SOURCE: "'Suche Strange Desygns': Madness, Subjectivity, and Treason in Hamlet and Elizabethan Culture," in Renaissance Drama, n. s. Vol. XX, 1989, pp. 51-75.

[In this essay, Coddon uses the transgression and punishment of Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, as an example of how Shakespeare's depiction of madness functions within—and against—structures of Elizabethan power, and asserts that "Shakespeare's investigation of the interplay of unreason's 'strange desygns' and the 'wild minds' of the body politic stands in reciprocal rather than imitative relation to the offstage drama of disobedience and melancholy, treason and madness, that led Robert Devereux to the scaffold."]

"For, to define true madness, What is it but to be nothing else but mad?" reasons Polonius (2.2.92-94). Whether Robert Devereux; second earl of Essex, was actually mad in any clinical sense of the word is not an issue for historicism.¹ But that his "madness" was poor Robert's—and ultimately, the Tudor state's—enemy may be as illuminating for discussions of madness in Shakespearean tragedy as humoral psychology and the vogue of melancholy. Essex seems to have suffered from what Timothie Bright would have called a "melancholie madnesse," replete with bouts of near-stuporous despair and religious mania (2). The possibility that the earl was punished with a "sore distraction" is frequently viewed as a kind of colorful biographical sidelight to the rebellion of 1601: Essex, "brilliant, melancholy and ill-fated," becomes the embodiment of the Elizabethan mal du siècle, his Icarian fall mirroring the fate of a generation of aspiring minds.² "The flowre of chivalrie" who fell heir in his own lifetime to the heroic legacy of Sir Philip Sidney, Essex has been identified as the historical inspiration for Henry Bolingbroke, Hamlet, and Antony. But the affinities between Essex and the heroes of Shakespearean drama evoked in contemporary accounts of the earl's madness suggest a reciprocity more complex than a mere one-to-one correspondence between history and fictions. Essex's madness, whatever its precise pathological nature, was profoundly engaged in his transgressions as subject, according to John Harington's diary entry of a few months prior to the insurrection:

It restesthe wythe me in opynion, that ambition thwarted in its career, dothe speedilie leade on to madnesse; herein I am strengthened by what I learne in my Lord of Essex, who shyftethe from sorrowe and repentaunce to rage and rebellion so suddenlie, as well provethe him devoide of good reason or righte mynde; in my last discourse, he uttered suche strange desygns that made me hastene forthe, and leave his absence; thank heaven I am safe at home, and if I go in suche troubles againe, I deserve the gallowes for a meddlynge foole: His speeches of the Queene becomethe no man who hathe mens sana in corpore sano. He hathe ill advysors, and much evyll hathe sprunge from thys source. The Queene well knowethe how to humble the haughtie spirit, the haughtie spirit knowethe not how to yield, and the mans soule seemeth tossede to and fro, like the waves of a troubled sea. (225-26)

Harington attributes Essex's madness to "ambition thwarted in its career," articulating a Tudor and Stuart commonplace: "Ambition, madam, is a great man's madness."³ But in Harington's discourse the causal relation between overreaching and insanity is ambiguous; ambition may "speedilie leade on to madnesse," but madness spurs the subjective overthrow of the pales and forts of reason that should constrain the "haughtie spirit." The discourse of madness becomes virtually indistinguishable from the discourse of treason: "he uttered…strange desygns"; "His speeches of the Queene becomethe no man who hathe mens sana in corpore sano"; "the haughtie spirit knowethe not how to yield." Harington finds Essex's madness so alarming not because it is irrational but because it speaks "strange desygns": reason, or treason, in madness. And yet he represents Essex nonetheless as a victim as well as violator subjected by his own disordered subjectivity: "the mans soule seemeth tossede to and fro, like the waves of a troubled sea." The mad Robert Devereux is, then, as radically self-divided a subject as Hamlet, though not because the fictive prince was "inspired" by the historical earl. Madness is mighty opposite of the ideology of self-government, or what Mervyn James has called the "internalization of obedience" (44). As such, madness disintegrates the identity so precariously fashioned by notions of inward control and self-vigilance, notions whose contradictions become increasingly critical toward the end of Elizabeth's rule. Madness renders the subject not more but less himself; it becomes the internalization of disobedience, prerequisite and portent of the external violation of order.⁴

Not all of Essex's transgressions against Elizabethan authority, of course, were merely internal. Yet even at the height of his political/erotic courtship of the queen, his potentially unruly disposition is a topic of courtly conversation. William Camden recalls of Essex, "Nor was he excusable in his deportment to the Queen herself, whom he treated with a sort of insolence, that seemed to proceed rather from a mind that wanted ballast, than any real pride in him . . ." (qtd. in Matter 5; emphasis mine). That Camden casts the earl's "insolence" as a psychological rather than spiritual defect is a telling qualification. Essex's subjectivity becomes the site of the displacement of sin by disorder; the Luciferean sin of pride has metamorphosed into a dangerous inward unfixity. This apparent displacement does not mitigate the earl's "insolence" so much as it inscribes the inextricable—but here, disturbingly precarious—relation between subject and subjectivity; the instability of the latter is reciprocally engaged in the performance of the former, as in Harington's description of the "haughtie spirit." This shift from soul to subjectivity is bound up in the cultural shift from medieval ecclesiastical authority to Renaissance secular authority; as the sinner was to the Church, now the disordered subjectivity is to the secular state. Subjectivity, "a mind that want[s] ballast," is identified as the site of potential transgression and the object of authority and control.

