New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains 103230829X, 9781032308296

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New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare

It has been over two decades since the publication of the last major edited collection focused on psychoanalysis and early modern culture. In Shakespeare studies, the New Historicism and cognitive psychology have hindered a dynamic conversation engaging depth-oriented models of the mind from taking place. The essays in New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains  seek to redress this situation, by engaging a broad spectrum of psychoanalytic theory and criticism, from Freud to the present, to read individual plays closely. These essays show how psychoanalytic theory helps us to rethink the plays’ history of performance; their treatment of gender, sexuality, and race; their view of history and trauma; and the ways in which they anticipate contemporary psychodynamic treatment. Far from simply calling for a conventional “return to Freud,” the essays collected here initiate an exciting conversation between Shakespeare studies and psychoanalysis in the hopes of radically transforming both disciplines. It is time to listen, once again, to seething brains. James Newlin is a lecturer at Case Western Reserve University in the Department of English. He is the author of Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Film and Television (University of Alabama Press, 2024). He has also published in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Shakespeare Bulletin, SubStance, and elsewhere. James W. Stone is a lecturer on Shakespeare at American University, at the Osher Institute at Johns Hopkins, and at OLLI at American University. He taught at the American University in Cairo and at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Crossing Gender in Shakespeare: Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Difference Within (Routledge, 2010) and articles on Shakespeare, Milton, the Renaissance Ovid, film theory, and contemporary Egyptian art. His current project is co-editing a collection of essays by British scholars on Shakespeare and psychoanalysis.

Routledge Studies in Shakespeare

Shakespeare and the Grace of Words Language, Theology, Metaphysics Valentin Gerlier Reading Robert Greene Recovering Shakespeare’s Rival Darren Freebury-Jones Shakespearean Spaces in Australian Literary Adaptations for Children and Young Adults Michael Marokakis Reading Shakespeare in Jewish Theological Frameworks Shylock Beyond the Holocaust Caroline Wiesenthal Lion Violent Liminalities in Early Modern Culture Inhabiting Contested Thresholds Kaye McLelland Tombs in Shakespearean Drama Monumental Theater H. Austin Whitver Hermeneutic Shakespeare Min Jiao Pivotal Lines in Shakespeare and Others Finding the Heart of the Play Sidney Homan New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare Cool Reason and Seething Brains Edited by James Newlin and James W. Stone For more information about this series, please visit: https://www​.routledge​ .com​/Routledge​-Studies​-in​-Shakespeare​/book​-series​/RSS

New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare Cool Reason and Seething Brains Edited by James Newlin and James W. Stone

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, James Newlin and James W. Stone; individual chapters, the contributors The right of James Newlin and James W. Stone to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-30829-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-30830-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-30689-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003306894 Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

In memory of Christian A. Smith

Contents

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction

ix xii 1

JAMES NEWLIN AND JAMES W. STONE

PART I

Cryptonomy, Necrology, Ghosts

17

1 “That Dim Monument”: The Fantasy of the Crypt in Romeo and Juliet and Antigone 19 ADAM RZEPKA

2 The Time Is Out of Joint: Hamlet Speaks to the Dead

35

KASEY EVANS

3 “Mine Own, and Not Mine Own”: Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and Early-Modern Psychotheology

52

ANDREW BARNABY

PART II

Festivity and Sacrifice 4 Hamlet’s Nobler Choice: The Interior Game

69 71

RUSSELL J. BODI

5 “Is this a holiday?”: Festivity and Sacrifice in Julius Caesar 87 JAMES W. STONE



viii Contents PART III

History and Trauma

101

6 “All Badged with Blood”: Equivocation as Trauma in Macbeth 103 DEVORI KIMBRO

7 “Crawling between earth and heaven”: Sadomasochism and Subjectivity in Hamlet 116 GABRIEL A. RIEGER

8 The Primal Scene in Pericles: Trauma, Typology, and Mythology

132

ZACKARIAH LONG

PART IV

Gender Trouble

147

9 Phallic Fantasies in The Taming of the Shrew 149 W. REGINALD RAMPONE JR.

10 The Gilded Puddle: Scatology, Race, and Masochism in Antony and Cleopatra 163 DREW DANIEL

11 Staging the Woman in The Tempest and Ex Machina 179 JAMES NEWLIN

PART V

Shakespeare and the Matter of Clinical Practice

195

12 “method in’t”: Hamlet as Analysand

197

NICHOLAS BELLINSON

13 What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Psychological Complexity 215 RICHARD M. WAUGAMAN

14 An Afterword on Apocalypse and Afterwardness

231

VERA J. CAMDEN

Index

245

Notes on Contributors

Andrew Barnaby is Professor of English at the University of Vermont. He is the co-author of Literate Experience: The Work of Knowing in Seventeenth-Century English Writing (Palgrave, 2002) and has published articles on Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Wole Soyinka. His writings on Freud include Coming Too Late: Reflections on Freud and Belatedness (SUNY Press, 2017) and “The Psychoanalytic Origins of Literary Trauma Studies” in Trauma and Literature, edited by J. Roger Kurtz (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Nicholas Bellinson is Tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis. His dissertation discusses patterns in Shakespeare’s use of songs, ranging from their ambiguous involvement in comic resolution to their expression of tragically suppressed female subjectivity. His other research interests include Shakespearean names, artistic expressions of time, features of the lyric mode, and the experience of meter in Greek and Latin poetry. Russell J. Bodi is Professor of English at Owens State Community College, where he also served as Director of Honors. He is the chair of the Ohio Shakespeare Conference, and he is presently at work on a volume of essays on Shakespeare and athleticism. Vera J. Camden is Professor of English at Kent State University, Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center. She is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and She Being Dead Yet Speaketh: The Franklin Family Papers (Iter Press, 2020). She also serves as co-editor of American Imago and American Editor for Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. Drew Daniel is Professor in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of 20 Jazz Funk Greats (Bloomsbury, 2008), The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance (Fordham University Press, 2013), and Joy of the Worm:



x Notes on Contributors Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Kasey Evans is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at Northwestern University. She is the author of Colonial Virtue: The Mobility of Temperance in Renaissance England (University of Toronto Press, 2012). Her current project, Renaissance Resurrections: Making the Dead Speak in Reformation Texts, considers how grief and mourning are translated into new literary forms after the Protestant Reformation. Devori Kimbro is Associate Lecturer in English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where she teaches introductory composition and Honors Humanities seminars. Her work has appeared in Prose Studies, Humanities, Shakespeare, and The Sundial. She is the co-host of the podcast Remixing the Humanities. Her work explores connections between cultural trauma and religious identity in early modern England. Zackariah Long is Associate Professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University. He has published essays in English Literary Renaissance and Journal of Literature and Trauma, as well as in edited collections, including Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), The Shakespearean Death Arts: Hamlet Among the Tombs (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), and The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory (Routledge, 2017). He is currently working on books about Shakespeare and early modern trauma and Hamlet and the Renaissance memory theater. James Newlin is Lecturer at Case Western Reserve University in the Department of English. He is the author of Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Film and Television (University of Alabama Press, 2024). He has also published in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Shakespeare Bulletin, SubStance, and elsewhere. W. Reginald Rampone, Jr., is Associate Professor of English at South Carolina State University. He is author of Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare (Greenwood, 2011) and is the co-editor of Shakespeare’s Global Sonnets: Translation, Appropriation, and Performance, with Jane Kingsley-Smith (Palgrave–Macmillan, 2023). Gabriel A. Rieger is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English literature at Concord University. He is the author of Sex and Satiric Tragedy in Early Modern England: Penetrating Wit (Ashgate, 2009). He has published in Early Modern Literary Studies, Religion and Literature, and elsewhere. Dr. Rieger currently serves as faculty advisor to the Concord University Newman Club and Executive Project Director of the Appalachian Shakespeare Project at Concord University. He resides in

Notes on Contributors  xi Athens, West Virginia, with his wife, the poet K. Irene Rieger, and their two children. Adam Rzepka is Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University, where he teaches early modern literature and critical theory. His research focuses on the soul as a dynamic system in early modern faculty psychology and on the ways in which engagements with this system animated theatrical performance. His current book project examines “experience” as an emergent concept in early modern discourse, and argues for Shakespeare’s theater as a crucial testing ground for its knowledge claims. His work has appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, and is forthcoming in Renaissance Drama and multiple edited volumes. James W. Stone is Lecturer on Shakespeare at American University, at the Osher Institute at Johns Hopkins, and at OLLI at American University. He taught at the American University in Cairo and at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Crossing Gender in Shakespeare: Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Difference Within (Routledge, 2010) and articles on Shakespeare, Milton, the Renaissance Ovid, film theory, and contemporary Egyptian art. His current project is co-editing a collection of essays by British scholars on Shakespeare and psychoanalysis. Richard M. Waugaman, M.D. is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University and Training and Supervising Analyst, Emeritus, at the Washington Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute. Half of his 200 publications are on Shakespeare. He is in the private practice of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in Potomac, MD.

Acknowledgments

This project originated in a series of symposia and seminars, on the shared theme of “New Directions for Shakespeare and Psychoanalytic Studies,” held in 2020 and 2021. The first symposium was held at Case Western Reserve University and was co-sponsored by the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center and the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities. Thank you to Maggie Kaminski and the staff of the Baker-Nord office and to Catherine Sullivan and the staff of the CPC. This event also received support from the English department at CWRU; thank you to Christopher Flint and Latricia Robinson-Allen. The CWRU event was co-organized by the late Christian Smith, and the idea for the event was initiated in Christian’s Shakespeare and psychoanalysis list-serv. A follow-up seminar was held at the Shakespeare Association of America in 2021; most of the chapters presented in this volume originated in this seminar. We wish to thank Karen Raber and the rest of the staff at SAA. The editors also wish to thank Hayley Verdi, Maggie Vinter, Denna Iammarino, Megan Griffin, Laura Evers, and Lance Parkin for their assistance with this project. Richard Waugaman is grateful to the Folger Shakespeare Library for granting him Reader’s privileges since 2002. Vera J. Camden thanks Dr. Valentino Zullo for his editorial assistance. Devori Kimbro thanks the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and the Department of English of UTC for their material and financial support in the composition of this chapter. She also thanks Yan Brailowsky. Nicholas Bellinson thanks Dr. Joel Markowitz for his enormous contributions to his thinking on both psychoanalysis and Shakespeare. Russell J. Bodi wishes to thank Steven Ross, for providing many insights into psychological phenomena and terminology, and J. Heath Huber for providing explanations of fencing rules and an introduction to the allimportant concept of mensur. James Newlin wishes to thank the organizers of the 2021 meeting of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference, where he presented an early version of this argument. Drew Daniel wishes to dedicate his essay to the memory of Janet Adelman. 

