The Hamlet Doctrine

Knowing Too Much, Doing Nothing

Simon Critchley, Jamieson Webster

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781781682579
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di Shakespeare

Arguably, no literary work is more familiar to us than Shakespeare's most famous tragedy. Everyone can quote at least six words from the play; often people know many more.In this riveting and thought-provoking re-examination, philosopher Simon Critchley and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster explore Hamlet 's continued relevance for a modern world no less troubled by existential anxieties than Elizabethan London.Reading the drama alongside writers, philosophers and psychoanalysts-Schmitt, Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Melville, and Joyce-the authors delve into the politics of the era, the play's relationship to religion, the exigencies of desire and the incapacity to love. It is an intellectual investigation that leads to a startling conclusion: Hamlet is a play about nothing in which Ophelia emerges as the true hero.From the illusion of theatre and the spectacle of statecraft to the psychological theatre of inhibition and emotion, what Hamlet makes manifest is the modern paradox of our lives: where we know, we cannot act.
The Hamlet Doctrine is a passionate encounter with a great work of literature that continues to speak to us across centuries.

Part I

By Indirections Find Directions Out—Carl Schmitt’s Hamletization

WHY IS HAMLET unable to speak the truth about what he has learned from the lips of the ghost? Why is Hamlet unable to utter to anyone onstage what he has heard, not even to ever-loyal Horatio? Why the desperate need for secrecy? In 1955, Carl Schmitt, the infamous German jurist, gave a series of lectures, entitled Hamlet or Hecuba, that circle obsessively around these questions.

To understate matters somewhat alarmingly, Schmitt is a controversial figure. Although this is not the place, much could and should be said about his involvement with the National Socialist regime and his apologia for dictatorship and political authoritarianism. But let’s initially confine ourselves to one line of questioning. Schmitt is best known as the great theorist of the decision, where the concept of the political consists in the ability to decide between friend and enemy. Schmitt’s famous definition of sovereignty is, in a literal translation, “Sovereign is, who can decide on the state of exception” (Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet). The sovereign is the person who is exhibited by the decision on the state of exception. The question “who?” is answered by the decision itself. That is, the decision on the state of exception, the moment of the suspension of the operation of law, brings the subject “who?” into being. To put it into a slogan, the subject is the consequence of a decision. Thus, the subject of political sovereignty—a prince of Denmark, for example, and would-be king—is defined, indeed constituted, by the potent capacity for decision. The sovereign has to be politically and—insofar as the body politic is identified with the body of the king—corporeally virile.

The question then becomes blindingly obvious: if the decision is so decisive to the very definition of politics and sovereignty, then what on earth is Carl Schmitt—Herr Professor Dr. Decision Himself—doing focusing on the most indecisive character in world literature: Hamlet? As Hamlet already made crystal clear above, he cannot act on the basis of the instructions of the ghost and avenge his father’s murder. Now, if sovereignty is the capacity for a decision, then is indecision a questioning of sovereignty? If the political is defined by the sovereign decision, then does the indecision of the sovereign—and Hamlet is rightful heir to the rotten state of Denmark—imply a critique of this concept of the political? If the sovereign is defined by the potency of decision, then is Hamlet’s evident impotence somehow politically important? Does this indecision mark a crisis in the concept of sovereignty? Or can we perhaps imagine an uncoupling of sovereignty from potency and a shift in the classical conception of the political subject? Is it too much of a stretch to say that Schmitt’s meditation on Hamlet might be read as a kind of critique of his earlier decisionistic conceptions of politics and sovereignty? Might Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba be read, then, as an oblique self-critique?

Be that as it may—and the latter questions are admittedly speculative—what is certain is that Hamlet cannot decide: for whatever reason, he’s lost his mojo of sovereign potency. As we said above, Hamlet is an anti-Oedipus. Where Oedipus begins knowing nothing and acts constantly till he is led toward the knowledge that destroys him, Hamlet knows everything from the get-go. What is revealed is that this knowledge does not lead to action but to its opposite. On this account, the character of the tragic hero shifts decisively from antiquity to modernity: the modern hero cannot decide. This is the process that Schmitt Germanizes with what Polonius would call a “vile phrase”: Hamletization (Hamletisierung). It might turn out that this term best describes the condition into which the political has fallen in the modern world: we have all become indecisive Hamlets living in states that we know to be rotten. Perhaps Schmitt’s decisionistic concept of the political has become Hamletized.

