SOURCE: Pandit, Lalita. “Language in the Textual Unconscious: Shakespeare, Ovid, and Saxo Grammaticus.” In Criticism and Lacan: Essays and Dialogue on Language, Structure, and the Unconscious, edited by Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit, pp. 248-67. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Pandit explores how Shakespeare's characterization of Hamlet builds upon his memory of various sources, including Saxo's, as well as upon his audience's familiarity with the playwright's life and other works.]

It is, however, precisely with that private mythology that any examination of the stranger in Shakespeare must begin, though obviously the communal mythology which he inherited from his sources, along with plot structures and casts of characters, must also be taken into account. Especially important is the body of myth implicit in those fairy tales, fabliaux, and novelle to which he turned constantly in search of story material and most especially, the Metamorphoses, which possessed his imagination from the time of his school days, making him in the profoundest sense, as his contemporaries already surmised, another Ovid, Ovid reborn an Englishman.

—Leslie A. Fiedler The Stranger in Shakespeare

In the following pages, I should like to focus on the theme of authorial subjectivity in the context of intersubjective mirroring in the Shakespearean text. I take authorial subjectivity to represent a reflexive double of the personality, not its mere expression. The first part of the essay then concentrates on the intersubjectivity of a reader's response to the contextually accumulated aesthetic value and emotive power of the single line utterance in Shakespeare. I speak of aesthetic pleasure primarily in terms of the emotional identification of the reader with the author, and of both with the character(s). The other related subject of inquiry addressed in this essay is a reader's analytic, not merely responsive recognition of the ‘other’ consciousness, of the author and of the character, of the mirroring. It is important to remember that it is the consciousness of the author as real person, reflexively structured in the speech of the authorial ‘subject’, to which we can refer the psychoanalytic ‘meaning’ we wish to examine. The characters are only intended speakers, like figures in a dream. They speak only what the dreamer wishes to hear, or whatever is consistent with the narrative paradigm(s) of the, in this case Shakespearean, dream-texts. This ‘meaning’ is not to be formulated as a conclusive hypothesis, then, but is to be seen as the endless, subjective and intersubjective suggestiveness of Shakespeare's speech, of his “full word.”

A brief example from Hamlet should elucidate the last point. At the end of the infamously vituperative, “Get thee to a nunn'ry” speech Hamlet tells Ophelia, “I say we will have no more marriage” (Hamlet 3.2.148).¹ This line assumes larger personal or subjective significance, if we associate it with the underlying fantasy of the annulment of marriage through the temporary disappearance, or absolute exclusion, even foreclosure of the wife/mother, especially as presented in the romances. In both Pericles and The Winter's Tale, the wife is deliberately concealed; she spends the interval between her ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’ in a cloistered setting. This duration of the supposed death covers exactly the years from the birth of a daughter to her reaching puberty. At the same time it coincides with the mother's/wife's aging, her passing from full reproductivity to menopause. In The Tempest, the wife-mother is totally absent, as if she never existed and as if Miranda is of no woman born. In Cymbeline, Imogen is not all wife, she is not a mother yet, and she is still very much a daughter battling with her father. Like her counterparts in the early Comedies she can wander around in male clothing and meet with her long-lost brothers. Like Thaisa and Hermione she is not subjected to a state of suspension and arrest. But, again, she is not fully wife and also not a mother. Shakespeare's biographers tell us about his hasty marriage, one of the very few verified facts of the Bard's life. It seems logical to assume that he felt pressured into marrying before he was ready because of the unplanned pregnancy (if one could impose a pattern of planned reproductivity on the Elizabethans), the conception of Susanna. To conclude that one can hear in Hamlet's pithy imperative the dramatist's own left-over or ‘surplus’ anguish and disgust may not be out of place. But I am not sure that such a reduction can lead us anywhere. Rather than seeking such reductions, I hope only to bring into focus the indeterminate moments in an interpretive act, before the formulation of a conclusive closure, when the reader becomes aware of the reverberative nature of such lines, phrases, and narrative sequences.

Perhaps one doesn't need to restate that the ghost in Hamlet is unlike the conventional ghost on the Elizabethan stage. Yet to hear him say, “O! Hamlet, what a falling off was there / From me,” takes the reader by surprise (Hamlet 1.5.47-48). It makes the conversation between the ghost and the prince sound like a real conversation between a father and a son; an aged, wronged father and a loving son; something out of a dream. And Shakespeare did, we are told, play the ghost. The all too human ghost-speech starts out with an innovative sententiousness which I should like to address first: “Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast / With witchcraft of his wits, with traitorous gifts—/ O wicked wit and gifts that have the power / So to seduce!” (Hamlet 1.5.42-45).

In his very valuable work on Shakespeare's use of sententiae Charles D. Smith indicates parallels of these lines with the common proverb: “There is witchcraft in fair words.”² The Latin version of this proverb in Publius Syrus is “Habet suum venenum blanda oratio” (Flattering speech has its own poison). Both Smith and T. W. Baldwin maintain that Shakespeare, like any other Elizabethan schoolboy, would have learned and committed to memory the entire Sententiae Pueriles: the book of boys' commonplaces.³ After further examination, one can see the image of poison emerging out of these sententiae. The association of poison with flattering speech remains submerged in Shakespeare's own rendering of the proverb. But it resurfaces in the ghost's description of the special poison: “juice of cursed hebona” (Hamlet 1.5.62). It was poured into King Hamlet's ears by Claudius, whose flattering speech (as the ghost claims) seduced the queen. At the end, she actually drinks from the “poisoned cup.” Hamlet calls Claudius “Thou incestious, murd'rous, damned / Dane,” before he makes him “drink off the potion,” having hurt him first with the “envenomed” point of the weapon, the point with venenum (Hamlet 5.2.324-26). Hamlet dies of the same poison. So does Laertes.