Introduction James Newlin and James W. Stone

In the account of differing perspectives that opens the final act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus declares that there are things More strange than true. I never may believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact. (Shakespeare 2017, 5.1.2–8) Theseus identifies madness, sexuality, and poetry as beyond the full grasp of “cool reason.” Each “apprehends” an understanding of the world beyond what can be immediately, empirically “comprehended.” That Theseus effectively conflates mental unrest with sexuality and creativity is of obvious interest to any literary critic drawing upon psychoanalytic models of reading. But, for now, let’s concern ourselves only with Theseus’s model as an account of the poet’s “fine frenzy” (5.1.12). Theseus is effectively describing sublimation, the psychological process described by Freud wherein the unconscious material of the mind is reworked into a productive, often artistic, activity.1 More striking is that, in his own account of sublimation, Theseus uses the same metaphor as Freud. Freud borrows the term from chemistry. Sublimation is the chemical process whereby an object in a solid state transforms into a gaseous one—or, the process that Shakespeare knew as “seething.”2 It is not surprising that Freud’s understanding of the mind or of creative endeavors aligns with Shakespeare’s, since so many of Freud’s concepts were derived from his reading of Shakespeare.3 All the same, the exactness of the parallel here—two accounts of poetic inspiration, both depicting the “boiling” upwards of what is beyond immediate, concrete observation into something wholly other, something poetic, romantic, and strange—strikes us as powerfully uncanny. As Terry Eagleton (1986) once DOI: 10.4324/9781003306894-1

2  James Newlin and James W. Stone joked, “though conclusive evidence is hard to come by, it is difficult to read Shakespeare without feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with” the work of Sigmund Freud and a host of other modern writers (x). This premise is of course not strictly true. But it is so strangely apt that one cannot dismiss it entirely out of hand. Theseus may draw a hard and fast distinction between the “strange” and the “true,” but we suspect that Shakespeare did not. The plays tell us again and again that there is more than cool reason can discern—more than what is in your philosophy, Horatio (Shakespeare 2006, 1.5.165–6).4 There is the true, certainly. But there is also the strange. Psychoanalysis, as a fusion of hermeneutic interpretation and scientific observation,5 is a discipline that concerns itself with measuring the relation between the empirically, observably true and the sometimes covert, abstract, or strange products of seething brains. It is the heir to Shakespeare in this regard (and in so many other regards). Yet in an era fixated on “evidence based” practices, literary studies has grown ever too fixated on the empirically true, at the expense of all that can be learned from remaining attuned to the strange. Shakespeare studies, in particular, has long neglected the insights and methods of psychoanalytic reading, despite the prominence of psychoanalytic models of reading for Shakespeare studies at the end of the last century; despite the extensive dialogue with Shakespeare within psychoanalytic studies; and despite Shakespeare’s own seeming insistence that there is “more” to learn from seething brains than from cool reason alone. We hope that this volume, New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains, will inspire renewed interest in psychoanalytic criticism of the plays and poems of William Shakespeare. The essays in this collection originated in a series of symposia and seminars held in 2020 and 2021, seeking new directions in psychoanalytic readings of Shakespeare. It has been over two decades since the last major edited collection dedicated to psychoanalysis and early modern culture appeared.6 It is time to listen, once again, to seething brains. Since the 1980s, Shakespeare and early modern studies have been dominated by historicist approaches that have, generally, placed less priority on close reading. The rise of the New Historicism occurred at a time when psychoanalysis, in fertile dialogue with feminism and deconstruction, was popular in Shakespeare studies. Stephen Greenblatt’s canonical Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) marked an epochal move away from formalism and New Criticism toward the political, the historical, and the biographical. Non-canonical texts and not traditionally literary discourses from history and politics, religious tracts and sermons, letters and journals, and travel writing informed Greenblatt’s reading of canonical authors like More, Marlowe, Spenser, and Shakespeare. The coiner of the term “New Historicism” effected a similar interplay of non-literary discourse and the literary canon in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) and in subsequent books.7

Introduction  3 In “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” Greenblatt (1986) argues that using psychoanalysis to read early modern texts is anachronistic. The New Historicism regards the constellation of Freud and his patients as a bourgeois world in which oedipal family struggles and the conflictual dynamics of transference are cut off from the broader context of social relations that were binding and foundational in Shakespeare’s time. The circle of Freud and his patients presupposes that “proprietary rights to the self have been secured” (216). In an effort to highlight (or force) the contrast between Freud’s world and the early modern period, Greenblatt adduces historian Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre to illustrate how the self’s lack of proprietary rights led to a dizzying mise en abîme of imposture in a sixteenth-century case study from southwestern France. Davis recounts a court trial that sought to distinguish between the real Martin Guerre and another man who looked and acted just like him. Without belaboring the details, suffice it to say that the imposter—one Arnaud du Tihl—was ultimately revealed and the state put him to death. Many of the motifs in this case seem analogous to those privileged by psychoanalysis, Greenblatt writes, but since psychoanalysis occupies itself with individuals securely in possession of themselves, it cannot offer a cogent explanation for this much earlier case embedded in historical institutions, in which socially constituted laws bound the judge, Jean de Coras, and the principal actors who testified at the trial. A court of law draws its conclusions not by looking inside the accused’s subjective self (as Freud did with his patients on the couch) but by turning to external evidence: to defining marks on the physical body, to traces of clothing, to narrative histories detailing the sight of someone in a given time at a specific place, to property and notarial records, to the accounts of witnesses (including the wife married to both seemingly identical men known as Martin Guerre). Materials, laws, and institutional processes, not an internal psyche, produced the human subject in Renaissance Europe, according to this historicizing account. As for the court of law, so too for the stage: Greenblatt gives several examples of doubling and disguising, identical twins, impersonation, and imposture in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The frictions in the dialectic of the drama eventually resolve themselves in a denouement that distinguishes the genuine original from the factitious and duplicitous double. Greenblatt’s (1986) essay is premised on the assumption that Freud posits a psyche that depends for its integrity on biology and on a distinctly individuated body. The child has a “theoretically prior state of nonalienation” in psychoanalysis, a theory that harbors the “romantic assumption” that “the child is father of the man and that one’s days are bound each to each in biological necessity” (213). Psychoanalysis “seize[s] upon the concept of a ‘natural person’” (221). Over against Hobbes in his Leviathan—a model text for the New Historicism—Freud posits an “authentic person” buried deep in the child’s psyche. But “for Hobbes there is no person, no coherent, enduring identity, beneath the mask” that human agents must wear when

4  James Newlin and James W. Stone bound by the norms of the social contract. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Hobbes, Freud (Greenblatt asserts) “anchor[s] personal identity in an inalienable biological continuity” (222). Our view is that the author of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality—one of the three essays is entitled “Infantile Sexuality”—does not see childhood as a state of Wordsworthian innocence or believe that children are in possession of unproblematic selfidentity, dominated as they are by oral and anal phases even before genital sexuality expresses itself. A biologically centered and determined individual, free of the social, may have been at the core of Freud’s (1953–74) early neurological work and of his project for a scientific psychology (1:281–94), but Freud left biologism and neurology behind fairly early in his career, changing his focus to language: the talking cure, slips of the tongue, revelations elicited through the transference in the spoken exchanges between patient and analyst. Language in Freud serves a similar function to politics and law in Greenblatt and Hobbes, in that it limits the individual’s freedom. In Lacan’s terms, language constitutes the subject as a barred subject, a subject of loss. The subject is subjected; the subject is interpellated (to use Althusser’s word) by the Other. In our view, contrary to Greenblatt’s caricature of the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud does not construe an individual free of the constraints of law and custom. These constraints derive from oedipal repression (a distant analogue to the repressive state in Hobbes); the Freudian laws of the father are as foundational for civilization (and for its malaise or discontents) as are the law courts, the political arenas, or the decrees of the Sovereign. The Superego’s repression of sexual desire is a central concept in psychoanalysis, as intimidatingly formative as the Leviathan. And there is no Superego without the language of the other(s) that instills its prohibitions. Greenblatt’s (1986) portrayal of a psychoanalysis that bases itself upon some bedrock core of biology—biology that escapes the nexus of social construction—is premised on a straw man, a misrepresentation. The New Historicist exhorts us to acknowledge the superiority of Hobbes the political philosopher and of Natalie Zemon Davis the historian over against Freud the psychoanalyst. We are told that one of Hobbes’s chief insights is that if human subjects strip away their socially prescribed roles and masks, they become “a chaos of unformed desire that must be tamed to ensure survival” (222). True enough. But this insight is not something with which Freud would disagree; he and Hobbes are not poles apart about the fundamental role played by law in preventing human life from being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The religious and anthropological speculations that Freud wrote in the latter part of his life extrapolate what was already evident in his five major case studies (from 1905 to 1918). Neither on the societal nor on the familial scale is life possible without the repression of the child’s desire either to kill or to sleep with one of its parents. Earlier still, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud had set forth his theory regarding the fundamental dialectic of repressing desire or failing to do so.

Introduction  5 The evidence for the theory Freud took from his patients’ dreams (the raw material that was made to yield ore after painstaking analysis) and from foundational stories like those of Oedipus and his parents or the family romance surrounding Hamlet. This is not to say that psychoanalysis and historicism are wholly incompatible. As Richard Waugman suggests, in his contribution to this collection, Greenblatt’s famous critique of psychoanalysis in “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture” may not be quite as critical as it has been deemed. Elsewhere in our volume, Gabriel Rieger argues that psychoanalytic models of ego dissolution and fracturing align with Greenblatt’s famous notion of self-fashioning; Devori Kimbro finds points of comparison between the experience of individual, subjective trauma and a broader social experience particular to a given historical moment; and James Newlin argues that psychoanalytic models of reading might help us to resurrect something of the initial early modern experience of Shakespeare’s plays. As Meredith Skura has repeatedly argued, psychoanalysis should not be viewed as being in opposition to the discipline of history since psychoanalysis is itself already a form of history.8 For Shakespeare, too, the distinction between antique fables and antic ones could be a slim one.9 Of course, the general loss of interest in psychoanalytic models of reading in Shakespeare studies does not reflect a general loss of interest in the study of the mind. The “return of theory” in early modern studies promised an engagement with new—better, more “true”—models of cognition.10 In a particularly forceful critique, Sharon O’Dair (2015) calls upon literary theorists to “shed psychoanalysis from their professional interpretative repertoires.” In O’Dair’s telling, “the science of psychology has long since abandoned psychoanalysis” (140). Much as anthropologists “tested the theory [of structural kinship] and found it wanting,” psychologists have rejected psychoanalysis and have since pursued the “better” theories of “cognition, human development, and social psychology” (139). Humanists should follow suit. In fact, numerous studies show that psychoanalytic or psychodynamic treatments are as, or more, effective than cognitive or behavioral ones.11 While practitioners and scholars may believe that they have “relegated [psychoanalysis] to the history of the discipline” (O’Dair 2015, 139), the repressed does have a way of returning. Robert Bornstein (2005) has demonstrated that many of the major concepts in contemporary mainstream accounts of the psyche—particularly those in the disciplines of “human development” and “social psychology”—are effectively psychoanalytic ones by other names. As to the reliability of cognitive and related models, and to whether they are more “true” because they are the result of better and more frequent “testing,” recent scholarship has shown that almost the exact opposite has been the case. Over the past decade, the scientific community has grappled with a “replication crisis,” or, the fallout resulting from the widespread revelation that a huge number of published, experimental

6  James Newlin and James W. Stone results cannot be reproduced. R. Barker Bausell (2021) argues that institutional pressures and other established practices have encouraged scientists not to conduct replication tests, but rather to pursue research projects that will result in new, often radical, claims. As a result, this has led to a situation where “most published research findings are false.”12 This is a problem that has affected many disciplines—from medical science to economics— but it has particularly impacted the field of psychology. A study by the Open Science Collaboration (2015) tested the reproducibility of a representative sample of research published in three major, peer-reviewed journals: Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Over 270 authors contributed to this “large-scale, collaborative effort,” conducting over 100 replications (aac4716–1). The researchers found that only a little more than half of the experiments in cognitive psychology reported in any one of those journals could be replicated. (Studies in social psychology fared even worse, and, overall, only 39% of any of the psychological studies considered could be replicated [aac4716–3].) This is not a call to dismiss all scientific research out of hand. But if the editors of these prestigious journals have such a mixed record of recognizing reliable accounts of the mind, the odds that a humanist-dilettante will have better luck identifying what’s true and what’s not are quite slim. Mark Kaethler (2020), in a review of the last two decades of scholarship on cognition in Shakespeare studies, finds that much of this work results in “scientism”—a “tendency to see anything with a scientific bent as automatically truthful” (e:12571–10n2). And while there have been efforts to apply the scientific method to the study of literature,13 many of the concepts drawn from recent research on the brain invoked in early modern cognitive studies—e.g., “mindreading” and “conceptual blending”—are still theories.14 As Mary Thomas Crane (2001) puts it, in her pioneering study Shakespeare’s Brain, “the current theories of cognitive psychology” merely offer a means for “more informed speculation” about the nature of Shakespeare’s art and the mind that created it (16). Crane’s (2001) volume arguably inaugurated the subfield of cognitive Shakespeare studies. Crane analyzes the material construction of Shakespeare’s works, by intuiting something of the author’s “embodied mind”—i.e., the network of connections between physical, cognitive functions and cultural, discursive structures—from close readings of hyper-specific linguistic features of the plays. If Crane sought to present a “materialist” account of Shakespeare’s brain, much of the work that has followed applies cognitive theory to understanding Shakespeare’s characters—perhaps making this theoretical application even more theoretical still. For Kaethler (2020) and others,15 this brand of character criticism can reflect problematic “assumptions about a normative mind” and human behavior and present them as the stuff of factual, empirical truth (e:12571–2). (For example, Kaethler takes issue with Paul Cefalu’s [2015] portrait of Iago receiving

