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Hamlet and the Sovereignty of Reasons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2016

Jeffrey Knapp
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Abstract

Why does Shakespeare link the psychological disintegration of Hamlet with the political disintegration of Denmark? This essay answers that question by comparing Shakespeare's tragedy to his later history plays, which foreshadow the “antic” Prince Hamlet in the “frantic” King Richard II and the “madcap” Prince Hal. All of these plays insist that a monarch pays a heavy price for claiming that he represents and even embodies the people he rules: he comes to feel internally divided, multiplicitous, populous. But the plays also cast doubt on the ability of the people to achieve any greater coherence as a sovereign power. Through Henry V and Hamlet in particular, Shakespeare offers the theater as a model of power sharing among diverse forces: not only the monarch and the people, but also the actors, the audience, and the author.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 78 , Special Issue 4: Shakespeare's Politics in Honor of the 400th Anniversary of his Birth , Fall 2016 , pp. 645 - 662
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2016 

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References

1 Freud, Sigmund, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, trans. Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 381 Google Scholar.

2 Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works [hereafter CPW], trans. Strachey, James et al. , 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), 4:264–65Google Scholar, 260, and 7:310.

3 CPW, 4:266 and 1:265.

4 CPW, 7:309, 21:188, 13:212–13. In “Against Self-Criticism,” London Review of Books, Mar. 5, 2015, 13–16, Adam Phillips similarly underscores Freud's “claim to sovereignty over the text and the character of Hamlet” in The Interpretation of Dreams, although Phillips claims that Freud also renounces this interpretive crown by endorsing the principle of “over-interpretation”: “Freud's guilt about his own aggression,” Phillips writes, “leads him to open up the play having closed it down” (14). But Phillips's psychoanalysis of one sentence from The Interpretation of Dreams fails to account for the rest of Freud's interpretations of Hamlet, not to mention the rest of the passage on Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams.

5 Freud, Sigmund, Gesammelte Werke: Chronologisch Geordnet [hereafter GW], ed. Bonaparte, Marie, 18 vols. and Nachtragsband (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1952–87), 10:174 Google Scholar; CPW, 20:63 and 23:192; GW, 17:119. From the start of his extant writings on Hamlet, Freud identifies himself with Oedipus: “I have found, in my own case too, falling in love with the mother and jealousy of the father” (CPW, 1:265). The German word for “unearth” in the sentence where Freud claims to have uncovered Hamlet’s central conflict is erraten (GW, Nachtragsband, 660), which means to unriddle (erraten and Rätsel share the same roots). In his article “The Œdipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery: A Study in Motive,” American Journal of Psychology 21 (1910): 72–113 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Ernest Jones wrote that “the central mystery” of Hamlet “has well been called the Sphinx of modern Literature” (74)—and “it is but fitting,” he added in a footnote, “that Freud should have solved the riddle of this Sphinx, as he has that of the Theban one” (74n2). Cf. Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (1940) (New York: Norton, 1976), 22n3.

6 Hamlet, 3.2.365–66; 2.2.48–49 and 158–59; 3.1.164–65; 2.2.27. All of my quotations from Shakespeare refer to The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

7 Hamlet 4.5.45; 4.7.177; 4.5.75–76, 30, 60, 23, and 46–47.

8 Hamlet, 1.2.20, 29, 36–37, 122, 49, and 9.

9 Hamlet, 2.2.55–57 and 1.1.104–8. The queen is willing to accept a third “main” motive for Hamlet's wildness later on: Polonius claims that the problem is Ophelia's rejection of Hamlet; Claudius asks Gertrude, “Do you think ’tis this?” and she replies, “It may be, very like” (2.2.151–52).

10 Hamlet, 4.1.45; 4.7.8–18; 4.5.99–103 and 78–91.

11 Hamlet, 3.1.39 and 157–58.

12 Hamlet, 3.3.14–15 and 22–23.

13 Richard II, 1.1.196; 3.2.67–79 and 106–20. For other, more legalistic and mystical Renaissance accounts of the king's more-than-oneness, see Kantorowicz, Ernst's indispensable The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957)Google Scholar.

