[In the following essay, Stone studies Shakespeare's representation of androgyny in Hamlet, and finds that the collapse of sexual difference in the play leads to a parallel disintegration of moral boundaries.]

Some wish to see in Hamlet a womanish, hesitating, flighty mind. To me he seems a manly, resolute, but thoughtful being.

I cannot see Hamlet as a man. The things he says, his impulses, his actions entirely indicate to me that he was a woman.

—Sarah Bernhardt

Hamlet has proven to be an interpretive mystery for critics interested in gender, a play whose proverbial excess of meaning has led some critics to gender the excess and the mystery of the text itself as feminine. Since the problem of this problem play is femininity as such, Ernest Jones was prompted to call Hamlet the Sphinx of modern literature, and Jacqueline Rose, following T. S. Eliot, calls it the Mona Lisa.¹ In what follows I will explore the various ways androgyny, the collapse of sexual difference, is represented, whether in figuring Hamlet as a feminized, impotent man, or Gertrude as a masculinized, castrating woman. The penetration or invagination of one sex by the other leads, I argue, to the collapse of moral difference and of meaning, an undoing of boundaries described in terms of “incest,” “jointure,” “union,” and making opposites “common.” I aim to show how even the foundational distinctions between soul and body, and love and death, implode, since they depend upon a gendered hierarchy whose implicitly exclusionist assumptions the play disjoints.

Many gender critics of the 1970s, including some Shakespeareans, advanced the term “androgyny” to designate the harmonious reconciliation of sexual difference and friction.² Theirs is an essentially comic notion deriving from the discordia concors or coincidentia oppositorum of Renaissance Neoplatonism as repopularized in Jungian psychology. This view of androgyny is imbued with the pious and nostalgic aim of recapturing the paradisiacal union of male and female components before the fall into separate and divisive sexes. Tragedy, according to this account, results from the impossibility of maintaining androgynous balance between man and woman. I believe instead that in Hamlet Shakespeare represents the way that androgynous union engenders dissolution and death, both of which the play typecasts as feminine. The thesis that Hamlet's tragedy lies in his having to expel the woman in himself in order to take manly action and to re-establish sexual difference is belied by the catastrophic “union”—a word whose importance I will explore below—that concludes the tragic action.³ The union that erases the ambiguously gendered divisions between mind and body, deeds and words, duty and affect, gives rise to a catastrophic crisis of nondifference. This tragic endpoint reiterates precisely the quandary which diseases Denmark at the opening of the play, when the absence of difference signifies that nothing is taboo, including incest, adultery and murder.

The woman in Hamlet is as much a threat to him as the invaginating “mother”—“hysterica passio” (2.4.57)—is to Lear, the inextricable “woman's part” (2.5.20) is to Posthumus, and the (s)mothering Volumnia is to Coriolanus. Hamlet's inaction, which he and others characterize as feminine, stems from the fact that he is “as patient as the female dove” (5.1.273) and prone to “such a kind of gaingiving as would perhaps trouble a woman” (5.2.205).⁴ A defining axiom of the misogyny that pervades Hamlet is that the baser matter that contaminates male spirit is woman, in whose folds man is sexually implicated. Man's figuring of himself as spirit is ultimately literalized (fatally—“the letter killeth”) as matter because man is born of woman. Shakespeare may intend a pun upon the Latin mater to suggest a resonant conflation of “mother” and “matter.” Hamlet makes a pointed juxtaposition of these two words when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern relate that Gertrude wants to meet him in her closet: “But sir, such answer as I can make, you shall command—or rather, as you say, my mother. Therefore no more, but to the matter. My mother, you say—” (3.2.314-16). In the closet scene itself, Hamlet's opening remark is “Now, mother, what's the matter?” (3.4.7). The punning association of matter with mater, body with woman, points to the woman's part—her “country matters” (3.2.115)—that constitutes every man (as divided-invaginated).⁵

The maternal inheritance or matter from which Hamlet struggles to disburden himself is oddly associated with his loquaciousness. In his third soliloquy he curses his propensity for words and feelings rather than deeds, for which Claudius has accused him of being “unmanly” (1.2.94):

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murthered, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must like a whore unpack my heart with words And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A stallion!⁶

(2.2.568-73)

The play associates the dilatory circumlocution of “words, words, words” (2.2.192) with the unchaste female who makes of man the necessarily debased image of herself—“whore,” “drab,” “stallion.”⁷ Hamlet contrasts his purity of devotion to his ghostly father's memory with the contaminating adulteration that results from material embodiment: “And thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain, / Unmix'd with baser matter” (1.5.102-04). But just what distinction obtains between the father's spoken commandment and the feminizing words that Hamlet so outspokenly inveighs against for coming between himself and his filial duty? The mediation point between male and female speech is the body that both sexes share, that “mixture”⁸ of brain, book and matter that no verbal legerdemain can slight, no rationalization gloss over.

Hamlet's moment of resolute clarity unwittingly betrays his most persistent blind spot. For all his verbal facility, the speaking subject fails to note one of the basic tenets of his education in rhetoric and philosophy: the res or substance of an idea is its matter, whereas the word that gropes to express it concretely is the verbum. By the logic of this standard rhetorical distinction, the matter or substance of Hamlet's thoughts is feminine, while the words of the paternal commandment are masculine. Precisely when Hamlet insists upon his unmixed indebtedness and loyalty to paternal spirit (verbum) he betrays the maternal origin without which his and his father's words would be groundless because immaterial. If one hierarchy posits male spirit as that which inseminates, informs or animates female matter, a subversive and opposite conception insists on the ideational matter that gives birth to words, words that express at best imperfectly their material / maternal origin.⁹

Hamlet feels that his inheritance from suckling Gertrude's maternal matter is moral because corporal contamination: “I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me” (3.1.122-24)¹⁰ The original malaise of origin is exacerbated in the next developmental stage of incorporating the drab-whore-stallion's language—another kind of matter—whose sole profit, Hamlet suspects, is the ability to articulate his malaise, curse it and thereby suffer it the worse. Hamlet's apostrophe to Gertrude—“Frailty, thy name is woman” (1.2.146)—applies as well to (the woman in) himself. He is a subject divided by the loss (of purity, of self-presence, of the father)¹¹ that subjectivity presupposes, since the speaking subject attempts to recoup via language a loss that language itself has occasioned. Although words render Hamlet too effeminate to perform male deeds, the law of the father that enjoins the son to take dutiful action in the father's name expresses itself by means of the same linguistic mechanism that makes its fulfillment, in the third soliloquy quoted above, seem impossible. Words are indifferently the vehicle of both paternal law—Hamlet's pledge of filial allegiance to “thy commandment” (1.5.102) and the “ghost's word” (3.2.280); “Now to my word” (1.5.110), he says as he screws up his courage—and of its breach and adulteration. The recognition of this nondifference between male and female speech, between performative and expressive utterance, is what undoes Hamlet's best intentions to act (1.5.29-31), leaving him prisoner to his ineffectual self-reproaches, which are the melancholic introjection of his misogynistic reaction to the women in whose folds he senses himself helplessly implicated.¹²

Since woman is the Other who symbolizes self-loss for the man, it is no surprise that Hamlet's soliloquies are touched with a misogynistic animus and a melancholic infatuation with suicide as release from feminine and feminizing loss. The violence that Hamlet is called upon to effect in the father's name is what spells the sacrifice of those feminine qualities of loquacious inaction that some critics have regarded as Hamlet's most ingratiating characteristic. It is these same feminine qualities, however, that excite in Hamlet the urge to violence in the first place, a violence that aims to expel the feminine from within him. This violence is turned suicidally inwards; “manly” action gives way to melancholic enervation. Hamlet's initial resolve to remain faithful to his father's memory dissolves into suicidal self-disgust:

O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter. O God! O God!