Introduction  7 treatment from a cognitive behavioral therapist who might place Iago on the autism spectrum [Kaethler 2020, e:12571–6]).16 While psychoanalytic literary criticism has no problem with imagining Hamlet or Shakespeare “on the couch,” at its most insightful, it does so from a position suspicious of scientism’s claim to certainty.17 In turn, psychoanalysis has always sought collaboration with literary studies in order to expand its practitioners’ powers of observation.18 The discipline of psychoanalysis has been accused of reductivism. But as Farhad Dalal (2018) has shown, it is in the “observation” of behavioral models of psychology— where the subject is assessed according to dubious or socially determined criteria,19 gauged according to unreliable scales of degree20—where a patient is reduced to a list of often arbitrary attributes. Psychoanalysis, on the contrary, assumes the individual subject’s “infinite variety” (Shakespeare 2014, 2.2.246). This is where readers of Shakespeare ought to begin as well. Our volume is arranged thematically. And we begin, effectively, at the end. In our first section—“Cryptonomy, Necrology, Ghosts”—Adam Rzepka, Kasey Evans, and Andrew Barnaby examine the way that anxieties about mortality are figured in Shakespeare’s plays and in the literature of psychoanalysis. In his essay, Rzepka links the figure of the crypt in Romeo and Juliet with Antigone’s tomb and with Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham’s revision of Freud’s conception of mourning. Effectively diagnosing the play’s timeless quality, Rzepka reads each of these plays’ entombing spaces as a place where intertwined and paradoxical desires flow with intensity—like any “timeless” experience of fantasy. In her chapter, Evans urges us to rethink one of the most familiar phrases in the Shakespearean corpus. Drawing upon the insights of trauma theory and theoretical historiography, Evans argues that Hamlet’s proclamation that “the time is out of joint” reflects the sense that the Prince is caught in a kind of temporal loop—or spiral—between an experience of engaging with a present, dead spirit and with disavowing that presence. As is the case with many other essays in this volume, Evans opens a productive conversation about the points of connection between historical and psychoanalytical models of thought. Barnaby also turns to Hamlet and to its titular character’s problems. Drawing upon Eric Santner’s notion of “psychotheology,” Barnaby reads Hamlet as an exposition of what it means to live in the shadow of a death that marks a decisive boundary between existence and annihilation. Yet, in a dazzling connection, Barnaby shows that Shakespeare gives Hamlet a “good ending” after all—by working through these same questions in Twelfth Night, a play he likely wrote in the same year. A reading of Hamlet opens the next section of our volume, “Festivity and Sacrifice.” In his essay, “Shakespeare’s Festive Violence: Hamlet’s Interior Game,” Russell J. Bodi draws upon recent work in social facilitation theory, as well as personal interviews with competitive athletes and martial artists, in order to read Hamlet as an athlete. Bodi emphasizes the broader festival atmosphere of the final scene, in order to reconceive Hamlet’s famous

8  James Newlin and James W. Stone introspection, likening it to that of athletes preparing for violent engagement. In his reading of Julius Caesar, James W. Stone considers the festival context of the play. The Lupercalia, where a sacrifice is offered for the purposes of purification, provides the background and prelude for the assassination of Caesar, reflecting both the theological and the psychoanalytic accounts of Caesar’s murder. Murdering the god-king is a necessary sacrifice that ultimately leads to the restoration of fertility. Yet Stone draws upon feminist psychoanalytic models of reading to challenge these familiar interpretations of the play’s festival context. The murder in the Capitol also recalls the Lupercalian ritual of striking women with thongs (februa)— effectively feminizing Caesar. “The psychoanalyst’s question, like the historian’s,” Meredith Skura (1993) notes, “is precisely what past subjects were like” (89). The essays in the next section of our volume (“History and Trauma”) consider the points of intersection between analytical and historicist critical practice. Kimbro considers Macbeth within its specific cultural moment—the fallout of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 and the subsequent execution of its Catholic plotters—to show how the play’s record of cultural trauma is also a model of individual trauma. Kimbro finds that equivocation—the rhetorical practice that allowed Jesuits to avoid incriminating themselves while under oath without lying—leads to a kind of fracturing of the self. In his chapter, Rieger is also concerned with the early modern period’s account of psychic division. Drawing upon Cynthia Marshall’s account of the shattering of the self, Rieger draws a vibrant synthesis between the New Historicist practice, with its focus on self “fashioning,” and psychoanalytic criticism, with its focus on self-dissolution and masochism. Rieger reads Hamlet as a figure who embodies the early modern view that self-dissolution can provide a means of paradoxically constructing subjectivity. In the final chapter in this section, Zackariah Long considers the relation between contemporary psychoanalytic practice and early modern models of historical thought. Drawing upon Ruth Nevo’s bravura reading of Pericles, as well as recent conversations in trauma studies, Long offers a close analysis of the opening scene of Pericles as the play’s “primal scene.” Tracing the opening scene’s resonance throughout the play alongside the play’s many biblical and classical references, Long finds that the discourse of typology provides a useful analogue for our own contemporary, psychoanalytic understanding of the workings of trauma. Many of the most exciting recent conversations in both Shakespeare studies and psychoanalytic literature have concerned identity. The writers in our next section demonstrate the diverse set of approaches that can be applied to accounts of gendered, sexual, and racialized identities. In his chapter, W. Reginald Rampone, Jr. considers the troubled distinction between the symbolic figure of the phallus and the actual, physical penis. In a close reading of The Taming of the Shrew and its contemporary stage history, Rampone argues that it is Petruchio’s tongue that serves the role of that “particularly

Introduction  9 privileged signifier,” the phallus. Yet while Petruchio’s speech may control the symbolizing function of this world, it also demonstrates his own sexual short fallings: his penis can never rise to the status of the phallus. (So to speak.) In his provocative chapter, Drew Daniel considers the social construction of fantasy in Antony and Cleopatra. Daniel focuses on Octavius Caesar’s description of Antony drinking from the “gilded puddle” of horse urine, to show how fantasies of transfer and contagion reflect the surrounding frames of patriarchy and white supremacy. In Daniel’s reading, the passing description of Antony drinking the horse’s “stale” becomes a moment for considering the relation of abjection and waste with the ongoing project of racialized, imperial masculinity. Newlin also considers the role that fantasy plays in constructing our understanding (and assumptions) about identity. Drawing upon recent work in performance history and adaptation studies, Newlin reads Alex Garland’s 2014 science fiction film, Ex Machina, as an unexpectedly faithful adaptation of The Tempest. For Newlin, Ex Machina helps us to understand the way that Shakespeare anticipates Lacan’s diagnoses of the ingrained misogyny in the symbolic order—while also providing a valuable contemporary counterpart to the original staging of Miranda by the Renaissance “boy actress.” We close with the perpetual, unavoidable question of theory’s relation to practice. We hope that our volume is testament to the value of psychoanalytic theory for understanding Shakespeare’s drama and verse. But we also hope that readers—including psychoanalytic practitioners—continue to think about the value of Shakespeare for clinical practice. In his chapter, Nicholas Bellinson turns to that most familiar of literary analysands, Hamlet. Many figures of the Renaissance stage announce their plans or express their character in soliloquy, but Bellinson suggests that only Hamlet uses soliloquy to transform his, in ways that closely resemble the dynamic of the “talking cure.” In this creative, original reading of the play, Bellinson argues that Hamlet is effectively an analysand avant la lettre. It is not only Hamlet’s symptoms that should interest psychoanalysis, but also the form and function of his private speech. Drawing upon his 45 years of experience as a clinical psychoanalyst, Waugaman calls for a renewed focus on Shakespeare’s account of the mind, while warning against “groupthink” in both clinical practice and literary theory. Just as the clinician must acknowledge the individual patient both in light of and apart from the expectations of a given theoretical framework, psychoanalytic literary criticism must demonstrate a more complex application of theory, blended with close study of the uniqueness of each character and text. Finally, in her afterword, Vera Camden considers the thematic and imagistic convergence of the papers in this volume around themes of death, decay, and contagion—and how that may reflect the global pandemic that shadowed the drafting and delivery of these papers. Drawing upon Freud’s analysis of the dream of the burning child (“Father, can’t you see I’m burning?”), Camden

10  James Newlin and James W. Stone confronts the burning question of how Shakespeare and psychoanalysis can guide us through the apocalypses of our wounded world. We certainly hope that readers will not have to wait 20 years to see another edited volume on psychoanalysis and early modern culture! Therefore, we take it that the most exciting part of our book is its prognostic character. There are readings of Freud and Lacan here, to be sure. But we also hear about Nicholas Abraham, Maria Torok, and Eric Santner, and of scholarship in social facilitation theory and on the psychoanalysis of race. Future psychoanalytic readings of Shakespeare should do more to engage the emerging body of scholarship in contemporary psychoanalytic theory. For example, in recent years, Shakespeare studies has been enlivened by a robust conversation about the study of identity, particularly following the many exciting events and publications of the RaceB4Race initiative. We hope that these conversations are usefully complicated by readings of such diverse accounts of identity as Donald Moss’s (2021) controversial conception of “parasitic whiteness”; Farhad Dalal’s (2002) group analysis–oriented account of the processes of racialization; Ranjana Khanna’s (2003) notion of “worlding psychoanalysis,” meaning both the documenting of the colonial origins of psychoanalysis as well as an understanding of psychoanalysis’s value for addressing global strife; Jacqueline Rose’s ongoing work in feminist psychoanalysis; and Patricia Gherovici’s (2017) work on “transgender psychoanalysis.” We believe that psychoanalysis offers a model for praxis in the humanities, as well as one for theory. In his New Introductory Lectures, Freud (1953–74) declared that perhaps the “most important of all the activities of analysis” is its “application to education, to the upbringing of the next generation” (22:146). The model of focused listening prescribed by psychoanalytic practice is much the same as that needed to direct a successful class discussion.21 Every day the Chronicle of Higher Education publishes a new editorial or think-piece on the disconnectedness of the current generation of college students. Psychoanalysis provides a model for engaging students in the classroom, precisely because it begins with an understanding of their resistance and disconnection. Moreover, instructors in literature—particularly those who serve as academic advisors—are on the front line of the student mental health crisis. While there is a real danger in instructors overstepping their bounds and behaving as though they have training in counseling or social work that they lack, the fact remains that working with students experiencing crisis is a central part of our job. Psychoanalysis offers a model for focused, sympathetic listening, and these skills are increasingly necessary for our interactions with students—particularly when the alternatives pushed by university administrators are ineffective, cost-cutting measures emphasizing “wellness” or “mindfulness” or may be automated counseling delivered via a phone app.

Introduction  11 Finally, as the humanities become more and more marginalized within the university, and as the future of the English or Shakespearean classroom becomes less and less clear, we can also turn to the example of Freud and his colleagues. Though the cost and time demands of psychoanalytic treatment can limit its access to the leisure class, this was not the original intention. And, as Elizabeth Danto (2005) has documented, Freud and his followers were committed to providing treatment to underserved communities in free clinics throughout Europe and, as the discipline spread, the world. Shakespeare scholars interested in social justice and outreach may find much to learn from the examples of these clinics, if we hope to bring the study of literature to those who cannot afford to spend $35k a year—the average cost of a year’s worth of college, according to the Education Data Initiative (Hanson 2022). As both a social and a linguistic mode, psychoanalysis intervenes in the world. It attends to the character of people and of literary texts, but even in its examination of literature, psychoanalysis seeks to ameliorate the world and our understanding of the world. The contributors to New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains practice close reading. They read both Shakespearean and psychoanalytic texts with an eye toward understanding how the manifest verbal traces are symptomatic of something not manifest. In doing so, they are true to a long history of psychoanalytic theory and practice, from the earliest history of the psychoanalytic movement to the latest developments in psychology and literary criticism. Shakespeare was foundational and revelatory for Freud, taking on profound significance when he left neurology behind and pushed instead toward allegory, on both the local scale of the patient and his dreams and writ large in myth and literature: Moses, Oedipus, Hamlet, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Goethe. Psychoanalysis is an ally of close reading in seeking out parapraxes, puns, jokes, and what Freud (1953–74) called the antithetical meaning of primal words (11:155–61). Witness in The Interpretation of Dreams the way that Freud relishes multilingual puns, whose unpacking often serves as the hinge through which the psychoanalysis of symptoms yields therapeutic meaning. A primal word carries both one sense and its opposite, like the Latin sacer, which means both “sacred” and “accursed,” or the German unheimlich (uncanny), which means both what is strange, alien and frightening, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the opposing sense, what is most familiar and home-like. Notwithstanding the many differences between close reading and psychoanalysis, the two modes have in common a discourse that revels in paradoxes, aporias, contradictions—antitheses that implode univocal meaning. For Freud, as for more recent psychoanalytic readers of Shakespeare’s texts, divided identity is constituted in and through divisions that are manifested in language. The contributors to these New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare fall into this camp. Their brains seethe with the non-sense, and the sense, of uncanny antitheses.

