SOURCE: Grossman, Marshall. “Recovering the Terror of Trifles.” Shakespeare Studies 27 (1999): 51-64.

[In the following essay, Grossman points to Hal's ambivalent search for his own identity as the wayward prince's primary characteristic.]

I know you all, and will a while uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness.

Whatever it is Hal is doing in his doings with Falstaff, Peto, Bardolph, and Poins in the early scenes of 1 Henry IV, his first soliloquy reassures the audience or himself that he will do it only for “a while.” Harry Berger reminds us that this “a while”—the lapse of time between the “now” of act 1 scene 2 of 1 Henry IV and, say, the end of 2 Henry IV, when the debt Hal never promised comes due—is mediated by a representation that is both performative and textual (Making Trifles of Terrors, 244-45). During and through his verbal performance, the Hal we see or read is at every moment complicated by his and our continual textual and historical reference to Henry V—whose presence is felt sometimes as the Prince imagines him in anticipation, sometimes as anticipated but unrealized by the Prince. At times, the shadow of the King he will become appears without the apparent complicity of the Prince—proleptically, in the mode of “history in the future tense,” as Auden characterized the Aeneid.

Insofar as the second tetralogy participates, along with Richard III, in a legitimating account of the origins of the Tudor dynasty that culminates in a dynastic marriage, the Henriad, an identification Berger pointedly adopts, retains formal traces of the dynastic epic epitomized by the Aeneid, revived in the dynastic romances of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser, and transmuted to supranational ends and ultimate origins by Milton. Shakespeare's “history in the future tense,” encompassing the failure of Henry VI and the consequent necessity of a second dynastic marriage—between Henry VII and Elizabeth of York—to establish the Tudors, adds a self conscious doubling to the generic plot that is wholly characteristic of his structural technique. The doubling (or repetition) of the dynastic plot as a formal structure for reflexive complication in the histories doubles again the use of familial doubling in the same plays—such doubling is obvious in Hal and Hotspur but is now also brilliantly extended by Berger to Gaunt and Bolingbroke, two characters who barely existed as characters before Berger noticed them. More generally in Shakespeare, this reflexive doubling is seen in Lear and Gloucester, Hamlet and Laertes (and Fortinbras) and then, in the strangely attenuated reemergence of the dynastic plot in the late Romances, with the struggles of Leontes and Polixenes, Alonzo and Prospero resolved through the marriage of their children into a single dynastic posterity.

Berger notes the affinity of the rhetorical weaving of subject positions by this narrative shuttle, in which present actions are given meaning as the effects of a past which has, in turn, been constructed as their cause, and Lacan's passage about discovering oneself in what one will have become, in and through a symbolic order that is always experienced retrospectively:

For the function of language is not to inform but to evoke. … I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.¹

I am going to expand this elliptical reference a bit, first in relation to the specifically narrative temporality underlying Lacan's understanding of how the self becomes a subject through the misrecognition of its own desire, and then, with specific (and, I hope, illustrative) reference to Hal's “I know you all” soliloquy in act 1 scene 2 of 1 Henry IV² Doing so will help assess how close Berger has been willing to come to the edge of the “vertiginous vortex of Lacanian conundrums” even at “the risk of being sucked down into those depths and lost forever” (xix), and it will allow me to point—speculatively—in the direction toward which a further collaboration between Shakespeare and Lacan might lead.³

In pursuing this line of thought, I shall, for the most part, respect Berger's precautionary good sense and join him in keeping my “approprations from Lacan as mundane and low-grade as possible.” Moreover, I will add to this a working rule of my own: “the most reductive reading of Lacan is—at least for my present purpose—the most useful.” Thus, if what I have to say is overly simplistic, its simplicity will at least be self-conscious. I want to think about Hal's verbal evocation of the King he will become and Lacan's familiar remark that “the unconscious is structured like a language” with the aim, eventually, of nudging Harry Berger's characteristically inimitable reading of linguistic complicities toward a consideration of the psychoanalytic transference as a model that may elucidate the performativity of the Shakespearean text; that is, a model which explains what it is the Shakespearean text does in and to its readers, and how it does it. Specifically, transference might suggest how it comes about that these texts enable us—perhaps, force us—to do something ethical with words.

To administer this nudge, I propose to interrogate the specifically textual complexity of Hal's evocation of Henry V by asking again the two questions Harry Berger appropriates from the Nixon impeachment inquiry: “What did the Prince know, and When did he know it?” while recalling Berger's proviso that there is no Prince except as we construct him now and then, here and there.