The period between 1597 and 1601 saw the deterioration of Essex's favored position with Elizabeth, a change that would culminate in the queen's fateful refusal to renew the lucrative sweet wines monopoly. But Essex's fall from grace was only partly due to the parsimony and caprice of the aging queen. In 1598 occurred the notorious ear-boxing incident, in which Essex responded to Elizabeth's sharp cuff on the ear by reaching for his sword. The apparent if swiftly checked impulse toward regicide was compounded by Essex's self-justification questioning the infallibility of the sovereign will. "What, cannot Princes err? cannot subjects receive wrong? Is an earthly power or authority infinite?" he wrote in a letter to Sir Thomas Egerton. "Pardon me, pardon me, my good lord, I can never subscribe to such principles" (qtd. in Lacey 213). But "such principles" were precisely those to which Tudor propaganda demanded subscription:

al subjects are bounden to obey [Magistrates] as god's ministers: yea although they be evil, not only for feare, but also for conscience's sake…let al marke diligently, that it is not lawful for inferiours and subjectes, in any case to resist or stand against the superior powers: for s. Paule's words be plain, that whosoever withstandeth the ordinaunce of god. (An Exhortation concerning good order and obedience, to rulers and Magistrates)⁵

Moreover, the writer of the Exhortation deems it "an intolerable ignoraunce, madnes, and wickednes, for subjectes to make any murmuring, rebellyon, resistance or withstanding, commocion, or insurrection against there most dere and most dred soveraygne Lord and king …" (66; emphasis mine). Essex's outrage may have been as temperamental as political, the effect of what Egerton diplomatically referred to as his need "to conquer [himjself," but the surly defiance of his letter accords with the "strange desygns" that perturbed Harington and the sometimes flagrant insubordination that characterized the earl's misadventures in Ireland in 1599. Openly disregarding the queen's orders, Essex conferred knighthood upon over eighty members of his company "without even the justification of a military victory."⁶ But when he chose to return to England against the queen's wishes, and burst in upon a half-dressed Elizabeth in her private chamber, his violation of the boundaries of subject took on yet more dangerous implications. If his making for his sword symbolically threatened the queen's body politic, his intrusion into her private room also threatened the sacred, gendered body of the royal virgin.⁷ Just as the subject's identity was enabled by his inward and outward adherence to the prescriptions of authority, the monarch's identity depended upon the uniformity of obedience, as Elizabeth well understood: "I am no Queen. That man is above me," she raged to her godson Harington (Nugae Antiquae 134). Like Diana surprised by Actaeon, Elizabeth exacted physical punishment upon the intruder, though confinement, not dismemberment, was Essex's sentence. Essex spent nearly six months in the custody of the Lord Keeper Egerton. A letter from John Donne, then secretary to the Lord Keeper, to Henry Wotton provides a window into the perception of the prisoner's condition:

He withers still in his sicknes & plods on to his end in the same pace where you left us. the worst accidents of his sicknes are that he conspires with it & that it is not here beleeved. that which was sayd of Cato that his age understood him not I feare may be averted of your lord that he understood not his age: for it is a naturali weaknes of innocency. that such men want lockes for themselves and keyse for others. (Qtd. in Bald 108)⁸

While Essex was hardly suspected of putting on an antic disposition, Donne's comments reveal the degree to which the physical and mental anguish of the insubordinate earl was subjected to political scrutiny.

"Madness in great ones must not unwatched go" (3.1.89), Claudius observes in Hamlet. With Essex's most erratic behavior explicitly bound up in gestures of disobedience, his inward distress ("he conspires with it") becomes as suspect as his public comportment. Donne's conclusion "that such men want lockes for themselves and keyse for others" is of a piece with Harington's comment that "the Queene well knowethe how to humble the haughtie spirit, the haughtie spirit knowethe not how to yield," and with Camden's reference to Essex's "mind that wanted balast." All three observations imply an antagonism not only between the subject and power, but between subjectivity and power, anticipating both the confrontation and the outcome. It is an agon in which the subject necessarily turns upon the "self as well as upon authority. For if, as Foucault has suggested, power is realized and resisted in its effects, i.e., in its "government of individualization," contestation disrupts the "form of power which makes individuals subjects"—subjects in both senses of the word.⁹ The problem of containment becomes one of confinement. The disruption of the internalized relation between authority and inwardness transforms the dialogue of "subjectification" into a problem of material subjugation: as authority gives way to coercion, the body, not subjectivity, becomes its object. Ultimately, "a mind that want[s] ballast" can be disciplined only by the exaction of punishment upon the body. In Hamlet, the restoration of the "mad" hero's wits is necessarily punctuated by the death that swiftly follows his recovery of sanity. If the deployment of physical punishment transforms as much as fulfills power relations ("The Subject and Power" 794-95), the literal silencing of madness by confinement, constraint, or extinction of the body is itself an unstable strategy of containment. For the division of inwardness and the body that enables post-Reformation subjectivity situates madness nonetheless in the equivocal space between interiority and exteriority. Neither wholly confined to nor estranged from inwardness, madness in its semiotic excess problematizes the closure that is the object of rites of punishment, on both the stage and the scaffold.