One can thus see how the image emerges out of the self-pitying vituperation of the ghost in lines acted by the author. It is a speech meant only for the son, and it falls into his ears like poison. Horatio had feared that the ghost might lead Hamlet to “the dreadful summit of the cliff / That beetles o'er his base into the sea” (Hamlet 1.4.70-71). The image suggests falling into water. Instead of being drowned by water (as Ophelia is, falling off from the tree on which she sat, along with the branch that broke, into her “muddy death”), they are all destroyed by the poison. Horatio associates with the ghost the sorts of things one commonly does associate with ghosts, or, the sorts of things Elizabethans commonly did. The encompassing speech of the author—a consummate rhetorician—associates with the ghost the multiple significations of poison and being poisoned through the ear by rhetoric. He hears the dialogue between the father and the son, but as if in a dream. Such transformations of words, thoughts, and phrases, into objects and stories occur in dreams.

My next example of the suggestive, intersubjective power of the single line in Shakespeare is Lady Macbeth's often remembered: “Had he not resembled / My father as he slept I had done it” (Macbeth 2.2.12-13). The reference to associational memory, the poignant confession of a love that contradicts all her actions—and her hyperbolic boast about being able to pluck her nipples from the boneless gums of the babe that milks her (“smiling in her face”)—all this and the incipience of her ultimate falling off from reason, make this an utterance of immense aesthetic and emotive value. This simultaneous admission and denial of maternal love and filial piety strikes one as the true speech of the unconscious. In her staunch pursuit of duty, ambition, and greatness, she adopts a rhetoric that negates, or possibly forecloses maternal love and tenderness. As she bends over the sleeping face of the trusting, aged king, for one moment, the rhetoric fails and her consciousness dissolves into an awareness of the timeless sleep of the womb where the father is also the child. Surely, one can say Shakespeare knew what daughter-love is. But whose unconscious, whose subjectivity, and whose awareness is this?

In this intersubjective mirroring one can trace a double inscription of subjectivity. First of the intended ‘subject’ (Lady Macbeth): the wife humanized as daughter in the world of Shakespeare's imagining. Shakespeare endows his character with an autonomous unconscious. Therefore, what Lady Macbeth says has internal significance. Transferentially, the incorporation of the authorial intent as well as of authorial ‘subjectivity’ is marked in the verbal structure of the line. I should perhaps not exclude the reader, who also experiences what daughter-love is, what pieties the sleeping, vulnerable face of an aged father can give rise to. Through an interpretive transference in this way, the reader, by recognizing (even without being able to define it) the immense aesthetic and emotive value of the line completes the hermeneutic circle. It is this circularity of emotional identification that leads to aesthetic pleasure. But the question of identification leads us back to the author, since Lady Macbeth is only a phantasm. The essential referentiality of the text inevitably points to the author to whom the reader, every reader, is the ghostlike auditor; the real or imagined addressee in every act of speech.

In the context of this node of emotional identification(s) and transferences leading to aesthetic pleasure, a reference to Indian aesthetical theory seems relevant. Though most contemporary Indian film and literature follow Western aesthetic principles, all of classical literature, dance, and music is based on the principles of Rasa theory. The word rasa stands for aesthetic pleasure. Each work of art according to this theory is supposed to be structured by a dominant sentiment like laughter, wrath, pathos, romantic love, and so forth. These sentiments arouse in the audience related emotional states. The catharsis of the endings and/or other climactic moments in a text, a raga or a dance sequence take the particular sentiment and the corresponding emotional state to a final stage, at which point the interpretive community—the text, author, and audience—are brought together in experiencing the rasa. Aesthetic pleasure is thus necessarily associated with the particular sentiment and the corresponding emotional state(s). One might regard Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's failed comedy, as structured around the dominant sentiment of romantic love, the reinforcing sentiments being wrath, valor, and pathos. Certainly the tragic ending, in consonance with Romeo's dream and the sensuality of Juliet (even in her death), marks a celebration of romantic love, an unconsumed, immaculate passion, the course of which cannot run parallel with physical time. A suggestion of its perpetuation in time through marriage would have been out of place.

The possibilities of applying this theory to works that were written in a different tradition remain limited. As explicated in the major dramaturgical work of Bharata-Muni, the Natyashastra, the basic principles of the theory appear to be very formulaic. Yet the exclusive emphasis on the effect of a work of art validates response, transactive interpretations and the reflexivity of ‘author function.’ However, when an interpretive community brings into play diverse forms of orientations and identities, the experiencing of rasa is bound to become more idiosyncratic than the theory, in its most orthodox forms, presupposes. But in any event, the basic principles of mirroring and identification—as formulated by Lacan or by Bharata-Muni—are significant to any response theory of aesthetic pleasure.