But why is Hamlet Hamletized? Why does he remain tight lipped about what he knows? While vigorously disavowing the validity of any psychoanalytic interpretations of Hamlet—indeed “the lady doth protest too much, methinks”—Schmitt nonetheless insists that what we are faced with in the play is, to use a Freudian term, “a taboo.”¹ For Schmitt, there are two riddles in the play: first, Hamlet’s indecisiveness and inability to avenge his father, and, second, the lack of clarity as to the guilt or innocence of Gertrude.

Both riddles are solved by linking the taboo not to what Schmitt would see as some vague psychoanalytic cause but to a real historical situation. Schmitt’s basic claim is that Hamlet is a mask for King James I of England. James’s mother was Mary, Queen of Scots, whose husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was murdered fewer than eight months after James’s birth in June 1566. Mary remarried three months after her husband’s murder, with James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, who was widely suspected of being the murderer of Henry Stuart.

In February 1601, the Earl of Essex, together with the Earl of Southampton, led an abortive rebellion against the aging and increasingly despotic Queen Elizabeth, Essex’s former mentor and probable lover. The rebellion failed, Essex was beheaded, and Southampton’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Now, both Essex and Southampton were active patrons of Shakespeare’s acting troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. After the event of the rebellion, very possibly alluded to as “the late innovation” in Hamlet, the theaters were closed, ostensibly because of the plague. This explains why “the tragedians of the city” are wandering the country in search of employment. During this period, there was also a sudden mode for children’s acting companies, such as the Children of the Chapel, referred to explicitly in Hamlet as “Little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for’t.”

Any precise dating of Hamlet is necessarily speculative, and we would rather avoid the distracting and unending quest for an authentic and original Ur-Hamlet. We know that on July 26, 1602, Shakespeare’s Hamlet was entered in the Stationer’s Register in London, and the play must have been performed prior to that date. The First, or so-called bad, Quarto, which has many odd virtues, not the least of which is a kind of rough-and-ready theatricality that is close to tragic farce, was published in 1603, the year of James’s accession to the throne. The Second Quarto, sometimes jokingly called Hamlet in its eternity rather than entirety, was published in 1604–5 and is 79 percent longer than the First. After James became monarch of both England and Scotland, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men became the King’s Men, and Shakespeare was appointed royal valet. Schmitt’s claim, then, is that Hamlet harbors a taboo, and this provides the reason that the play takes on its peculiarly oblique form. Schmitt writes that, out of consideration for King James, “it was impossible to insinuate the guilt of the mother in the murder of the father.”²

Schmitt provides an admittedly singular and, indeed, odd taboo-based explanation of Hamlet’s Hamletization, which it is impossible either to refute or confirm. A little like Hamlet himself, Schmitt cannot bear the sheer fictional Gorgiastic deceptiveness of theater, its nothing. The power of an artwork cannot therefore be explained in exclusively aesthetic terms but must be located in a specific historical reality. His interpretation has the virtue of explaining the great success of Hamlet on the London stage: everyone knew that it was the true backstory of the new king, but no one could say this openly. Hamlet is a kind of pièce à clé.

This Globe of Spies

BUT DO WE need such a determinate, external historical explanation of Hamlet in order to throw light on the phenomenon of Hamletization? After all, there might be other reasons for Hamlet’s silence that are internal to the play itself. In order to broach this line of thought, let’s go back to the beginning of Hamlet. In the final scene of act 1, after Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost, he swears that he shall avenge his father’s murder,

Thy commandment all alone shall live

Within the book and volume of my brain

Hamlet then hears the voices of Horatio and Marcellus seeking him out. Horatio shouts “Hillo, ho, ho, my lord!” to which Hamlet responds ecstatically, “Hillo, ho, ho, boy! Come, bird, come.” When Horatio asks for news of what’s happened, Hamlet cries out spontaneously and manically, “O, wonderful!” But then when Horatio asks Hamlet to tell the news, Hamlet’s response becomes instantly guarded, “No, you will reveal it.” There then follows some sixty rather agonizing lines of back and forth between Hamlet, Horatio, and the others, where the ghost intervenes no fewer than four times, demanding that they “Swear by his sword.”