Historian Lacey Baldwin Smith remarks that "[b]y the time Essex turned to treason, the deterioration in his character had passed beyond the point of hysteria: it was bordering on insanity which led him to confuse the fantasies of his own sick brain with reality" (The Elizabethan World 266). Smith's reference to the rebellion as "an act of political madness" seems particularly resonant precisely because it may be tacitly redundant: was Essex's madness—or the madness of great ones, both onstage and at court—ever not "political," that is, charged with implications against the inscription of order, obedience, and authority that fashioned and controlled identity in late Tudor and early Stuart England? When Essex's "strange desygns" finally bodied forth action on February 8, 1601, the equivocal boundaries between representation and rebellion almost wholly collapse, though not quite in the way the earl had planned. If the playing of Shakespeare's Richard II "40 times in open streets and houses" failed to rouse the support of the citizens for the rebels, the consequences of the failed insurrection produced a spectacle of trial, repentance, and noble death that seemed to duplicate the form and effect of the tragic denouement. Although Essex repeatedly declared his innocence during the trial, once his fate was decided paranoiac self-justifications gave way to compliance with the art of dying. Entailing confession, repentance, and "the return of the traitor to society and to himself," as Steven Mullaney puts it (33), such performances were commonly described and, perhaps, implicitly prescribed in ars moriendi handbooks, published accounts of executions, and penultimate moments in contemporary tragedy.¹⁰

On February 25 Essex faced the executioner with a noble set speech in which he confessed his spiritual and political transgressions, forgave and prayed for forgiveness, and affirmed throughout the absolute justice of the authority that condemned him:

Lord Jesus, forgive it us, and forgive it me, the most wretched of all; and I beseech her Majesty, the State, and Ministers thereof, to forgive it us. The Lord grant her Majesty a prosperous reign and a long one, if it be His will. O Lord, bless her and the nobles and ministers of the Church and State. And I beseech you and the world to have a charitable opinion of me for my intention toward her Majesty, whose death, upon my salvation and before God, I protest I never meant, nor violence to her person; yet I confess I have received an honourable trial, and am justly condemned. And I desire all the world to forgive me, even as I do freely and from my heart forgive the world. (Qtd. in Harrison 323)

As J. A. Sharpe has discussed in a suggestive essay, the theatricality of "last dying speeches" on the scaffold in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England served a specific ideological function: noble traitors and common criminals alike became "willing central participants in a theatre of punishment, which offered not merely a spectacle, but a reinforcement of certain values.… they were helping to assert the legitimacy of the power which had brought them to their sad end" (156). And following James's analysis of Tudor and Stuart "ideological controls" in the face of limited coercive power, Sharpe has suggested that this "theatre of the gallows" demonstrated the condemned man's "internalization of obedience," the willing representation of inward acquiescence to good order (158-61).¹¹ The case of Essex, then, seems particularly stirring: not only the avowed traitor, but the disordered, self-divided subjectivity is restored, identity—as noble, Christian subject to her majesty and her ministers—recovered in the assertion of the righteousness and coherence of authority.¹² "I am no Queen," Elizabeth had complained upon Essex's violation of her royal imperatives; in dying, Essex effectively reaffirmed the monarch's identity as well as his own.

Yet there was enough uncertainty about semiotic containment in such spectacles of death that Essex's execution, like Mary Queen of Scots' beheading, was kept a semi-private affair, printed transcriptions of the event rather than the event itself entrusted with the dissemination of its ideological significance.¹³ Hence the ideological efficiency of "the theatre of the gallows" may be no less equivocal than the "strange desygns" that prefaced the performance. As Foucault has remarked, "there was…on the part of the state power, a political fear of the effects of these ambiguous rituals" (Discipline and Punish 65). The willingness to spare Essex the humiliation of public execution may have stemmed in part from fear that the propaganda value of such a spectacle could beckfire, especially given the popularity of the earl with the citizens.¹⁴ Nor was the proliferation of official propaganda any insurance that the populace would be duly awed by the terrible enactment of power and punishment:

The condemned man found himself transformed into a hero by the sheer extent of his widely advertised crimes, and sometimes the affirmation of his belated repentance. Against the law, against the rich, the powerful, the magistrates, the constabulary or the watch, against taxes and their collectors, he appeared to have waged a struggle with which one all too easily identified.… If the condemned man was shown to be repentant, accepting the verdict, asking both God and man for forgiveness for his crimes, it was as if he had come through some process of purification: he died, in his own way, like a saint. (Discipline and Punish 67)

Indeed, three years after Essex's death one Robert Pricket published a tributary poem about the earl, "Honor's Fame in Triumph Riding," in which the earl's downfall is attributed chiefly to the machinations of his enemies, just as he had claimed during his trial. The verses sent Pricket to prison (Matter 78). For while the poem is not explicitly subversive, such lines as "He died for treason; Yet no Traitor. Why?" stand in sharp contradiction with the official exegeses of the earl's demise.¹⁵

The ways in which that other great Elizabethan spectacle of death—tragedy—duplicates, appropriates, and, sometimes, questions the strategies of power informing productions of authority and punishment on the scaffold are thus ideologically as well as aesthetically significant. As Leonard Tennenhouse has commented, "The strategies of theater resembled those of the scaffold, as well as court performance…in observing a common logic of figuration that both sustained and testified to the monarch's power …" (15). But the apparent exclusion of madness, of unreason, of disorder, from the final transcriptions of the actual traitor's death is consistently called into question, even subverted, in the punishment meted out by an ostensible tragic order. In the middle tragedies of Shakespeare, discrepancies between the spectacle and its discursive record bequeathed to the survivors undermine the closure apparently evoked in the hero's "restoration to himself in death; the words of Horatio, Edgar, and Macduff seem glaringly inadequate even as plot summaries. "In Shakespeare…madness still occupies an extreme place, in that it is beyond appeal. Nothing ever restores it either to truth or reason. It leads only to laceration and thence to death" (Foucault, Madness and Civilization 31-32); the highly stylized return to self before death is unsettled by the madness that out-lives the individual subject in the gulf between tragic experience and its final retelling.¹⁶ Madness does not deny authority so much as testify to a fissure in the structure of authority—and subjectivity, an excess that is not recuperated by the "government of individualization," to disrupt both subjection and subjectivity. As such, its discourse of "wild and whirling words," of a "soule…tossede to and fro, like the waves of a troubled sea," is peculiarly resistant to strategies of containment.

