ABSTRACT
One-fifth of Hamlet involves metatheater and much of its lifelikeness is created metatheatrically. Hamlet is full of tropes about poetry, writing, and journaling. When we first meet the Prince he’s denying that he seems. This he almost immediately reverses by enacting madness through the whole middle of the play. As bait for his mother, Hamlet writes some dozen lines to insert into Gonzaago. Underlying The Mousetrap is the question whether the Ghost is the spirit of his father. Freud saw it—obvious but paradoxical—the unconscious mind thinks in symbols. “Hamlet looking at Hamlet” looks inward. This self construction depends on a “theory of mind” too, but a theory of one’s own mind as it mirrors one’s own desires, beliefs, and intentions. Hamlet can even see his own process of self perception. This model of consciousness is reminiscent of The Mousetrap and the Dumb Show. The playwright was at pains to preserve the Dumb Show. Nigel Alexander thinks that Hamlet’s divided mind is the center of his consciousness, his self awareness arises out of the separation of his conscious from his unconscious mental operations. Various dumb shows function as soliloquies, as the machinery of his conscience. But they think in pictures what the soliloquies debate in words—shame versus blame, activity versus passivity, revenge versus conscience, oblivion versus conscious awareness. By studying dreams Freud came to understand the nature of “primary process thinking” in the unconscious. But one of the greatest scholars of Shakespeare came to the identical conclusion by the analysis of ambiguity in poetry. William Empson understood the unconscious of psychoanalysis and the unconscious of poetry are the same. Freud, before he appreciated paradox in the unconscious, had to accept it in poetry. And Hamlet, with its ambiguity born of metatheater, was catalytic.
