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. Thomas of Ely’s story was found in a parson’s commonplace book which includes hymns, proverbs and prayers. It is a story to tell a flock, simple enough structurally – the ghost is not even a soul of the dead – but functionally quite complex. In Shakespeare’s era, writing also becomes much more extensively used as an administrative tool – nowhere more obviously than in the legal system. The Marian statutes of the 1550s, which reformed medieval trial procedure, “established the legal necessity to collect all the facts about a particular incident and present them in the form of a written dossier”. Modern literature – literature as literature – is a particular fold within this archive: it belongs to what Foucault called the “Library” in his essay on Flaubert.
