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Hardin L. Aasand (Dickinson
State University):
O'ertopping Pelion: Hamlet,
Laertes, and the Revenge Tradition
Memento, Domine,
famulorum famularumque tuaram qui nos praecesserunt cum
signo fidei, et dormiunt in somno pacis.
Remember, O Lord, thy servants who have gone before
with the sign of faith and sleep in the sleep of peace.
[1]
The lines cited above derive from the liturgical formula for
the canon of the Mass, and they provided Catholic believers
in pre-Reformation England with a means to commemorate and
reintegrate the dead with the living by entrusting the dead
to the prayers of intercession. As Anthony Low has recently
suggested, the Reformation deprived England of this vital
nexus by excising Purgatory as a liminal domain within which
the deceased had been communally bound to the living. Low
suggests that the Reformation audience, confronting a void
created by the loss of Purgatory, were essentially abandoned
to a silence when confronting the dead
[2].
Silence and corrosive parodies were the only vehicles for
dealing with the deceased [3].
I offer this intercessionary prayer as a gloss for the
discomfort produced in the famous graveyard scene of 5.1 in
Hamlet, for this scene presents an important tableau
in which Shakespeare unites a pair of avengers amidst the
heaping of death in an act of commemoration. As many critics
note, the Reformation transformed the early modern English
churchyard into a site of bifurcated significance, one in
which the sacred and secular uses of cemetery space vied for
legitimacy. [4]
In Elizabethan England, churchyards were common places,
frequently violated and overrun sites of both the sacred and
the profane. Modern readers need to disturb their
preconceptions of churchyards as privileged sites of
hallowed graves and ornate markers in order to discern a
more vivid portrait of burial sites that all too often were
spaces of symbolic contestation and common disturbance. For
instance, in Kent in 1573 a churchyard reportedly "lieth
open, whereby swine and other cattle come in and dig up the
graves . . . It hath been presented divers times and no
reformation had." [5]
Indeed, the fear of swine encroachment and violation of
graves is a frequent fear. During the same time, two farmers
were warned by local officials to cease defacing and
spoiling graveyards with their cattle. In Lincolnshire, the
churchyard fence was dismantled "so that cattle and hogs
came into the same and rooted up the graves of dead bodies
there interred." [6]
Bishop Richard Montague offered timely advice during his
visit to Norwich in 1638:
Be [these
graves] conveniently covered, made seven foot deep,
kept from scraping of dogs, rooting up of hogs, fouling
and polluting otherwise, as the resting place of
Christians dead? . . . Is the grave made east and west,
is the body buried with the head to the west, is the
grave digged seven foot deep, and being made up and
buried, preserved from violation?
[7]
The good bishop's
prescription of a proper grave is a testament to the
temporal and secular forces at work to disturb graves and
violate sacred space.
In addition to foraging cattle and swine, churchyards also
suffered or "were profaned" by secular abuses of gaming and
revelry, by "any unlawful or unseemly act, game or exercise,
as by lords of misrule, summer lords or ladies, pipers,
rush-bearers, morris dancers, pedlards, bowlers, bear wards
and such like." [8]
Thus, in Hamlet, Hamlet's observations that the
chapless skulls tossed up by the gravedigger could be used
in a game of loggats is not an instance of grotesque poetic
license, but rather a morbid touchstone for an Elizabethan
audience. In Salisbury, for example, disinterred mazzards of
bishops are transformed into more pragmatic mazzards - cups
- for the supping of wine.
[9]
Such anecdotes provide clear instances of subjects becoming
objectified. As David Cressy observes in his Birth,
Marriage, and Death, Elizabethan churchyards were often
treated as barnyards or country fairs: these "dormitories of
Christians" became stables of "private uses" and boorish
activities by which the symbolic status of churchyards as
hallowed sites was appropriated by carnivalesque forces
marked by their temporal character.
[10]
Cressy's account of Elizabethan burial sites resonates for
students of Hamlet, for the graveyard sequence is a
memorable tableau of the play and its thematic concerns, one
that illustrators and engravers often revisited for
emblematic representation. The churchyard as visualized is a
provocative synecdoche for the emphatic presence of death
that permeates the play from its spectral visits of Act I to
the bloody havoc that Fortinbras confronts in Act V.