Berger's allusions are characteristically pointed. The questions, “What did the president know, and When did he know it” were aimed precisely at defining the ethics of the Nixonian text by retrospectively identifying various choices as episodes in an unfolding narrative. The intent of the famous questions was to allow Congress to predicate Nixon's ambiguous words and performance on specific causes and intentions. Once the ethos of the Nixon administration was read out of the actions of the “cover-up”—the inception and, so to speak, paternity, of which was established by Nixon's replayed words in the “smoking gun tape”—it would become possible to read that ethos back into the whole panoply of “White House Horrors” and hold Nixon responsible for them. In a perhaps reversed direction, we are called on to parse the difficult ethos of Prince Harry in terms of when and how he came to identify himself with and as Henry V. Later, in its proper place, it will be necessary to comment on Berger's still more reflexive allusion, at the conclusion of his Henriad essay, to Hitchcock's darkly comic film, The Trouble with Harry. Implicating the ethos of the reader in his reading to finally place Harry before Harry, I suspect that this allusion may reveal Harry's “darker purpose,” or better, the darker purpose of the Harries.

First, there is more to be said about Harry of Monmouth's Harry. Because Hal (or Henry, or Harry) is made entirely of words, the Prince exists only when he is spoken—either inwardly by a reader or out loud by an actor. In either case, the speaking implies audition. In performance, the Prince is a collaboration of playwright, actor and audience; but, even when read, the Prince is heard as well as spoken, inwardly voiced as the voice of another whom the reader both speaks and hears.⁴ This chiasmic exchange of voices in which we lend voice to a fictional character, exchanging his “I” for ours, addresses Cavell's recognition that we must show ourselves to the text.

Writing about King Lear, Cavell argues that to “acknowledge” characters as persons, we must become visible to them, “revealing ourselves, allowing ourselves to be seen.” What exactly Cavell means by acknowledgment is the subject of his long essay on Lear and of much of Berger's elegant “Acknowledgment” of Cavell. I take both Cavell and Berger to mean that we acknowledge characters as persons when we meet them as subjects like ourselves and endow them with supratextual thoughts and experiences, through which they may seem sometimes to know more than they say; sometimes, to say more than they know; sometimes to know more than they are aware of knowing. In acknowledging characters as persons, we necessarily acknowledge ourselves as characters. Cavell says, a bit mysteriously, that to put oneself “in the presence of characters” presupposes discovering that “I am helpless before the acting and suffering of others, but I know the true point of my helplessness only if I have acknowledged totally the fact and the true cause of their suffering.” A Lacanian might say, a bit more mysteriously, “I am helpless before the acting and suffering of others, but I know the true point of my helplessness only if I can acknowledge totally the fact and the true cause of the other in which I am,” then add: “but, since I can encounter myself only as I am estranged in my speech, I can't.” At least for me, this reformulation moves closer to the dynamics of the central issue around which Berger and Cavell circle: when we acknowledge characters as persons by “revealing ourselves, allowing ourselves to be seen,” we reveal ourselves to ourselves as characters; we acknowledge our own textuality, when we understand that our subjectivity comes to us by way of a plot. To be a subject, to say “I,” is to narrate the story in which one discovers oneself as a character. In short, full subjectivity implies a rhetoric as well as a grammar, and, thereby, a complicity with the symbolic, the language in which the self is always and necessarily to be found elsewhere.⁵ “In psychoanalytic anamnesis, it is not a question of reality, but of truth, because the effect of full speech is to reorder past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come, such as they are constituted by the little freedom through which the subject makes them present” (Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, 48). In reading Shakespeare, it is not only Hal's “truth” that depends on his ordering of past (and present) contingencies into a language of narrative necessity but, potentially, our own: to the extent that his language—which includes a rhetoric and a grammar—and ours become complicit.

Berger sees Cavell's notion of “acknowledgment” as a reason to privilege reading over performance:

It is only by taking advantage of the opportunities of the text that we acknowledge “totally the fact and true cause.” We may then find that the character is both credited and discredited, or we may refuse the language of praise and blame and assert only that the character is responsible, is complicit, in ways that account for and derive from his suffering. Textuality offers us not the answer but the opportunity to struggle against the temptation to use or reduce or praise or blame. In this struggle, the struggle of interpretation, we define the character's personhood over against our own. And we do so in such a way as to preclude our closing the book on the character.