(1.2.129-32)

Dissolution of the sullied because “solid” (Folio) flesh motivates the suicidal urge, whose promise is the body's liquefaction. Ophelia, whom many critics have regarded as Hamlet's estranged feminine self,¹³ will seek the same watery solace, the dissolution of resolution, in her suicide. In Hamlet's case suicide is figured in terms of orgasmic melting and post-coital flaccidity, the relieving of a tension.¹⁴ The impulse for such release through sexual climax is paradoxically Hamlet's sense of disgust at being indissolubly imbedded in his sexual body. Insofar as his body is sullied by sexuality, it is regarded as feminine. The law of the father forbids trying to escape the feminine by means of masturbatory self-slaughter: seeking to kill desire by extinguishing the demands localized in the phallus. But man's imperative goal of self-identity is fractured under what it type-genders paranoiacally as the subversive influence of feminine difference and dissolution. Male “resolve” to do the father's bidding suddenly means quite the opposite, “resolve” as suicidal dissolve, which frees one from paternal obligation. This contradictory use of the same word instances what Freud calls the antithetical meaning of primal words.¹⁵ What Freud sees as a difference of meaning that divides the putatively self-identical can be subsumed as well under the rubric of difference of gender. Antithetical gender confusion is implicit in the liquid imagery of the passage, which may be interpreted as male sexual discharge or the symbol of dearly besought female dissolution of the father's law.

In this first soliloquy Hamlet curses the lust that hastens Gertrude to an incestuous remarriage, a lust that patently belies her masking self-representation as “Niobe, all tears” (1.2.149).¹⁶ Here unfolds a curious paradox: To forgo the whoring maternal flesh Hamlet contemplates resolving himself into a watery dew, but this water gets refigured as the salt water of woman's tears, which represent the hypocritical disguise of a body more compact with lust than mourning. If being embodied taints Hamlet with the legacy of woman, his proposed escape from the maternal body by dissolving it is no less implicated in the language of female lust and hypocritical masquerade. The extinction that death promises as end point is but the return to an inescapable origin—what Hamlet will designate in his most famous soliloquy as the “undiscover'd country” (3.1.79)—a meternal presence that dissolves duty and the father's law, such as the everlasting father's “canon 'gainst self-slaughter.” Suicide is an escape from the maternal yet also the temptation of the maternal as that which licenses a return to (intrauterine?) deliquescence.¹⁷

Laertes serves as Hamlet's mimetic double with respect to the imagery of water. He is the rival who swears to take action immediately upon hearing of Ophelia's death by drowning, rather than avoid the responsibility for vengeance by dwelling upon thoughts of watery dissolution or the expense of melancholy tears:.

Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, And therefore I forbid my tears. But yet It is our trick; nature her custom holds, Let shame say what it will. (Weeps.) When these are gone, The woman will be out.

(4.7.184-88)

Laertes expels womanly tears as the only means of preserving his manly vigor intact. The same dewy tears that Laertes seeks to purge are the responsibility-dissolving liquefaction, the sweet consummation of death, that Hamlet dreams of merging with by melting into. But in the closet scene Hamlet adopts a more “masculine” position, asking his father not to look upon him with pity lest he “convert / My stern effects. Then what I have to do / Will want true colour—tears perchance for blood” (3.4.128-30). Hamlet's forswearing of tears for the rhetoric of blood vengeance will make him indistinguishable from Laertes by the time that they square off together in the graveyard scene.¹⁸

Whether tears in Hamlet's first soliloquy represent Niobe's sincere expression of grief or Gertrude's masquerade of seeming, they serve variously to define the bifurcated feminine. In his initial appearance in the play, Hamlet in black dress takes pains to distance himself from ornamental or seeming mourning, dismissing tears as so many feigned motions of actors:

Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.” 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play; But I have that within which passes show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

(1.2.76-86)

His scorn for seeming notwithstanding, soon enough Hamlet will act if not feign the madman's part. In this passage and what follows I am concerned with the feminine associations of neither feigning nor madness, but rather with the inconsistent disavowal of tears and of playing.

In his third soliloquy the fickle prince admires the Player, the man who plays the woman's part, for his convincing simulation of tears. By the time that the players arrive in Elsinore, Hamlet has come to believe that public show is the sole means to plumb private conscience and that the only sincere expression of inner grief is paradoxically its impersonation on a public stage, completely reversing his earlier contempt for the actor's “fruitful river in the eye.” Initially Hamlet envies the woman's role portrayed by the Player because it differs so markedly from the female roles that he characterizes himself as having played up to this point, the roles of antic fool and madman. Hecuba's “bisson rheum” (2.2.502) in response to the slaying of her husband “would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven / And passion in the gods” (2.2.513-14). This conflation of weeping and lactary nurturing, as if the slain husband is his wife's child (Niobe, all tears), serves to foil Gertrude's tearful posturing, but ultimately Hamlet comes to recognize Hecuba's reality as that of an impersonated representation, a “fiction” evacuated of real motive, as yet another masquerading “nothing”:

O what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that the player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann'd, Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing! For Hecuba! What's Hecuba to him, or he to her, That he should weep for her? 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, Make mad the guilty and appal the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears.

(2.2.544-60)

If Hecuba were not a representational fiction, one would conclude from this passage that emotion secures action: Feminine tears are not opposed to masculine revenge but are instead the motivating guarantee of its success. However, it is precisely the feminine side of his nature that Hamlet scapegoats for his “pigeon-liver'd” (2.2.573) cowardliness, castigating himself in this same soliloquy, as we have seen, for being a wordy drab-whore-stallion. The very words by which Hamlet bolsters his courage to act are the vehicle for dilation¹⁹ since they defer action by substituting for it. The various distinctions that Hamlet mediates between sincere and feigned tears, acting and playacting, deeds and words²⁰ can all be subsumed under the general rubric of male and female. But such easy dichotomies do not hold, for the play insists on the antithetical collapse of primal antinomies.

Hamlet charts clear-cut distinction between himself and the Player's fictional Hecuba, the good woman, but he is able to locate scant difference between himself and the real bad woman whose flesh and word are indistinct from his. Difference obtains between men until they are linked sexually by the bond of a common woman. Hamlet remarks the difference between his father and Claudius—“So excellent a king, that was to this / Hyperion to a satyr” (1.2.139-40); and he interjects the difference between his cowardly self and the archetypal hero into the triangle formed by his rival father figures—“My father's brother—but no more like my father / Than I to Hercules” (1.2.152-53). Because the bad woman makes of Hyperion (Hamlet's father) a satyr (Claudius), of Hercules a Hamlet, then by the chiastic terms of the analogy she makes of Hamlet a lascivious satyr like Claudius. Of a self-possessed man she makes the effeminate coward that is Hamlet's consistent self-identification when taking stock of himself in the first four soliloquies.

Hamlet blames the bad woman with whom he is inextricably intertwined for his vacillation between virile resolve and conscientious scrupling. That man and woman are interconnected—that man is dependent, not author of himself—gives rise to his misogyny. The origin of his disgust for woman is man's origin and telos in woman, in what he metaphorizes as her “undiscover'd country.” The darkness of this region of sex and death is what Hamlet points to as the cause of his effeminizing cowardice:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.

(3.1.83-85)

Conscience is masculine “resolution” to do one's duty. In antithetical fashion it also acts to resolve (dissolve) obligation, in the feminizing sense advanced in my reading of the liquid images above. The decline of “pitch” may suggest fears of post-coital flaccidity and the loss of manliness. But the resolution assured by conscience is “native,” a gift from the mother. How can conscience impel one forward to take manly action, on the one hand, yet transform one into an irresolute coward, on the other? As the swelling of thought and of conscientiousness that forecloses action, religious conscience prohibits murder and leaves vengeance to God alone. A very different conscience is expressed by the Ghost, the unwelcome paternal superego that exacts the killing of Claudius even as it forbids Hamlet to kill himself. Conscience makes contradictory demands because it fails to reconcile the masculine and feminine elements that it comprises. It epitomizes the gendered ambivalence (androgyny) between male and female, spirit and body, action and cowardice: binarisms that don't align themselves in any consistent parallelism, but rather criss-cross androgynously.²¹

Hamlet's melancholy and madness are, like conscience, represented in terms of the feminine that both fractures and empowers him.²² Although Hamlet castigates himself for being “unpregnant of my cause” (2.2.563) due to cowardice, Claudius sees in his nephew's psyche a woman whose plotting he likens to an oedipally menacing parturition:

There's something in his soul O'er which his melancholy sits on brood, And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose Will be some danger.