My final example of the multiple significations of the single sentence utterance in Shakespeare takes us into the world of King Lear. In act 1, scene 5, after his confrontation with Goneril, Lear is left alone with his Fool. He is waiting, perhaps without hope, to find out if the other daughter will be kind. Before the onset of the great rage, in this short scene Lear is profoundly quiet and absentminded. In the backdrop of the Fool's seemingly nonsensical chatter, he says, as if to himself: “I did her wrong.” Most readers of Shakespeare would agree that this muted confession, protected from exposure by the prattling, nonintrusive presence of the Fool, marks one of the saddest and most beautiful moments in Shakespeare. I certainly cannot determine what ‘sentiment’ or the corresponding ‘emotional state’ it arouses. But why is it so moving? Is it just the Aristotelian ‘Pity’ or something more personal and particular. The element of surprise that this utterance conveys suggests Shakespeare's ability to grasp and communicate the unpredictability of the situation, of the possibilities of individual human utterance: his ability to hear the authentic speech, the full speech, of ghosts. That is why these utterances slip out of the context even though their suggestive power is contextually built. Such utterances also give the proverbial “larger than life” dimension to Shakespeare's characters. The larger than life quality is in fact the inscription of unpredictability in all its nuances.

Cordelia, who is evidently expected to be the perfect little daughter, refuses to participate in the rhetorical avowal of love. She refuses to fulfill the demand of the King-Father for such rhetoric at the formal, ritualistic moment of the division of a kingdom and the passing on of royal authority. In refusing to fulfill this demand she insults the King in front of all assembled. In a sense she betrays him, lets him down, does him wrong. What is understood by the other characters as the king's wrong judgment is only his stubbornness, a trait that Cordelia shares with him. She interprets Lear's demand for a hyperbolic expression of filial love as a demand for an avowal of real love. Goneril and Regan don't. Lear takes the power of his authority too far. All this makes the father and daughter “more sinned against than sinning.” In act 4, scene 7, when she wakes him out of the stupor, after “the great rage is killed in him,” Lear says, “You do me wrong to take me out o' th' grave” (King Lear 4.7.44). Upon fully waking up he tells her, “your sisters / Have, (as I do remember) done me wrong: / You have some cause, they have not” (King Lear 4.7.72-74).

The emotional synchronicity of: [I did her wrong] [you do me wrong] [they did me wrong], before the onset and after the quieting of the “great rage” inscribes in the discourse of the play the mark of Lear's ‘subjectivity’. The ear and gaze of the Other are for Lear those of the author. The phantasmatic, “larger than life” King-Father confesses, as if to Shakespeare: “I did her wrong,” “they have done me wrong,” “you do me wrong,” the second person pronoun may very well refer to him. He takes this character out of the ‘grave’ of non-being and makes him live through all these painful emotions. An actor truly has to experience all the pain. “You do me wrong to take me out of the grave,” is also a line that in moments of extreme suffering a human subject would address to the progenitor who binds one to life in taking one out of the stupor of non-being. Hamlet also bemoans ever having been born (in time).

Cordelia is in Lear's fantasy a daughter-mother. He says to Kent, “I lov'd her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery” (King Lear 1.1.123-24). Even this is said in reference to his rage, “Come not between the dragon and his wrath” (122). Is it an enactment through deferred action of the rage of the infant who may have fantasized being abandoned? The process and necessitation of deferred action no doubt transform it. Having left him to the care of the ‘sisters’ who are not ‘mothers’, Cordelia, as if in a dream, comes to wake him up from the non-being of a deathlike sleep: “The innocent sleep, / Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care” (Macbeth 2.2.34-35).

The single line utterances I've chosen here are, it is perhaps evident, profoundly confessional. They are all associated with the father in some way. Unlike commonplaces and sententiae they do not contain any usable universal or folk wisdom to account for their memorability. Their force is unlike the rhetorical force of lines like “thou art a soul in bliss but I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire,” which in fact follows “You do me wrong to take me out of the grave.” These utterances can in some sense be taken as instances of the merging of personal speech (associated with the author) and the impersonal speech (associated with language as an autonomous system). Jonathan Culler, in his Structuralist Poetics refers to Lear's “Pray undo this button,” and Milly Theale's “I can never be better than this,” the only line spoken by her as she faces the Bronzino portrait at a moment that marks the “pink dawn of an apotheosis,” in Henry James' own description of the moment. Culler uses these as examples of utterances that defy analysis and “mark places where the text escapes in several directions at once.”⁴ This “spilling over,” characterized by Barthes as the pleasure of the text, is explained by him as a “cohabitation of languages which work side by side.”⁵ Culler says further, “To define such moments, to speak of their force would be to identify the codes that encounter resistance there.”⁶

For readers and interpreters who are operating inside the discourse of critical theory, to define the emotive power of the Shakespearean line may involve identifying the code that encounters resistance. The identifiable code may very well be the theory of response. Instead of positing the cause of pleasure in the text, the response theory would allow us to refer to the interpersonal, intersubjective identification(s): of author, reader and the text. Each one of these partakes in the dynamic of being the other's Other. The reader and the author are each other's Other because, as Lacan emphasized, a reciprocal relationship through language is not only possible, but necessary. The phantasmatic other—Lear, Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, with whom a reciprocal relationship is not possible, and thus with whom a real identification is also not possible—that phantasmatic other nevertheless, causes ‘desire’, and gives pleasure. Of course, the status of the author in relation to the character, of the intending consciousness in relation to the intended consciousness is more complicated. The characters (Lear, Hamlet, Lady Macbeth) in effect speak to the author, the author who becomes the auditor of their speech. Similarly the actor who assumes the subjectivity of the character speaks to and is held in the gaze of the audience. The characters thus remain suspended in a one-dimensional Otherness, where they can be heard, but not spoken to, where reciprocity is inevitably barred.