Figure 1
Delacroix's Graveyard Lithograph (see:
[http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/classes/Shakespeare_Illustrated/dh.html]
(lithograph) and [http://www.abcgallery.com/D/delacroix/delacroix16.html]
(painting)
Delacroix's famous 1843 lithograph of Hamlet, Yorick, and
the gravedigger evinces the essential elements of this scene
(but for the subsequent procession that brings the royal
party and Ophelia's corpse into the scene): Hamlet's
philosophical excavation of the first gravedigger's more
literal excavation of the earth, the memento mori presence
of Yorick's skull that grounds Hamlet's sense of death and
its levelling force; the backward looking, disinterested
Horatio; and the second gravedigger sitting with two feet in
the grave (textually already absent and sent off for a cup
at Yaughan's , Johan's, or some other offstage topical
allusion). The lithograph is a quiet tableau that freezes
Hamlet's interrogation of the gravedigger into a
respectable, conservative icon, lending Hamlet a heroic
posture as the melancholic, inquisitive Dane. Denied its
theatrical context, Delacroix's lithograph commemorates a
scene by investing the panoply of skulls, the grime of the
labor, and the anonymity of death with an emblematic purity
unfettered by problematics of mortal decay, maim'd sacred
rites, and absent purgatories.
For all of its iconic placidness, this scene as enacted,
however, was frequently disparaged for its breach of
neo-classical decorum, for its violation of sacred space and
tragic tone by a secular and profane space in which Hamlets
courts the ironic presence of clowns and death's atomistic
sense of humor. In 1733, Voltaire characterized this
interlude as one of dramatic "buffooneries" that, while
mimetically integral as a reflection of the gravedigging
profession, was improper for the tragic subject matter. In
addition, an anonymous critic writing in 1752 suggested in
Observations on the Tragedy of Hamlet that the scene
was "motley," an adjective that conveys the patched and
botched nature of the scene's design. The writer laments the
debasement of "sublime compositions" with "wretched farce."
Moreover, this anonymous critic charges Shakespeare with
violating the "grave" decorum of tragedy by profaning noble,
moral scenes with impertinent wit. Within his critique, the
critic cites an equally critical verse from David Mallett, a
bit of doggerel prompted by Lewis Theobald's 1733 edition of
Shakespeare: "As Gold in Mines lies mix'd with Dirt and
Clay, Now, Eagle-wing'd his Heav'n-ward Flight he takes, The
big Stage thunders, and the Soul awakes; Now, low on Earth,
a kindred Reptile creeps, Sad hamlet quibbles, and the
Hearer sleeps." This verse plumbs the subterranean depths of
the cemetery to excoriate Shakespeare for the contamination
of his high, grandiose style with "trifling, vain and
impertinent Witticisms." [11]
These instances of graveyard desecration and generic
corruption are homologous events that rehearse the motley
scenes that in fact constitute both human life and the
dramatic mirrors held up to nature. Act V.i clearly
demonstrates that the churchyard with unmarked graves and
unregulated plots was a topical place, a locus representing
Ophelia's burial, the mingling of bodies, of social classes,
and of dramatic genres a proper background for a death that
is given an ambivalent legitimacy. The proliferation of
skulls and the communing of bodies in interlarded,
undifferentiated graves is indeed a major concern of this
play, and here I use the term "interlarded" intentionally,
for its derivation from "enlarded" hearkens back to its
physiological and rhetoric origins as both a swelling,
corpulent body and bombastic rhetoric, a "verbal stuffing."
[12]
As Patricia Parker notes, enlarged rhetoric is associated
with the "forcing" or "farcing" of pride with rhetorical
embellishment. Hamlet's graveyard is thus poignantly
farcical, a tone established at the outset by the
gravedigger's occupation of the stage's platea,
[13]
whose expostulation on crowners' quest laws, the proper
treatment of suicide victims, and corporeal vermiculation
permeates the remainder of the scene.
This impropriety, which disturbed early Neo-classical
critics of the play, extends beyond the opening moments of
5.1 and the gravedigger's parodic rehearsal of legal
inquests and encompasses the arrival of the funeral cortege.