(3.1.166-69)

Here for a change feminine melancholy is thought to give rise to consequential activity. Like Richard II's self-reflexive “My brain I'll prove the female to my soul, / My soul the father, and these two beget / A generation of still-breeding thoughts” (5.5.6-8), Hamlet's broodings are his parthenogenic progeny (brood); they disclose the only (living) kin he is willing to acknowledge. Gertrude characterizes Hamlet's madness as his brooding and breeding internal female:

This is mere madness, And thus awhile the fit will work on him. Anon, as patient as the female dove When her golden couplets are disclos'd, His silence will sit drooping.

(5.1.279-83)

The oscillation from the fit of “mere” (French “mother”) madness to patient silence, both characterized as feminine extremes, traces Hamlet's manic depression in terms of feminine fickleness.²³ Hamlet is capable of both destructive violence and peaceable generativity, the feminine double bind that constitutes him.²⁴

Once the feminine is abstracted from the physical body and becomes a disembodied metaphor, it ceases to be threatening. Following literary and philosophical convention, Hamlet refers to the soul that informs his body as the feminine anima. This feminine in himself bonds homosocially with the same element in Horatio, Hamlet's soulmate: “Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, / And could of men distinguish her election, / Sh'ath seal'd thee for herself” (3.2.63-65). Horatio displaces Ophelia as Hamlet's bosom bondman because he is safely desexualized. He is feminine insofar as he represents the allegorized rational soul, but he has excised the (feminizing) madness and passion of sexual desire, whose deleterious world-historical influence is personified in the play as the fickle whore Fortune. Hamlet admires in Horatio that he has been.

As one, in suff'ring all, that suffers nothing, A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards Hast ta'en with equal thanks; and blest are those Whose blood and judgement are so well commeddled That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger To sound what stop she please. Give me that man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, As I do thee.

(3.2.66-74)

We have seen that Hamlet contrasts “the motive and the cue for passion” that should inspire him to act with the Player's imaginarily motivated passions. Since the prince is “patient” like a female dove and “patient” and “passion” are etymologically equivalent in designating passive suffering, then what Hamlet envies in Horatio is his freedom from female melancholy, the manic depressive roller coaster sometimes figured as Fortune's wheel.²⁵

Female Fortune is also identified with the type of wheeling and extravagant opportunism that Hamlet so despises in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: male varlets whose “privates” are collusively cross-coupled with the “secret parts of Fortune” (2.2.234-35) to form an illicit because hermaphroditic union. Like the whore Fortune they try to manipulate Hamlet's pipe: “You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass” (3.2.355-58). At this point Hamlet regards himself no longer as a male whore, a minion-slave of the strumpet Fortune, whose threat, which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern personify, has become manifestly external and therefore easier for Hamlet to confound. In act 4 Hamlet will take fatal Fortune into his own hands by disposing of his old schoolfellow conspirators and thus disburdening himself of the feminizing menace that they personify. And by the ultimate scene of the play he will be able to bolster his sense of masculine courage by heaping abuse upon the foppish courtier Osric, who represents the no longer threatening feminine that the mature Hamlet can easily dismiss.

One consequence of Hamlet's inability to isolate and then excise the woman from himself is that the distinctions he tries to draw between other people are as confused as he is self-divided sexually. In the closet scene with his mother, Hamlet protests too much in overdrawing the contrast between the “counterfeit presentment” (3.4.54) of the elder Hamlet and of Claudius. Beneath the son's defensively schematic opposition between ideal and nightmare father figures, Hyperion and satyr, lurks the doubt that they are not so different after all, since Gertrude has held both in common. Although Hamlet asserts that “sense to ecstasy were ne'er so thrall'd / But it reserv'd some quantity of choice / To serve in such a difference” (74-76), he criticizes in his mother the appropriation of sense by ecstasy and the resulting loss of difference. With the woman on top sense loses its hierarchic superiority over sensuousness, its subversive contrary, and reason becomes merely the instrument for satisfying desire: “And reason panders will” (88). That Hamlet's father represents reason and his stepfather will is only an ideal presentment shown to be “counterfeit” since reason and will are not opposed but in collusion, rendered common in Gertrude's faulted vice.²⁶ It is as if the elder Hamlet (reason) acts as pander-advocate for his own cuckolding, the willful coupling of Claudius and Gertrude. What belies the schematically contrasting portraits that Hamlet uses to badger his mother is his description of Claudius as “a king of shreds and patches—” (103), followed immediately by the stage direction “Enter Ghost.” The referent of Hamlet's interrupted word portrait is indifferently Claudius and the elder Hamlet, since invoking the one seems to call up the other. Gertrude says that Hamlet's vision of the Ghost is an hallucination induced by “ecstasy” (140), the very faculty whose improper dominance Hamlet said caused Gertrude's failure to recognize the difference between Claudius and the elder Hamlet. The ultimate failure of proper difference is that the rational faculty of differentiation in both Hamlet and Gertrude has ceded place to mother and son's common bond of ecstasy.²⁷

In a way similar to his counterfeit portrayal of the collapsed rival father figures, it is impossible for Hamlet to separate Gertrude and Ophelia despite their ostensible differences. Whereas he tries but fails to keep the father figures separate, Hamlet doesn't seem to want to distinguish between the women in his life. What he calls Ophelia's “painting” (3.1.144) dovetails with his criticism of Gertrude's masquerade of mourning. The sexual contamination that Hamlet insists upon attributing to his mother is transferred to Ophelia, who is the target of her friend's obscene wit just before their joint spectatorship of The Murder of Gonzago. The remark that Ophelia should sequester herself in a “nunnery” (3.1.121) is famously subversive: Is a nunnery where a young woman goes to preserve her chastity, or a brothel in which she squanders it; a place of sexual renunciation, or one of carnal indulgence? Does this once fundamental distinction still make any difference? Gertrude's position as whore (in her son's eyes) crosses over indifferently onto Ophelia's chaste body, making of apparently antithetical contraries an indistinguishable conjunctive union.

It is against this union of what should be opposites—ideal and debased fathers, chaste and unchaste women, spirit and body—that Hamlet inveighs when he attacks the conjunction of sexual opposites: “I say we will have no mo marriage” (3.1.149). Precisely this copular mixing of the sexes has informed Hamlet since birth, and we have seen that it is this contamination of origins that engenders mature thoughts of suicide. Hamlet can no more escape the fallen transformation of chastity (the “honesty” of mind) into heterosexual coupling (the telos of bodily “beauty”) than he can avoid his own originary embodiment: “The power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness” (3.1.111-14). Beauty belies honesty because honesty itself is not honest; honesty panders beauty. Hamlet thematizes the way that corporal beauty gives the lie to honesty when he plays upon the possibility of lying in the sexual sense with the nunnery-destined because dishonest Ophelia: “Lady, shall I lie in your lap? … That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.” The provocative allusions to “country matters” and to Ophelia's reductive, genital “nothing” (3.2.110-20) imply that Hamlet's lying in her beautified lap is the cause of dishonest moral lapse in herself and others. Revulsion is Hamlet's response to the genital materiality of woman, which makes of her chastity a nothing, of her honesty a lie.

Hamlet's misogynistic banter early in 3.2 is a prelude to the staging of The Murder of Gonzago, a play within the play that thematizes the origin of man's disgust for woman, whose effects have already evidenced themselves preposterously in Hamlet's prescriptive fore-play with Ophelia. In recounting the scene of his death, the Ghost tells Hamlet that “the serpent that did sting thy father's life / Now wears his crown” (1.5.39-40), the crown symbolizing both his kingship and his wife's genitalia.²⁸ The liquid poured in the ear is a deathly bane that undoes the vital liquid that King Hamlet once disseminated in a homologous orifice. The contrary valences of the liquid image—semen = life versus semen = poison—instance Shakespeare's antithetical pharmakon. King Hamlet is represented as emasculated. Coppélia Kahn notes the sexual confusion that the Ghost engenders in Hamlet in asking the son to identify with the feminized father: “The elder Hamlet is in the feminine position of being penetrated by the man who has already penetrated his wife.”²⁹ The play within the play that Hamlet stages is an attempt to recall, replay and thereby undo the scene of the elder Hamlet's death.³⁰ If Hamlet sees a mimetic representation of his father penetrated and the reaction to it of the guilty spectators, he reasons that this will provide him sufficient motive for taking manly revenge, which entails the reassertion of the law of the father that the murder (and Gertrude's adultery) breached.

