent hero who simply needed to ascertain the facts and decide the best time and place of getting revenge. In Taylor's view, there was a cultural need for such straightforward virtue in response to the turbulent history of the overthrow and restoration of the English monarchy. I would add that audiences sensitive to the consequences of deposing kings would empathize with Hamlet's need for caution in assessing his situation and deciding how to take action. In this perspective, Hamlet feigns madness much as did his “ancestor” Amleth in Saxo Grammaticus or the bibical King David (I Samuel 21:10-14) and the classical Odysseus, solely as a tactical means of evasion or delay the better to achieve his goal.

The second view—that of Hamlet as a hesitater—emerges from early nineteenth-century readings by English critics, preeminently Hazlitt and Coleridge, who were themselves political quietists and not men of action. More or less concurrently, German critics began to “romanticize” Hamlet, emphasizing how too much thought inhibited him from action.⁵ This reading of the play defines the problem taken up by the third paradigm—the Freud-Jones interpretation, which is in large part an attempt to answer the question, “Why does Hamlet delay killing Claudius, when he could have done it so much sooner?”

Freud and later Jones provided several versions of Hamlet as instantiating the idea of unconscious conflict over what (by 1910) Freud would term “the Oedipus complex.” As everyone now knows, this theory holds that he is inhibited by unconscious guilt over his patricidal and incestuous wishes, which in part also explains his melancholia. These formulations enhanced the prominence of sexuality in both literary and theatrical interpretations of the play. Contemporaneous social changes gave an impetus to franker discussion of—and perhaps even preoccupation with—“sex” in the colloquial sense (Taylor 1991, 260-62). Freud, and to a greater extent Jones, tied their oedipal interpretations to Shakespeare himself, augmenting longstanding critical speculation about the ways in which Hamlet the character and Hamlet the play could be seen as autobiographical emanations.

Several prominent literary critics, who did not necessarily buy the Freud-Jones approach, gave some legitimacy to the search for covert reasons for Hamlet's delay (as well as the connections between Hamlet's psyche and Shakespeare's). John Dover Wilson concluded What Happens in Hamlet (1935) by confessing that he did not know what happens in Hamlet! T. S. Eliot wrote in “Hamlet and His Problems”: “We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he tackled it at all is an insoluble puzzle, under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot even know. … We should have to understand things about Shakespeare which Shakespeare did not understand himself” (1919, 126). And Caroline Spurgeon buttressed her study of Shakespeare's imagery by appealing to psychoanalysis: “the repeated evidence of clusters of certain associated ideas in the poet's mind … throws a curious light on what I suppose the psychoanalyst would call ‘complexes,’ … things and ideas which are linked together in Shakespeare's unconscious mind, and some of which are undoubtedly the outcome of an experience, a sight or an emotion which has profoundly affected him” (quoted in Taylor 1991, 263). Norman Holland's Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare elegantly summarized the analytic literature using this paradigm: “Curiously, the nonpsychoanalytic critics give us a lead in this direction. Despite their differing preoccupations, a single thread ran through their readings: in Hamlet, inner impulses are given outer expression. … [T]he defensive maneuver that permeates the language, character, and events of the play is projection” (1964, 203). Holland likewise reviewed the essays presenting the oedipal and preoedipal configurations, splittings, doublings, and triplings, and multiple representations of fathers, sons, and women thrown into relief by ego psychological approaches.

The fourth major paradigm shift, beginning in the 1930s and led by William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1936), was the literary and cultural focus on irony and ambiguity as well as on distorted or interrupted narration. These trends heightened the tendency to analyze the play, Hamlet, rather than the character of Hamlet. The so-called “new criticism” derided the Romantic view of characters as though they were real persons (Knights 1933). The relation of the play to Shakespeare's life became less a matter of his psychology than of his career in the theater. Literary critics stressed the “indecipherability” of the play. As David Bevington wrote, “It is appropriate that for modern critics Hamlet should be Shakespeare's greatest dramatic enigma, for misunderstanding is the unavoidable condition of Hamlet's quest for certainties” (1968, 1).

This literary paradigm facilitated various psychoanalytic interpretations that focussed on doubling, ambiguity, and the lack of a clear boundary between sanity, feigned madness, and genuine madness. Both Lacan's (1959) reading and to some extent Stanley Cavell's (1987) fit in here. The problem of “representation” became more prominent (Green 1983). These later psychoanalytic readings built on the earlier ones, but provided a fresh approach to the play and openly addressed (Eissler 1971) whether the problem was with the play or the character or both.

