Mimesis in Hamlet

In view of recent revisions of the concept of “mimesis” and the thorough-going critique of “representation,” ¹ Shakespeare criticism faces a number of challenging propositions which cut deep into its (largely unformulated and rarely questioned) assumptions of continuity and congruity between the act of interpretation, its cultural function, and its unique object, the Shakespearean text in the theater. What the newest criticism seeks to undermine is the validity of a critical tradition according to which the “meaning” of Shakespeare, then and now, used to be read in terms of a privileged representativity and a given authority inherent in the act of representation (and interpretation) itself. In the light of this tradition the work of the poet, the voice of the actor, the response of the spectator or reader were taken to share in a cultural language and purpose whose legitimation was established through generally available and relatively stable links between language and meaning, signifier and signified. The argument against this tradition by now is powerfully familiar; and although there is no space here to interrogate the theoretical objections on the level of social ideology and cultural politics, yet it would be possible to suggest (although the oversimplification is obvious) that behind this argument there is a genuine sense of crisis in the continuity of the liberal tradition in both criticism and the theater. If, in western critical discourse, the humanistic education has ceased to be able to revitalize its sense of vocation and continuity on traditional grounds and if, in many theatrical productions, the contradictions between past functions and present uses of Shakespeare's plays have become too painful to provide a source of strength and coherence, then indeed there is some urgency in the necessary attempt to look more critically at those traditional premises on which concepts of representation and mimesis have in the past been applied to the plays of Shakespeare.