ABSTRACT
“Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems’” (Hamlet I, 2, 76). In answering his mother's question about the reason why he is still persisting in his “nighted colour” (I, 2, 68), Hamlet brings up a fundamental issue: the relationship between reality and illusion. But as soon as this relationship is explicitly discussed on the stage, we are already beyond theatrical illusion, we can meditate upon the kind of reality contained in this illusion, upon the ways this kind of reality manifests itself, upon the means to perform it, and, moreover, we can ask ourselves about the difference between signifier and signified, actor and character, stage and audience. Hamlet describes the manner of his acting by assigning it to the realm of illusion, pose, and dissimulation, these being only “the trappings and the suits of woe” (I, 2, 86), nothing but decoration and disguise, things that can be simulated, “actions that a man might play” (I, 2, 84). To these he opposes something that goes beyond illusion: “I have that within which passes show” (I, 2, 85).