The recurring of the image of the “egg-shell” in Hamlet and King Lear allows us to speculate on another instance of ‘personal speech’ in the Shakespearean discourse. In both plays the image stands for territorial occupation or possession of land (the crown held as its symbol). More specifically, it refers to a recently seized, to be seized, or abandoned territory, land, crown, and/or royal authority. Reflecting on Fortinbras's energy and enthusiasm in comparison to his own inactivity, Hamlet refers to him as a “delicate and tender prince”

Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd,
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell

(Hamlet 4.4.48-53)

Hamlet is speaking of Fortinbras's Polish invasion, in which, according to the Captain, they stand to “gain a little patch of ground / that hath in it no profit but the name” (Hamlet 4.4.18-19). Thus Fortinbras dares everything “even for an egg-shell” while Hamlet dares nothing to retrieve his inheritance. Fortinbras obviously symbolizes the virtue of honor and heroism; yet the image of the egg-shell negates the desirability of these, even though Hamlet establishes this desirability by adopting the rhetoric of self-reproach. Might it not be, then, that in this speech we have the key to Shakespeare's tragic hero's dilemma, or of Shakespeare himself: the actor-author, who pursued both wealth and name, but only through an activity that he most desired. The creative activity is a positive, regenerative Karma or cumulative action as opposed to the repetitive-compulsive Karma that entraps his Hamlet.

The image develops differently in Lear. In one of his wise-fool moments, the Fool says to Lear, “Nuncle, give me an egg, and I'll give thee two crowns.” Lear's response is: “Which two crowns shall they be.” Upon which the Fool produces one of his reproachful, fool-like vituperations: “Why, after I've cut up the egg i' the middle and eat up the meat, the two crowns of the egg” (King Lear 1.4.155-59). The Fool obviously takes the word to refer to egg-shells, the bald crown of Lear, and the golden crown that he recently renounced; the last of these renders them both homeless. While Hamlet has been dispossessed, Lear has dispossessed himself. The context in both cases is a reproachful self-vituperation. The Fool likens Lear's division of the “opulent lands” to cutting up the egg in the middle and eating up all the meat. At another place in the play a servant talks of finding egg whites to heal Gloucester's blinded, wounded, eye-sockets.

Another consonance of such narrative, lyrical moments in Shakespeare's world is evident in the flower-offering sequences in The Winter's Tale and Hamlet. A close reading of these would benefit from being prefaced by a line from the Tale that is evidently self-referential. Act 3, scene 3, of the play enacts the abandoning of the infant Perdita by Antigonus on the Bohemian sea coast: “Either for life or death.” The scene also incorporates a clear but indirect reference to theatrical illusion. There is storm and a shipwreck. Antigonus is eaten by a hungry bear. The Clown, even as he is witnessing these, tells the shepherd of the two sights of destruction “by sea and by land.” To the shepherd these seem almost impossible, as the fantastical, and the marvellous seems to an audience. Reassuring the shepherd of the actuality of these events, the Clown refers to the visible, palpable content of these: “I saw these sights. The men are not yet cold under water, nor the bear half dined on the gentleman. He's at it now” (The Winter's Tale 3.3.105-6). All this has happened here and now. However, the blessed sight of the infant Perdita huddled along with her bundle of gold is reserved only for the Shepherd. “Thou met'st with things dying, I with things new-born,” he says (The Winter's Tale 3.3.113-14). Through indirection this pronouncement can be attributed to Shakespeare the playwright, who has left behind the sights of things dying (his great tragedies, histories) and, is now turning to things new-born, in his Late Romances.

Many critics of Shakespeare would agree that his turning to the tragicomic mode of the Romance in the last phase allowed him to find life-affirmative, regenerative culminations to the very same narrative fantasies that were present in his tragic drama. Even some of the conflicting themes of his comedies reach new resolutions in the romance form. This form allowed fourteen or sixteen long years of narrative temporality: time to wait, time to heal, time to forgive, time for death and rebirth, for recognition and so forth. The generic conventions of the tragic form, the precipitative peripeteia does not allow such a duration. Such precipitative temporality of the tragic form duplicates the tragic vision of life. In tragedy, time runs out, as for instance it does for Macbeth and Hamlet. In tragedy, the human agent reaches the end of time, the point in time that allows no return and no continuity. This point is wishfully extended in the Romances. Hamlet's last vote for Fortinbras, with whom he had identified, expresses a desire for continuity. In the romances, the authorial self that, like Hamlet, had met with things dying and wished for new life, is now, in more than one sense, meeting with things new-born: Marina, Perdita, Miranda. It is also appropriate that these lines should occur in the The Winter's Tale. It is the play that struggles the most with the ghosts of the tragic theme and form.