(68)

I would add that, when we define a character's personhood over against our own, we also define our own personhood over against the character's. What sort of person is Hal? What would Hal think of me?

I am less interested in the rivalry of text and performance than in the underlying processes of identification implicit in Cavell's idea of becoming visible to what are, after all, fictional characters who exist only within us. Berger elaborates the important differences between the Prince performed and the Prince read, but it is a corollary of his own argument that a reading includes a performance and a performance at least evokes a reading. If Berger is right about Shakespeare's thematic anti-theatricalism, and I think he is, then potential performance forms the ground of reading, and reading forms the ground of performance. The creative tension between the two can be appreciated only to the extent that each is haunted by the other. Thus, although the reading I suggest here pertains to text rather than performance, I am less sure than Berger is that it would not pertain to performance as well, and I remain agnostic about Berger's anti-theatrical polemic, which strikes me as rooted very much in a particular critical context. Doubtless, there are distinctions to be drawn between hearing the Prince spoken aloud—on a stage—and hearing him speaking inwardly, perhaps in one's own voice. However, as Lacan points out, “there is no speech without a reply, even if it is met only with silence, provided that it has an auditor” (Lacan, Ecrits, 40). In performance or in the book, the work of the transference, if it occurs at all, occurs in ein andere Schauplatz.

On the textual scene: There is a chiasmic expense of time in the reading of Hal. Like the still frames of a movie from which our eyes and minds construct motion, the words and sentences, of which Hal is made, occur in us; the time of reading mediates to us the fictive time in which Hal becomes Henry. What happens—for text and reader—during this temporal crossover? Using our time to represent to ourselves the “while” that separates Hal from the fullness of his time, we encounter Hal as delinquent, truant from his father's court, ambivalently suspended in the choice of a father or, as Freud would have it, an ego-ideal, between Falstaff—“the latter spring! … All-hallown summer!”—whose clock measures time in units derived from bodily appetites: “cups of sack,” “capons,” and “the tongues of bawds” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.158-59; 7-8), and Henry IV, who always knows what time it is, worries about being too late, as Richard II had been in his return from Ireland, or too early, as Hotspur will be at Shrewsbury. The temporal rubbing up of contrary self-representations yields a friction in Hal's character. There is the Prince who knows his comrade idlers and represents his dalliance with them (to himself) as feigned idleness, crafty indulgence—an antic delinquency by which to evade the competition for honor with Hotspur and diminish strategically the expectation of his reign. This version of Hal is close to, but not quite congruent with, the more compactly distant and somewhat cruel experimenter, who uses Francis, the under-skinker, as the subject of an experiment explicitly aimed at the juncture of language, class and the discursive opportunities they provide, and who understands (as Lear would not) that he is separated from Francis only by the wider experience social rank affords. Unlike the addled Lear, he understands this distinction to be instituted by an insurmountable linguistic barrier, not to be overcome by a change of clothes: “That ever this fellow should have fewer words than a parrot, and yet the son of a woman!” The uneasy difference, the dissonance that defines the lability of his character, is that between the Prince who already knows, and therefore is, what he will become and the apprentice Prince who finds the time to be “of all humors” in this “pupil age” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.92-98).

Hal represents his whiling away of time in Eastcheap sometimes as the strategic concealment of an enforced royal nature, sometimes as the time in which his true nature will be chosen or created and sometimes as the pupil age in which the future king learns his trade. He directly evokes his future self when he tells an uncomprehending Poins that learning to “drink with every tinker in his own language,” he has struck the “very base string of humility” and “that he shall command all the good lads in Eastcheap” when he is King—as we know he will—because they think him “no proud Jack … but a Corinthian, a lad of mettle, a good boy” (2.4.5-15). When Hal, role-playing with Falstaff, proleptically assumes his father's state and banishes old Sir John (“I do, I will” 2.4.481), he appears to understand becoming King as becoming his father, and thus reprimanding himself. As he reenacts an inverted version of his grandfather's complicity in the banishment of his own father, some part of him also accepts that in banishing “plump Jack”—both the fat knight and that part of himself that incorporates Falstaff as ego-ideal—he will banish “all the world.” What, then, are we to make of the quality of Hal's affection for the idlers of Eastcheap—whom he appears to admire, to loath, and to manipulate to his future advantage—or the drawers, whose company he both enjoys and patronizes with such ironic and perspicacious language?