Ophelia's maimed rites are maimed further by Hamlet's
interruption of Laertes' mournful eulogy for his sister, an
expressive grief that itself interrupts the priest's
half-hearted services and suggests Laertes's deferred eulogy
for a father buried in "hugger
mugger."[14]
Indeed, Ophelia's interrupted burial provides the court and
theatrical audience with a promise of the only complete
ceremony in the play: Hamlet Sr's bones were "quietly
inurned" and have now "burst there cerements"; Polonius's
body lacks the proper memorial signified by hatchments and
trophes that reveal noble status; and Ophelia's suicide
receives only an attenuated ceremony announced by Yorick's
tongueless skull. This vertiginous layering of past and
present death renders Laertes's spontaneous leap and
Hamlet's ironic counter leap into the grave fitting
valedictory gestures for bodies that have lacked the ritual
closure that makes the mourning process so essential for the
living. Revenge tragedy, Michael Neill reminds us,
represents in its theatrical negotiation of social practices
the accommodation both of "death" as an abstract terminus
ad quem for all mortals and of the dead who remind us of
our obligation to accommodate them, an accommodation which
(pace Antony Low) the Protestant Reformation rendered
anxiety-ridden and inconclusive as a socially sanctioned
event. [15]
Natalie Davis conjectures that the "Protestant soul" was
"left with [its] memories, unimpeded and
untransformed by any ritual communication with [its]
dead." [16]
It is within this context that I wish to consider the
textually ambivalent treatment of Hamlet and Laertes's
disposition at Ophelia's grave.
The textual record of this scene is itself as confounded and
open-ended as Ophelia's grave. The existence of three
distinct states of the play (Q1, Q2, F1)
[17]
allows for distinct treatments of the burial. For centuries,
critics have debated the physical piling on of bodies within
Ophelia's grave: Do Hamlet and Laertes both leap into the
grave, one after another? Does Laertes alone leap in and
climb out to wage battle? Do both young nobles remain
outside the grave and struggle above the grave? The text of
course fails to resolve the dilemma, the three versions
providing similar yet distinct treatments of their
actions:
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The 1603 Q1, which some critics believe reflects an early
performance, includes the stage direction of Leartes leaping
into the grave, followed by Leartes' clear rhetorical
bombast:
Now power your
earth on, Olympus hie,
And make a hill to o'retop olde Pelion
What's he that coniures so?
Q1 also explicitly includes Hamlet's own responsive leap
into the grave. The marginal placement of the stage
direction suggests that Leartes' allusion to the classical
Pelion and its hubristic connotation propels Hamlet to offer
his dramatic leap. Furthermore, the text suggests that both
remain in the grave during this verbal sparring:
And where thou
talk'st of burying thee a live,
Here let us stand: and let them throw on us,
Whole hills of earth till with the height thereof
Make Oosel as a wart.
While this scene of verbal and physical sparring is repeated
in Q2 and F1, each text provides subtle omissions that may
suggest authorial dramatic revision.
The Folio retains Laertes's leap following 3433 ("Till I
have caught her once more in mine armes") but Q2 is silent
but suggestive of Laertes's leap. Both Q2 and the Folio
imply that it is Laertes's bromide against Hamlet and his
flamboyant plea for a mountainous tomb that prompts Hamlet's
outburst:
Now pile your dust
upon the quick and dead
Till of this flat a mountain you have made
T'o'ertop old Pelion or the skyish head
Of blue Olympus.
While both versions omit
Hamlet's subsequent leap into Ophelia's grave, they do
retain Hamlet's cynical rebuke of Laertes's histrionic
behavior and highly charged rant:
What is he whose
griefe<s>
Beares such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Coniures the wandering stares, and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers.
Hamlet's declaration of his identity, 'This is I/Hamlet the
Dane" is intermingled with his own hyperbolic invocation
that attempts to surpass Laertes's Homeric exhortation:
And if thou prate
of mountains, let them throw
Millions of Acres on us, till our ground
Sindging his pate against the burning Zone
Make Ossa like a wart, nay and thou'lt mouthe,
Ile rant as well as thou.