Accordingly, among the most important mandates of Foucault's landmark if controversial work is that madness and its representations be investigated in terms of their functions within—and against—structures of power.¹⁷ If the political drama of Essex's madness, rebellion, and noble death shares marked affinities with the tragedies contemporary to it, so does the theater itself duplicate and reflect upon a more insidious crisis of authority swelling in late Elizabethan England. What will distinguish madness in such plays as Hamlet (1601) and King Lear (1605) from its depictions in the equally pathologically fixated tragedy of the late 1580s and early 1590s is the subordination to which it will subject other plot elements: madness does not serve narrative so much as narrative serves madness.¹⁸ This narrative non serviam constructs a split not so much between "plot" and "character" as between agency and inwardness, a division clearly manifest in the so-called "problem" of Hamlet but also informing tragedies as early as Marlowe's Edward II (1593) and as late as Webster's Duchess of Malfi (1613). The antagonism between subjectivity and the drama's "syntygmatic axis" (Moretti 55-64), between disorder and a linear mimesis, duplicates the position of power's subject in relation to the authority that, like the narrative, both constricts and constrains him. But the notion of tragic madness as overtly or even covertly "subversive" is problematic.¹⁹ In fact, madness displaces action, metaphorizing it but also taking its place. If madness seems to privilege and enlarge the tragic hero's subjectivity, so does it also fragment, check, and defer it. As an inversion of internalized "ideological controls" madness by definition precludes the realization of a stable, coherent subjectivity in opposition to the disorder from without.

Foucault has discussed the historical liminality of the Renaissance madman positioned between the wandering lunatic of the Middle Ages and the construction of bourgeois individualist subjectivity, the rise of the modern "anatomo-politics of the body" that banishes unreason (Madness and Civilization 35-64; History of Sexuality 139-45). Recent critical works by Francis Barker, Catherine Belsey, and Terry Eagleton have applied the Foucauldian notion of liminality to the Shakespearean subject, particularly in the paradigmatic case of Hamlet.²⁰ The absolute impenetrability of Hamlet's mystery, the absence of the full interiority apparently promised in the prince's claim that "I have that within which passes show" (1.2.85), leads Belsey to conclude that "Hamlet is…the most discontinuous of Shakespeare's heroes," riddled almost to the point of unintelligibility by the "repressed discontinuities of the allegorical tradition" (41-42). Barker and Eagleton go a step further; because humanist subjectivity has yet to fully emerge in the late sixteenth century, "in the interior of [Hamlet's] mystery, there is, in short, nothing."²¹ But this nothing's more than matter; because the privatized subjectivity is incomplete, "wild and whirling words" are never wholly opaque, much less transcendent. The discourse of madness, feigned, real, or a combination of both, remains in Shakespeare's plays as in Harington's diary a language of "strange desygns," of matter and impertinency mixed. The break between subject and society is equivocal rather than absolute, and the idiom of unreason in Shakespeare retains resolutely social resonances.²² The idealization of madness as a transcendent world metaphysically autonomous of its material conditions is a romantic and post-romantic construct: "Garde tes songes! Les sages n'en ont pas assez beaux que les fous!" concludes Baudelaire's "La Voix." But in Elizabethan and Jacobean theater the mad hero is never an absolute exile; even when banished, like Lear, he is accompanied, if only by a parodic progress. His threat tras gressive more than nihilistic, the mad tragic hero, un-like the fully demonized savage or "ungovernable man," violates and recognizes social boundaries simultaneously.²³ In his tragedy he lingers in the dangerous, equivocal space of "reason in madness," but he is never completely marginalized. For he remains bound up in the social situation from which he is (subjectively) divided, linked to the specter of a former self whose public form he reassumes in dying.²⁴

Therefore, to consider the problem of madness in Hamlet—and in Hamlet—is to examine its manifestly political implications in the play. Political not in the sense of topical allusions to historical persons such as Essex, but rather in the sense that Hamlet's madness articulates and represents a historically specific division by which inwardness, breaking down the pales and forts of reason, enacts the faltering of ideological prescriptions designed to define, order, and constrain subjectivity. The similarities between the madness of fictive Hamlet and that of historical Robert Devereux, the unreason that violates the sanctity of a virgin's private chamber or defies a monarch's command, derive from the transgression of ideological boundaries governing both treason and madness. That Shakespeare problematizes Hamlet's "antic disposition" at every turn is significant; the fact that Hamlet's madness cannot be pinned down, clarified, or debunked allows its consistent perception as a conduct of "strange desygns" and a threat to the sovereign. The various attempts at diagnosing Hamlet's malaise ventured by Claudius, Polonius, and Gertrude are informed by a recognition that in the ambiguous space in which reason and madness intersect lies treason. As with Essex, it is not madness itself but the insidious presence of method in it that constitutes "strange desygns." This particular danger characterizes no less the madness of Ophelia:²⁵

                   Her speech is nothing.
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection. They aim at it,
And botch the words up to fit their own
 thoughts,
Which, as her winks and nods and gestures
 yield them,
Indeed would make one think there might be
 thought,
Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.
                                   (4.5.7-13)

As Laertes quite rightly observes, "This nothing's more than matter" (175); Ophelia's "unshaped" speech no less than Hamlet's "wild and whirling words" threatens to inscribe its disorder on the "ill-breeding minds" of the body politic. In Hamlet it is not transcendent truth that unreason speaks, but "dangerous conjectures" rooted in the subject's problematic relation to the authority against which his—or her—inwardness is constructed.