The fifth and last paradigm I would like to suggest is that of “Hamlet and trauma.” In part, the cultural matrix of literature and trauma arises from the twentieth-century experiences of the Holocaust, atomic destruction, as well as colonial, racial, and sexual oppression.⁶ Even more profoundly than formal criticism, literature depicts the damage done by trauma to its victims. Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) is justly one of the most celebrated of such explorations. Psychological and political analyses have gone hand in glove in anatomizing individual and collective “traumatic stress syndromes.” Psychoanalysis owes its current awareness of the significance of real-life trauma at least as much to movements outside the field (notably, the growing public awareness of child and domestic abuse, as well as of the horrors of the Holocaust and the Vietnam war) as it does to any internal developments.

The trauma view that I now wish to develop at greater length shares with new criticism the premise that the “uninterpretability” of Hamlet constitutes a central problem, although it treats it in a very different way. It ventures at least a partial explanation of how and why the play is replete with themes of misunderstanding and why it obscures, reverses, and lays traps that leave not only its characters but also its readers in doubt and indecision. It is not accidental, as Harold Bloom has commented, that the history of Hamlet criticism is filled with “misreadings, many highly creative in themselves” (1998, 407). The trauma perspective also addresses the psychoanalytic question of how to conceptualize the interaction between the external reality portrayed in the play and the internal reality (and perceptions) of each character.⁷

The title of an important book on the long-term impact of childhood trauma, Shattered Assumptions (Janoff-Bulman 1992; see also Herman 1992), captures the essence of the model I shall use as a framework for this discussion. The shattered assumptions in trauma include that one can trust those nearest and dearest, and that one can count on the stability of the ground beneath one's feet (shaken metaphorically in instances of intrafamilial betrayal, and literally in natural disasters such as earthquakes). The “container,” the potential space in which one lives, no longer holds. Interpretation of events becomes constricted or chaotic or both. Numbness (cf. Macbeth's reaction to the news of Lady Macbeth's death) oscillates with lability and incomplete control of one's emotions. One of the main effects of trauma is a difficulty in deciding whether what is going on is real; there is a defensive oscillation between “This couldn't possibly be true” and “Oh, my God, if this is true, then my whole world is shattered.” Trauma breaks apart the intricate linkage between “logical relationship” and “human relationship,” as I have argued with respect to the “nonsense” in King Lear and the ridiculing of logic in Beckett's plays. The self and the world become loathesome, and a profound mistrust of the future sets in. In the effort to master a trauma, the quest for revenge and a scapegoat are commonly seen behaviors. In Hamlet, the main scapegoats are women and Hamlet himself.

It has been well established that a sense of unreality is a pervasive response to massive trauma. A child victimized by her father's sexual abuse may report how she takes herself psychically out of the room or watches the scene from a distance. A woman who as a child survived several years in a Nazi death camp later came upon one of her drawings in an exhibition about the Holocaust. Her response was, “So it really happened, it wasn't a dream after all.”

Although multiple effects ensue in the wake of severe trauma, several discrete syndromes have been identified, most notably “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD). But clinicans have come to appreciate that someone may be profoundly affected by trauma without having PTSD. With reference to Hamlet, a better term for capturing the plight of the characters is “complex traumatic stress syndrome” (Herman 1992), which signifies that the traumatic events are not entirely in the past. Even the term “traumatic event” can be an oversimplification. All the facets of an event must be taken into account to gauge a person's reaction. One consistent finding has been that the secrecy associated with a trauma is especially devastating. Even a child who is not being seduced but who knows about and is terrified of revealing what is happening to a sibling in the family may well experience difficulties in concentrating and appear lost in reverie. This state can be accompanied inwardly by severe doubts about what is real and what is not. Coerced vows of secrecy combined with confusion about fact and fantasy often lead to incomplete or fragmented narratives. It has been understood in psychoanalysis almost from the beginning that a story that cannot be told directly in narrative discourse finds expression through displacement, symbolization, and action, as Freud spelled out in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914). Work with victims of severe trauma highlights how it may be impossible to put parts of the story into words at all. These memories will then be experienced nonverbally, encoded, perhaps, as bodily experiences. “Dissociation” comes closer than “repression” to describing the variety of ways that knowledge becomes confused and disavowed in traumatic states.