Despite the overt subtleties of these texts, in which Hamlet
and Laertes confound a burial already confounded by its
dubious legitimacy, the physical action provides a clear
distinction between Laertes's metamorphosis into a living
monument for a sister, a prosopropoeic trophe that belatedly
responds to a father buried in hugger mugger, and Hamlet's
corrrosive "outfacing" of Laertes's self-imposed
mortification.
While eighteenth-century editions retained Hamlet's
responsive leap as a stage direction, the editors disagreed
as to its significance in deciphering Hamlet's motivation
and essential character. George Steevens and Edmond Malone
[18]
each retained Hamlet's responsive leap, but each arrived at
a distinctly different conclusion regarding its dramatic
effect. Steevens describes Hamlet's behavior as follows:
He interrupts the
funeral designed in honour of this lady, at which both
the King and Queen were present. . . . He insults the
brother of the dead, and boasts of an affection for his
sister, which, before, he had denied to her face; and yet
at this very time must be considered as desirous of
supporting the character of a madmen, so that the
openness of his confession is not to be imputed to him as
a virtue
On the other hand, Edmond Malone dismisses Steevens'
antagonistic regard for Hamlet's boorishness and considers
Hamlet's behavior a heroic gesture: Hamlet had not intended
to "insult" Laertes, but rather he was motivated by "his
love to her, (which then he had no reason to conceal) and
from the bravery of her brother's grief, which
excited him (not to condemn that brother, as has been
stated, but) to vie with him in the expression of affection
and sorrow." Malone concludes, "[He] neither
assaulted, nor insulted Laertes, till that nobleman had
cursed him, and seized him by the throat." Thus Malone
declines to see Hamlet's behavior as that of the "physical
aggressor."
Hamlet's leap into the grave prompted a panoply of debate:
William Richardson (1780), Edward Strachey (1848) and F.A.
Marshall (1875) extol Hamlet's "towering passion" and
subsequent leap as reflective of a "deeper embosomed love .
. . too sacred to be seen; and like fire, when pent up, it
had acquired greater force."
[19]
On the other hand, writers like Francis Gentleman (1770) and
George Farren (1827) characterized Hamlet's leap as "a most
outrageous degree of passion" that, conveying Hamlet's
impassioned mind, "interrupts a sacred ceremony."
[20]
Critics have generally viewed the stage direction as a
characterological extension of Hamlet and Laertes' rival
passions rather than as the emblematic vehicle for staging a
critique of the mourning process. More recently, in his
essay, "Four Feet in the Grave," Sheldon Zitner follows
Harley Granville-Barker in voicing disapproval of an action
that diminishes Hamlet's newly found maturity and sobriety
of purpose. Granville-Barker goes so far as to charge
Shakespeare's actors with perpetrating an act of betrayal
against the author. For Granville-Barker, the actor
portraying Hamlet was carried away by his own emotions, and
thereby damaged the authorial design of Hamlet's character.
Critics have subsequently blamed the energeia of performance
rather than authorial intent for Hamlet's explicit
physicality at Ophelia's grave.
Hamlet's leap admittedly violates his advice to the actors
by exhibiting the excessive display of emotion so excoriated
by Hamlet ("Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand,
thus, but use all gentley . . . For anything so o'erdone is
from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first
and now, was and is to hold as 'twere the mirror up to
nature"), yet to read it purely as a reflection of Hamlet's
interiority is to undermine Hamlet's unique spatial
relationship with the other members of the play: The
presence of the trapdoor, which embodies both a grave and
the entrance to the cellarage from where the ghost had
previously arisen, is traversed by two characters who have
occupied distinct dramatic modes of presentation. Perceiving
these theatrical leaps as reflections only of character
rather than as theatrical effects, critics have ignored the
emblematic and symbolic dimension of the moment:Hamlet,
Laertes, and Ophelia possess a grave that encompasses them,
swallowing them whole. While Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa
suggest that the stage conveys iconographically the medieval
hell-mouth ( "To the symbol-conscious Elizabethan audience,
however, jumping into the trap also confirmed Hamlet's
readiness to enter hell like Laertes in pursuit of his
revenge," [21])
I wish to supplement this reading with the suggestion that
the agon between Laertes and Hamlet which envelopes
Ophelia's lifeless body is also a dramatic danse
macabre, in which Laertes and Hamlet, in vying for a
legitimate commemorative power, also contend with the corpse
of Ophelia, who is jostled and reanimated by their intimate
struggle [22].