Manly revenge may be all the easier if Hamlet can demonstrate that his adversary, who wears the sexually ambiguous crown, is only a castrated, petticoat king, a replicated reflection of the turn that he effected upon his brother king. Perhaps Hamlet identifies the feminine in his own conscience with something similar in his stepfather, which will make the latter vulnerable to being caught by the play within the play: “The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King” (2.2.600-01). The Mousetrap conflates Claudius's captured conscience with Gertrude's, whose pet name, “Mouse,” is echoed in the closet scene. After the play within the play Hamlet uses the same “king”/“thing” rhyme and another double entendre with vaginal referent to express his confidence that Claudius has been hollowed into an empty shell: “The King is a thing … / Of nothing” (4.2.27-29).³¹ If both Claudius and King Hamlet are reduced to a feminized nothing, the distinction between them must have collapsed in Hamlet's mind.

Stanley Cavell advances the provocative thesis that Claudius is both father and mother in Hamlet's dumb-show, because it substitutes Claudius as a veil for Hamlet's mother, the murderer behind the murderer. (“None wed the second but who kill'd the first” (3.2.175).³² The dumb-show is a re-visioning of the unseen original murder, which it reenacts with the mother-father (Claudius covering for, and acting at the behest of, Gertrude) taking the masculine position by pouring poison into the man's ear, reversing the scenario in the primal scene (of intercourse), where the woman is the passive receptacle of what the man pours.³³ My quarrel with Cavell is his assumption that Gertrude was passive in the primal scene, whereas in the murder scene she turns around suddenly and assumes the aggressor's stance. We may suspect that Hamlet has entertained the deep fantasy of a “masculine” Gertrude all along: In the primal scene that continues to haunt his unconscious, Hamlet is traumatized by the vision of his father castrated (feminized) in the act of intercourse.³⁴ Gertrude is imagined as the masculine aggressor in the two original scenes of sex and murder, of Death (Hamlet's “consummation / Devoutly to be wish'd” (3.1.63-64)) as the punning conflation (climactic-extinctive) of these two senses, which are but different manifestations of the same horror in the male imagination. In appropriating the masculine powers of her husband, Gertrude renders him impotent, the ghostly hollow of his former self, and so she must proceed adulterously to some other man to satisfy her swelling urge for sexual jointure. Hamlet describes the fierceness of Gertrude's desire for his father in terms that ominously suggest a voraciousness that, like a parasite's, devours its object to the bone and so must prey elsewhere: “She would hang on him / As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on” (1.2.143-45). Gertrude's devouring orality knows no bounds, for every taboo which poses a resistance only serves the more to excite her transgressive desire.

The confusion of man and woman explicitly reaches the collapsing point of nondifference when Hamlet takes his leave of Claudius in order to begin his journey for England. He propounds a syllogism which intertwines the sexes incestuously and androgynously:

HAM.
Farewell, dear mother.
KING.
Thy loving father, Hamlet.
HAM.
My mother. Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh; so my mother.

(4.3.52-55)

Hamlet's ostensibly innocent allusion to the biblical idealization of sexual union in marriage points instead of a nonideal, incestuous materialization. The prince is revolted by the interchangeability of parts (partners) in the sexual act, whose locus Sonnet 137 suggestively designates as the genital “common place” (1.10),³⁵ the place where man and woman (as well as the elder Hamlet and Claudius, the ideal and degraded father images) become indistinguishable in the chiastic coupling of mother-father. Ernest Jones explains the mother-father confusion in terms of the psychoanalytic “combined parent concept” (113), in which the child imagines its parents as one flesh in coitus. Hamlet's chop-logic employs the rhetorical commonplace of chiasmus to signify and to predicate the reduction of sexual difference to the common genital site where the sexes are indifferently one (androgynous).

It is the misogynistic representation of woman as duplicitous masquerader that marks the focal point of Hamlet as a tragedy; the play passes beyond the ideal specularity of comedy to a specifically linguistic duplicity and subjectifying self-division, the principle of difference which patriarchal, misogynistic discourse takes woman to be.³⁶ Gertrude's crossing of sexual boundaries and collapsing of difference informs the androgyny that so conspicuously marks Hamlet's character. Whereas female unfaithfulness suggests a complication that comic transvestism turns into a joke, insofar as the transvestic disguise miraculously defuses the charge of cuckoldry, the perception of woman's adultery in the tragedies incites a catastrophe of nondifference. Gertrude's incestuous duplicity sloughs off external disguises that are merely specular and therefore comic in favor of a masculinely aggressive jointure, effected via duplicitous language, of things that are normally and normatively contrary. Her violation of the incest taboo, which insists on keeping one's husband and brother-in-law distinct, leads to a collapse of difference in general. It is on account of Gertrude, the “imperial jointress” (1.2.9), i.e., the one who undoes difference by effecting jointure, that “the time is out of joint” (1.5.196). She is responsible for making “the night joint-labourer with the day” (1.1.81) and for the undoing of propriety (proper difference) that results when “the funeral baked meats … coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” (1.2.180-81).

Woman is the principle of difference that paradoxically collapses difference, reducing Claudius, Hamlet, and Hamlet's father to the commonly denominated nexus of Gertrude's shared body. The word “common” occurs several times to designate the universal reductionism of death: “Thou know'st 'tis common: all that lives must die” (1.2.72); “(Reason's) common theme / Is death of fathers” (1.2.103-4). Death is the common lot of everyone born of woman's “common place,” the uncanny home (unheimlich heim) that makes of woman man's genesis (womb) and his destined end (tomb). In the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy, Hamlet's fears of death situate their imaginary locus in “the undiscover'd country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (3.1.79-80). The latent pun on the genital sense of “country” equates death with woman's hell, her not so Elysian Fields.³⁷ The nether country is where man and woman are at one in the three developmental stages of birth, copulation, and death.³⁸

The sexes are made common in the primal scene of copulation and of death. Often in Shakespeare's plays “death” puns upon the chiastic indistinction (or so the man imagines) of the sexes in orgasm. Death as the climactic collapse of male potency also points to castration anxiety. Although these senses of “dying” are not foregrounded in Hamlet at the level of local wordplay, they are a motivating thematic concern overall. Love is literalized (materialized) as death in the figure of Lamord, the Norman knight who rides “incorps'd” (4.7.86) upon the back of his horse, whose punning name collapses death (la mort) and love (l'amour, or the Latin amor). The erotic instincts aim towards the same release of tension that death grants, and life and death are tellingly juxtaposed (“incorps'd”) in Laertes's exclamatory pseudo-recognition, “Upon my life, Lamord” (4.7.91). Lamord is like Hamlet a death messenger who adorns himself in the gallant's fashionable jewels: “the brooch indeed / And gem of all the nation” (4.7.92-93). In mimetically similar terms Ophelia describes Hamlet as formerly “Th' expectancy and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion and the mould of form” (3.1.154-55), though of course he subsequently drapes himself in deathly black, as if to say that love and mourning describe the singular and identical trajectory of every embodied consciousness. The love gem as poisoned death trafficer comes to a head in the “union” jewel of the final scene of the play.³⁹

Life and death are conjoined in a cyclical and interanimating feeding process:

HAM.
For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion—Have you a daughter?
POL.
I have, my lord.
HAM.
Let her not walk i' th' sun. Conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive—friend, look to't.

(2.2.181-86)

Conception is corruption, and conversely; life generates spontaneously from death, only to provide more grist for death's maw. Hamlet himself is the maggot son bred from the conjunction of living sun (Hamlet as father) and dead matter (mater): “I am too much in the sun” (1.2.67), he laments, as if to suggest that his exalted origins have overripened and putrefied. The necrophilic self-identification as cadaver-bred maggot suggests at once a sperm breeding and a parasite feeding. Love reduced to deathly parasitism is an analogue for the way that the liquid poured in King Hamlet's ear and the union wine consumed in the final scene are both conjunctive-inseminating and poisonous, with the latter sense parodic of and parasitic upon the former, taking precedence. The chaliced union wine is a parasitic parody of the Communion wine of the Last Supper, the drinking and eating of a dead body in order to gain life thereby.