12  James Newlin and James W. Stone

Notes 1 Freud’s first published comments on sublimation appear in The Three Essays (see, for example, Freud [1953–74, 7:178–9]), though he uses the term as early as 1897, in a letter to Fliess (1:248). See Strachey’s discussion in Freud (7:156n2). See also Valdrè (2014). 2 Schmidt (1971) gives “to boil” as the first definition for “seethe.” Freud’s term also draws upon the concept of the sublime; see Valdrè (2014, 18–19). 3 See Holland (1966, 55–75). Had he lived longer, Christian A. Smith’s next book would have examined Freud’s life-long reading of Shakespeare. In the years before his untimely death, Christian initiated conferences, seminars, and book projects on Shakespeare and new developments in psychoanalysis. He had a keen intellect and was a tireless organizer in Marxist and Freudian approaches to Shakespeare. Christian’s first book was Shakespeare's Influence on Karl Marx: The Shakespearean Roots of Marxism; see Smith (2021). 4 The Romances tend to conclude by withholding the clarification of their fantastic events, conveying the sense that wonder often trumps reason. It is only off-stage, after the play’s staged narrative has concluded, that the characters may “demand and answer” one another (Shakespeare 2010, 5.3.155) and “rectify [their] knowledge” about the “strangeness of this business” (Shakespeare 2011, 5.1.245, 247). 5 See Rudnytsky (2002, especially 207–84). 6 See Mazzio and Trevor (2000a). 7 See Stone (2010, 24–42) for a defense of psychoanalytic formalism over against Greenblatt’s historicizing reading of Twelfth Night. Whereas Greenblatt regards Feste’s reference to the cheveril glove (at the opening of 3.1) that can be turned inside-out as a homology for male and female genitals, Stone sees the inside-outness of the glove as symbolizing the reversibility of words themselves. According to Feste, the glove-like reversibility and slipperiness of words makes wanton the people who use and are subjected to them. 8 See Skura (1993) and (2000). See also Mazzio and Trevor (2000b). 9 Both the second quarto and Folio text use “anticke,” which could signify either “antic” or “antique.” See Chaudhuri’s discussion in Shakespeare (2017, 5.1.3n). 10 The reference is to Cefalu and Reynolds (2011). 11 See the bibliography and comments by Bornstein (2005); in their substantial literature review, Cieri and Esposito (2019) detail many parallels between psychoanalytic accounts of the mind and current work in neuroscience. See Shedler’s (2010) defense of the efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy, as well as his response to his critics in Shedler (2011). 12 See Ioannidis (2005), discussed at length in Baussell (2021, especially 43–48). 13 See the review essays by Ty (2010) and Pechter (2014), both of whom raise valuable questions not only about the applicability of cognitive science to the interpretation of literature, but also about the limits of many of the theories and experimental models—conceptual blending, fMRI technology—regularly cited in cognitive literary studies. 14 See Lyne (2011), for an application of conceptual blending theory to the study of Shakespeare; see Helms (2019) for a study of “mindreading” or “Theory of Mind” (ToM)—the preconscious ability to attribute or recognize another’s mental state—in Shakespeare’s plays. 15 See also Pechter (2014, 211–12). 16 Setting aside Kaethler’s (2020) objection to “Cefalu’s alignment of a stigmatized condition with what is arguably Shakespeare’s most opprobrious villain” (e:12571–6), Cefalu’s (2015) volume is of interest, given its interrogation

Introduction  13 of the assumptions of ToM and its synthesis of cognitive and psychoanalytic approaches. 17 See Jacques Lacan’s (2006) distinctions between the knowledge produced by empirical, scientific observation and “truth” (726–45). 18 See Camden (2022, 4–10). 19 For example, over the course of the last century, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) variously identified homosexuality as a perversion; as a disorder; as normative; and as a disorder again. See Dalal (2018, 55–6). 20 See Dalal’s (2018) blistering critique of the “gloss of objectivity” in CBT and happiness economics (especially 23–4), as well as his critique of the practices of symptom-identification associated with the DSM (52–65). 21 See Felman (1982).

References Bausell, R. Barker. 2021. The Problem with Science: The Reproducibility Crisis and What to Do About It. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bornstein, Robert F. 2005. “Reconnecting Psychoanalysis to Mainstream Psychology: Challenges and Opportunities.” Psychoanalytic Psychology 22 (3): 323–40. Camden, Vera J. 2022. “Introduction: Reading to Recover: Literature and Psychoanalysis.” In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis, edited by Vera J. Camden, 1–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cefalu, Paul. 2015. Tragic Cognition in Shakespeare’s “Othello” Beyond the Neural Sublime. New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. Cefalu, Paul, and Bryan Reynolds, eds. 2011. The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cieri, Filippo, and Roberto Esposito. 2019. “Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: The Bridge between Mind and Brain.” Frontiers in Psychology 10: 1983. Crane, Mary Thomas. 2001. Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dalal, Farhad. 2002. Race, Colour, and the Processes of Racialization: New Perspectives from Group Analysis, Psychoanalysis, and Sociology. Hove: Brunner-Routledge. ———. 2018. CBT: The Cognitive Behavioral Tsunami: Managerialism, Politics, and the Corruptions of Science. Abingdon: Routledge. Danto, Elizabeth Ann. 2005. Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis & Social Justice, 1918–1938. New York: Columbia University Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1986. William Shakespeare. Oxford: Blackwell. Felman, Shoshana. 1982. “Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable.” Yale French Studies 63: 21–44. Freud, Sigmund. 1953–74. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated and edited by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud. 24 vols. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Gherovici, Patricia. 2017. Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference. London: Routledge. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1980. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

14  James Newlin and James W. Stone ———. 1986. “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture.” In Literary Theory/ Renaissance Texts, edited by Patricia Parker, and David Quint, 210–24. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hanson, Melanie. 2022. “Average Cost of College & Tuition.” Education Data Initiative, October 24, 2022. https://educationdata​.org​/average​-cost​-of​-college. Helms, Nicholas R. 2019. Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Holland, Norman N. 1966. Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare. New York: McGrawHill Book Company. Ioannidis, J. P. A. 2005. “Why Most Published Research Findings are False.” PLoS Medicine 2 (8): e124. Kaethler, Mark. 2020. “Shakespeare and Cognition: Scientism, Theory, and 4E.” Literature Compass 17: e12571. Khanna, Ranjana. 2003. Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 2006. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Lyne, Raphael. 2011. Shakespeare, Rhetoric, and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mazzio, Carla, and Douglas Trevor, eds. 2000a. Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge. ———. 2000b. “Dreams of History: An Introduction.” In Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, edited by Carla Mazzio, and Douglas Trevor, 1–18. New York: Routledge. Moss, Donald. 2021. “On Having Whiteness.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 69 (2): 355–71. O’Dair, Sharon. 2015. “Cursing the Queer Family: Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis, and My Own Private Idaho.” In Shakespearean Echoes, edited by Adam Hansen, and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., 130–41. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Open Science Collaboration. 2015. “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science.” Science 349 (6251): aac4716. Pechter, Edward. 2014. “Character Criticism, the Cognitive Turn, and the Problem of Shakespeare Studies.” Shakespeare Studies 42: 196–228. Rudnytsky, Peter L. 2002. Reading Psychoanalysis: Freud, Rank, Ferenczi, Groddeck. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Schmidt, Alexander. 1971. Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary: A Complete Dictionary of All the English Words, Phrases, and Constructions in the Works of the Poet. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Shakespeare, William. 2006. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson, and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2010. The Winter’s Tale. Edited by John Pitcher. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2011. The Tempest. Edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan, and Alden T. Vaughan. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, rev. ed. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2014. Antony and Cleopatra. Edited by John Wilders. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2017. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. New York: Bloomsbury.

Introduction  15 Shedler, Jonathan. 2010. “The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy.” American Psychologist 65 (2): 98–109. ———. 2011. “Science or Ideology?” American Psychologist 66 (2): 152–4. Skura, Meredith Anne. 1993. “Understanding the Living and Talking to the Dead: The Historicity of Psychoanalysis.” Modern Language Quarterly 54 (1): 77–89. ———. 2000. “Early Modern Subjectivity and the Place of Psychoanalysis in Cultural Analysis: The Case of Richard Norwood.” In Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, edited by Peter Brooks, and Alex Woloch, 211–21. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, Christian A. 2021. Shakespeare's Influence on Karl Marx: The Shakespearean Roots of Marxism. New York and London: Routledge. Stone, James W. 2010. Crossing Gender in Shakespeare: Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Difference Within. London and New York: Routledge. Ty, Michelle. 2010. “On the Cognitive Turn in Literary Studies.” Qui Parle 19, no. (1) (Fall–Winter): 205–19. Valdrè, Rossella. 2014. On Sublimation: A Path to the Destiny of Desire, Theory, and Treatment. Translated by Flora Capostagno and Caroline Williamson. London: Karnac Books.

Part I

Cryptonomy, Necrology, Ghosts



1

“That Dim Monument” The Fantasy of the Crypt in Romeo and Juliet and Antigone Adam Rzepka

Romeo and Juliet’s action rushes headlong through a curiously suspended temporality. At the start, the Chorus reassures us of the tragic deaths we know will occur at the end, and the events of the play itself become a kind of recollection of how they come about. In this sense, the Prologue anticipates the familiarity with the basic plot of the play that nearly all audiences have today; that many would have had by the time of the 1597 quarto, which announces that the play has “been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely” (Shakespeare 1597);1 and that at least some would have had at its first performance, if they knew the story from Arthur Brooke’s Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet or William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (or any of the preceding continental versions of the tale).2 Shakespeare seems to have accelerated the story’s pace in those sources with an eye to fixing it in a more memorable form, effecting, in Bruce Young’s (2014) words, a “contraction and dislocation of time” (181). Of course, other plays with prologues or familiar sources make some dramatic use of what Johannes Birringer (1984), discussing Doctor Faustus, describes as “the paradoxical simultaneity of pre-determination and assumed performatory ‘freedom,’” and each new performance of any enduring tragedy has either to overcome or to accommodate the faint background of its protagonists’ many previous deaths (63). All tragic theater has, in this regard, an uncanny aspect, in Freud’s sense of the unheimlich as the return of the repressed. No other early modern tragedy, however, is so thoroughly conditioned by “paradoxical simultaneity” as Romeo and Juliet, to the extent that its uncanny sense of tragic fate functions as a kind of Nachträglichkeit, weaving its unending future iterability back into its characters and its poetry. As I have argued elsewhere (Rzepka 2017), both Romeo and Juliet seem to be haunted by an intimation that they are not just fated to die young but, as Mercutio puts it, “already dead” (Shakespeare 2016a, 10.11)—their anticipation of a violent end is figured as a dim recollection that they have met it before.3 The play winks relentlessly at this idea, from Mercutio’s quip to Friar Laurence’s suggestion that Romeo has hauled Juliet out of “a grave” DOI: 10.4324/9781003306894-3

20  Adam Rzepka (9.83) to Juliet’s view, from the balcony, of Romeo “as one dead in the bottom of the tomb” (17.56) to Romeo’s “strange dream that gives a dead man leave to think” (22.7). By casting its protagonists’ fate as so familiar that they themselves seem to be recalling it, Romeo and Juliet takes account of its own unparalleled success—its timelessness—through a theatrical version of the self-reflexive claims to eternal literary reanimation in poems like Sonnet 18 (“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” [Shakespeare 2016b, 13–14]). On this view, the play is purpose-built for the Freudian “compulsion to repeat” with which John Channing Briggs (2009) finds it to infect its audiences—the drive “to witness and undergo the delights and rigors of Romeo and Juliet again and again (295).4 My argument here will be that the repetition compulsion that Briggs identifies is driven by the construction of a fantasy space in which desire is sealed off from time: “that dim monument,” the Capulet tomb. At the heart of what makes the play appear unusually “timeless” in its reflexive, metatheatrical account of fate and in its unwavering drive to remain on the stage is the perpetually renewed scene of death and desire, less like a static emblem than a looping gif, encrypted within it. To account for the function of this encrypted fantasy, or fantasy of encryption, I will take up a post-Freudian intervention by the psychoanalysts Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham. In essays published between 1968 and 1973, Abraham and Torok (1994) elaborate a theory of the “illness of mourning” (Freud’s “melancholia”) “that results from those losses which cannot be acknowledged as such” (130). In the semiconscious fantasy life of the subject, they report, this inability to complete the work of mourning occasions the construction of a “psychic tomb” in which the lost object of desire remains locked away, alive, forever. This is a crystallization, at the level of fantasy, of the various forms of repetition compulsion and recursive time that condition Romeo and Juliet. As in the play, timeless desire finds a fundamental figure and central point of reference in the crypt. Torok and Abraham’s work will also throw into sharp relief a second, much earlier dramatic crypt: Antigone’s “tomb, my bridal bed” (Sophocles 1982, 978), to which she is condemned to be “a living soul within the grave” (1187).5 In overlaying these two crypts on a shared psychoanalytic template, I will not be making new claims for Shakespeare’s knowledge of Sophocles, but I will suggest a new way to think about this insistent echo in the absence of decisive evidence for influence. Specifically, I am interested in the ways in which fantasy, particularly in its relationship to the drives, can seem to resist or elude personal and social history—the ways in which fantasies function as “timeless” figures and figures of timelessness.6 Romeo and Juliet foregrounds Romeo’s melancholy at the start of the play, and it is conventionally understood as a setup in the form of an ailment that Juliet will cure. After all, we never meet or even hear much about Rosaline, the ostensible cause of Romeo’s sadness, and the primary symptoms of that sadness set out early in the play (its rejection of social ties, its