Madness in Hamlet, then, while engaging and even subjecting subjectivity, is not contained within it. As a particular mode of discourse it continually threatens to be construed—or misconstrued—into an incitement of social and political disorder. The metonymie markers for order—moderation, stoicism, obedience—are undermined throughout the play by the dangerous if impenetrable subjectivity of the hero. When Claudius urges Hamlet to give over his obdurate mourning, he invokes a series of maxims on authority and obedience to natural and divine order:

                         But to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness. 'Tis unmanly grief,
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschooled.
For what we know must be, and is as
 common
As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie, 'tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd, whose common theme
Is death of fathers.
                               (1.2.92-104)

Claudius may be "a little more than kin, and less than kind," but his reasoning articulates views about mourning and self-government that were commonplaces of Elizabethan The Protestant religious as well as psychological thought.²⁶ The protestant emphasis on an all-encompassing providence identified the will of God in all human experience regardless of how apparently arbitrary or unpleasant, while the government of passions was particularly imperative in a culture with more than its share of life-threatening hazards (see Thomas 1-21). Similarly, Claudius's insinuation that such mourning is effeminate tacitly genders melancholy; it is worth noting that Ophelia's madness, with its "unshaped" content of sexual and political allusions, doubles and even parodies Hamlet's distraction (cf. Showalter 80-83). That Claudius is so eager to attribute Ophelia's madness to "the poison of deep grief (4.5.76), indeed, the filial grief for which he upbraids Hamlet in 1.2, suggests that the feminization of madness in later periods has its seeds in the cultural construction of the rational, obedient male subject (see Foucault, History of Sexuality 104, 121).

But the claims of obedience upon inwardness are deflected by "that within which passes show," by the implication that the wisdom of authority—divine, royal, filial—can neither order nor account for the subject's perception of his own experience. The mor alization of the inward space ("'tis a fault to heaven"), designed to encourage the subject's self-surveillance against the possible disruption of "unmanly" passion and madness, fails to dissuade Hamlet from his melancholy. But with the failure of inward constraints authority seeks to impose its will on the subject's body: Hamlet must stay in Denmark while Laertes is allowed to return to France. The inward refusal of covert ideological controls moves power to expose and flex its coercive underpinnings. As the play develops and Hamlet's melancholy intensifies into the more dangerous "antic disposition," the question of his physical constraint becomes all the more literal and imperative. Denmark does become a prison: Rosencrantz warns Hamlet, "You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty if you deny your griefs to your friend" (3.2.345-46), while Claudius plots the ultimate physical curtailment: "For we will put fetters about this fear, Which now goes too free-footed" (3.3.25-26).

But while madness addresses and reproduces the problematics of authority, the internalization of disobedience precludes taking arms against a sea of troubles. The radical inutility of unreason divides subjectivity and agency, and hence the question of Hamlet's "delay" should be considered in light of the more pervasive antagonism between inwardness and authority. The appearance of the ghost does not counter the vacuity of the preceding exercises in patriarchal authority but rather duplicates and even literalizes it in the equivocal space of the supernatural.²⁷ Hamlet's initial address to the ghost identifies its ambivalence:

Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts
  from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee.
                                 (1.4.38-44)

As a figure of boundless semiotic ambiguity the ghost is aligned with madness and "break[ing] down the pales and forts of reason" (1.4.28). Horatio, the paradigmatic reasonable man, is even more ineffectual than Claudius against unreason:

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my
 lord,
Or to the dread summit of the cliff
That beetles o'er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other, horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of
 reason
And draw you into madness?
                                 (1.4.69-74)

The threat of madness or demonic possession, like Claudius's admonishment of unnatural grief bound up in the ideology of self-vigilance, holds no sway over the prince, who "waxes desperate with imagination" (1.4.87).

The uncertain origins of King Hamlet's ghost have been well documented. But its eschatological ambiguities may be less significant than the rhetoric of filial duty and natural bonds, the very idiom that Claudius employs in 1.2, in which the ghost couches its exhortations to revenge: "If thou didst ever thy dear father love"; "If thou hadst nature in thee, bear it not" (1.5.23,81). But unlike the apparitions of The Spanish Tragedy and Antonio's Revenge, the specter of King Hamlet is a figure of contamination as much as one of justice. "Taint not thy mind" (1.5.85), it urges Hamlet, yet it is not revenge but its own sickly idiom that the ghost inscribes within the "distracted globe" of Hamlet. The ghost claims in what is actually a mode of occupatio:

                          But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young
 blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their
 spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand an end
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
                                    (1.5.13-20)

But in reappearing to Hamlet in Gertrude's closet the ghost seemingly effects its own prophecy on Hamlet, whom Gertrude describes almost exactly as the ghost has hypothetically in 1.5:

Forth at your eye your spirits wildly peep,
And, as the sleeping soldiers in th' alarm,
Your bedded hair like life in excrements
Start up and stand on end.
                                  (3.4.120-23)

Although speaking from the conventional position of justice, the ghost shapes its claims on the government and direction of the subject through fragmentation, contamination, madness. It is worth noting that the so-called "problems" of Hamlet's character—the obscurely motivated "antic disposition," the delay, the swift transitions from brooding soliloquy to "a kind of joy"—do not arise until the end of 1.5, after the encounter with King Hamlet's ghost. The radically ambivalent nature of the ghost serves as an almost emblematic contradiction that subsumes the play's manifest attempts at narrative coherence. Intention and consequences will diverge wildly and overtly; wills and fates will so contrary run. Hamlet's subjectivity is riven by an exhortation to obedience undermined by its own ontological and discursive equivocation.

