ABSTRACT
Hamlet walks out alone and delivers the axial meditation of western literature. Soliloquy 4 can be moved without damaging its impact, perhaps because of its lack of first-person viewpoint. John Lee disputes whether Shakespeare’s great achievement is the creation of interiority: The limited lexicon of Elizabethans precludes the depiction of selfhood modern psychology achieves—that Hamlet’s descriptions of self are missing “a self-constituting interiority possessed of agency.” He disallows “soul” as synonym, but “soul” is in the play in multiple ways that add up to self. Neuroscience shows how cognition’s split into explicit and implicit compartments allows human consciousness. Neuroscience and postmodern literary interpretation converge in “the gap.” Ellen Spolsky says the “divided mind” evolved to facilitate consciousness also leads to poetry. Different brain functions create a gap between visual and linguistic. The center of Hamlet’s consciousness is reflected in The Mousetrap. Her “slippage between word and world” goes to the heart of his mystery, which he returns to in Soliloquy 7. Neuroscience’s idea of consciousness as a product of the gap in a bicameral brain seems right. I am me myself choosing right and not wrong, in a circular process. Freud found some bad deeds were done because they were forbidden and accompanied by a mental relief. These he “described as criminals from a sense of guilt.” Guilt comes from the superego developing as a self-observing capacity, “which has the function of observing and criticizing the self and of exercising a censorship {.} which we become aware of as our ‘conscience.’” In “Mourning and Melancholia” he footnotes the play to show how object loss—normally only causing mourning—can turn against the self. The shadow of the lost object fell upon the ego, which led to conscience, leading to consciousness.
