ABSTRACT
Hamlet tells the story of a king’s murder. In a monarchy, no act threatens genealogical or “blood” modes of social and political reproduction more deeply than the murder of a king. No act involves less exchange or negotiation. The killer has got away with it too-which means that the sociallysanctioned violence which helps secure both the social order and the boundaries between discourses has been eluded. After Claudius’ concealment of murder, social order can only be based on lies and pretence. But a fiction may now tell the truth, become a weapon for revealing hidden disorder and discontinuity. In that move, the springs and delirium of mimesis begin to be displayed. For instance, how real is the Ghost?, how true his (?) its (?) claims? It is a question to which others are immediately joined. How “alive” is he? How dead? The possibility of achieving life after death and the possibility that fictions might be true fuse into one another in Hamlet as they do so often. In the scene where Hamlet instructs the players to mime his father’s death, the play represents the “simulation” - to use Greenblatt’s term-of a murder. By having Claudius respond to that scene as if it were real, the play comes as close as drama can to feigning and repeating a murder, stretching the limits, and affirming the power, of the representational paradigm. One should note that this simulation can have “real” effects because the play within the play exists as writing, a piece of “portable property” endlessly available for revision: Hamlet himself rewrites this piece of theatre before the players play it. With Hamlet an author, Hamlet denotes its own institutional space, marked out on one side by its existence as a theatrical event and, on the other, its existence as a script. There exists a gap between the play’s performance and its text however. Hamlet’s detailed instructions to the players intensifies the logic by which it is true that a performance can only reduce a script’s range of effects and meanings. As we shall see, moving within this loose and uncertain space, the play unsettles a variety of ethical orders too. More generally still, in exploring the border at which discontinuity and continuity, madness and order, life and death, are joined and separated, in representing the limits of representation-Hamlet has served as a classic model for claims that literary texts
obey no general laws, that each is unique and that, therefore, “literature” captures reality most finely. For this reason, it has long been a favoured object for close reading, the defining practice of modern criticism. But one can also read, and closely read, to end that kind of criticism-to reflect on it and to re-engage the connections between old texts and current society.