Whether sex is poisonous or generative is also at the heart of the characterization of Ophelia, who is regarded with extreme ambivalence as an exemplar of unchaste beauty in life and chaste idealization in death.⁴⁰ In terms of the analogy by which she is fixed in the passage quoted above from act 2, scene 2, Ophelia is like rotting flesh which breeds, only to have her brood turn around and devour its life source incestuously. Flesh as food for maggots—“We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots” (4.3.21-23)—contrasts with Laertes' remark at Ophelia's funeral about the regenerative powers of her virgin body to conceive immaculately: “Lay her i'th' earth, / And from her fair and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring” (5.1.231-33).⁴¹ Maggots or violets; dishonest or virginal woman; conception as curse or as blessing? To these confused binarisms Gertrude adds the “Lamord” question: epithalamion or funeral?

(scattering flowers) Sweets to the sweet. Farewell. I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife: I thought thy bride-bed to have deck'd, sweet maid, And not have strew'd thy grave.

(5.1.236-39)

Dead flowers substitute for marital defloration and “dying.” Gertrude the jointress again does what Hamlet reproached her for in act 1 when he complained that “the funeral bak'd meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” (1.2.180-81). Elegy is but a cover for matrimonial lust in Hamlet's deflating satire.⁴²

The collapse of love and death reaches its hyperbolic climax when Hamlet and Laertes, the rival lovers, leap into (penetrate) the open grave for one last necrophilic embrace (with Ophelia, with/against each other). Hamlet can achieve his devoutly wished love consummation only with a corpse, and in the next scene he will consummate his death wish by becoming incorpsed in himself. Hamlet points to the paradox of Laertes's being “buried quick” (5.1.274) with Ophelia, an act of hyperbolic excess that he vows to imitate mimetically:

And if thou prate of mountains, let them throw Millions of acres on us, till our ground, Singeing his pate against the burning zone, Make Ossa like a wart. Nay, and thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou.

(5.1.275-79)

Hamlet and Laertes become indistinguishable in their rhetorical overreaching, as well as in their ostentatious sacrifice of the quick for the dead. Earlier in this scene, before he knows that the grave is destined for Ophelia, Hamlet feels confident that he can distinguish between the living and the dead in much the same way as he can differentiate between truth and lying. He says that the Gravedigger “lies” in the grave in both senses of the word. “Thou dost lie in't, to be in't, and say 'tis thine. 'Tis for the dead, not for the quick: therefore thou liest” (122-24). When Hamlet jumps into the grave, he literalizes his earlier wordplay (3.2) about how much he would like to lie with Ophelia's nothing, her death (nothing)-breeding genitals (nothing).

The state of the union (political, matrimonial) that words like “Lamord” symbolize is epitomized not only in the incestuous union of Gertrude and Claudius—their love is the elder Hamlet's death—but also in the pearled “union” (5.2.269) that joins and unjoins the lovers. “Union” is both union (marriage jewel) and disunion (poison), a liebestod that reengages the paradoxically inseminating poison of the primal scene/murder scene. “Union” is one of Freud's uncanny “un” words whose primal sense is antithetical, both itself and not itself.⁴³ This doubling dissolution is gendered (by men) as feminine, as that which introduces difference into male notions of self-identity predicated on self-sameness. As the union pearl is dissolved in the cup of wine, so too the royal place in the hierarchy which the union symbolizes—“the term is normally reserved for pearls of finest quality, such as might be in a royal crown” is the Arden editor's footnote (410)—is dissolved in death, reminding us of Hamlet's malcontent satire on the power of death to undo social as well as sexual distinction by making common the king and the commoner:⁴⁴ “a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” (4.3.30-31)⁴⁵ thanks to the anal reductionism of “impolitic worms,” for which “your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table” (4.3.23-24).⁴⁶ Since Hamlet has referred to himself as a beggar (2.2.272), in death he and Claudius will be indistinguishably incorpsed. The androgynous “Lady Worm” (5.1.87) is the phallic penetrator and oral, feminine devourer that reduces the courtier, lawyer, and jester, the mother and her son, to the same level as the commoner in the grave. As high is reduced to low on the axis of social status, so sexual distinctions are likewise undone in death, as in birth and intercourse. Their collapse is what sets off the chain of deaths in the play, which in turn viciously reestablishes the cycle of sexual nondifference (a corpse of whichever sex is still a just a corpse).

Critics have frequently remarked upon Hamlet's shift in character upon his return from England, usually describing it in terms of a new resolution and stoicism. I prefer instead to see in the later Hamlet someone who is far less anxious about the collapse of boundaries, to the point that he decides that there is but one way to resolve his formerly unresolved anxiety about nondifference: destroy difference via the massive implosion that death effects. The death that Hamlet once feared so obsessively ultimately becomes the lover he embraces (graphically symbolized when he enters Ophelia's grave). When Hamlet assumes the manly role of avenger in the final scene and realizes the fantasy playacting of Lucianus, he penetrates the feminized Claudius with his poisoned phallic sword. Revenge seeks by repetition of the primal scene to undo the original crime. But the compulsion to repeat engages as well the drive towards death, fulfilling Hamlet's prophetic sense that his realization of manhood was fated to achieve but a reductive quintessence of dust, a return to residual matter (mater). Hamlet's consummating manly gesture is vitiated in that the hero collapses again into his mother: like hers, his affiliation (union) with the husband-father, whom he has addressed as “mother,” is fatally poisonous, a suicidal resolution figured as liquifying dissolve.⁴⁷ The androgynous sexual mixture⁴⁸ that consummately joins male and female, I have argued, is the indistinction of death. Death returns man to the undiscovered country whence he originated, the place where he and woman are joined (foutre) in a common fault or fold, cross-coupled in nondifference. It is through metaphors of “mixture,” “jointure,” and “union”—rendering the sexes “common”—that Shakespeare plays out the poisonous consequences of androgyny.

Notes

1. Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (Garden City: Doubleday, 1949), 25-26. Jacqueline Rose, “Hamlet—the Mona Lisa of Literature,” Critical Quarterly 28 (1986): 35-49.

2. See Mircea Eliade, The Two and the One, trans. J. M. Cohen (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1965); June Singer, Androgyny: Towards a New Theory of Sexuality (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1976); Carolyn Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Knopf, 1973). Heilbrun defines androgyny as “a movement away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender toward a world in which individual roles and the modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen” (ix). This early champion of androgyny believes that Hamlet's tragedy consists in having to eschew androgyny and destroy Ophelia, his saving feminine self, in order to accomplish the manly task of vengeance. See also Heilbrun's more recent discussion in Hamlet's Mother (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).

3. David Leverenz makes the most persuasive case for the beneficent value of Hamlet's feminine side in his influential essay, “The Woman in Hamlet: An Interpersonal View,” in Representing Shakespeare, eds. Murray Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). “Hamlet is part hysteric, as Freud said, and part Puritan in his disgust at contamination and his idealization of his absent father. But he is also, as Goethe was the first to say, part woman. And Goethe was wrong, as Freud was wrong, to assume that ‘woman means weakness. To equate women with weak and tainted bodies, words, and feelings while men possess noble reason and ambitious purpose is to participate in Denmark's disease that divides mind from body, act from feeling, man from woman” (111). In Shakespeare's Division of Experience (New York: Summit Books, 1981), Marilyn French concurs with Carolyn Heilbrun that action is the province of the man, whereas Hamlet's “primary response to experience is to ‘feel it—through sensation, emotion, or reflective thought. Hamlet's response to life, then, is ‘feminine” (147). In The Mystery of Hamlet (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1881), the Victorian scholar Edward P. Vining made the first detailed argument for Hamlet as a woman, locating Hamlet's femininity in such features as his melancholy, playacting (masquerade), hysteria, faintness, mysteriousness, gentleness, wordy poetizing, (feigned) madness, lack of strength or courage to act—features “that are far more in keeping with a feminine than with a masculine nature” (48). Vining thought that Hamlet was in fact a woman disguised at birth as a man, like Ovid's Iphis, because Gertrude knew that her husband wanted a boy. From his mother's disguise of him as a girl, Hamlet learned “dissimulation” (82). The following toss-off is typical of Vining's tendentiousness: “Hamlet has a woman's daintiness and sensitiveness to perfumes” (77).

4. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Hamlet are from the Arden edition of the play, ed. Harold Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 1982).