This Reformation danse macabre recirculates in its
medieval form the energies of a post-Reformation audience
for whom death offers only an anxious deferral of absolute
certainty: lacking a Purgatory, the dead are jostled and
dragged and deprived of an uninterrupted obsequy.
If the funeral protocol, properly enacted, offered at least
a communal closure for the dead, its truncation was
responsible for the "most terrible of . . . psychic
wounds"[23]:
. . . the mounting
of carefully hierarchized funeral processions, whose pomp
was often crowned by the erection of lavishly ornamented
tombs, has to be recognized as a principal mode of
resistance to the aggressive commonness of death. But
ironically enough if the elaboration of funeral arts
sought to contain the threatened chaos of mass
extermination, it also served, in a society almost
neurotically obsessed with stabilization of the social
order, to make any disruption or displacement of funeral
properties seem even more dangerous and offensive than it
had done before.
If we may use the language of Robert Weimann, language which
Andrew Gurr usefully resurrects in his recent book on Sh's
original staging, Ophelia's grave occupies the hierarchized
locus of representation and authority, and it
is a space which Laertes attempts to claim with his leap in
order to undo the maimed rites and provide Ophelia's grave
with a "living monument."
[25]
For Laertes, however, Ophelia's grave -- with the memory of
Polonius's own secret burial still latent within him --
requires a spontaneous gesture of commemoration that Laertes
substitutes for the sage requiems already denied Ophelia.
His leap and rhetorical trophes provide the kind of social
imprimatur for a death that has brought shame to his family
name and generated the parodic discourse of philosophically
minded gravediggers. Laertes's leap reflects a tragic view
of time "as an ineluctable linear process," in Michael
Neill's words, over which a person tenuously claims triumph
through the artifice of ceremony.
[26]
Laertes's desire to be buried with his sister and join his
father in an anonymity deprived of social ostentation
reflects the depth of his grief; while it seems excessive
and histrionic, Laertes's dramatic leap into the grave is a
pre-mature death that countermands his earlier disdain for
"obscure funerals."
Observing Laertes's leap into the grave (a leap which
editors always retain and which critics invariably embrace),
and incensed by Laertes' enlarded elegy , Hamlet responds in
kind, and yet his leap (which critics still dispute) is an
iteration that is imbued with the clownish disposition
acquired from his jesting encounter with the festive
gravedigger. Laertes's leap prompts Hamlet to remove himself
from the platea he has occupied throughout the play, from
his liminal point of commentary, from his shared mingling
with jesters and clowns, from his satirical position as
commentator in order to re-enter the revenge drama he had
previously critiqued and deferred entering.
Hamlet's leap should not be detached from his earlier
jesting with the gravedigger, for his graveyard shift has
entrusted him with a newfound wisdom on death's sardonic
wit, as Yorick's skull and he share a wistful and reciprocal
glance that encompasses past, present, and future in a
cyclical exchange. If viewed as a comic gesture, a detached
critique of Laertes's mournful gestures, Hamlet's leap and
subsequent struggle with Laertes represents the "dance of
comedy" which Michael Neill characterizes as "'the whirligig
of time' in which all things turn and return as though
governed by the seasonal patterns of rotation and renewal."
[27]
His father's revenant, Yorick's chapless skull, and
Ophelia's shrouded corpse prompt Hamlet's rejection of
Laertes's gesture of termination, critiquing a gesture that
would bury alive Laertes and his grief. Marjorie Garber
refers to comic gestures such as this as a "a
desacralization, a normalization, a refusal to privilege
death." [28]
Hamlet's jibes at Laertes's grief and imitative leap are
tantamount to the notorious "jigs" which concluded typical
tragedies. Hamlet seals the ceremony with his own eruption
of leaping and physicality, engaging Laertes in a bifurcated
dance that marries tragedy and comedy in a grim marriage of
contrariety. [29]
In Neill's terms, Hamlet's leap is a "graffiti violently
scrawled across some funerary monument . . .. a spirit of
pagan defiance closer to the grotesque irreverence of
carnival" than to any sublime gesture of consolation.