Consistent with the contemporary belief in natural immortality, a biological and psychological continuity sought through one's progeny (something Shakespeare advocates in the Sonnets), the author in the romances seeks compensation for the lost lives of the parents through the celebration of the sexuality and love of the children. Note that at the moment of her being recalled to life, Hermione's wrinkles are the most noticeable. Prospero refers to his return to Milan, where, he says “Every third thought shall be my grave” (The Tempest 5.1.312). Pericles is a very tired, old man at the end, and is revived only by the energetic Marina. In contrast, not-old Macbeth has no children and kills off all of Macduff's. The possibilities of Hamlet and Ophelia's marriage are foreclosed by the very revelation of the sins of the fathers at the outset. A comparative reading of the flower speeches of Ophelia and Perdita can allow us to see that Shakespeare is imaginatively seeking potent and plausible antidotes to tragedy. These are perhaps the only instances of formalized flower (offering) speeches in Shakespeare's drama. Though the settings are very different, the regenerative references to love, death, and feminine sexuality are common to both.

In the ghost-haunted, evil-infested world of the Danish court, Ophelia's sensuality can find release only in madness. Perdita, on the other hand, expresses her sensuality freely and naturally in the pastoral world of Bohemia. Even though it is not entirely free from evil, imaginatively, Bohemia represents an antidote to Denmark. Within the imaginative pattern of the narrative fantasy, Perdita is associated only with her foster father at the flower offering festival. Appropriately, he is the one who, at her otherwise negated nativity (in the Sicilian court), had triumphantly pronounced his meeting with “things new-born.” In the absence of his wife, Perdita is named the queen of the festival. The occasion for Ophelia's flower offering on the other hand, is a frustrated, forbidden mourning.

The doubling and mirroring in these two sequences from Hamlet and the The Winter's Tale is reinforced by the reference to the Proserpina myth. The association of Hermione's death and resurrection with Proserpina's loss and partial resurrection have been noticed by critics. Its connections with Hamlet may seem less evident, yet in the opulent flower imagery and drowning associated with Ophelia's death, the latent reference to the myth comes into a brief but sharp focus. Perdita directly refers to the goddess's dropping of flowers, as she is borne off by the God of the underworld. The image of Proserpina, picking flowers, “Violets blew, or Lilies white as Lime,” according to Ovid's account, blends with Perdita's joyous and innocent flower celebrations, as well as with Ophelia's funereal, suicidal, sensual and bawdy dalliance with them. Proserpina represents for both an ideal that they somehow fall short of. Both Perdita and Ophelia speak of the lack of violets and lilies. Ophelia says, “I'd give you some violets but they all withered when my father died,” and Perdita, the knowledgeable gardener, includes violets and lilies in her list of Spring flowers that are out of season. The connection with violets in Ophelia's case is more poignant. When in the graveyard scene, the “doctor” remarks that instead of flowers, “shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her” (Hamlet 5.5.218), Laertes says: “Lay her i' th' earth, / And from her fair and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring” (Hamlet 5.5.225-27).

This identification seems more significant when we notice that Proserpina's flower-gathering moment in Ovid represents a narcissistic totality: “And while of Maidenly desire she fillde hir Maund and Lap, / Endeavoring to outgather hir companions there.”⁷ This suggestion of narcissistic wholeness, represented by the flowers of her “maidenly desire,” with which she fills her lap makes the flower gathering Proserpina an ideal self-image for both Perdita and Ophelia. This association of images goes beyond the author's conscious use of the myth. For example, Ophelia's singing (her “melodious lay”) associates with the mournful dirges of Proserpina's companions who were with her when in a single instant of time she is held in the gaze, loved, possessed, and taken away (“By hap / Dis spide her: loved her: caught her up: and all at once well neere: / So hastie, hot and swift a thing is Love, as may appeare”).⁸ At this moment in the Ovidian myth, the narcissistic totality is lost in Proserpina's being held simply as an object of the Other's erotic gaze. Ophelia represents both the violated goddess and the mourning companions. The manifest object of loss in Ophelia's lament is the dead father, while the latent object of loss is her own sexuality, which, at the beginning of the play is simultaneously subjected to Hamlet's rejection and her father's and brother's dicta of taboo—their sententious, paranoic warnings. Her sexuality, in being seen in these demented mirrors, is verbally violated. The consuming passion of Proserpina's lover violates in a symmetrically opposite way.