The question of “real” vs. “feigned” madness in Hamlet can be recast as an offshoot of the larger problem, “what is real and what is fantasy?” Hamlet's madness, however one chooses to regard it, is contiguous with the punning, doubling, delaying, and deception of the play. For virtually every character, deception of others goes hand in glove with self-deception. The scenes of madness—real for Ophelia, equivocal for Hamlet—are equivalent to dreams inserted into the text of a narrative that become switch-points for actions leading in unforeseen directions. Ophelia's madness closes off and summarizes the action more than it redirects it, but does the latter to some extent as well.

Shakespeare makes Hamlet's madness a question for all the characters in the play—including Hamlet himself—and shows how each one gives an explanation commensurate with his or her self-interest, but does not really know. Polonius believes that it is true madness and caused by love-sickness. Gertrude believes that it is true madness and due to the “o'er hasty marriage.” She later changes her mind (partially) during the “bedroom” scene when Hamlet insists that she not tell the king that he is feigning madness, but rather report that he is truly mad. Insofar as Ophelia believes that Hamlet is truly mad, she can feel less rejected in love (and perhaps less defective), but in the face of his hostility, she does not know for sure. Claudius sends Guildenstern and Rosenkrantz to find out either the cause of his madness or indeed whether it is real, but because he knows that he has killed Hamlet's father, he suspects strongly that Hamlet's madness is feigned to disguise his knowledge. But Claudius seems also to entertain the possibility that Hamlet is intermittently mad and that something dangerous is hatching beneath the brooding melancholy.

Hamlet, the character, is severely traumatized by the Ghost's recollections, leaving him, as it were, both certain and uncertain that his father was killed by his uncle as well as of his mother's collusion with him or, at least, of her betrayal of the memory of her recently deceased husband.⁸ Hamlet's encounter with the Ghost is replete with imagery of spatial dislocation (the dizzying height), shaking of fundamental beliefs (the Ghost rumbles from beneath the ground), and frantic attempts to regain stability and certainty (Hamlet forces Horatio and Marcellus to take an oath not to tell what they've seen or hint that Hamlet is feigning madness). He moves them from place to place and the oath includes the phrase hic et ubique, “here and everywhere.” Hamlet's melancholy, by his own lights, is wholly real—in 1.2 he has not heard about or seen the Ghost—but upon being traumatized by the Ghost's revelations, his strategy is to feign madness. There is more continuity between his genuine melancholy and the “antic disposition” than he himself can acknowledge.

One could further speculate that Hamlet's initial melancholy is a response not only to the “o'er hasty marriage” but also to the secrecy and lies perpetrated by Claudius and the feeling that he is being used. His gradual awareness that Ophelia too is being used (whether with or without her consent he cannot be sure) augments his sense of betrayal and anger, perhaps pushing him farther than he can control. In short, Hamlet's feigned madness is a symptom of the “feigning” and deceit around him, but he is intermittently more unhinged than he realizes or wishes to be. His apology to Laertes in 5.2 that his madness, not he himself, was responsible for his rash actions (killing Polonius, cruelty to Ophelia) is not merely an attempt at exculpation, but represents Hamlet's own struggle to distinguish real from feigned madness. His “antic disposition” cannot be separated from his “objective” uncertainty about whether or not Claudius actually murdered his brother, an uncertainty that is seemingly resolved after the play-within-the-play. But it is not entirely removed for the audience (or perhaps even for Hamlet) until we hear Claudius confessesing his crime in an aborted prayer for forgiveness.

The dramaturgic consequences of Ophelia's madness have been less closely examined than have those of Hamlet's. Is the audience sufficiently prepared for her breakdown to see it as plausible? The groundwork is laid in part by the way that Ophelia's feelings are consistently ignored and she is silenced. A striking example occurs at the end of her terrible scene with Hamlet, after he has cursed and denounced her, when her father says to her: “You need not tell us what Lord Hamlet said, / We heard it all” (3.1.175-76). Hence her madness is focussed on her speaking in such a way that she cannot be ignored.⁹ When, after learning of Polonius's death and the secrecy surrounding it, she wants to see Gertrude, Gertrude at first demurs, “I will not speak with her” (4.5.1). Only in her madness does anybody begin to listen to Ophelia!