“That Dim Monument”  21 resistance to expression) seem to dissipate when the lovers meet. Yet this melancholy is tightly bound in its topology to the specter of the Capulet monument that begins to loom over the play the moment that Rosaline is forgotten. Although the crypt, as such, arrives with Juliet, Romeo and Juliet’s experiments with both time and encryption begin with Romeo alone. More precisely, they begin before we even meet Romeo, with the twin reports about him given by Benvolio and then Montague. Asked by Lady Montague “saw you him today?” Benvolio replies: Madam, an hour before the worshipped sun Peered forth the golden window of the east, A troubled mind drive me to walk abroad, Where underneath the grove of sycamore That westward rooteth from this city side, So early walking did I see your son. Towards him I made, but he was ‘ware of me, And stole into the covert of the wood. (Shakespeare 2016a, 2.105–12) The space-time that the melancholic Romeo inhabits is shuffled in a number of ways here, most immediately through the undecidable question of whether Benvolio has, in fact, seen Romeo “today.” The opening two lines of his reply luxuriate in a Homeric dawn whose presence is difficult to explain if we catch the “hour before” before it. Benvolio is talking about the dark of night or, at most, the earliest pre-dawn murk, in terms of classical brilliance. The attendant problem of visibility is compounded by Romeo’s retreat: Benvolio spots him already “underneath” a grove, from which he retreats into the “covert of the wood” that he is already in. Montague’s concurring speech recasts these successive enclosures as a kind of entombment, while pointedly reiterating Benvolio’s ambiguity about time and, specifically, daylight. Romeo has often been spotted in the grove at the pre-dawn hour, he says, But all so soon as the all-cheering sun Should in the farthest east begin to draw The shady curtains from Aurora’s bed, Away from light steals home my heavy son And private in his chamber pens himself, Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out, And makes himself an artificial night. (2.121–27) The Homeric epithet for dawn is more pronounced this time, but again Romeo is never quite illuminated by it. Both Benvolio and Montague tell us that Romeo’s melancholy is defined not so much by a dark seclusion from

22  Adam Rzepka daily life as by a perpetually incomplete flight from the moment when light and time reanimate the world. The night in which Romeo is shut up in the private chamber of his melancholia is emphatically “artificial,” while his flight from Benvolio takes him to a “covert” within a “grove” just outside the city walls. The impression is that Romeo’s melancholy is like a hall of mirrors, or a set of Matryoshka dolls: every externality concealing an internality is itself concealed, establishing a proliferative logic of morbid enclosure.7 Once Romeo meets Juliet, these chambers of artificial night, with lived time pressing on their green canopies and shuttered windows, take a definitive form, coalescing from the grove and chamber into a tomb. After their night together in Juliet’s chamber, in another ambiguous dawn when the Nurse reports that “the day is broke” and Juliet insists that “yon light is not daylight,” Juliet has her “ill-divining” vision of Romeo “As one dead in the bottom of a tomb” (Shakespeare 2016a, 17.40, 17.12, 17.54–56). As in the previous balcony scene, the lovers are looking for a way out of time through what Garrett Sullivan (2005) describes as “erotic self-forgetting” (18). In that earlier scene, they agreed on a time to meet the next day (“the hour of nine”) and then immediately lodged in a timeless present: Juliet: I have forgot why I did call thee back. Romeo: Let me stand here till thou remember it. Juliet: I shall forget, to have thee still stand there,   Rememb’ring how I love thy company. Romeo: And I’ll still stay, to have thee still forget,   Forgetting any other home but this. (Shakespeare 2016a, 8.211–18) When Juliet sees Romeo as if he were entombed in the second balcony scene, she has just explained how time will slow inexorably down the moment he leaves: “I must hear from thee every day in the hour, for in a minute there are many days: / O by this count I shall be much in years, / Ere I again behold my Romeo” (17.44–47). Both arrests of time are playful, but this second one is ruefully so, as Juliet imagines growing old in the hours that Romeo is away. Ten lines later, she sees him as already dead, deep in the tomb, just where she will, in fact, see him next. I will come in a moment to Juliet’s two more extensive visions of the crypt, but already here, while the lovers still hope for a life together, the blurry sequestrations of Romeo’s melancholy—that “misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms” (2.166)—have resolved into the figure of the crypt. There is a similar relationship between Freud’s foundational paper on “Mourning and Melancholia,” which sees melancholy as introjective in a general sense, and Torok and Abraham’s work, which discovers its specifically cryptic form; as with Romeo in Act 1, the crypt isn’t fully visible yet, but it’s already there. Freud’s (1953–74) essay understands melancholia as

“That Dim Monument”  23 “something more than normal mourning.” The two processes both react to the loss of a loved object, but melancholia is much more complex. The actual loss of the object isn’t a necessary condition for melancholia: “experiences that involved the threat of losing the object” are enough. This means that melancholia consists of “countless separate struggles” rather than a linear working-through of a single loss (14:256). Crucially, it also means that melancholy is open-ended, without a clear resolution—it “behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies … from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished” (14:253). What is sometimes missed in this account of melancholia as “pathological mourning,” however, is its basis in a strangely redoubled form of introjection that encloses the ego within the darkness of a lost object that has itself been enclosed within the ego. The melancholic reaction to loss, Freud writes: was not the normal one of a withdrawal of the libido from this object, and a displacement of it on to a new one, but something different … the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, it … served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego. (14:249) This model speaks directly to Romeo’s case not only in the intractability of his sadness but also in its reverberating interiority. He is not just mourning the loss of Rosaline; he has enclosed that loss within himself, and himself within that loss, his own “despisèd life closed in my breast” (Shakespeare 2016a, 5.111). This self-introjection is echoed everywhere in his external enclosure in the suspended time of shadowed groves and darkened chambers. Psychoanalytic theories of melancholia after Freud echo Romeo and Juliet in gradually fixing these introjections in the form of a timeless selfentombment. Abraham and Torok (1994), following both Freud and Melanie Klein, take up the idea of melancholy as pathologically introjective mourning and extend it to a description of a fantasy structure that they call “incorporation,” in which the lost love object is not introjected but perpetually preserved in an internal “tomb” or “crypt” of which the melancholic is only dimly aware (or not aware at all): Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject. Reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes, and affects, the objectal correlative of loss is buried alive in the crypt as a full-fledged person, complete with its own topography. (130) This is meant to be more phenomenological (Abraham’s term is “transphenomenological”) than might at first be apparent.8 Incorporation is an

24  Adam Rzepka “antimetaphor,” and Abraham and Torok emphasize that it is, for the subject, very much like having an actual, “topographical” lost loved one locked away inside an internal crypt, even though the subject is not fully conscious of its existence. This is why incorporation is not introjection but the “truncated or deformed” fantasy that results from failed introjection. “Introjection,” Abraham and Torok write, is a “process,” while “incorporation denotes a fantasy” (125). Again, though, the lost object is not “living in a crypt” alone—the subject herself is encrypted with it. The original mechanism of introjective identification theorized by Freud is still very much at work for Torok and Abraham, who describe it as “an imaginary and covert identification, a crypto-fantasy that, being untellable, cannot be shown in the light of day … The mechanism consists of exchanging one’s own identity for a fantasmatic identification with the ‘life’—beyond the grave—of an object of love” (141). Juliet’s entombment of Romeo in scene 17 gives way, in the next scene, to the first of two vivid fantasies in which she herself is entombed. The first directly precedes the Friar’s explanation of his plan, so that Juliet does not yet know that one of the possible extremes she imagines will be realized when she pleads, O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris, From the battlements of any tower, Or walk in thievish ways, or bid me lurk Where serpents are. Chain me with roaring bears, Or hide me nightly in a charnel house, O’ercovered quite with dead men’s rattling bones, With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls. Or bid me go into a new-made grave And hide me with a dead man in his shroud … I will do it without fear or doubt, To live an unstained wife to my sweet love. (Shakespeare 2016a, 18.77–88) The dialectic of desire and disgust in this vision of live burial shapes a viscerally evocative yet paradoxical scene. Juliet remains “unstained” by virtue of her body’s immersion in foul decay, and that chastity in turn serves a “sweet love” that the audience knows is already carnal. This transgressive purity reflects a key element of Torok and Abraham’s account of incorporation. What causes mourning to become melancholia and then incorporation—what occasions the construction of the crypt—is not just the loss of the loved object but, more specifically, “a loss that occurred before the desires concerning the object might have been freed from a state of conflict” (Abraham and Torok 1994, 113). The psychic crypt thus contains the lost love, a projection of the subject, and a compressed, idealized fantasy of the scene of unresolved desire, which Abraham and Torok refer

“That Dim Monument”  25 to as the “idyll” or the “idyllic moment” (141). Romeo and Juliet further develops this idea that the scene of self-encryption is at once purified and passionate in its alignment of the Capulet tomb with a marriage bed. The notion occurs to Juliet in her demand to her mother to delay her marriage to Paris or else “make the bridal bed / In that dim monument where Tybalt lies” (Shakespeare 2016a, 17.200–01), and it is likely that Juliet’s bed was staged, in early productions, in a discovery space that actually doubled as the tomb in which Romeo later finds her.9 Of course, the figure of lovers united in death was commonplace in the period, as was the practice of joint burial. As Ramie Targoff (2012) has shown, however, Shakespeare erases from his sources for the play any sense that the lovers will be reunited in the afterlife, suggesting instead that their fate can go no further than “posthumous intimacy in the tomb” (24). Romeo thinks in terms of this morbid intimacy when he discovers Juliet. Noting that she still appears alive in death, he wonders whether death itself might keep her alive out of desire: “Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe / That unsubstantial death is amorous, / And that the lean abhorred monster keeps / Thee here in dark to be his paramour?” (Shakespeare 2016a, 24.102–05). Antigone is, even more insistent on the union of Antigone’s live entombment with her marriage bed, though this has tended to be of less interest to psychoanalytic readings of the play than the defiance for which that entombment is the punishment. As the Chorus watches Antigone brought in just after her sentencing, it sees her “make her way / to the bridal vault where all are laid to rest” (Sophocles 1982, 898–99). As she is then led off, Antigone returns to the image, beginning her parting speeches with “O tomb, my bridal bed” (978); once she has gone, the Chorus compares her to Danaë, who “traded / the light of day for the bolted brazen vault— / buried within her tomb, her bridal-chamber” (1037–40). And then there is the Messenger’s lurid report of what Creon’s forces find when they return to open “that rocky vault of hers, / the hollow, empty bed of the bride of Death” and “unhallowed wedding-chamber”: there in the deepest, dark recesses of the tomb we found her … hanged by the neck in a fine linen noose, strangled in her veils—and the boy, his arms flung around her waist, clinging to her, wailing for his bride, dead and down below, for his father’s crimes and the bed of his marriage blighted by misfortune. … and then, doomed, desperate with himself, suddenly leaning his full weight on the blade, he buried it in his body, halfway to the hilt. And still in his senses, pouring his arms around her,

26  Adam Rzepka he embraced the girl and breathing hard, released a quick rush of blood, bright red on her cheek glistening white. And there he lies, body enfolding body … he has won his bride at last, poor boy, not here but in the houses of the dead. (1327–71) As in Romeo and Juliet, the climax of the tragedy is an “unhallowed” marriage of sex and death in a tomb where both lovers are, in turn, “still in [their] senses.” The Messenger’s report in Antigone is much more explicitly (even gleefully) sexual than Romeo’s passing fancy that “unsubstantial death is amorous,” but its account of a thrusting, panting, spurting death amplifies the same punning logic of his last words as he embraces Juliet: “Thus with a kiss I die” (Shakespeare 2016a, 24.120). The amplification of sexualized violence in Antigone’s version of the climactic scene of desire suggests that the erotic transgression encrypted in the “idyll” is much more dire than Abraham and Torok’s initial description of “desires” in “a state of conflict” makes apparent. In a singly authored essay in The Shell and the Kernal, Torok clarifies its stakes in her summary of the “clinical facts” of encryption in her patients: The illness of mourning [i.e., melancholia] does not result, as might appear, from the affliction caused by the objectal loss itself, but rather from the feeling of an irreparable crime: the crime of having been overcome with desire, of having been surprised by an overflow of libido at the least appropriate moment. (Abraham and Torok 1994, 110) When Juliet imagines herself perfectly preserved for Romeo in the “charnel house,” she encrypts an erotic love that has rent the fabric of her world. The fantasy of a timeless desire—its exclusion from living history— is inseparable from the sense that it constitutes an “irreparable crime.” This fundamental violation of the social and symbolic order, more than anything else, is what has made Antigone timeless for psychoanalytic theory, particularly through Lacan’s (1997b) sustained attention to the play, which for him “reveal[s] to us the line of sight that defines desire” itself (247). In his 1959–60 seminar, Lacan modifies the Hegelian understanding of Antigone’s crime as a fundamentally sociohistorical disruption, recasting it as a fundamentally symbolic one.10 Antigone becomes the essential figure for the unaccountable persistence of the symbolic order in the face of civic law—a clash that ultimately drives her beyond the symbolic order itself as, Lacan says, she “push[es] to the limit the realization of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such” (1997b, 282).