Ophelia's sexuality is in this way denied and negated by the vituperative discourse of Hamlet, and the overall rhetoric of the play Hamlet: the underworld of a dense male fantasy. The dramatic structure of the Romance on the other hand works towards a regenerative ending through an affirmation of the pubescent sexuality of Perdita. Ophelia unconsciously associates the usurpation in terms of the rape of Proserpina, mourned by her mother and her singing companions. The father's death, as I have suggested, gives her a convenient, near-at-hand object of lament. It is easy to understand why she would only focus on the themes of usurpation, loss, and mourning in the myth. In this context, it is of specific relevance that in her “madness,” decked in flowers, she seeks Hamlet's mother: “The beauteous Majesty of Denmark.” To speak of Ophelia thus is to speak of the intersubjective mirroring incorporated in Shakespeare's text. In Ophelia's flower-language, her own brand of mad-speech, we can mark how Shakespeare hears the speech (of the unconscious) of the ‘other’ (‘petit a’, object of desire), whom he can hold in his reflective gaze, but in whose gaze he cannot be held. Here, I am particularly refering to the ‘written’ Ophelia, not the theatrical enactment of her. Though, sadly, in Shakespeare's time even her character would have been played by a male actor. Nevertheless, through the intersubjective mirroring of interpretation, the author, whose supreme fiction(s) reflect a troubled ambivalence towards feminine sexuality, also becomes an object of gaze. His “greatness,” reflected here in his ability to give Ophelia an autonomous unconscious (reflected in her flowery or “muddy death” and her mad-speech) is held in the interpretative gaze as an adored object, whatever one might (as a female subject) feel about his troubled ambivalence.

Shakespeare's own conscious use of the myth is evident in the watery death of Ophelia. The association here is not with the goddess, but Cyane, one of the Sicilian nymphs who laments the rape of Proserpina and blocks Pluto's way to the underworld. She is metaphorically “wounded in the heart” by Pluto, because it is through the bottom of the pool, named after her that his chariot is received back into the underworld. After the affront, she silently nurses the wound in her heart that none could heal, and, is washed away in weeping, till her body melts limb by limb and is dissolved into water:

To water, shoulder, backe, brest, side: and finally in stead
Of lively bloud, within hir veynes corrupted there was spred
Thinne water: so that nothing now remains whereupon
Ye might take hold, to water all consumed was anon.(9)

The queen describes Ophelia as having fallen into the “weeping brook”: “Her clothes spread wide / and mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,” till “heavy with their drink / Pulled the poor wretch” from her “melodious lay” to her “muddy death” (Hamlet 5.1.175-83). Within the complicated emotional logic that is uncovered here, it makes perfect sense that Ophelia's narcissistic self-love should lead to an identification with the Proserpina figure, while Shakespeare sees her (as do the other characters) only as the victim. The watery dissolution, the unhealing wound of the heart link her image with the violated nymph.

Even though the occasion for the flower offerings in Hamlet is in direct contrast with the celebration in the Tale, Florizel also brings up the associations with death. To Perdita's rhapsody referring to Spring flowers: “O, these I lack / To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend / To strew him over and over!” he responds, “What, like a corse?” (The Winter's Tale 4.4.127-30). Perdita's appropriate rejoinder is: “No, like a bank for Love to lie and play on; / Not like a corse; or if not to be buried / But quick and in mine arms” (The Winter's Tale 4.4.131-33). The rhetorical association of love and death is reminiscent of Juliet, another variation of the Proserpina figure in Shakespeare. In Ophelia's mad ravings the father's corpse remains verbally embedded with the flowers, at the same time it stays rotting wherever Hamlet claims to have dumped it. With the real flowers she decorates her own body, which is soon to become a corpse.

The two flowers that both Perdita and Ophelia mention in addition to violets, are “Rosemary” and “Rue.” Perdita, who is concerned with durability, includes these because their fragrance lasts forever. She also reminds her guests that these two flowers stand for “Grace and remembrance.” Ophelia also mentions this. But she incorporates the flowers more into the internal trauma of her sorrow and the general themes of the play. She says, presumably to Laertes, “There's rosemary, that is for remembrance; pray you, love remember” (Hamlet 4.5.175-76). These lines cannot but echo the ghost's “Remember me,” and thus, serve only to persuade revenge. For Ophelia, flowers as physical objects are only symptoms of whatever it is that is ailing Denmark, where her own sexuality is reduced to a symptom. Further, in offering “rue” to the queen, Ophelia suggests only the durability of repentance and sorrow: “There is rue for you, and here's some for me; we may call it the herb of grace a' Sundays” (Hamlet 4.5.181-83). Perdita offers Polixenes lavender, mints, savory marjoram, and “the marigold that goes to bed with the sun / And with him rises weeping,” the flowers of middle summer, meant to be given to men of middle age (The Winter's Tale 4.4.105-8). Her anthropomorphic attributions extend to “pale primroses / That die unmarried ere they can behold / Bright phoebus in his strength” (The Winter's Tale 4.4.122-24). The reference to Ophelia's dying unmarried is again obvious here.

The underlying working-through of the Proserpina myth in consonance with the doubling in Perdita's semi-divine figure, establishes Ophelia, symbolically, as a sort of lost fertility goddess. But unlike in the Ovidian myth, in the Shakespearean tragedy she is never to return. In contrast, the “lost” princess in the Romance is restored to her mother and to her fatherland; she has at the same time found a royal husband. The goddess in the Ovidian myth is likewise through the intervention of Jupiter restored both to her mother and her husband. The reference to changing seasons in the Tale, and the mythic associations of the changes with the goddess's contractual exit from the surface of the earth into the underworld, justifies, mythically, the title of the play. Shakespeare's search for an authentic comic ending merges a personal belief in natural immortality with the perennial immortality of nature, the cyclic disappearance and return of lilies, violets, and daffodils. The author's Ovidian double consciousness seems most richly mirrored here.