Ophelia has been used as bait by her father and Claudius (with Gertrude's tacit agreement), and she is attacked by Hamlet in part because he discovers her role in the trap set for him. Her trauma is characterized by a web of half-truths, paternal attempts to deny her perceptions, and the secrecy attending the murder and “hugger mugger” burial of Polonius. This web, combined with the fact that the man she has loved killed the father she also loved, as well as the impossibility of any kind of open grieving or raging—let alone discussion—contribute to her breakdown. As trauma theory teaches us, the secrecy and extreme difficulty of telling what has gone on are no less damaging than is the actual deed (e.g., incestuous abuse of the child).

Another way of looking at the traumas that drive Ophelia to madness is that, with the death of her father and absence of her brother, she has lost male protection (Claudius being of dubious value in that regard) and has no standing as an unmarried woman. With Hamlet's madness, cruelty, exile, and possible death, she is deprived of a husband. He has, moreover, been looking not for a wife but for someone with whom he can beget the “child” revenge. Ophelia is unsuitable in this regard, for she is too close to Polonius and Claudius-Gertrude. His attack on her in the “get thee to a Nunnery” scene (3.1) is caused in part by his anger at finding her wanting as a partner in his plot against the king to avenge his father's murder.

Trauma likewise disturbs the sense of reality, leading to processes of disavowal or disconnection, in the sexual domain. Both the ghost of Hamlet's father and Hamlet himself reproach Claudius (and Gertrude) for being “incestuous” and “adulterous.” Yet neither the play nor Hamlet the character is entirely clear whether Gertrude and Claudius slept together before the death of Hamlet's father. (A similar ambiguity hovers over whether or not Hamlet and Ophelia have slept together, as her mad songs [4.5] suggest.) Even the definition of “incestuous” is a problem since Elizabethan law considered the marriage of a woman to her deceased husband's brother to be incestuous, but no characters in the play (other than the two Hamlets) seem to notice this. Lisa Jardine (1996) argues that, notwithstanding the ecclesiastical codes posted in every parish, Elizabethans in practice often countenanced such unions, especially if the heir of the deceased brother did not lose his property as a result. This disinheritance was technically an “offence,” which explains Hamlet's bitterly ironic exclamation, “No offence in the world!” (3.2.214). Claudius announces that Hamlet remains heir to the throne, and therefore he has ostensibly not lost his property. Jardine's analysis helps us to understand why the Elizabethan audience would not necessarily have reacted with horror or outrage at the union of Claudius and Gertrude. But is it only Hamlet, obsessed with his mother's sexuality, who fixates on the theme of incest; or do the other characters need to ignore or deny it?

Who, in short, is traumatized and therefore responding with denial, confusion, and uncertainty about what is real and what is fantasy? The most obvious answer, of course, is Hamlet, followed by Ophelia, and probably Gertrude. But the entire play exudes the aura of a traumatized environment. We, in the audience, must in turn live with a discomfiting set of ambiguities, awaiting further clarification, which comes only partially by the end of the play. Granted, we learn that the Ghost told the truth about having been murdered by Claudius, his brother. But we do not know for sure whether there was any complicity, direct or indirect, on the part of Gertrude or whether the Ghost's account of the method of his murder can be believed (Cavell 1987). We likewise do not know whether the union of Gertrude and Claudius was indeed incestuous or whether Hamlet was only feigning madness. Nor can we expect that Horatio's promise at the close, “All this I can / Truly deliver” (5.2.363-64), will answer all these questions.

The theme of a story that can be told only incompletely or deceptively runs like a red thread throughout the play. Both classical psychoanalytic theory and trauma theory emphasize the indirect telling of that which cannot be remembered or safely told. Hamlet cannot say publicly that what he has heard from the Ghost has horrified him and is enough to drive him crazy. He therefore appears to Ophelia after encountering the Ghost “with a look so piteous in purport / As if he had been loosed out of hell / To speak of horrors” (2.1.81-83). Ophelia cannot say how distraught, how used, how furious, and how negated she has been; so she sings in her mad ditties about the death of her father and the death of her love for and from Hamlet. Hamlet's imparting to Horatio how he will resort to the play-within-a-play to coerce Claudius to reveal involuntarily what crimes he has committed, “If his occulted guilt / Do not itself unkennel in one speech” (3.2.70-72), is a way of filling in the hitherto unspeakable.

Accordingly, the ending of the play tolls with the word “tell” (and its analogues) in a last-ditch effort to represent and restore the broken narrative that constitutes the tragic action. The dying Hamlet proclaims:

You that look pale and tremble at this chance,
That are but mutes and audience to this act,
Had I but time, as this fell sergeant Death
Is strict in his arrest, O I could tell you—
But let it be, Horatio, I am dead:
Thou livest; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.