“That Dim Monument”  27 Lacan understands Antigone’s live entombment to capture her place “between two deaths” (symbolic and actual), but he does not spend much time considering the strangeness of its topology in a play where everything depends on burial in the earth. Asked by the leader of the Chorus, “Antigone—what sort of death do you have in mind for her?” Creon replies: I will take her down some wild, desolate path never trod by men, and wall her up alive in a rocky vault, and set out short rations, just the measure that piety demands to keep the entire city free of defilement. There let her pray to the one god she worships: Death—who knows?—may just reprieve her from death. (Sophocles 1982, 870–78) This is such a particular, unwieldy punishment that it is hard to account for in dramatic terms. Creon’s justification is that Antigone worships death, but surely the neater punishment for this is simply death, not spending time with death, in a living tomb, with the possibility that death will, like the death that Romeo imagines preserving Juliet in her crypt, keep her alive. Antigone at first looks for precedents for this fate—“think of Niobe—well I know her story— / think what a living death she died” (915–16)—but the Chorus quickly corrects her, noting that Niobe “was a god, born of gods” (925) and throwing Antigone back onto the singularity of her punishment: “I go to my rockbound prison, strange new tomb— / always a stranger, O dear god, I have no home on earth and none below, / not with the living, not with the breathless dead” (939–42). Ultimately, Antigone’s live entombment will prove not just strange but exactly the kind of “defilement” of the city that Creon hopes to avoid by keeping her indefinitely alive with “short rations.” The Chorus anticipates this, binding its recognition that Antigone “went too far, the last limits of daring” to the recognition that her punishment pushes past the limits of divine order by sending her “down / to the halls of Death alive and breathing” (Sophocles 1982, 943, 913–14). Tiresias finally persuades Creon that he has gone too far: you have thrust to the world below a child sprung for the world above, ruthlessly lodged a living soul within the grave— then you’ve robbed the gods below the earth, keeping a dead body here in the bright air, unburied, unsung, unhallowed by the rites. (1185–90) Antigone’s live burial is the exact inversion of Polyneices’ exhumation, and it is just as much a crime against the gods. The living soul in the darkened

28  Adam Rzepka tomb must be returned to the “bright air” and the dead body to the darkness “below the earth,” and this must be done urgently: “The day comes soon,” Tiresias continues, “no long test of time, not now / when the mourning cries for men and women break / throughout your halls,” threatening “cities in tumult” (1199–1202). The Chorus leader urges Creon to exhume Antigone “quickly”—“Now,” Creon replies, “I’m on my way!” (1232). Friar Laurence feels the same urgency—the same pressure of time on the crypt—on learning that the letter informing Romeo of Juliet’s living death has not been delivered; sending Friar John to bring “an iron crow … straight / Unto my cell,” he notes that “Within three hours will fair Juliet wake … / Poor living corse, closed in a dead man’s tomb!” (Shakespeare 2016a, 23.21–29). Yet what being entombed alive and alone is actually like is never shown to us, either in Romeo and Juliet or in Antigone. In Romeo and Juliet, we are instead given vividly emblazoned fantasies of this experience, like Juliet’s picture of the charnel house, or, later, her much more extended vision of waking up alone in the crypt: How if, when I am laid into the tomb, I wake before the time that Romeo Come to redeem me? ... O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught, Environèd with all these hideous fears, And madly play with my forefathers’ joints, And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud, And, in this rage, with some great kinsman’s bone, As with a club, dash out my desp’rate brains? (Shakespeare 2016a, 20.29–53) This soliloquy veers off from Juliet’s earlier intimations of the “ancient receptacle” (20.38) not only because those intimations are now a looming reality but also because the space and time of the tomb have been altered to allow for feeling—for sensation rather than preservation. What terrifies Juliet in this new vision is the realization that there is a world inside the crypt in which time might still go on. The contrast between the filth of decay and the idyllic purity preserved within it has given way here to an active violation as the crypt opens into time and action. Juliet’s once silent, hidden, chaste body is now “Environed” in awful interaction with the remains around her, and these remains are themselves now subject to violation. This shroud is not some hypothetical “dead man’s” but specifically Tybalt’s, and the bones are not anonymous but those of Juliet’s “forefathers” (20.50), her “ancestors” who have lain here “this many hundred years” (20.39–40). As in Antigone, there is a sacrilegious cast to the transgression of a “living soul” into the sanctified space of the tomb. Again, what the crypt contains

“That Dim Monument”  29 is not exactly the memory of a lost love but the scene of a “crime” of desire that cannot be assimilated to the narrative time of memory. Why is this particular kind of crypt the orienting fantasy for these tragic protagonists, who seem so driven at every point toward their fate? Romeo, and then Juliet, certainly live this way, so bound up from the first words of their play with a sense that they are “already dead” that Romeo seeks out proxy tombs and Juliet is plagued by fantasies of the real one. Antigone seems no less unswervingly driven, and psychoanalytic readings have been consistently interested in her as a figure not only of symbolic rupture but also of the ineluctable force of the Freudian drives as they pour out of that rupture. The Chorus recognizes this fundamental implacability in Antigone: “Your own blind will, your passion has destroyed you,” it tells her, so that its later characterization of “the power of fate” as “a wonder, / dark, terrible wonder” immune to any human force seems to describe Antigone herself (Sophocles 1982, 962, 1045–50). For Lacan (1997b), this drive is the death drive, embodied in Antigone not because, as Creon mistakenly thinks, she “worships: / Death,” but because she appears to be motivated by laws that are beyond or prior to human codification. “This then,” Lacan says, “is how the enigma of Antigone is presented to us: she is inhuman”; and “What does it mean that Antigone goes beyond the limits of the human? What does it mean if not that her desire aims at the following—the beyond of Atè?” (263). Žižek (1992) has made this alignment of Antigone with the drives a centerpiece of Lacanian interpretation, starting most significantly with his reading of her, in Looking Awry, alongside contemporary works like The Terminator, The Night of the Living Dead, and Pet Sematary. Because Antigone inhabits “the domain between two deaths, between her symbolic and her actual death,” she presents an “insistence on a certain unconditional demand on which she is not prepared to give way.” The return of the dead—the failure to be successfully buried and mourned—“is a sign of a disturbance in the symbolic rite, in the process of symbolization,” and the undead are therefore motivated by drive rather than desire, which remains thoroughly bound up in the symbolic order. Like the Terminator, Antigone is “the embodiment of drive, devoid of desire” (21–22). Žižek will later complicate this picture by attending to the role of fantasy in it, in line with Lacan’s division of the three fundamental “orders” or “registers” of psychoanalysis: the symbolic, with which we can crudely align desire; the real, from which the drives appear to come; and the imaginary, which is the domain of fantasy.11 In The Plague of Fantasies, Žižek (1996) writes that “fantasy is the very screen that separates desire from drive” (32). Fantasy, in other words, is a compromise, in the form of a fixed image, between the drives, in their meaninglessness and ahistoricity, and the stories we tell ourselves about the vagaries of desire—the notion of “starcrossed lovers” captures this compromise perfectly. The corollary effect of this function of fantasy in relation to drive is that desire appears as if it were fixed in a single scene that remains somehow changeless, constantly

30  Adam Rzepka buffeted (even violated) by social and historical time yet perpetually frozen, or looped. The crypt is the dominant fantasy in Romeo and Juliet for this reason: the “compulsion to repeat” the play—to return to it as if it were timeless—is figured in the topology of the lovers’ fate. Romeo’s melancholia is not Freud’s but rather Torok and Abraham’s: it does not fail to deal with a loss so much as seek a timeless enclosure in which to rehearse it, endlessly and irresistibly. Nothing quite works as this fantasy space until Juliet provides Romeo with the “palace of dim night” in which they will continually restage their “dateless bargain to engrossing death” (Shakespeare 2016a, 14.115). It may be apparent that the ahistorical force of this cryptophoric fantasy extends beyond the plays I’ve considered here and into my argument itself, and I’d like to close with a suggestion that this may have something to do with the uneasy place of fantasy in literary historiography. My claims in this essay fall short of a linear narrative of influence in two ways: first, by suggesting that Romeo and Juliet was written to take account of its future success in an unending series of performances, so that the play’s protagonists seem to be acting in a kind of Nachträglichkeit; and, second, by suggesting that Antigone’s living death in her “unhallowed wedding-chamber” prefigures Romeo and Juliet’s living deaths in the “bridal bed / In that dim monument” of the Capulet crypt. Neither claim is impossible, or even unlikely, but neither has a firm historical basis—both rely on uncanny returns rather than established causal chains. The uncanny insistence of the crypt through these gaps and inversions in history speaks to a long antagonism between psychoanalytic and newhistorical methodologies in early modern studies. The locus classicus of the conflict is Stephen Greenblatt’s (1990) assertion of psychoanalytic interpretation’s “belatedness” in “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture” (142). The leading and most conciliatory answer to this assertion is clearly expressed by Carla Mazzio and Trevor Douglas in their introduction to Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture (2000): “Psychoanalysis really is history: a method of interpretation organized around generating narratives of the past” (1). Because they are characterized by their interminable resistance to change, neither fantasy nor drive fits easily with this idea that psychoanalysis is always-already historiographical, and their resistance is perhaps most pronounced in the fantasy of living death, where fantasy and drive are most closely fused. In Žižek’s (1989) formulation, “The place ‘between two deaths’” marks the “empty place” that “the process of historicization implies”—“a non-historical kernel around which the symbolic network is articulated” (135). The question of whether there really are cultural formations that persevere in fundamentally unchanged forms across history is probably undecidable; the more interesting question, for Žižek, would be how our valuations of historical contingency take shape, again and again, around the strange attractor of this apparent perseverance. Transhistoricism may itself be a fantasy, but, if it is, it is a transhistorical one.

“That Dim Monument”  31 Both fantasy and drive also seem to resist an even more essential principle of psychoanalytic interpretation than its historicism: the primacy of language. A tension between the symbolic and the imaginary, and, at the level of metapsychology, between signification and topology, has long been one of the animating dilemmas of psychoanalytic theory. Lacan, who tended to marginalize the imaginary in favor of the symbolic, refused the topological understanding of introjection, because for him what introjection introjects is a signifier, not an object or a scene.12 On a strictly Lacanian view, Torok and Abraham misrecognize a symbolic pathology as a fantastical one, and the topology of the crypt that consumes Romeo and Juliet is better understood as a problem of signification—not a spatial crypt but an encrypted network of meaning. Abraham and Torok are acutely aware of this tension and, by the first publication of The Wolf Man’s Magic Word in 1971, the crypt is firmly understood as a “verbarium” to be made visible by a “cryptonomy”—a fantasy constructed out of preserved scraps of language, which, taken on their own, have become unintelligible. Derrida (1986), in an essay that served as a foreword to Torok and Abraham’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, elaborates this ambivalent position of the crypt between erased meaning and dim topology: “Neither a metaphor nor a literal meaning, the displacement I am going to follow here obeys a different tropography. That displacement takes the form of everything a crypt implies: topoi, death, cipher” (xiii). The account of the crypt as both a topos and a “cipher” suggests a more nuanced way to see the apparent conflict between literary history and literary fantasy: it is not that fantasies like the crypt recur outside of language and outside of history, but that they take their shape from the limits of language and narrative. Antigone and especially Romeo and Juliet remind us that this shape is also the shape of a theater, that space in which language and narrative are warped around spectacle. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, the final figure of encryption, beyond the successive enclosures of melancholic self-mourning and entombments fantasized and realized, can be only the theater itself, the encircling vault in which the lovers whose deaths we’ve witnessed however many times relive their primal scenes, never to be put to rest. This “constitutive irresolution,” as Judith Butler (2002) calls it, marks not only the limit of time in “motionless moving” but also the limit of language in an absorptive visuality: “In the theater,” she writes, “we watch those who are buried alive in a tomb, we watch the dead move, we watch with fascination as the inanimate is animated” (49).