[30]
If Hamlet appears unattractive and physically aggressive
within the grave, duplicating Laertes's own rant, it is
because he has been occupying a different stage and a
different dramatic mode of presentation. His address to
Laertes is an address to Laertes's elegiac disposition and
it suggests that Hamlet's own position within the drama is
riven between that of grief and of satiric commentary:
What is he whose
griefe<s>
Beares such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Coniures the wandering stares, and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers.
Hamlet deplores the histrionics of mourning, the
performative engagement in a grief that Laertes rightfully
possesses. His subsequent hyperbole is equally abusive and
painfully intolerant of Laertes' passionate display. Hamlet
appears to realize his dramatic relapse when he apologizes
to Horatio for "forgetting himself." Indeed, Hamlet's
problem is not the "forgetting of himself," a forgetting
which allowed him to craft his trenchant eulogy for Yorick,
but rather a constant remembering of himself and of his
self-conscious language that threatens to conflate him and
Laertes into an interlarded plot.
Like Yorick's skull, Laertes's hyperbole presents itself as
a rhetorical shape that Hamlet characterizes by its
"emphasis": "What is he whose griefe/ Beares such an
emphesis, whose phrase of sorrow/ Coniures the wandering
starres" (TLN 3449-51). Hamlet's prologue in the graveyard
and his acceptance of the fine death to which we all return
allows him this initial dismissal of Laertes's grief and its
excessive melancholia, for it hauntingly evokes his own
progress through the initial four acts of the play. Hamlet's
recognition that Laertes is a dramatic counter becomes
possible for him only in retrospect: "by the image of my
Cause, I see/The Portraiture of his" (F1-only line).
If Shakespeare intended
these graveside leaps - Laertes's followed by Hamlet's - it
suggests a visual tableau of contrastive avengers rather
than redundant mourners. Hamlet's violation of Laertes's
physical space within Ophelia's grave serves only to
contrast a mourning that, hyperbolic in its classical
heaping of images, is inappropriate for a Hamlet whose
deferred mourning has found its outlet in the wistful
exposition upon Yorick's skull. If critics deplore Hamlet's
insensitive leap as a malicious attack on Laertes's private
grief, they ignore the historical significance of the motley
drama in which comedy and tragedy struggle in a dialectical
embrace. Laertes's desire for hatchments and trophes for his
deceased family -- even if formed by his own physical and
rhetorical efforts -- encounters Hamlet's tenacious
acceptance of death's sardonic wit. Each avenger stands
waist deep in the grave of the pathetically ignored Ophelia,
struggling with the death encorpsed in a shroud,
anticipating the imminent duel which will return them both
to the same heaping grave.
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Footnotes
[1] Anthony Low, "Hamlet and the Ghost
of Purgatory: Intimations of Killing the Father." ELR
29.3 (Autumn 1999): 463. [back]
[2] Low, 447ff. [back]
[3] Low, 463. Low refers to Thomas
Becon's mock prayer: "for Philip and Cheny, more than a good
meany, for the souls of father Princhard and of mother
Puddingwright, for the souls of goodman Rinsepitcher and
goodwife Pintpot, for the souls of Sir John Husslegoose and
Sir Simon Sweetlips, for the souls of your benefactors,
founders, patrons, friends and well-willers, which have
given you either dirge-groats, confessional-pence, trentals,
year-services, dinner or supper, or anything else that may
maintain you." [back]
[4] Clare Gittings, Death, Burial,
and the Individual in Early Modern England (London:
Croom Helm, 1984): 140. David Cressy, Burial, Marriage
and Death (New York: Oxford UP, 1997), chapter 17. Low,
p. 451ff refers to the loss of fraternities and prayer
societies that were maintained to remember the dead: "in the
course of a generation the gentry who ran the Church and the
State simply decided that it would be convenient to cease
remembering their dead." [back]
[5] Cressy, 467. [back]
[6] Cressy, 466. [back]
[7] Cressy, 467 [back]
[8] Cressy, 468. [back]
[9] See The Oxford English
Dictionary, s.v. Mazard for this anecdote from the 1632
Proclamations of the Star Chamber. [back]
[10] Cressy, 465. [back]
[11] See Critical Responses to Hamlet,
1600-1790, ed. David Farley-Hills (New York: AMS Press,
1997), vol. 1 for the following essays: Voltaire, Letter
Concerning the English Nation (1733), 74; Anon.