5. Margaret Ferguson discusses the conflation of mother and matter in “Hamlet: Letters and Spirits,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985). Ferguson argues that the hysteria that Freud diagnosed in Hamlet results from the hero's maternal/material legacy: “As we hear or see in the word ‘matter the Latin term for mother, we may surmise that the common Renaissance association between female nature in general and the ‘lower realm of matter is here being deployed in the service of Hamlet's complex oedipal struggle. The mother is the matter that comes between the father and the son—and it is no accident that in this closet scene Hamlet's sexual hysteria rises to its highest pitch” (295). See also Patricia Parker, “Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying, and the ‘Secret Place of Woman,” Representations 44 (Fall 1993): 60-95.

6. In lieu of the Folio's scullion, the reading printed in the Arden edition, I opt tendentiously for the Second Quarto's stallion = “male whore,” a choice of words that better fits Hamlet's sense of compromised masculinity. The animal virility suggested by stallion is undercut by the reference to prostitution which Hamlet and Hamlet associate with women.

7. In his commentary on the function of language in Lacan, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen points to the way speech disengages the speaker from the present immediacy of intuition, absenting the object that speech intends to capture by naming it, and thereby opening up a loss within the speaker himself that makes of him a subject. “The subject speak(s) in order to say nothing: ‘Words, words, words. … Speech, instead of saying something, now speaks itself and thus speaks the truth, which is precisely that speech says nothing—nothing other than the ‘hole in the real that is the subject at the moment when he speaks” (139). Naming the object leaves in its wake “nothing but words, words, words—that is, a subject” (193). Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford, Calif.: Standford University Press, 1991). The “nothing” that the subject speaks is gendered feminine in Hamlet's bewdy remarks to Ophelia during the play within the play. For the male, to become a subject is to fall under the sign of woman.

   At a spring 1994 symposium at Berkeley on “Rhetorics of Early Modern Masculinity,” Patricia Parker spoke about the efforts of Renaissance authors to achieve stylistic virilitas. Their goal was a sinewy (nervosus) style, which these anti-Ciceronian rhetoricians attempted to ground in the male body (nervus = “penis”). But no male could express a virile style in words whose lingua-derived copia was gendered feminine. In the epistle dedicatory to his A Worlde of Wordes (1598), John Florio commented anxiously on the emblematic proverb, “Le parole sono feminine, & i fatti sono maschii, Wordes they are women, and deeds they are men.” Like Hamlet, Florio sensed his project for a virile style hopelessly compromised by its imbrication and entrapment in woman's textual web. See Parker's essay, “On the Tongue: Cross Gendering, Effeminacy, and the Art of Words,” Style 23.3 (1989): 445-65. Here Parker demonstrates how Erasmus' Lingua treatise (1525) associates the loquacious male with the “loud and babbling harlot” of Proverbs 7, a passage relevant to Hamlet's self-characterization as a wordy whore. Parker discusses the way that Erasmus prefers manly brevitas to excessive verbal copia: “The arts of rhetoric as devices for amplifying a theme (‘amplificandi rationes) are not only contrasted with deeds but linked to a loquacity gendered as ‘foolish and womanish (‘stultam ac muliebrem loquacitatem)” (449).

8. My contention that the male fears being compromised and contaminated by his dependency upon the mother's body is deeply indebted to Janet Adelman's Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992). Adelman argues that the feminine presence that divides Hamlet's male identity is the mother regarded as whore: “He himself is subject to his birth: he would imagine himself the unmixed son of an unmixed father, but the whore-mother in him betrays him, returning him to his own mixed (mixture = “sexual intercourse” (OED 1e)) origin, his contamination by the sexual female within” (30).

9. I owe to Joel Altman the tenor of my remarks about the way that res and verbum reverse the gender hierarchy of spirit over matter.

10. Erasmus' Lingua begins with a proverb that suggests that the verbose male is he who has sucked too long at the mother's breast: “Ubi uber, ibi tuber; fatti maschii, parole femine” (“Where there is a breast, there is a swelling; facts are masculine, words are feminine”) (460; quoted in Parker).

11. The son's loss of the father results in the impossible duty to restore him, to avenge the dead by undoing the adulterous usurpation of Claudius and Gertrude.

12. In the closing chapter of The Gendering of Melancholia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), Juliana Schiesari analyzes the male's scapegoating of woman in Hamlet, Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, and Freud's works. “The melancholic's desire for the father's gaze is concomitant to and inseparable from a profound denigration of women, who are typically accused of all the horrible things the melancholic can also accuse himself of duplicity, inconstancy, inhumanity, animality, and base materiality. Obviously, the melancholic projects on women the lack that he would deny in himself, except of course when he addresses himself in the voice of his own superego” (239). This observation leads to a reading of Burton that is relevant as well to my dissection of Hamlet: “In diagnosing, as Freud too would, the female melancholic as phallicly needy, Burton blushingly foregrounds his own sexual deprivation, his own ‘unmanliness. Much later, in discussing love melancholia, Burton does not mince words when he says outright that melancholia ‘turns a man into a woman (3: 142)” (252). Hamlet suffers from an inversion of love melancholy since the woman in him makes him too disillusioned to love any woman. In “Mourning and Melancholia” (Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955-74), 14: 239-58), Freud instances Hamlet's melancholia, his self-reproaches and suicidal impulses, as the turning against his own ego of a repressed hostility towards a once loved object. The ambivalently cathected object is introjected, i.e., internalized as the ego's own object, as opposed to the release of the object that occurs in mourning. Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Lupton invoke Lacan's reading of Freud in arguing that whereas Oedipus Rex ends with the recognition of castration, Hamlet begins with it. Hamlet is like a little girl, they assert, in recognizing castration immediately: “Since the little girl is mourning something that was never there in the first place, we would argue that her relation to the phallus is melancholic rather than mournful. We could say that she mourns mourning—that is, that she mourns the lack of any real object that could be mourned, or, more precisely, that she mourns the lack of a lack that could be restored.” After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 56. Janet Adelman takes issue with “critics who use the model of Freud's ‘Mourning and Melancholia (who) generally assume that the lost object is Hamlet's father; but Hamlet's discovery of the whore inside himself suggests that the lost, introjected, and then berated object is his mother” (256-57). See also Ranjini Philip, “The Shattered Glass: The Story of (O)phelia,” Hamlet Studies 13 (1991): 73-84.

13. In “Creativity and its Origins,” D. W. Winnicott anticipates Carolyn Heilbrun (see n.3 above) in arguing that the male and female elements in Hamlet are in harmony until his father dies. Thereafter he rejects the female and projects it onto Ophelia, whom he then maligns for her femininity. Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 1971).

14. Avi Erlich regards the “flesh” in this speech as a representation of the “solid” penis, which Hamlet wishes poured out orgasmically “into a dew.” Hamlet's Absent Father (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 65. Erlich's analysis is at times stretched and tendentious, but his book remains probably the most detailed compendium of psychoanalytic readings of the play.

15. See the essay by this name, S. E. II: 155-61.

16. Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Lupton comment on the identification of Hamlet with Niobe: “Niobe, becoming her tears, is a favored Renaissance figure of narcissistic identification with loss; she thus becomes an image of the melancholic petrification to which Hamlet and Hamlet are subject. Niobe's metamorphosis materializes the watery fate imagined in the soliloquy's opening line” (115).

17. At several points in The Interpretation of Dreams (S. E. 4 & 5), Freud discusses water as a dream element that symbolizes woman, especially with regard to male fantasies of birth and of returning to the womb.

18. Laertes appeals to the blood/tears opposition in defending the incorruptibility of his descent and the chastity of his mother:.

    That drop of blood that's calm proclaims me bastard, Cries cuckold to my father, brands me harlot Even here between the chaste unsmirched brow Of my true mother.

    (4.5.116-20)

    This confidence about origins contrasts with Hamlet's nagging fear that Gertrude may have cuckolded King Hamlet and so have branded her son a bastard and a harlot.

19. In a series of articles Patricia Parker has argued the centrality for Shakespearean tragedy of “dilation” in the rhetorical and temporal senses, as well as in the sense of delation or accusation. I use the word to describe how Hamlet's delay in the midst of resolution leads to self-accusation; dilation engenders delation. See especially Parker's “Shakespeare and Rhetoric: ‘Dilation and ‘Delation in Othello,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London: Methuen, 1985): 54-74.