The assumption of his warlike obligations at Shrewsbury does not make Hal the image of his father either, although we are told that on that day “The King hath many marching in his coats” (1 Henry IV, 5.3.25). Emulating his father's valuation, he eloquently honors the body of Hotspur with his own favor but also eulogizes the undead Falstaff with the admission that he “could have better spar'd a better man” (5.4.104), and—almost but not quite inexplicably—accepts Falstaff's desecration of Hotspur's corpse and with it the code of valor that represents honor as a fungible commodity and covers over as ethos the political necessity for Hal to kill and Hotspur to die. He plucks down Percy and assumes his honors, as he promised his father he would, but only for a while. At the start of 2 Henry IV, it is, comically, Falstaff who strides the field as Percy's nemesis—a lie Hal claims he is glad to “gild,” if it will do the fat knight good. These final, ambivalent encounters of 1 Henry IV recall on the field of history the defining moment in the tavern when Hal seems honestly on the cusp of a decision about whether to protect Falstaff or turn him over to the watch, until Falstaff abruptly drops flattery and answers the charge of unknightly cowardice by offering to “become a cart” as well as any man. In the earlier scene, Hal seems to me to be repelled by Falstaff's presumed cowardice, then to be won back by his clever audacity, but also by his assumed willingness to face the sheriff bravely and “as soon be strangled with a halter as another” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.496-99). In the scenes at Shrewsbury, the audacity is confirmed, but so too is the cowardice. Falstaff's corrupt treatment of his conscripted troopers is dark enough to begin to alienate the audience and dramatically prepare us for the Prince's promised rejection of him. Even if the queasy humor of Falstaff leading his “ragamuffins where they are pepper'd” (5.3.36) is discounted as a modern sensibility imposed on an early modern text, the stabbing of Hotspur's corpse is, to say the least, un-endearing, especially so soon after Hal's eulogy establishes the ethos of princely combat. In an odd way, our complicity with Hal in accepting Falstaff's bad behavior at Shrewsbury presages the chill we may later feel when Henry V orders the killing of the prisoners in Henry V, 4.6. The structure of the play seems to prepare everything for Hal to become Henry, but instead Falstaff appears with Hotspur's body, and the newly minted Henry reverts to Hal, setting the stage for Part 2 to repeat the entire pattern of delinquency, military action, and redemption in the fullness of time. It may be tempting to attribute these anomalies to possible exigencies of composition in which the two parts may, at some point, have had more or less independent lives. But such exigencies are irrelevant to the textual unconscious of the text, as we have it.

When we read the Henriad, we confront these various and momentary versions of Hal as a series of dismayingly concordant discordances. We may inscribe his textual self alternatively in a bildungsroman through which Hal transforms himself into Henry V or in a dynastic epic in which he always already figures the fulfillment of a revealed destiny. Mediating or failing to mediate these contradictions is—for a while—how we spend our time, but we will never know Harry all, because no matter what narrative paradigm we use to interpret him there will always be something left over, a superfluity of overlapping signifiers that cannot be resolved into a single plot. It is in this crease or gap in the symbolic that one may sense the presence of the Real, from which derives the tenuous feeling that he—and, therefore, we—are persons. “The Real” is Lacan's designation for that which resists symbolic representation, the unarticulated remainder that is foreclosed from speech. In Shakespearean language, we might say that “the Real” designates something that cannot denote us truly because it passes show. Manifest only as a discontinuity within symbolic representation, the effect of “the Real” is always felt in retrospection, always belated: sensed only in the ripples left on the surface of representation as it disappears.

I think we find something close to the effect of the Real described, again in Shakespearean language, by Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing
A local habitation and a name.

(5.1.12-17)

The progression Theseus posits from “things unknown” to imaginary bodies and the symbolic shapes issuing from the “poet's pen” works backwards to explain away the disconcerting evidence of the Dream. Theseus begins with the fairy “bears” of the youths' narrations and turns them into imaginary bushes and to “aery nothing.” Not wanting to reveal himself, he refuses to acknowledge the cause (in the Real) of the events the youths suffered: “Such tricks hath strong imagination, / That if it would but apprehend some joy, / it comprehends some bringer of that joy” (18-20) and so refuses to acknowledge that he is as they are—subject to the wills of the wisp. But, in the very moment that the cause eludes representation and disappears, Hippolyta insists that something remains: something “of great constancy” that is somehow both in and absent from “the story of the night told over, / and all their minds transfigurd so together” (23-27). This something disappears, yet persists, rather like the hypermetric foot elided, yet marked, by the silent intervocalic Vs of “heaven” in Theseus' chiasmus of the poet's rolling eye.