But what are they swearing to keep secret? To be sure, it is not the secret that Hamlet has heard about his father’s murder, because he does not tell it to them. All that they swear to keep secret is presumably that a ghost appeared who bears an extraordinary resemblance to the dead king. True enough, in act 3 Hamlet alludes to “the circumstance / Which I have told thee, of my father’s death.” But we are not witnesses to what Horatio is told. We don’t know what he knows. As events move toward their denouement in act 5, Hamlet once again assumes that Horatio knows, although he does not utter the secret onstage.

Why the need for secrecy? A possible answer is provided by the very scene that follows Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost, in the seemingly incidental opening lines of act 2. Polonius is in conversation with one Reynaldo (the cunning Reynard, or fox, who becomes Reynoldo in the Folio edition and Montano in the First Quarto, where Polonius is mysteriously transformed into Corambis, which is apparently the name for a genus of spider), whom he is hiring to spy on his son, Laertes, who has just returned to Paris. Mightn’t it strike us as odd that the very same Polonius, who had given his son such sage fatherly advice in act 1 as “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” and “To thine own self be true” should now be sending a spy to follow him? Furthermore, the ruse here is wickedly artful: Polonius asks Reynaldo to insinuate himself with certain Danish friends of Laertes in Paris, “Danskers” (which is accurate: “Danish” is Dansk in Danish), and to “put on him / What forgeries you please.” To be clear, Reynaldo is meant to tell lies about Laertes, such as “drinking, fencing, swearing, quarelling, / Drabbing,” that is, whoring. Polonius’s reasoning is quite bizarre and couched in fishing and hunting metaphors:

Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth,

And thus do we of wisdom and of reach

With windlasses and with assays of bias,

By indirections find directions out.

Fishing here is really phishing, the elaborate construction of a hoax to take in the gullible, in this case Laertes’s Parisian Dansker chums. Reynaldo is paid to tell lies in order to see if they reveal anything sordid but true in Laertes’s behavior. Why is the lie always the only path to the truth? And further, it is not even enough just to spy—as if we slide between the meanings of the word “insinuate.”

Hamlet’s world is a globe defined by the omnipresence of espionage. Hamlet is arguably the drama of surveillance in a police state, rather like the Elizabethan police state of England in the late sixteenth century or the multitude of surveillance cameras that track citizens as they cross London in the current second late-Elizabethan age. Indeed, during the time of the Cold War, in countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia, Hamlet was not seen as some existential drama of indecision in a world of bourgeois anomie but as an allegory of life in a totalitarian regime. The First Quarto version of Hamlet was famously performed as something between tragedy and absurdist farce in 1978 at the Theatre on the Balustrade in Prague, where Václav Havel started as a stagehand. In this interpretation, Polonius has the key role as spymaster general.

Consider the proliferation of spies in Hamlet: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent to spy on Hamlet; Ophelia agrees to be the bait as Claudius and Polonius spy on the prince; Polonius spies a second time and is undone with a rapier; someone is clearly spying on Ophelia, otherwise an account of her last moments before she slipped into “muddy death” could not have been given. And is there not the slightest doubt as to the integrity of Horatio—oh so loyal and beloved Horatio—who suddenly turns up out of the blue from Wittenberg to attend Hamlet Senior’s funeral and has apparently been hanging around Elsinore for two months somehow unnoticed by Hamlet (how big is Elsinore?). As well as being on friendly terms with the sentinels, Marcellus and Barnardo, Horatio also seems to recognize Hamlet Senior in the armor he wore in a battle that was fought some thirty years earlier (presumably before he was born).

Isn’t this all very odd? Might not Horatio be Fortinbras’s spy? Think about it: the play finishes with a cordial exchange between Horatio and Fortinbras where the latter declares, “Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage.” But in this interpretation, such magnanimity is not surprising because Hamlet has served as the perfect, albeit unknowing, conduit by which Fortinbras could accede to the throne of Denmark. The pretender Hamlet murders Claudius but has the decency to kill himself in the process and with his “dying voice” says “th’election lights / On Fortinbras.” Take it a step further: let’s imagine that Horatio and his paid accomplices, Marcellus and Barnardo, agree to concoct the story of the ghost in order to dupe an already intensely fragile, grief-stricken, and almost-suicidal young aristocrat. Hamlet unwitti...