20. Again the relevant foil for Hamlet is Laertes, whose deeds in defense of his slain father contrast with Hamlet's soliloquizing. Claudius rouses Laertes to action by appealing to the bad example of Hamlet: “But to the quick of th'ulcer: / Hamlet comes back; what would you undertake / To show yourself in deed your father's son / More than in words?” (4.7.122-24). The wordy son is the mother's son who can only rail ineffectually against bastardy, whereas the father's son is a man who vindicates his legitimacy in deed.

21. Even at the zero degree of etymology, some critics have construed the word “conscience” to express an irreconcilable sexual divide, since it may allude in its first syllable to the female genitalia, while its independent root designates disembodied mind. In his edition of Shakespeare's sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), Stephen Booth glosses “conscience” in Sonnet 151 as “cunt knowledge.” “Any word with con in it appears to have invited Shakespeare and his contemporaries (see Congreve, con and noc) to play on the commonest name for the female sex organ” (526). Other critics who comment on the sexual sense of “conscience” are Erlich, Hamlet's Absent Father 188, 229-30, and Parker, “Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying, and the ‘Secret Place of Woman,” 83.

22. In her Foucault-inspired account of madness as that which opposes rational closure, Karin S. Coddon anatomizes the “feminization of madness” (392) in the play. “Suche Strange Desyngns': Madness, Subjectivity, and Treason in Hamlet and Elizabethan Culture,” in the edition of Hamlet edited by Susanne L. Wofford (Boston: Bedford Books, 1994): 380-402. For a critical history of madness, love melancholy, and hysteria in connection with Ophelia, see Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985): 77-94.

23. Juliana Schiesari surveys the way that melancholy from Aristotle to Freud has been associated with male genius, whereas women have been relegated to the realm of unproductive mourning. (See especially the introductory chapter of The Gendering of Melancholia.) I argue, however, that Hamlet's melancholy is at times figured as feminine and productive, not exclusively as feminine and debilitating.

24. Erlich is perhaps not at his credible best when he offers an analysis of the sexual oscillation in this passage in terms of erection and detumescence: “‘His golden couplets disclosed strikes me as a possible though disguised reference to ejaculation, with ‘couplets referring to Hamlet's testicles and ‘disclosed to an orgasmic bursting out. Similarly, ‘His silence will sit drooping seems a description of a post-coital penis” (Hamlet's Absent Father 176). Erlich calls ejaculation what I describe as parturition.

25. Peter Erickson contrasts the feminine side of Hamlet manifested in his soliloquies with the male element foregrounded in Hamlet's relationship with Horatio. By the end of the play it is Horatio whom Hamlet asks to perpetuate his memory, as opposed to the usual means of passing on one's legacy by linking with a woman who in turn gives birth to a male heir. Since Gertrude's conduct corrupts the ideal of motherhood, Erickson argues, Hamlet turns to the chaste, passionless Horatio instead. “In a world where love between men and women has become irrevocably duplicitous, sexuality can be avoided by turning to male ties to fashion a dependable bond.” Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 77. If Hamlet and Horatio are solumates and the anima is gendered feminine, however, this would indicate that the male-male bond does not so much escape the feminine as sublimate it by abstacting it from the body.

26. See Adelman, Suffocating Mothers (252-53) for the way that the play inscribes woman's responsibility for moral fault in her material body. “Fault” was a slang term for the female genitals, and the French foutre = “sexual intercourse” was pronounced the same way.

27. Ophelia remarked earlier upon Hamlet's “unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth / Blasted with ecstasy” (3.1.161-62). Ex-stasis defines madness as eccentricity, the alienation of the self from its rational center.

28. For the double valence of “crown,” see Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (New York: Routledge, 1992), 30.

29. Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1981), 135. In opposition to Kahn's view of the ear as a vaginal analogue, it is also possible to regard the murder as an act motivated by homosexual jealousy (“the primal eldest curse … A brother's murder” (3.3.37-38) with the ear as locus of anal penetration. Jonathan Goldberg critiques what he regards as Kahn's compulsory heterosexism in “Romeo and Juliet's Open Rs,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994). In the same anthology, Richard Rambuss' “Pleasure and Devotion: The Body of Jesus and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric” cautions against the uncritical assumption, popular among heterosexist critics, that any penetrated body must be a female one, and that the site of entry is necessarily vaginal. Richard Crashaw, for example, imagines the wounds that penetrate Christ's body on the cross in homoerotic terms. In “The Death of Hamlet's Father” (Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis (London: Hograth, 1951), I, 323-28), Ernest Jones argues that the poison is semen, the ear a displaced anus, so a homosexual rape is at issue. Norman Holland sums up the debate as follows: “One need not choose between heterosexual or homosexual insemination for, in the unconscious, there is no negation. Rather, both apply; and the fact that the symbol is ambiguous suggests an ambiguity in the play's presentation, one that reaches to an early level of infantile confusions” (194). Context must determine symbolic usage, so it may be plausible to see the ear of the original murder as a homoerotic locus, while its replay in The Murder of Gonzago foregrounds the hetero sex act as murderous-castrating. The critics' lack of consensus over anal versus vaginal interpretations may reflect the ambiguously oscillating, androgynous orientation of the text itself.

30. See Alexander Grinstein, “The Dramatic Device: A Play Within a Play,” in The Design Within: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare, ed. M. D. Faber (New York: Science House, 1970), 147-53. Grinstein believes that the play within the play follows the same laws as Freud's analysis of the dream within a dream: it is an attempt to undo a past event.

31. In “Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying, and the Secret Place of Woman,” Patricia Parker comments on these two references—“conscience” and “nothing”—to the woman in Claudius. Of the first she says that catching the King's conscience “elicits the con-, count, or euphemistic country matter lurking within this monarchical con-science and its closeted secrets” (83).

32. Central to Janet Adelman's argument is Hamlet's fantasy of Gertrude as the phantom murderer of Claudius: “The playlet is in fact designed to catch the conscience of the queen” (31).

33. This is Cavell's summary comment in Disowning Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): “One's belief in Gertrude's power is surely not lessened if in constructing the primal scene from the fantasy/dumb-show one finds a man collapsing not upon her pouring something into him but upon her having something poured into her (the reversal of passive into active)” (185).

34. Avi Erlich is the critic who writes most extensively about the castration of King Hamlet in the primal scene. See especially chapter four of Hamlet's Absent Father. For textual evidence of castration, one may point to King Hamlet's lament that he was “cut off even in the blossoms of my sin” (1.5.76) and his injunction to Hamlet to “Remember me” (1.5.91), which suggests that the son is called upon to restore (re-member) the father's missing phallus.

35. The “common place” is what in King Lear Edgar calls the “indistinguish'd space of woman's will” (4.6.273), where “will” refers both to volition and to the genitalia. Desdemona's fetishistic handkerchief, associated metonymically with her private parts, is said to be a “common thing” (3.3.302), and in the brothel scene Othello addresses his wife as a “public commoner” (4.2.73). Troilus's misogyny similarly points to the way that his Cressida is common to everyone because she makes her “thing” public, open to all comers.

    This is, and is not, Cressid. Within my soul there doth conduce a fight Of this strange nature that a thing inseparate Divides more wider than the sky and earth.

    (5.2.143-46)

    Lars Eagle suggests (Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of his Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 238n.) that Ophelia regards Hamlet in much the way that Troilus sees himself divided when he regards himself reflected in Cressida. Ophelia's “O woe is me / T' have seen what I have seen, see what I see” (3.1.152) might be paraphrased as “This is and is not Hamlet.” In Hamlet's eyes, he is divided because he sees Ophelia as double (duplicitous), chaste and not chaste. In A Theater of Envy (Oxford University Press, 1991), René Girard asserts that Ophelia is “contaminated with the erotic strategy of a Cressida and the other least savory Shakespearean heroines. What Hamlet resents in Ophelia is what any human being always resents in another human being, the visible signs of his own sickness” (285). Cressida and Ophelia are both objects of a misogynistic gaze that sees double when it sees woman, because it sees woman as common and therefore duplicitous. See also the discussion of “common” in Parker's Representations article.