Notes 1 For an argument that “Romeo and Juliet was clearly becoming a fashionable currency” as early as 1598, see Cathcart (2013, 155). 2 For Brooke’s poem, see Bullough (1966, 1:284–363). For a capsule survey of Brooke’s Italian sources, see Young (2014, 181–92).

32  Adam Rzepka 3 All citations of lines in Romeo and Juliet refer to Shakespeare 2016a. Note that this edition is based on the 1599 Quarto, which has only scenes and not Acts. 4 See also Lina Perkins Wilder’s (2010) sense of the play’s thoroughly “retrospective quality” in Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties, and Character (60). 5 All line citations of Antigone refer to Sophocles (1982). 6 It may be useful to note from the start that the fantasy of undead timelessness in Antigone and Romeo and Juliet is different from the Lacanian notion of the “missed appointment” and the “time of the Other” in Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. For that analysis, see Lacan (1977). 7 See Drew Daniel’s (2013) discussion, in The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance, of “a psychoanalytic model for how to think through the representational challenges occasioned by the bodily ‘interior’” (89). 8 Derrida (1986) recounts Abraham’s thoughtful, persistent rejection of the “dogma” of “the incompatibility of Husserlain phenomenology with the discoveries of psychoanalysis” in his foreword to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok” (xxx). 9 On the likely possibilities for staging the tomb in the Shakespearean theater, see Thompson (1995). See also Jill Levinson’s (1987) cautious endorsement of the double function of the discovery space (15). 10 Hegel (2018) positions Antigone as representative in this regard in The Phenomenology of Spirit, at the end of the section on “Reason” and the beginning of the section on “Spirit” (251 and 272). He returns to the play in Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1991, 189 and 206). 11 For an overview, see the entry on “order (ordre)” in Evans (1996, 131–2). 12 See, for example, the treatment of introjection in Lacan’s (1997a) first seminar (83).

References Abraham, Nicholas, and Maria Torok. 1986. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy. Translated by Nicholas Rand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1994. The Shell and the Kernal: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Edited and translated by Nicholas Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Birringer, Johannes H. 1984. Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Tamburlaine: Theological and Theatrical Perspectives. Frankfurt: Verlag Peter Lang. Briggs, John Channing. 2009. “Romeo and Juliet and the Cure of Souls.” Ben Jonson Journal 16: 281–303. Bullough, Geoffrey. 1966. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. 8 vols. New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith. 2002. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press. Cathcart, Charles. 2013. “Romeo at the Rose in 1598.” Early Theatre 13: 149–62. Daniel, Drew. 2013. The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance. New York: Fordham University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1986. “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok.” Foreword to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, edited by

“That Dim Monument”  33 Nicholas Abraham, and Maria Torok, xi–xlviii. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Evans, Dylan. 1996. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1953–74. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated and edited by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud. 24 vols. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1990. “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture.” In Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, 176–96. New York: Routledge. Hegel, Georg. 1991. Elements of The Philosophy of Right. Translated by H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2018. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Terry Pinkard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet.” In Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, edited by Shoshana Felman, 11–52. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1997a. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique. Translated by John Forrester. London: Norton. ———. 1997b. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Dennis Porter. London: Norton. Levinson, Jill. 1987. Shakespeare in Performance: “Romeo and Juliet”. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mazzio, Carla, and Douglas Trevor. 2000. “Dreams of History: An Introduction.” In Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, edited by Carla Mazzio, and Douglas Trevor, 1–18. London: Routledge. Rzepka, Adam. 2017. “Chamber, Tomb, and Theater: Life in Romeo and Juliet’s Spaces of the Dead.” In Critical Insights: “Romeo and Juliet”, edited by Robert C. Evans, 181–200. New York: Salem Press. Shakespeare, William. 1597. An Excellent Conceited Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. London: John Danter. ———. 2016a. “The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.” In The New Oxford Shakespeare, edited by Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and Gabriel Egan, 997–1078. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016b. “Sonnet 18.” In The New Oxford Shakespeare, edited by Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and Gabriel Egan, 2826. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sophocles. 1982. “Antigone.” In The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, translated by Robert Fagles, 55–128. New York: Viking Penguin. Sullivan, Garrett. 2005. Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Targoff, Ramie. 2012. “Romeo and Juliet and the Practice of Joint Burial.” Representations 120: 17–38. Thompson, Leslie. 1995. “‘With Patient Ears Attend’: ‘Romeo and Juliet’ on the Elizabethan Stage,” Studies in Philology 92: 230–47. Wilder, Lina Perkins. 2010. Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties, and Character. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

34  Adam Rzepka Young, Bruce. 2014. “‘These Times of Woe’: The Contraction and Dislocation of Time in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.” In Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance: Appropriation, Transformation, Opposition, edited by Michele Marrapodi, 181–98. London: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. ———. 1992. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 1996. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.

2

The Time Is Out of Joint Hamlet Speaks to the Dead Kasey Evans

In “Queer Spectrality,” Carla Freccero (2006) makes an ethical distinction between two ways of engaging with the past. Spectrality names a “mode of historical attentiveness that the living might have to what is not present but somehow appears as a figure or a voice, a ‘non-living present in the living present’ that is no longer or not yet with us” (70). Necrology, on the other hand, denotes a mode premised on the burial of the dead—on whose behalf the historian then presumes to speak, risking presentist and colonialist bias. Necrology, for Freccero, is a form of disavowal: a “disappearing” of those who might contradict the history that the living wish to tell. Dead and gone, the buried relinquish even the past, which, like the present and the future, comes to belong to the living. Spectrality, on the other hand, imagines the dead still among us and affords them an ethical claim on the way we narrate the past, live in the present, and imagine the future.1 We might be tempted to map Freccero’s distinction onto Prince Hamlet’s two modes of encountering the dead. In Act 1, the ghost of King Hamlet tells his son of his traumatic murder and postmortem suffering, charging the prince with revenge and remembrance. In the gravedigger scene, on the other hand, Hamlet contends with the incorporate dead: the skull of Yorick, the smell of disinterred bones, and the dust and ashes to which we all return.2 Spectrality, Freccero might observe, describes Prince Hamlet’s ongoing ethical obligations to his dead father, while the cheerful gravedigger, lacking somber decorum, exemplifies necrology. However promising Freccero’s model might be, Hamlet’s encounters with the ghost and the grave resist her taxonomy, collapsing the distinction between spectral and necrological. In Hamlet, these encounters represent two halves of a single cycle, an eternal turning that entraps the prince. In confronting the ghost of his father, Hamlet indulges in a fantasy of disembodiment and, thus, of liberty from sin and corruption. Later, in the graveyard, though, a heap of old bones, unceremoniously exhumed, confutes Hamlet’s fantasy. Together, the spectral and the necrological confine Hamlet in a perpetual spiral, collapsing his future and his past—and locating his predicament within patterns of murder, guilt, and vengeance derived from some of the earliest mythemes of Western culture. This spiral, I will DOI: 10.4324/9781003306894-4

36  Kasey Evans argue, is intrinsic to revenge, which charges Hamlet with the return to and repetition of an original crime. But revenge in Hamlet is not exhausted by the extraction of an eye for an eye or a king for a king. Rather, revenge spins endlessly around, like a screw—the figure that struck trauma theorist Shoshana Felman (1977) as the perfect metaphor for the psychic trap of repetition-compulsion: the spiral consists of a series of repeated circlings in which what turns is indeed bound to re-turn, but in which what circularly thus returns only returns so as to miss anew its point of departure, to miss the closing point, the completion (or perfection) of the circle. The successive turns and returns of the spiral never meet, never touch or cross one another; hence, what the spiral actually repeats is a missed meeting with itself, a missed encounter with what returns. The screw, in order to precisely function properly, be operative, can by no means close the circle; it can but repeat it. (178–79) This turning screw is a useful metaphor for Hamlet’s claim that “the time is out of joint” (Shakespeare 2006, 2.1.186). Charged by the ghost of his father to avenge his murder, Hamlet is conscripted into repeating his uncle’s crime, itself an iteration of Cain’s murder of Abel—and yet, as Felman explains, he cannot close the circle, cannot iterate that crime exactly. He can only repeat and perpetuate his own “missed encounter” with his uncle’s crime, his father’s demand, and the first crimes of humankind. Hamlet’s turns of the screw thus continue to set the time out of joint, even as he seeks the revenge that allegedly could “set it right”—the indeterminacy of that “it” is a symptom of his recruitment into an ancient and inescapable pattern of crime and guilt. My inquiry proceeds in three parts. First, I consider the temporality of the play, arguing that the world of Hamlet is plagued by a recursive repetition-compulsion, the turning of the screw that is characteristic of revenge. Second, I analyze the ghost’s first apparition to Hamlet, arguing that in his inability to accept the ghost’s narrative of the past and of his own carnal sin, Hamlet perpetuates this temporal disjointedness. Third, I offer a reading of the gravedigger scene as the return of the repressed, in which both the forgotten past and the disavowed body confront Hamlet and demand his notice, like the dead rising from the grave.

Part 1: Temporality in Hamlet The texts of Hamlet decline to describe the actions of the play with temporal precision. The grieving Prince complains that his father died “but two months … —nay, not so much, not two—” before his mother remarried. Only eight lines later, he claims that she waited only a month, “a little

The Time Is Out of Joint  37 month” (Shakespeare 2006, 1.2.138, 145, 147). He subsequently complains to Ophelia, “look you how cheerfully my mother looks and my father died within’s two hours.” She replies: “Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord” (3.2.120–21). However much time has elapsed since the funeral, Hamlet’s friend Horatio has been at Elsinore since then—he came for just that reason from Wittenberg University. And yet when the play opens, Hamlet is unaware of his presence, as if he had only just arrived. Preparations for war with Norway “do not divide the Sunday from the week” and “make the night joint-laborer with the day,” disrupting both the weekly and the diurnal structures that typically order time (1.1.79–81). These unusual “joints” uniting the Sabbath to the work-week and the night to the day are, according to Hamlet, symptoms of a larger derangement in the temporal order. After the ghost disappears, Hamlet famously declares, “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right” (1.5.186–87). With these words, Jacques Derrida (1994) observes, Hamlet curses the destiny that calls him to put a dislocated time back on its hinges … a movement of correction, reparation, restitution, vengeance, revenge, punishment. … The fatal blow, the tragic wrong that would have been done at his very birth … is to have made him, Hamlet, to be and to be born, for the right, in view of the right, calling him thus to put time on the right path, to do right, to render justice, and to redress history, the wrong [tort] of history. There is tragedy, there is essence of the tragic only on the condition of this originarity, more precisely of this pre-originary and properly spectral anteriority of the crime—the crime of the other, a misdeed whose event and reality, whose truth can never be present themselves in flesh and blood, but can only allow themselves to be presumed, reconstructed, fantasized. (22–24) Reparation, restitution, revenge, rendering, redressing, reconstructing: these terms share the Latin prefix “re-” (“back” or “backward”), which can denote a repetition of an earlier act (as in a musical “refrain”) or a regression to an earlier state (as a tide “recedes” from the shore). With this striking prefixal repetition, Derrida describes Hamlet’s destiny—the future intended for him from the very moment of his birth—as a retreat into the past that will allow him to re-peat, re-dress, and re-pair an original trauma. Literally, of course, this original crime is King Hamlet’s murder at the hands of his brother Claudius. But as per Derrida’s remarks on the “properly spectral anteriority of the crime,” the vagueness and incoherence of the play’s temporal markers conscript Hamlet into a grander and more ancient pattern. “[B]orn to set it right”—the vague “it” expanding beyond the obvious referent to encompass unspecified but expansive injustice—Hamlet