14 Richard II, 4.1.179, 198, 192–93, 295; 1.1.121; 4.1.200–201.

15 Richard II, 5.5.1–11 and 31–32. The Folio text has “thus play I in one prison many people,” but this strikes me as a misreading of the manuscript or quarto: why would Richard stress that he's confined to one prison?

16 1 Henry IV, 3.2.68–69, 63, and 39–45; Richard II, 1.4.24–27.

17 1 Henry IV, 3.2.86–87, 30, and 12–17.

18 1 Henry IV, 1.2.198–203, 3.2.29; Richard II, 3.3.185; 1 Henry IV, 1.2.142–43.

19 1 Henry IV, 1.2.200 and 213–15; 5.2.60–64.

20 2 Henry IV, 5.5.58–62; Henry V, 3.1.1.

21 Henry V, 4.1.134–37, 230–36, 241–42, and 238. For a wonderfully illuminating discussion of the monarch's special worries and labors—his “care”—in Shakespeare, see Rutter, Tom, Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 74–77.

22 Henry V, 4.3.3; 4.1.290–92; 4.3.60–63 and 23–34.

23 Hamlet, 1.5.95–106.

24 Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus, 54 and 137; Hamlet, 1.5.172.

25 Hamlet, 4.3.4.

26 Hamlet, 1.5.140 and 163; 2.2.224, 240, 422, and 546.

27 Hamlet, 2.2.436–37; 3.2.11–12 and 26–28; 2.2.327–28 and 342.

28 I. G., A Refutation of the Apology for Actors (1615), ed. Richard Perkinson (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1941), 40; Crosse, Henry, Vertues Common-wealth (London, 1603)Google Scholar, P3r; J. Cocke, quoted in Chambers, E. K., The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923)Google Scholar, 4:256.

29 Arnold, Oliver, The Third Citizen: Shakespeare's Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)Google Scholar, 36 and 43.

30 Hamlet, 2.2.329–30 and 318; Wickham, Glynne, in English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660, ed. Wickham, Glynne, Berry, Herbert, and Ingram, William (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 79 Google Scholar.

31 Quoted in Chambers, ed., Elizabethan Stage, 4:318 and 330. In 1592, the Lord Mayor delicately wondered whether the queen might not be better served “by the private exercise of her Majesty's own players” (308). The vulnerability of actors to this constant pressure from the city is underscored by a 1598 minute of the Privy Council, which specifies that Shakespeare's theater company and one other had been licensed to play for public audiences in order to “be the better enabled and prepared” for royal performances, but that a third company was not needed and so could be “suppressed” (325).

32 Arnold, Third Citizen, 21, 12, 43, 12, 43–44.

33 [Anthony Munday?] and Salvianus, A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (1580), ed. Arthur Freeman (New York: Garland, 1973), 96–97; Greene, Robert [and Henry Chettle?], Greenes, Groats-Worth of Witte (1592), ed. Carroll, D. Allen (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), 83 and 85 (the same writer expresses both opposing views)Google Scholar; Hamlet, 3.2.4 and 39–40.

34 Arnold, Third Citizen, 38.

35 Henry V, 1 prologue 19; Hamlet, 5.1.251–83.

36 Harbage, Alfred, Shakespeare's Audience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941)Google Scholar, 161.

37 In Henry V, Hal, too, speaks almost a third of the play's lines; Hal has the most lines of any Shakespeare character across several plays.

38 I quote a commendatory poem in the second edition of Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (London, 1632), otherwise known as the Second Folio, A5r.

39 Hamlet, 5.1.150–55. Hamlet's own final reference to his brain not only pluralizes it but also alienates him from it: before “I could make a prologue to my brains,” he says to Horatio, “they had begun the play” (5.2.30–31).