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from Part I
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
For about a century, many directors and actors who thought about Hamlet thought about Freud. The result: countless productions in which, in the so-called “closet scene,” Hamlet's unpleasant words of castigation to his mother were suited to sexualised action. What we should say, of course, is that Freud, when developing his theory of the Oedipus complex, thought by using Shakespeare. In 1897 he wrote:
Shakespeare's unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero … How does he explain his irresolution in avenging his father by the murder of his uncle … better than through the torment roused in him by the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same deed out of passion for his mother … his conscience is his unconscious sense of guilt. (Freud 1985: 272–3)
This is a description not an explanation, and mistakes are made when the categories are confused. I want to sketch out some alternative contexts, amplifying my argument with references to screen productions, globally available, of the last sixty to seventy years.
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