Observations on the Tragedy of Hamlet (1752), 174.
[back]
[12] Patricia Parker, Shakespeare
from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1996): 223-4. [back]
[13] See Robert Weimann's
elaborations on this term and its frequent pairing with
locus in "Playing with a Difference: Revisiting 'Pen' and
'Voice' in Shakespeare's Theatre" SQ 50 (1999):
415-32 and Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Playing and
Writing in Shakespeare's Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2000), chapter 7. [back]
[14] Michael Neill refers to these
interrupted, truncated ceremonies as examples of aposiopesis
or arrested action. See Issues of Death: Mortality and
Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1997), 46 (and also chapter 6). [back]
[15] Neill, 244. [back]
[16] Natalie Davis, "Ghosts, Kin, and
Progeny: Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern
France." Daedalus, special issue on the Family
(1977): 95. [back]
[17] I cite from The Three-Text
Hamlet, eds. Paul Bertram and Bernice W. Kliman (New
York: AMS Press, 1991).[back]
[18] The following commentary from
Steevens and Malone derives from The Plays and Poems of
William Shakspeare, ed. James Boswell (1821; rpt. New
York: AMS Press, 1966): 2.532-5. [back]
[19] See Richardson's A
Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of Some of
Shakespeare's Remarkable Characters (1780; rpt. New
York: AMS Press, 1966): 122-4; Strachey's Shakespeare's
Hamlet: An Attempt to Find the Key to a Great Moral Problem
by Methodical Analysis of the Play (London: J.W. Parker,
1848): 90-1; F.A. Marshall, A Study of Hamlet
(London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1875): 98-9.
[back]
[20] See Francis Gentleman, The
Dramatic Censor; or, Critical Companion (London: J.
Bell, 1770): 1.28-9.; George Farren, Observations on the
Laws of Mortality and Disease . . . (London: Dean and
Munday, 1829): 377-8. Farren asserts that if Hamlet is not
"mad" to produce such a horrendous scene with Laertes, than
he is the most "cruel, senseless, and cowardly miscreant
that ever disgraced the human form." [back]
[21] Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa,
Staging in Shakespeare's Theatre (Oxford: Oxford UP,
2000): 153. [back]
[22] Low, 461. Low's scenario
suggests an even more violent dismissal of her corpse: "Both
leap into her grave together, wrestle and choke each other
as they trample on the corpse." Carol Rutter's "Snatched
Bodies: Ophelia in the Grave" eroticizes the image by
suggesting that Ophelia truly is resurrected in a mock
erotic embrace: "The spectacle he [Laertes]
unwittingly constructs is more horrific even than the
outrage he commits: in his embrace Ophelia rises from the
grave. For a moment her dead eyes gaze at the audience. For
a moment reanimated (like the Ghost, like Yorick), she
re-enters the field of play. And for that moment when she
won't play dead, she embodies a subversion of all those
patriarchal authorizations men in this play produce to
valorize death. . . Rearing out of the grave, Ophelia makes
the audience look death in the face" (311). "Snatched
Bodies" SQ 49 (1998): 299-319. [back]
[23] Neill, 293. [back]
[24] Neill, 293. [back]
[25] Weimann, 184, observes that the
locus is a "privileged site" of represented significance.
Weimann asserts that the tomb is a "topos of family dignity
and prosperity." Ophelia's grave, of course, exhibits an
extremely conflicted site of a broken, tarnished family.
[back]
[26] Neill, 284. [back]
[27] Neill, 283. [back]
[28] Marjorie Garber. Cited in Neill,
"Death and Ritual in Renaissance Drama." In True Rites
and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and
his Age. Eds. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (Urbana:
U of Illinois Press, 1992): 51. [back]
[29] Weimann, 98-102. See also David
Wiles, Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and Text in the
Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987),
chapter 4 "Kemp's Jigs." See also Neill, "Death and Ritual,"
51ff. [back]
[30] Neill 51. [back]
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