That the dead king's exhortation to revenge and remembrance is neglected by the play as well as the prince demonstrates Hamlet's consistent reluctance to privilege wholeheartedly any generic or hierarchic discourse of authority, with the possible exception of playing itself.²⁸ "The time is out of joint," Hamlet says at the end of 1.5, words that are all but literalized in the act that follows. The elapse of fictive time between the first and second acts, during which Hamlet has apparently done nothing save "put on" the ambiguous "antic disposition," and the centering of the plot almost exclusively on his "transformation" serve to turn the play away from the revenge plot commanded and authorized by the ghost. The discontinuities between 1.5 and 2.1 are as provocative as those informing Hamlet's "too much changed" character, the only striking "remembrance" of the precedent scene Ophelia's description of Hamlet surprising her in her closet. Because the strange encounter takes place offstage, the authenticity of Hamlet's demeanor remains, as is true of almost all of his "mad" conduct, uncertain. But if Ophelia gives a typical enough picture of the conventional melancholy lover for Polonius to make an immediate, confident diagnosis, her reference to his "look so piteous in purport / As if he had been loosed out of hell / To speak of horrors" (82-84) contradicts the relative benignity of love-madness with an evocation of the supernatural, irrational incident of the prior scene. Again, it is significant to note that Ophelia speaks of Hamlet in terms markedly similar to those in which the ghost describes "the secrets of my prison house."

It is not until well over four hundred lines into 2.2 that madness gives way to the subject of revenge, and even here it is a player's speech, "a dream of passion," that recalls to Hamlet—and to Hamlet—the purpose exhorted by the ghost. But while playing is aligned neither with the specious aphorisms of the ideology of self-moderation nor with the radically disintegrating forces of unreason, Hamlet's play-within-a-play, unlike Hieronymo's in The Spanish Tragedy, speaks daggers but uses none. Its purpose falls upon the inventor's head, alerting Claudius not only to Hamlet's knowledge of the fratricide but also to an apparent threat to the king's own life. Far from a vehicle of revenge, the play-within-a-play comprises but another obstacle. Significantly, closure for "The Mousetrap" is literally disrupted when the king, "frighted with false fire," hastily departs. In "The Mousetrap" as in Hamlet, in the place of closure there is madness; the ostensible revenger sings snatches of ballads, calls for music, and boasts to Horatio, "Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers—if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me—with two Provincial roses on my razed shoes, get me a fellowship with a cry of players, sir?" (3.2.284-87). Hamlet's antic foolery and incongruous festivity counter and parody the sober purpose and implication of the preceding performance. Thus the authority of playing is problematized by the play's contradictory and ambiguous effects.

Hamlet's crisis of subjectivity, then, is Hamlet's crisis of authority; the ideological constructs that shape power and subjection as mutually constitutive, specifically, the ideology of inward obedience designed to bolster the pales and forts of reason, are scrutinized and exposed as ineffectual. The disintegration of subjective identity—madness—corresponds to the airy nothing of ghostly authority, to the "king of shreds and patches," to the "dream of passion" of the players. If his "mousetrap" incites Hamlet to act, he nonetheless inverts the ghost's express command, bypassing the opportunity to kill Claudius and instead focusing on Gertrude, against whom he was told not to "contrive." First confronting the queen with words so "wild and whirling" she fears for her life, then inadvertently stabbing the eavesdropping Polonius, Hamlet proceeds to deliver, ironically enough, a high-minded lecture on the queen's failure to govern her passions. But his argument for self-restraint swiftly gives way to a morbid explication of the particularly sexual nature of Gertrude's betrayal, the source of Hamlet's melancholy even before he learns of his father's murder.²⁹ As madness impedes narrativity, purpose degenerates into repetition, a motif Shakespeare manifestly explores in King Lear. In Hamlet, a play still marked by the absent linear form of revenge narrative, hollow gestures toward purpose are approached only to be reversed. The sudden appearance of the ghost functions not only to remind Hamlet of his "almost blunted purpose," but also to rehearse the earlier encounter. Yet when it departs, Hamlet promptly reverts to another argument for sexual self-restraint ("Assume a virtue if you have it not"). As for Polonius, whose corpse has been almost comically forgotten for over a hundred lines, Hamlet asserts rather decorously that

                         For this same lord,
I do repent. But heaven hath pleased it so,
To punish me with this, and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.
I will bestow him and will answer well
The death I gave him.
                                (3.4.173-78)

But identity—as noble revenger—is no sooner restored than overthrown by madness, which resists closure and subverts purpose. Hamlet requests "One word more, good lady," then launches into an "antic" tirade upon Gertrude's sexual relations with "the bloat king." And in overt contradiction of his lofty repentance of lines 173-78, Hamlet announces that "I'll lug the guts into the neighbor room," and far from "answering well' for Polonius's slaying, stashes the body in a cupboard.

The fragmentation displaced in the grotesque mutilations of earlier revenge tragedies has become in Hamlet the condition of the hero's subjectivity, the principle governing dramatic structure, the violence inscribed on the body of the play instead of on the body of the villain. Indeed, Hamlet's strange business with the body of Polonius replaces what is in the source stories the actual dismemberment of the spying minister. In the very brief scene 4.2, often cut from stage productions, and in the ensuing interrogation by the king ("Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?" "At supper."), Hamlet's mysterious inwardness intersects with the contradiction of the body, the body that is at once absent and material, a thing and a thing of nothing. Madness, a discourse that collapses the ostensible distinction between the body and the "self," speaking an idiom that conflates and confuses the political and the "private," here posits as its referent the great leveler of differences, death. As Michael Bristol has commented, "Hamlet's 'extreame show of doltishness' reinterprets the basic distinctions of life: between food and corrupt, decaying flesh, between human and animal, between king and beggar. Temporal authority and indeed all political structures of difference are turned inside out" (187).

Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table. That's the end. (4.3.20-24)

Madness, then, is not so much metaphor as metonymy for death, a moment in which the materiality of the body overturns the authority of distinctions out of which coherent, unified subjectivity is constructed. For in Hamlet subjectivity is still engaged in materiality even as the autonomy of the "self ("is") from the body ("seems") is being asserted. By the graveyard scene the death-madness of 4.2 and 4.3 has become externalized, literalized in the representation of a gravedigger who "sings in gravemaking" (5.1.66), in Hamlet's hypothetical histories of the skulls of courtiers, politicians, as "Imperious Caesar" whose dust may stop a bung-hole. There is Yorick, too, the "mad rogue" whose literal antic disposition was "wont to set the table on a roar" (190).³⁰ The prince and the gravedigger discuss "Young Hamlet, he that is mad and sent to England," in the third person, as though the radically fragmented hero of acts 2 through 4 has been banished across the imaginary sea. Madness, death, fragmentation, hereto-fore located in Hamlet's "wild and whirling words," are in 5.1 presented as conditions of the play's world. Hamlet is again "good as a chorus," pointing out, commenting upon and interpreting the old bones in the graveyard, the "maimed rites" of Ophelia's funeral. At once justification and near-parodic literalization of the stuff of Hamlet's privileged subjectivity, the gross materiality of the grave seems to claim an authority that subsumes inwardness and difference. If the scene owes a debt to the memento mori tradition, the skulls emblematize not so much the vanity of the world as the material necessity that implicates subject and authority alike.³¹ Hamlet recognizes the authority of death as absolute and inviolable, yet even as recognition of authority confers, accordingly, the unified identity ("This is I, Hamlet the Dane!") disrupted by the more problematic relations to power, Hamlet's "towering passion" returns to destabilize the seemingly restored noble self. The scuffle with Laertes has an almost black comic aspect in contrast to the sober meditations on mortality that precede it, given the "bravery" of Laertes's speech, reasonable Horatio's typically ineffectual "Good my lord, be quiet," and Hamlet's some-what incongruous question to the man whose father he has killed, "What is the reason that you use me thus? I loved you ever" (285-86). The containment apparently evoked in the dialogue with the gravediggers is contradicted as soundly as Hamlet's promise to "answer well" for Polonius's death, madness once again violently usurping narrative order.

Yet Hamlet's outburst at Ophelia's grave exhausts his "wild and whirling words." In the final scene the hero at last becomes the "courtier, soldier, scholar" of Ophelia's tribute, recounting to Horatio the rash but providentially sanctioned actions on the ship, bantering wittily with Osrick the waterfly, graciously agreeing to the king's request for the conciliatory game with Laertes. Hamlet's placid fatalism despite his premonition of death and his acquiescence to providential design transform "distracted" subjectivity into noble subjection to the "divinity that shapes our ends." Hence Hamlet's apology to Laertes renounces madness, the unruly and disruptive force in the play as well as in his own "distracted globe": "His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy" (5.2.233). In the past, critics have debated over the sincerity or lack thereof of Hamlet's apology, a consequence of overemphasis on Hamlet as a naturalistic character rather than as central feature of a play in which the ambiguities, the "strange desygns," of madness are so foregrounded. Even when considered in a theatrical rather than purely textual context, wherein an actor is personating Hamlet, the tragic hero's last formal set speech, like that of Othello or even the premature "Let's away to prison" speech of Lear, engages the public dimension informing rites of symbolic closure in Elizabethan England. In Hamlet as in the scaffold speech of Essex, an eloquent if stylized confession redeems the transgressing subject and affirms the order he has violated, disclaims "a purposed evil" and restores the speaker to himself. Because the audience knows what Hamlet only presciently suspects, his death seems inevitable, in accord with the narrative logic so consistently violated before by the now-renounced madness.

But Shakespeare's decorous ritual of death, for all that it seems to observe a form of ideological closure, does not contain madness even by the hero's death and the extinction of his problematic subjectivity. "Madness dissipated can be only the same thing as the imminence of the end.… But death itself does not bring peace; madness will still triumph—a truth mockingly eternal, beyond the end of a life which yet had been delivered from madness by this very end" (Foucault, Madness and Civilization 32). For Hamlet "the rest is silence"; he bequeaths his "story" to reasonable Horatio. But Horatio's recapitulation of the tragic events contradicts Hamlet's own providential interpretation of his tragedy:

                         So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced
 cause,
And in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on th' inventors' heads.
                                 (5.2.374-79)

Moreover, Horatio urges that the rather skeletal tale be recounted to ward off the semiotic slippage aligned with disruptive madness; his task must be performed "Even while men's minds are wild, lest more mischance / On plots and errors happen" (388-89). If Hamlet has retracted his madness, Hamlet stops short of following suit. The division that breeds "dangerous conjectures" rests unreconciled; the condemned man's words enact a rite of obedience but affirm an order that is still estranged from the disorderly social reality of "wild minds." Shakespeare's tragedy, performed on the public stage, makes no attempt to contain the potentially dangerous play of signification that moved Tudor authority to make the executions of Mary and Essex semi-private affairs whose printed reports are as safely decontextualized as Horatio's account of what happens in Hamlet. Indeed, Shakespeare's investigation of the interplay of unreason's "strange desygns" and the "wild minds" of the body politic stands in reciprocal rather than imitative relation to the offstage drama of disobedience and melancholy, treason and madness, that led Robert Devereux to the scaffold. Whether Shakespeare's reflections were actually prompted by the ill-fated career of the queen's last favorite is ultimately less important than the pervasive crisis of inwardness and authority, enacted in Hamlet, acted upon by the earl of Essex. The ambiguous boundaries between treason and madness in Elizabethan England testify to the politicization of subjectivity, the traces of which essentialist readings of Hamlet—and of the history of "the self—have repressed but not effaced.³²

Notes

¹ Lacey Baldwin Smith has recently argued that the apparent madness of Essex, as well as of a number of other Tudor traitors, was a manifestation of a more insidious "cultural paranoia." That is, "the cause of irrationality need not lie exclusively in the tortured chambers of the mind; it can be external, and the self-destructive traitor can be a symptom of his society as well as a victim of his private insanity" (Treason in Tudor England 12). For an acute commentary and critique, see Christopher Hill's review.