How, then, do we acknowledge Harry and show ourselves? Is Cavell's formulation about Lear pertinent only to tragedy, or must we know our helplessness before Harry's “acting and suffering” by acknowledging “totally” its “fact and the true cause”? It is in response to these questions that I am tempted to inch a step or two closer than Berger to those Lacanian conundrums: “The unconscious is structured like a language” and “transference is the enactment of the reality of the unconscious.”⁶

The work of time spent in and on the tension between the competing and contradictory inscriptions of Hal may be illustrated by returning to Hal's first soliloquy to consider the specific linguistic mediations through which Henry V plays over his younger self. Following Berger's point about how the distribution and redistribution of bits of language among different characters establish complicities within the text, I want to look at the complicity of the rhetoric and language of Hal's soliloquy in the report Vernon makes of him at Shrewsbury, when Hotspur asks, “how fares the madcap Prince of Wales?”

The audience's sense that Vernon reports precisely the sunrise promised in the first act soliloquy is quickly validated by Hotspur's dry response: “No more, no more! worse than the sun in March, / This praise doth nourish agues” (4.1.111-12). Yet one could also imagine alternative scenarios in which we are victims of a deception, in which the Hal of Act 4 is simply a different person who happens to have the same name as the character who spoke the soliloquy in the first act. From within the play, the King almost invites us to suspect as much when he remarks on the tenuous relations of name and person:

O that it could be provd
That some night-tripping fairy had exchangd
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And called mine Percy, his Plantagenet!
Then would I have his Harry and he mine.

(1.1.86-90)

His Harry, my Harry—Harry of Monmouth, Harry Bolingbroke, Harry Percy—we are all Harry in this play. Just as the possibility of constructing a story supports our experience of self-identity over time, so the experience of difference within identity, in ourselves and others, supports our ability to read a story. The construction of identity within each of these registers may be more or less successful. Thus, in the case of 1 Henry IV, the intervening episodes prepare us for Hal's success at Shrewsbury; our relative comfort in assuming the continuity of his character is reflected in our interest in searching those intervening episodes for clues to its presumed unity. Retrospection restructures the events depicted as a plot with identifiable turning points, decisive choices, crucial traumas, and formative experiences that turn “madcap Prince” into “Feathered mercury … As if an Angel droppd down from the clouds.” On the contrary, we probably are much less comfortable with, say, the sudden reformation of Oliver in As You Like It or, even more tenuously, of Alonzo, Sebastian, and Antonio in The Tempest, preferring, in these cases, perhaps to evade the issue of character continuity on the assumption that the author's interest lies elsewhere. Without pausing to cite further examples, I will trust the readers' experience to confirm that identities in the world (as opposed to literature) vary similarly in their ability to attain the “authenticity effect.” Recalling Freud's trenchant, clinical observation that hysterics suffer from memories they can't remember—that is, from an inability to situate themselves as the subjects of a coherent history—I will suggest that the linguistic complicities Harry Berger finds distributed among Shakespeare's characters collectively structure the symbolic of these plays—including the “ethical discourses” of sinner and victim Berger identifies—as a series of unspoken reciprocal recognitions, an intersubjective grammar like the one that selects “I” as our name when we are the subject of a verb, “me” when we are its object, and “you” when we are addressed by another. To say, then, that the “unconscious is structured like [comme] a language” is to say that the unconscious is structured as a language; it is the set of rules that allows us to recognize ourselves in the Other, as grammatically correct and incorrect in place or out of place—in the intersubjective structure of our communities of discourse. Most important, it allows us to bind moment to moment in a syntax of tenses that gives us—the sense of self, returned to us from others—duration over time, so that we can both change and remain the same.

Vernon's “gorgeous as the sun at midsummer,” delivered in the fourth act of 1 Henry IV, returns to Hotspur the sunrise Hal had promised in the first; the simile of Hal mounting his horse “As if an angel droppd down from the clouds” makes good on Hal's metaphor of the “base contagious clouds.” When the Prince's “glitt'ring o'er my fault” returns as Vernon's “Glittering in golden coats like images,” however, things become more complicated and more interesting, because neither “fault” nor “images” provides a sufficiently concrete comparison. Hal's metaphor is clarified by the simile in which it is embedded: his reformed behavior will shine out from the sullen ground of his delinquency as bright metal shines out of a matte background. Vernon's “images” reminds us that both speeches describe—or, more accurately, construct—appearances. Clouds, mists, vapors, images-the language builds through the two widely separated speeches toward Vernon's final verb to witch and, by implication, to be bewitched, by the weird sister or night-tripping fairy who says in the Other, which, like his father, is both in him and out, “Prince of Wales thou art [though your father never was] and King Henry thou shall be [though your father is].”