(5.3.312-18)

He pleads with Horatio not to commit suicide: “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, / Absent thee from felicity awhile, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story” (325-28). He prophesies that Fortinbras will become king: “He has my dying voice, / So tell him, with th'occurrents, more and less, / Which have solicited—the rest is silence” (335-37). In response, Horatio offers to “speak to th'yet unknowing world, / How these things came about. … / … All this can I / Truly deliver” (358-59, 363-64). In a tragedy, however, there cannot be complete resolution. Even if Horatio knew all there was to tell (but he doesn't, and Hamlet instructs him to speak only “more and less”), Fortinbras wants no more than an abbreviated version of the story, enough to legitimize his taking of the throne, “Let us haste to hear it” (365).

Since trauma involves broken narrative, it is appropriate to conclude by wondering what a view of Hamlet from the perspective of trauma leaves unanswered. The ultimate challenge is to account for the greatness of the play, the way it has captured “center stage” in the history not only of English language and literature but in the consciousness of the world as well. In my admittedly limited reading of the literary, theatrical, and psychoanalytic criticism, I have not found a satisfactory—let alone compelling—account of that achievement; and I do not claim that my own “trauma approach” has succeeded where others have failed.

But it may be a start to pose a somewhat narrower question: how to understand Hamlet's transformation in mood and tone so that he comes by Act 5 to possess a calm reflectiveness (Kerrigan 1994; Bloom 1998, 429-31)? The indices of Hamlet's change include the cessation of his attacks on femininity and sexuality as well as the absence of soliloquies.¹⁰ To convince the audience that such an evolution has taken place is a theatrical challenge for the actor playing Hamlet. What can a trauma perspective offer? Bearing in mind my earlier warning that “diagnoses” of character run the risk of freezing the character into a “type” and thereby not allowing for transformation, I must admit that an emphasis on trauma could be counterproductive. Unless “diagnosis” includes the possibility of psychic change, it hypostasizes, remains static.

Over the decades, there has been a development in the trauma literature itself away from diagnostic categories, such as “shell shock,” to a greater sense of the openendedness in an individual's response to trauma. Although the process of change is clearly of central concern to anyone seeking to treat trauma victims (Herman 1992), there has in general been much more attention paid to the deleterious effects of trauma than to the remarkable healing and transformations that can take place. Some who have been victims of devastating traumas attain a sort of transcendence, often marked by forgiveness (or a different attitude toward vengeance), that is at once awe-inspiring and seemingly unimaginable to the rest of us. This might be thought of as a reframing of categories. Questions of good and evil, intentionality and chance, remain important, but they do not carry the same emotional weight that they did earlier in the person's life.

A suggestion—and it is only that—that I find helpful in continuing to draw an analogy between the clinical and dramatic experiences of trauma comes from Dan Jacobson, who proposes that great literature transforms and transcends the categories by which both the audience and the characters formerly lived. “Works like Hamlet,” he writes, “subvert the distinctions we ordinarily make between conscious and unconscious intentions, between manifest and latent content, even between language and the material world” (1989, 271). I would add that, by the end of Hamlet, our sense of what constitutes activity and passivity, acceptance and revenge, forgiveness and blame, mourning and melancholia—all these have been not so much intellectually altered as emotionally moved into a different orbit. I believe that good psychoanalysis also helps an individual to transcend and transform the categories with which he or she came into treatment. It remains for me an open question how successfully psychoanalytic explanations of Hamlet can address the transformations that take place in the course of the play. At the moment, I stand in awe and gratitude.

Notes

1. While I have not seen this trend documented for Oedipus Rex, my own experience in reading psychoanalytic essays on the play reveals how interpretations have shifted over the decades from seeing it as illustrating first the child's Oedipus complex, next counteroedipal impulses, then the dynamics of adoption, and finally Oedipus as an abused child.

2. In addition, there has been a crossfertilization (or, some would say, a crosscontamination) between mainstream literary and psychoanalytic modes, most notably in Lawrence Olivier's 1948 film version, which was very much influenced by the Freud-Jones view of the play.

3. Forty small-print pages of Volume 2 of the New Variorum Hamlet are taken up with a collection of opinions—including that of Isaac Ray, the nineteenth-century American psychiatrist involved in both asylum work and forensics—as to whether Hamlet's madness is real or feigned. The earliest discussion cited (1877, 235) is that of Aaron Hill around 1745. Oscar Wilde has quipped that the real problem of Hamlet is whether the critics are really mad or only feigning.