The symbolic associations of the figure of Ophelia with fertility and regeneration, validated by Laertes' wish for violets to spring from her flesh, points to a trans-textual reading of the play. Her premature death reinforces the sense of what is wrong with Denmark. Instead of the real famine, plague, and barrenness that afflict Thebes in Sophocles' Oedipus The King, the technically incestuous union of the king and the queen in Hamlet is followed by an imaginary pollutedness or barrenness, while the ghost still haunts the palace. It is in this sense that Ophelia's sexuality is reduced to a symptom. Indeed, Polonius, in conjunction with his prohibitive injunctions uses Ophelia as an explanation for Hamlet's madness. In his hysterical outbursts, to be witnessed by those who have wronged him, Hamlet uses her being a woman, a “possible breeder of sinners,” as a symptom of whatever it is that is troubling him. Having finally succumbed to the impact of these prohibitions and vituperations, in her mad speech, she puts pansies (thought), fennel (flattery), and columbines (cuckoldry) in between, separating rosemary and rue—grace and remembrance.

We have thus far tried to look into Ophelia's negative objectification in the discourse of Hamlet. It is however this excess of rhetoric, excess of discourse that transforms the neat Senecan revenge drama, the ghost's “story,” into a richly reflexive text. A second, brief examination of Shakespeare's use of commonplaces will help to illuminate this point further.

Shakespeare seems to examine various forms of the influence of sententious rhetoric, or habits of thought on beliefs and actions. As discussed above, Baldwin and Smith find dense reproductions of Latin sententiae in Shakespeare's discourse. In Hamlet, I think, each character uses the proverbial sayings differently, indicating varying levels of introspective, critical awareness, and this determines the role and function of each speaker in the highly self-reflexive discourse of the play. For example, Polonius and Laertes reproduce commonplaces mechanically, in an unaltered form. The latter is appropriately dispatched to France to return only when he is needed again. The former is made the disposable object of a very insignificant-seeming death, like a rat. Hamlet, who masterminds the discourse of Shakespeare's play, refers to him thus: “How now? A rat?” He calls the play in which he is to catch the conscience of the King, “The Mousetrap.” Note here that the speeches of the player king and the queen are strings of cleverly arranged sententiae, “shreds” and “patches” of proverbial rhetoric, most likely to trigger real or imagined guilt. Moral concerns in all ages tend to be incorporated into proverbial rhetoric. Hamlet constantly demolishes the proverbial presuppositions of others. Polonius in the very beginning of the play makes the prince an object of his sententious formula: the connection of (Hamlet's) madness with disappointment in love. When Polonius, following his hunch, makes the unfortunate mistake of losing his daughter to the “mad-for-love prince,” Hamlet's seemingly irrelevant, mad speech demolishes the old man's (the “fishmonger's”) cherished hypothesis.

Hamlet's own use of the proverbial lore, as one would expect, is different. He manipulates the sententiae, extends their implications beyond recognition, and projects these implications into images, metaphors, and other objectified representations. Such transformations of what one has read, heard, or what is drilled into one's memory occur in the process of actual dreaming. The sententiae also represent to Hamlet the privileged speech of the Other. He approaches them in the same way in which he approaches the speech of authority (of the King and sometimes of the queen also).

One of the strategies of Hamlet's mad rhetoric is that he often grafts his own most pithy utterances to the Other's speech in the form of rejoinders, reiterated images, phrases, riddles, introduction of puns, and so forth. When the whole block of this speech is ready, it seems all the vituperations and implications of guilt were inherently present in the Other's speech, and he only brought them out. To take an example from act 1, scene 2, his mother, speaking of his exaggerated grief says, “Thou know'st 'tis common. All that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity” (Hamlet 1.2.72-73). Her conclusive reasoning refers to the common sententiae from Culman: Mors Omni altati Communis est (Death is common to every age).¹⁰ The use of the sententia in Homer, Sophocles, Cato, Erasmus, as indicated by Smith, remains pretty much the same. In Gertrude's speech, her preceding appeals to her son are: “Cast thy nighted colour off,” “let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark,” (speaking for her husband here), and “do not for ever with thy vailed lids / Seek for thy noble father in the dust” (the motherly advice); all these attach a particularized context to the proverbial deduction. But the ever watchful Hamlet, always sensitive to language, plays on her use of the word common. “Ay, Madam, it is common,” is his rejoinder. Obviously, he takes common to mean vulgar, and changes the subject reference. It now refers to the particular circumstances of his father's death and his mother's hasty marriage. Thus, by shifting the subject reference he introduces the ‘as yet unspoken’ into the discourse of the play. Gertrude does not participate in the unspoken speech, and continues as if nothing was spoken: “If it be / Why seems it so particular to thee?” (Hamlet 1.2.75). To this his reply is: “Seems Madam? nay, it is. I know not / ‘Seems’” (76-77). Hamlet now picks on the innocuous word, “seems,” and introduces the theme of dissimulation. Through this punning indirection the queen and the king are accused of deceit. The ghost's accusatory account has not yet been heard and Hamlet is not yet determined to be mad.

It is clear that at this point Hamlet is politely participating in a dialogue. Gertrude and Claudius have not yet started to respond to, or participate in his indirections. Nor has he freed himself from the rules of conversational decorum as yet. Later, he uses the license of his madness to avoid answering questions, give irrelevant, opaque, intriguing answers, insert rejoinders when they are least expected or needed. It is in these ways that he invents his mad speech to counter the authority of the speech of the Other.

