ABSTRACT

Hamlet’s last wish is that Horatio ‘report [his] cause aright’, lest his name be wounded in the ignorant ear of ‘this harsh world’. This seems a straightforward enough request from one friend to another – ‘to tell my story’. But its simplicity is deceptive, coming from a figure whose most famous claim is to ‘have that within which passeth show’ (1.2.85), a figure who declares that no one, presumably not even Horatio, can ‘pluck out the heart of [his] mystery’ (3.2.336). Throughout the play Hamlet has expressed interest only in how his father shall be remembered; consequently this deathbed desire for transparency – a last-minute obsession with how his own story will be told – is out of character and signals a change in the play’s representational register. Something happens to the prince as he inhabits what Jacques Lacan calls l’entre deux mortes, the ‘space between two deaths’, a

space in which Hamlet can say while still alive, and without paradox, ‘I am dead Horatio’. The gap between physical death and one’s final inscription in the symbolic order is, in Lacan’s formulation, where repressed desires can finally materialize, since ‘the game is over’ and the subject no longer has anything to gain (or lose) by confronting them.1