36. To anyone familiar with his work, Joel Fineman's influence on my reading of duplicitous desire will be apparent. Fineman contrasts the giddy and playful androgyny of Shakespeare's transvestite heroines to the untransvested, unveiled duplicity of Gertrude: “Symmetrical desire, a structure of homosexual jealousy that is resolved in the comedies by apportioning out to each pair of rivals a matching pair of beloveds, is precisely what we have unresolved in Hamlet, where, correspondingly, we might say woman herself, as woman, because her name is frailty—is the image of androgyny.” “Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare's Doubles,” in Representing Shakespeare, 82. Fineman argues that woman's androgyny becomes the mirror for man's difference from himself: “The dialectic of Difference and No Difference contained by the original fratricide structure is transferred by Shakespeare to another formula of mirroring reciprocity, to themes of women and their frailty, to a kind of masculine misogyny that finds in the ambiguity of woman its own self-divided self-consciousness, its own vulnerability, its mortality” (89). In Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986), Fineman accounts for the difference between genders as originating in the feminine: “In a formula whose lusty misogyny is recognizably Shakespearean, we can say that in Shakespeare's sonnets the difference between man and woman is woman herself” (17). In a typical Neoplatonic schema, man is figured as the sun, woman as the moon, in service of an “orthodox erotics for which woman is the Other to man, the hetero to homo, precisely because her essence is to be this lunatic difference between sameness and difference” (120).

37. King Lear makes explicit the way that sex and death coalesce in woman's vaginal hell: “But to the girdle do the gods inherit, / Beneath is all the fiend's. / There's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit; burning, scalding, stench, consumption” (4.6.125-28).

38. For woman's antithetical symbolization of both life and death, see Freud's essays, “The Theme of the Three Caskets” and “The Uncanny,” in On Creativity and the Unconscious, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper & Row, 1958).

39. Much of my meditation on Lamord is indebted to Ferguson, “Hamlet: Letters and Spirits,” 298-304. As an especially apt instance of the “Lamord” wordplay, Ferguson quotes the epigraph to chapter 15 of Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir:.

    Amour en latin facit amor; Or donc provient d'amour la mort, Et par avant, soulcy qui mord, Deuils, plours, pieges, forfaitz, remords.

40. Valerie Traub argues that the only certifiably chaste woman is a dead woman. In life Ophelia is suspect because she is mobile and open, whereas in death her closure and immobility secure her chastity, thus making her available for the first time as an object worthy of Hamlet's romantic love (25-33). This conception of a safely enclosed because dead Ophelia is at odds with Patricia Parker's analysis in her Repreentations article. “In contrast to the natural modesty of women reported in Pliny and repeated in Crooke, Ophelia, in the melodious lay (4.7.182-83) of her drowning, floats more openly, face up, her clothes spread wide (175) in lines the ear may hear, given other such Shakespearean instances, as the spreading wide of her close” (75). Parker glosses “spread” as “open for copulation.” Traub completely ignores the pronounced sexual innuendo of Ophelia's death song: maids who open their “chamber doors” in losing their virginity (4.5.53), and the many phallic references to young men who “do't if they come to't—/ By Cock, they are to blame” (60-61), to “sweet Robin” (4.5.184), and to the death garlands of “long purples” or “dead men's fingers” (4.7.168-71). In dying Ophelia is foul (phallic)-mouthed, thus anything but closed-mouthed. For the chaste as dead woman, see also Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Peter Stallybrass gives a brilliant reading of open versus closed women's bodies in “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance, eds. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986): 123-42.

41. It is a measure of Laertes's ingenuous fatuity that he forgets his two earlier conversations in which violets are associated with the fading of love and death (1.3.5-10, 4.5.180-83). In this quotation from act 5 as well as in Shakespeare's Ovidian Poetry, the purpled violet may suggest graphically and etymologically love's wound as consequence of phallic violation (violets/violence).

42. Rhetorically, the elegiac cast that Gertrude gives to the shadowing of love by death corresponds to the isocolonic and oxymoronic formalism of Claudius, which also yokes contraries together in order to repress their contariety:

    Therefore our sometimes sister, now our queen, Th'imperial jointress to this warlike state, Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy, With an auspicious and a dropping eye, With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, In equal scale weighing delight and dole, Taken to wife.

    (1.2.8-14)

    This facile reconciliation of opposites via juxtaposition, this specious balancing of equal and homologous units (isocolon), is the object of Hamlet's critique, whose preferred rhetorical mode employs paronomasia to subvert and satirize isocolon. Of course Hamlet wants his own set of tidy moral contraries, provided that they not be reconciled. For discussion of Claudius's use of isocolon, see Stephen Booth, “On the Value of Hamlet,” in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, ed. Norman Rabkin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), esp. 148-149, and Ferguson, 292-93.

43. James Calderwood discusses “union” in terms of the frequent “hyphenisation of relations that leads to the total undifferentiation” in phrases like “uncle-father” and “aunt-mother” (2.2.372), and in Hamlet's confusing address of his (step)father as his “mother.” “All such repellent, hyphenised unions flow poisonously into the cup from which Gertrude drinks in the final scene and which Hamlet forces upon the already dying Claudius with the words, ‘Drink off this poison. Is thy union here?’ (5.2.331). Hamlet's killing of Claudius is, in this context, an act of restorative destruction, an undoing of unions that came into existence not through the linking of like to like but through the disintegration of proper differences.” To Be and Not To Be: Negation and Metadrama in “Hamlet” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 63. This returns me to my earlier invocation of René Girard's notion that the only way Hamlet can establish his difference from the feminine (the hymenated hyphenization) is by means of effecting masculine violence.

44. Steven Mullaney argues that because the playhouses were set in the marginal Liberties of London, the drama was able to arrogate to itself the license of having common men impersonate kings. Defenses of hierarchical degree, like Ulysses's famous speech in Troilus and Cressida, were evacuated by virtue of their parodic-representational frame; hence, difference was made common. The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), esp. 51-52.

45. Francis Barker comments that this line “is extraordinary (if it is so at all) for its insistence on the democracy of mortality in contrast with the hierarchized body politic of the living world, not for the corporeal expression in which the idea emerges.” The Tremulous Private Body (London: Methuen, 1984), 23.

46. Lalita Pandit points out that in the Saxo Grammaticus tale, when Amleth is questioned regarding the whereabouts of the eavesdropper (the unnamed Polonius figure) whom he has killed, he replies that “the man had gone to the sewer, but had fallen through its bottom and been stifled by the floods of filth, and that he had been devoured by the swine that came up all about the place.” In Shakespeare's play Hamlet responds to Claudius's inquiry about where Polonius is by saying, “At supper. … Not where he eats, but where a is eaten” (4.3.17, 19). The homology of “supper” and “sewer,” of eating and defecating, suggests a cannibalistic relationship between master and source texts as well as between living and dead bodies. “Language and the Textual Unconscious: Shakespeare, Ovid, and Saxo Grammaticus,” in Criticism and Lacan, eds. Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990): 248-67 (264). The corpse of Alexander may be food for worms but also fecal dust used to stop a “bung-hole” (= anus, OED 6) (4.1.198).

47. In Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, Norman Holland writes: “The finale, in which Hamlet and his mother die together, projects the wish to die with the mother, to return to her womb in a sexual way” (167). A counterpoint to the union of mother and son that death effects results when Gertrude drinks the poisoned union wine: she gives the lie to the union that her imperial jointure posited, since her death uncovers the differential severing that any jointure presupposes, the separation by death (of/from one's betrayed spouse) that jointure aims to repress.

48. In Suffocating Mothers, Janet Adelman points out that union is just another version of Hecate's “mixture rank” (3.2.251), the poison that kills Hamlet's father: “Each is the poisonous epitome of sexual mixture itself and hence of boundary danger, the terrifying adulteration of male by female that does away with the boundaries between them” (28).

My epigraphs from this ambivalently androgynous actress are gleaned respectively from M. Maurice Shudofsky, “Sarah Bernhardt on Hamlet,” College English 3 (1941): 293-95, and Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 38. In The Masks of Hamlet (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 105-6, Marvin Rosenberg offers a cento of original reviews of Bernhardt's 1899 performance, from which it appears that the ambivalent critics were roughly evenly divided on the issue of whether her Hamlet tended more (or too much) towards the masculine or the feminine. Marcel Pagnol suggested that since Hamlet “does not have the reflexes of a man,” perhaps his theatrical role better suits a woman: “Hamlet is for me, without any doubt, a philosophe d'un sexe douteux whose role could be perfectly played by a great comedienne.” (Quoted in Norman Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979), 183.).