A mask is never “just a mask” since it determines the actual place we occupy in the intersubjective symbolic network; what is effectively false and null is our “inner distance” from the mask we wear (the “social role” we play) our “true self” hidden beneath it. The path to an authentic subjective position runs therefore “from the outside inward”: first, we pretend to be something, we just act as if we are that, till, step by step we actually become it. … The performative dimension at work here consists of the symbolic efficiency of the “mask”: wearing a mask actually makes us what we feign to be. In other words, the conclusion to be drawn from this dialectic is the exact opposite of the common wisdom by which every human act (achievement, deed) is ultimately just an act (posture, pretense): the only authenticity at our disposal is that of impersonation, of “taking our act (posture) serious.”⁷

This passage comes from a book that aims to explicate Lacan. I quote it here because I think it also explicates Lacan's collaborator and colleague, Shakespeare.

Transference has a number of related meanings in psychoanalysis, but they all refer to adjustments in the grammar of the language that is the unconscious. Shakespeare's English is profoundly different from the English that King Alfred spoke and significantly different from that of the historical Hal. These changes were not willed. The Norman conquerors did not impose their language on the Anglo-Saxons because they wanted to create the language of Chaucer. The great vowel shift did not occur because someone thought it would be a good idea. Where are the inflectional declensions of yesteryear? Similarly, the language that is the unconscious evolves in response to adventitious, exigent, and contingent experiences—and—in not always obvious ways—to the political environment, the communal symbolic in which we must seek ourselves. Transference is the way we think through what we cannot think about, by attaching the emotional import of one set of relations to another set of relations and subtly supplementing their grammar with the impertinencies of rhetoric. When we read Shakespeare, we redistribute his language not only within the community of the plays, but between them and our own; we allow each to “corrupt” the other, and, in this way, we and Harry meet and are changed by having met. This is, I think, why Harry finds that “The only trouble with Harry that really troubles me is Harry's trouble with Harry” (Berger, 250).

So what is the trouble with Harry? His readings are often inimitable, performances, star turns, which limit their theoretical exemplarity and work against his serious ambitions—a conflict perhaps transferred to the tension he feels between text and performance. The reason Harry's readings are inimitable, though, is not just that most of us are not as smart as Harry, or, also and more generally, that we are simply not Harry. It is, I submit, Harry's courage in the transference—his willingness, as it were, to be seen by Shakespeare and to let us see Shakespeare seeing Harry—that generates those inimitable readings, that allows him to meld his textuality to a text, re-perform its words and speak from within the Shakespearean symbolic, that makes him so perspicacious and leaves so much working through for the rest of us. Not really wanting to get personal now, I cannot, however, resist adding that the phrase “the trouble with Harry” receives its special resonance from the Hitchcock movie of the same name. In the movie, the trouble with Harry is that Harry is dead but, through a series of screwball circumstances, won't stay buried; so the allusion may point toward Harry's “darker purpose.” I will leave aside the relationship of repetition and the death instinct here that might playfully play over his ongoing project of recombining earlier essays into books that make the individual essays new again, and stick more cautiously to Hal and the shadow of death that falls across “I know you all.” Banish plump Jack and banish all the world—and that's the trouble with Harry.”

Notes

1. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 86 (as cited in Berger, Making Trifles of Terrors, 214).

2. Berger includes remarks on this speech in a recent essay that further elaborates the themes developed in Making Trifles. See “The Prince's Dog: Falstaff and the Perils of Speech-Prefixity,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998): 40-73.

3. Such a collaboration was most fully explored by Joel Fineman. See especially, “The Sound of O in Othello: The Real of the Tragedy of Desire,” in The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare's Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 143-64.

4. See Harry Berger, Jr., Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

5. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?: Modern Philosophical Essays in Morality, Religion, Drama and Criticism (New York: Scribners, 1969), 37-39 and-Berger, 68.

6. See Lacan, The Four-Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 20-23, 149-60.

7. Slavoj Zilek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London: Routledge, 1992), 34.

This essay materially benefited from the comments of my colleague, Theodore B. Leinwand, whose assistance is gratefully acknowledged.