4. All references to Hamlet are to the Norton Critical Edition, edited by Cyrus Hoy.

5. See, however, the caution of Harold Bloom: “In our overenthusiastic embrace of the Romantic Hamlet, the hero of hesitation who dominates criticism from Goethe and Hazlitt through Emerson and Carlyle, and on to A. C. Bradley and Harold Goddard, we have been too ready to lose our apprehension of Hamlet's permanent strangeness, his continued uniqueness despite all his imitators” (1998, 412).

6. See the issues of American Imago edited by Cathy Caruth (1991) devoted to on psychoanalytic approaches to understanding the connection between literature and trauma as well as the paper in this journal by Greenberg (1998).

7. I have elsewhere (1988a, 1988b) developed these ideas on trauma in relation especially to modern drama, such as the works of Beckett, Ionesco, and Pirandello; but they can also be utilized with Hamlet, in some ways a quintessentially “modern” drama. To make a speculative leap, I would also see much of the impetus for “postmodern” and deconstructionist criticism as a response to the collective traumas of the twentieth century.

8. As many critics have noted, in the Quarto Gertrude clearly asserts “I did not murther him,” but in the Folio, Gertrude's response (3.4.29ff.) to the accusation, “Kill a king and marry his brother,” is one of surprise and not definite denial.

9. A partial exception is Gertrude's speech to Ophelia (3.1.38-42), where she expressed distress on Ophelia's behalf; but she is still primarily concerned with Hamlet's well-being. In some ways, this presages her speech to the dead Ophelia, which is again full of tenderness but casts her too much as Hamlet's bride. On Ophelia as bait, see Lacan (1959).

10. A further sign of change can perhaps be found in the ambiguity about Hamlet's age. In Act 5, he is definitely said to be thirty years old; but for much of the play he appears, at least to modern readers, to be considerably younger. It is as if he has matured with remarkable celerity in the course of the play.

References

Bevington, David M. 1968. 20th Century Thought on “Hamlet”: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Bloom, Harold. 1998. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead.

Caruth, Cathy, ed. 1991. Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Trauma. American Imago, 41-1 & 41-4.

Cavell, Stanley. 1987. Hamlet's Burden of Proof. In Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, pp. 179-91.

Eissler, Kurt R. 1971. Discourse on “Hamlet” and Hamlet: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry. New York: International Universities Press.

Eliot, T. S. 1919. Hamlet and His Problems. In Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964, pp. 121-26.

Freud, Sigmund. 1914. Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through. S.E., 12:145-56.

Furness, Horace Howard, ed. 1877. A New Variorum Edition of Hamlet. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Green, André. 1983. Hamlet et “Hamlet”: une interprétation psychanalytique de la représentation. Paris: Ballard.

Greenberg, Judith. 1998. The Echo of Trauma and the Trauma of Echo. American Imago, 55:319-47.

Herman, Judith. 1992. Trauma and Recovery; The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books.

Holland, Norman. 1964. Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare. New York: McGraw Hill.

Hoy, Cyrus, ed. 1992. Hamlet. New York: Norton Critical Edition.

Jacobson, Dan. 1989. Hamlet's Other Selves. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 29:265-72.

Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie. 1992. Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma. New York: Free Press.

Jardine, Lisa. 1996. “No Offence i' th' World”: Unlawful Marriage in Hamlet. In Reading Shakespeare Historically. London: Routledge, pp. 35-47.

Kerrigan, William. 1994. Hamlet's Perfection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.

Knights, L. C. 1933. How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? In Explorations: London, Chatto, 1946, pp. 1-39.

Lacan, Jacques. 1959. Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet. In Shoshana Felman, ed., Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Yale French Studies, 55/56 (1977):11-52.

Russell, Bertrand. 1954. Nightmares of Eminent Persons and Other Stories. London: Bodley Head.

Showalter, Elaine. 1985. Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism. In Patricia Parker and Geoffrey H. Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. New York: Methuen, pp. 77-94.

Simon, Bennett. 1988a. The Imaginary Twin: The Case of Beckett and Bion. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 15:331-52.

———. 1988b. Tragic Drama and the Family: Psychoanalytic Studies from Aeschylus to Beckett. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Taylor, Gary. 1991. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wilson, John Dover. 1935. What Happens in Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.