² See Wilson 228, and Esler 97-99.

³The Duchess of Malfi, 1.2.125. For discussions of the relation of failed ambition to melancholy and madness, see Babb 122-23; Esler 202-43; and Knights 315-32.

⁴ Cf. Smith's characterization of the Tudor traitor as "so unbelievably bungling and self-defeating…that it is difficult to believe [the traitors] were totally sane or that their treason, as perceived by the government, actually existed at all …" (Treason in Tudor England 2).

⁵ Reprinted in Kinney 63. For a valuable discussion of the inadequacy of "the orthodox Elizabethan framework…to absorb effectively the facts of heterodoxy and social flux" (59), see Montrose, "The Purpose of Playing."

⁶ Stone 401. Stone estimates that Essex was responsible for over twenty-five percent of the total knighthoods conferred during Elizabeth's reign.

⁷ '"Tis much wondered at here, that [Essex] went so boldly to her Majesty's presence, She not being ready, and he so full of dirt and mire that his very face was full of it," wrote Roland Whyte to Sir Robert Sidney about the incident (qtd. in Matter 14).

⁸ R. C. Bald holds that "the writer shows the kind of knowledge of Essex's condition that one would expect from an inmate of York House, and more perhaps than the current gossip would furnish him with" (108n2).

⁹ Foucault writes, "This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others must recognize in him.… There are two meanings of the word 'subject': subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to" ("The Subject and Power" 781).

¹⁰ Beach Langston considers Essex's death as an embodiment of the ars moriendi tradition in "Essex and the Art of Dying." Cf. my article on Macbeth, "Unreal Mockery: Unreason and the Problem of Spectacle in Macbeth."

¹¹ Cf. James 43-54. Other enlightening discussions of the stylistics and ideological implications of executions in early modern England are Foucault, Discipline and Punish 3-69 and Edgerton.

¹² Mullaney has written suggestively on the condemned traitor's recovery of decorum in the ritual of execution: "Confession, execution, and dismemberment, unsettling as they may seem, were not so much punishment as they were the demonstration that what had been a traitor was no longer, and that which had set him off from man and nature had been…lifted from him. When the body bleeds, treason has been effaced; execution is treason's epilogue, spoken by the law" (33-34).

¹³ Langston's essay considers a number of the printed accounts of Essex's "beautiful death." For a thorough overview of the ars moriendi in the English literary tradition, see Beaty.

¹⁴ See Foucault, Discipline and Punish 59-69.

¹⁵ Quoted in Matter 78.

¹⁶ Cf. Franco Moretti's commentary on Jacobean tragedy: "Fully realized tragedy is the parable of the degeneration of the sovereign inserted in a context that can no longer understand it" (55).

¹⁷ For critiques of Madness and Civilization and of Foucault's methodology, see Midelfort and Feder 29-34. Shoshana Felman offers a comparative critique of Foucault and Derrida on madness in her Writing and Madness (35-55).

¹⁸ What Robert Weimann observes of Hamlet's "antic disposition" seems to me to be true of madness in much late Elizabethan and early Jacobean tragedy: "Madness as a 'method' of mimesis dissolves important links between the representer and the represented, and can only partially sustain a logical or psychological motivation. What, especially in the court scenes, the 'antic disposition' involves is another mode of release from representivity" ("Mimesis in Hamlet" 204).

¹⁹ The "subversion/containment" debate has provoked lively and often constructive debate among the practitioners of "new historicism" and "cultural materialism." These positions are perhaps most clearly exemplified by Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, which argues that subversion is inevitably contained in Renaissance representations; and Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy, which aligns representations with contestatory and revolutionary discourses in early modern England.

²⁰ Barker 25-41; Belsey 41-42; Eagleton 70-75.

²¹ Barker 37. Eagleton concurs: Hamlet is "a kind of nothing…because he is never identical with himself" (73).

²² Weimann offers an analysis of the popular culture and morality context of "reason in madness" in Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (120-33).

²³ On the "ungovernable man," see Greenblatt 147-48.

²⁴ On the death of the tragic hero Barker comments, "Tragic heroes have to die because in the spectacular kingdom death is in the body. There is no 'merely' or metaphorically ethical death which does not at the same time entail the extinction of the body, and even its complete and austere destruction" (40).

²⁵ Elaine Showalter offers an enlightening commentary on critical representations of Ophelia's madness in "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism."

²⁶ See MacDonald 72-85. Michael Neill considers the relation of tragedy to the post-Reformation problem atizing of death, with the Protestant rejection of "the whole vast industry of intercession, and masses for the dead" (180); see '"Exeunt with a Dead March': Funeral Pageantry on the Shakespearean Stage." Clare Gittings also considers at length the social and psychological effects of the Reformation upon grieving and funeral practices in Death, Burial, and the Individual in Early Modern England.

²⁷ On the interplay of the equivocal, the irrational, and the supernatural (with particular reference to Macbeth), see Mullaney; Coddon.

²⁸ On the theater's construction of—and reflections on—its own authority see Montrose, '"Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture."

²⁹ Margaret Ferguson offers an interesting reading of the problematics of the closet scene in her fine essay "Hamlet: Letters and Spirits" (see esp. 296-97).

³⁰ Insightful comments on the "antic" qualities of the graveyard scene may be found in Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater 239-40; Barker 39-40.

³¹ Ferguson's essay considers the complex function of the memento mori in Hamlet (302-05). For a reading of Hamlet as a "memento mori poem," see Morris 311-41.

³² In each of its many metamorphoses, this essay has benefited from the criticism, guidance, and encouragement I have received from Louis A. Montrose; to him I extend my gratitude.

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