My next, and final example from act 4, scene 3, should illustrate the above point, and trace in the ensuing discourse the working through of the sententia: ‘death is a leveller’. When questioned about Polonius' whereabouts Hamlet's first answer is: “At Supper.” The king, this time participating in the mad speech, says, “At Supper? Where?” Hamlet's unexpected answer is: “Not where eats, but where he is eaten.” Only after repeated inquiries from the King, who confronts the riddles and insists on a clearer answer, does Hamlet come up with: “if indeed you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.” Hamlet's first answer brings to our attention a very interesting instance of homophony. In the Saxo Grammaticus tale, when Amlethus is questioned about the whereabouts of the treacherous eavesdropper, a friend of King Feng, the prince is said to have replied “the man is gone to the sewer.”¹¹ The word supper in Hamlet's prompt answer brings to mind the word sewer of the source. Shakespeare would have read the tale in Latin, but he would have thought in English, especially when transforming the material into his play.

In the source, Amleth had actually, after killing the man, cut “the body into morsels, seethed it in boiling water, and flung it through the mouth of an open sewer for the swine to eat, bestrewing the strinking mire with his hapless limb.”¹² Hence, the homophonous effect that Hamlet's “he is at supper” and Amleth's “he is gone to the sewer” create gives us a glimpse of Shakespeare's associative, creative memory at work. In the source Amleth is referring to something that is true, though what he says is taken as a joke. Hamlet on the other hand offers a riddle: “he is at supper”; “he is in heaven”; “send thither to see. If your messenger find him not there, seek him i' th' other place yourself” (Hamlet 4.3.33-37). What is offered as flouted truth in the source is in Shakespeare's play transformed into a metaphor via the mad talk of the prince. Moreover, the echo of sewer in supper, obviously emphasizes hearing; it is an aural association suggesting the author's hearing of the speech of the phantasmatic other, like the hearing of rhetoric, the poison poured in the ear.

The mad prince's evasive answers add to a normal conversational situation a subjective dimension; they create an imaginary space in which he can speak of his riddling metaphysics that represents life as feeding upon what is dead, and death as being eaten by what is to become food for the living: the mechanics of a gruesome oral metamorphosis. The corpse, Hamlet tells us, is eaten by the worms that we feed the fish with. Then, we eat the fish. (The swine of the source change into fish and worms.) This veiled vituperation leads to Hamlet's final aphorism that closes the sequence: “Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” (Hamlet 4.3.30-31).

We should remember here that in act 2, scene 3, Hamlet, speaking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, refers to himself as the beggar: “The beggar that I am” (272). So, the initiator of this discourse is the dispossessed prince (reduced to a beggarly state), and the respondent is the usurper King: “the fat king and the lean beggar.” Both are but “variable service two dishes, but to one table—that's the end” (Hamlet 4.3.23-25). In this image we can recognize the subtle transformations, reverberations of the sententiae, “death is a grand leveller.” The Senecan variations of this commonplace are: “Death levels all things”; “death levels us”; and “death will make you equals.”¹³ At this most reflexively Senecan moment in the play, it is relevant that the most approximate reference should be to him. The evasive fable of the corpse-worm-fish-king changes the abstract common saying into a powerful biological metaphor.

This perception of familial violence and aggression in terms of devouring and absorption, this oral-intestinal metamorphosis may no doubt be attributed to Shakespeare the person. The association of “sewer” with “supper” lies at the center of this mirroring circumference; it triggers the other associations. Did the great poet think all this up sitting at his dinner table, possessed by the spirit of his (Amleth) Hamlet? Did the burial(s) of Hamlet and his father, the associative image of swarming maggots and worms prey on his mind as he sat at the table, brooding? Did the Ovidian fantasies of metamorphosis assume new meanings? An analysis of Shakespeare's language directed to locate such traces of associational memory might enhance our sense of the author as a real person. But the Shakespearean text, or inter-text, written in the context of other texts, is after all a reflexive double of the author, located not in personal biography, but in the intersubjective field of speech and language.

Notes

1. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blackmore Evans (London: Houghton and Mifflin, 1974). All quotations from Shakespeare are from this edition. References are to act, scene, and line.

2. Charles D. Smith, Shakespeare's Proverb Lore: His Use of the Sententiae of Leonard Culman and Pubilius Syrus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 130.

3. T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare's SMALL LATIN AND LESS GREEK 1 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 591-95. Baldwin gives an interesting account of the use of the Sententiae Pueriles in Elizabethan England. He says that it was “very widely used in Shakespeare's time,” and “he may very well have memorized the collection.”

4. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 261.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. From Ovid, Metamorphosis, in Shakespeare's Ovid, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (New York: Norton, 1966), 110. References are to book and line.

8. Ovid, Metamorphosis, 5:495-97.

9. Ibid., 5:540-44.

10. Smith, Shakespeare's Proverb Lore, 35.

11. Humphrey Milford, The Sources of Hamlet: With An Essay on the Legend by Sir Israel Gollanncz (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 117.

12. Ibid., 115.

13. Smith, Shakespeare's Proverb Lore, 36.