38  Kasey Evans imagines himself born in order to set right a legacy of human sinfulness, which long precedes him, by repeating and repaying injuries done prior to his own memory. In this respect, Hamlet’s life runs down the tracks that Freud would later identify with the repetition-compulsion of trauma and with the death drive (an echo that reminds us once again of Shakespeare’s foundational influence on Freud’s thought). For Hamlet, the crime that knocked the time “out of joint” is both too recent—“O most wicked speed!” he laments, characteristically conflating the death of his father with his mother’s remarriage (Shakespeare 2006, 1.2.155)3—and distantly past. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (1953–74) identifies the original crime with Hamlet’s own repressed childhood wishes; Hamlet’s capacity for sudden action, as witnessed by his murders first of Polonius and later of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is stymied in the case of Claudius by self-reproach, brought on by his unconscious recognition that his uncle has enacted the prince’s own primal oedipal desires (4:264–66). That Freud borrows the name of Oedipus to describe this family drama attests to his conviction that patricide and incest (in fantasy or reality) precede Hamlet in Western drama every bit as much as they precede, for Freud, the birth of any son to a heterosexual couple. Thus, a Freudian such as Ernest Jones understands the oedipal drama as the originary or pre-originary crime to which Hamlet feels himself to be born, the crime prior to his father’s murder he feels compelled to “set right.”4 The primal criminal scene that Hamlet hopes to requite comes into focus through a series of allusions to early chapters of the book of Genesis. Even before he learns of the ghost’s visitations, Hamlet’s bleak vision of the world as “an unweeded garden / That grows to seed” analogizes Denmark with the fallen Eden (Shakespeare 2006, 1.2.135–36). This narrative substrate develops further when the Ghost describes his poisoning by Claudius in the language of the Fall (“A serpent stung me” [1.5.36]); when the ears of the King, like those of the credulous Eve, serve as “porches” through which death can enter (1.5.63); when Claudius is described as a kind of devil (3.1.38, 3.4.74, 3.4.167); and when the gravedigger traces his vocation to Adam, first among the “gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers” (5.1.30).5 This sequence of allusions maps Denmark’s tragedy onto the Fall, with King Hamlet as Adam, Gertrude as Eve, Claudius as the diabolical serpent— and Prince Hamlet, however improbably, as the would-be messiah who can restore humankind to divine favor.6 Genesis also provides a second narrative pattern for Hamlet: the first murder in the postlapsarian world, Cain’s slaying of his brother Abel. For his crime, Cain is punished with endless wandering, iterating his parents’ expulsion from Eden: Now therefore thou art cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. When thou shalt

The Time Is Out of Joint  39 till the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a vagabond and a renegade shalt thou be in the earth. Then Cain said to the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. (Or: my sin is greater than can be pardoned.) Behold, thou hast cast me out this day from (Hebrew: from off the face of) the earth, and from thy face shall I be hid, and shall be a vagabond, and a renegade in the earth, and whosoever findeth me shall slay me. Then the Lord said unto him, Doubtless whosoever slayeth Cain, he shall be punished sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any man finding him should kill him. (Genesis 4:11–15)7 Like his parents, Cain endures perpetual exile from the divine presence; like his father, he is cursed with laborious and fruitless tilling of the earth. Cain’s fratricide both iterates Original Sin and originates a pattern to which King Hamlet’s murder conforms. Indeed, the usurping King makes almost obsessive references to Abel’s murder, even at inappropriate moments, as when he accuses Hamlet of excessive grief over the death of his father: Fie, ’tis a fault to heaven, A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, To reason most absurd, whose common theme Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried From the first corpse till he that died today ‘This must be so.’ (Shakespeare 2006, 1.2.101–06) Abel’s is the “first corpse” in Judeo-Christian history. But since Cain was never a father, nor lived to mourn his own father’s death, he is a poor example in this already-clumsy attempt to assuage Hamlet’s grief. Abel’s appearance here reveals the King’s preoccupation and distraction by guilt. He invokes the story of Cain and Abel once again in soliloquy, when he confirms for the audience the truth of the ghost’s allegations: “O, my offence is rank: it smells to heaven; / It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t— / A brother’s murder” (3.3.36–38). Finally, Hamlet makes the play’s third reference to the biblical fratricide in the graveyard, upon witnessing the Clown’s indifference to the human remains disinterred by Ophelia’s grave: “That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once. How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if ’twere Cain’s jawbone, that did the first murder” (5.1.72–73). “Cain’s jawbone” plays on the subjective and objective genitive. Hamlet quips that the Clown treats the skull with all the disrespect that would be afforded to the bones of Cain, the first murderer in Judeo-Christian history. Additionally, “Cain’s jawbone” invokes the extra-biblical tradition that Cain killed his brother with the jawbone of an ass, a detail apparently borrowed from the story of Samson killing a thousand Philistines with such a weapon in Judges.8

40  Kasey Evans These biblical templates in Hamlet comprise a series of narrative substitutions and slippages corresponding to the pattern of revenge as a temporal spiral, a turning of the screw that can never precisely requite the original crime. Thus the indeterminacy of the “it” in Hamlet’s declaration, “O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right”: this “it” refers, of course, to his father’s murder by his uncle, the crime that the ghost asks him to avenge; but quickly, and despite the ghost’s admonitions, the sin of his father’s murder is overshadowed in Hamlet’s mind by the sin of Claudius’s incestuous remarriage to Gertrude. Correspondingly, Hamlet’s remit for revenge shifts from a requital of Cain’s murder of Abel—and, via the interpolated jawbone of the ass, Samson’s murder of thousands—to retribution for the Fall itself, misogynistically understood as a sin that belongs to Eve alone.9 No sooner does Hamlet fix his sights on a crime to avenge—“thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain / Unmixed with baser matter,” he vows to the ghost (Shakespeare 2006, 1.5.102–4)—than that event slips away with a turn of the screw, casting Hamlet vertiginously forward and backward in salvation history as an all-purpose avatar of generalized revenge. Thus framed, Hamlet’s hesitancy through much of the play is perhaps less a symptom of his intellection and indecisiveness than of the indeterminacy of the target: no individual, historically localized murder could feel sufficient, surely, to avenge the wrongs that have accumulated through the endless turnings of the screw. Nor, I think, should the Genesis narratives stand as a definitive origin that set the turning screw in motion; rather, they stand in for the idea of first-ness, a fantasy of origin, a promise that criminal acts calling out for revenge will recede ever further into the past. This is how I understand Derrida’s final sentence quoted above: “There is tragedy, there is essence of the tragic only on the condition of this originarity, more precisely of this pre-originary and properly spectral anteriority of the crime—the crime of the other, a misdeed whose event and reality, whose truth can never be present themselves in flesh and blood, but can only allow themselves to be presumed, reconstructed, fantasized.” We might define this pre-originary crime, in its non-definitive iterations, as trauma: an event that cannot be experienced in its own time but only through its subsequent intrusions into the psyche. The traumatic event itself, as well as Hamlet’s attempts at vengeance—destined for diffusion across an infinitely retreating sequence of crimes—does indeed suggest that “The time is out of joint”: crimes of the distant past make themselves felt in the present, while attempts to revenge crimes of the present lead Hamlet back into the past. This striving toward a fantasized original crime, this version of revenge as a regression ever-backward into the past, mimics what Freud identifies as the death drive: the impulse of every organism to seek to return to a prior, inert, restful state, what Hamlet calls a “consummation / Devoutly to be wished” (Shakespeare 2006, 3.1.62–63). Furthermore, the gravedigger underscores this affiliation when he tells us that the day

The Time Is Out of Joint  41 of Prince Hamlet’s birth was not only the day of his father’s victory over Old Fortinbras but also the very day he, the gravedigger, first took up his trade. Hamlet’s birth coincides both with Denmark’s ascendancy and with the promise of death. Correspondingly, the arrival of young Fortinbras in the play’s final act reverts to the scene of Prince Hamlet’s birth—during the battle between their fathers—even while it stages his death. To be born is to begin seeking death; with Freud (1953–74), “‘the aim of all life is death,’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’” (18:38). Taking some literary liberties with Freud’s word “inanimate,” we might say that the structure of revenge, its infinite recursions and regressions, precedes any particular act of revenge that Hamlet might accomplish. Hamlet’s desire to “set it right,” to solve the conundrum of the time “out of joint,” like the death drive, carries him into the future of consummated revenge only by driving him simultaneously toward the remote reaches of the past.

Part 2: The Ghost Incorporate Hamlet’s musings about time and revenge in Denmark, and the syllogistic puzzles they yield, are as philosophically dense as we might expect from a student of Wittenberg, Martin Luther’s institutional home during the early sixteenth century. But the idiom “out of joint” also moves Hamlet from abstraction into materiality. Earlier in Act 1, the term “disjoint” conjured up the world of the craftsman, the manual laborer, when Claudius spoke of enemies who suspected Denmark to be “disjoint and out of frame” (Shakespeare 2006,1.2.20), drawing his metaphor from carpentry. When Hamlet takes up the metaphor of the joint to describe time, he relocates the image from the carpenter and the counting house to the surgeon’s theater and the butcher’s shop. The OED locates the first printed appearance of the idiom “out of joint” in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, where it refers to the fracture or dislocation of a human limb. Another early English example appears in the fourteenth-century medical manual The Science of Cirurgie, translated into Middle English from Lanfranco of Milan’s Latin text. Lanfranco explains: “Whanne þat a wounde is in a lyme, & þe boon of þe same lyme is to-broke atwo & dislocate—þat is to seie [it is] out of ioynte.”10 Until the fifteenth century, the noun “joint” was used primarily in this sense: to denote a corporeal structure in the human or animal body where two bones, muscles, or ligaments articulate. In the sixteenth century, “joint” made its way from the physician’s handbook to the butcher’s shop. In this context, “joint” denotes “one of the portions into which a carcass is divided by the butcher, consisting of one or more bones with meat thereon, esp. as cooked and served at the table” (OED). “Joints” of this literally carnal type became a frequent subject for Continental genre painters: in a comic and satiric vein, Flemish artists such as Pieter Aartsen (“The Meat Stall,” 1551) depicted working-class people alongside

42  Kasey Evans slabs of meat to comment on their enslavement to bodily appetites, while marginal or background renderings of biblical narratives comment on Christian blood sacrifice and enter into Reformation debates about the Eucharist. These artistic projects, juxtaposing literal joints of meat with apparently disparate biblical content, force the viewer to grapple with the violent blood sacrifice at the heart of Christianity, and the liturgical repetition of this sacrifice at the center of the church service in the form of the Holy Communion.11 Submerged under the vocabulary of the “joint” in Hamlet, I am suggesting, is a metaphorical substrate of dismemberment. The body politic, as described by Claudius, as “disjoint”; the temporal sequence of expected patterns (of royal succession from father to son, of crime and revenge as explored in the previous section, even of night and day that have been made unnatural “joint-laborers”) diagnose this historical period as “out of joint”; and even the “jointress” Gertrude, whose incestuous “joining” to Claudius seems to Hamlet to exemplify all bodily corruption: these “joints” offer submerged or secondary deictics to the body (human and politic) in all of its mortality, its dismemberment, and even its consumptibility (“not where he eats but where ’a is eaten,” Hamlet quips of Polonius’s corpse [Shakespeare 2006, 4.3.19]). If revenge yields only a perpetually turning screw, a purportedly original crime locked into eternal return, then the Eucharist might offer the faintest promise of escape: a truly messianic instance in which the crime yields not its own eternal repetition but its expiation and redemption. This messianic persona is one that Prince Hamlet desperately wants to ascribe to his late father, as when he describes his father as “Hyperion,” the Greek sun god, as contrasted with Claudius the “satyr,” a lustful, drunken companion of Dionysus, the god of wine.12 But the ghost’s report challenges any such idealization of the king. Although Marcellus originally describes the ghost “as the air” (Shakespeare 2006, 1.1.150), it seems to be decisively embodied when it appears to Hamlet. The ghost recounts the gruesome details of his murder: Claudius approached the sleeping king With juice of cursed hebona in a vial And in the porches of my ears did pour The leperous distilment whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That swift as quicksilver it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body And with a sudden vigour it doth possess13 And curd like eager droppings into milk The thin and wholesome blood. So did it mine And a most instant tetter barked about Most lazar-like with vile and loathsome crust All my smooth body. (1.5.62–73)

The Time Is Out of Joint  43 The king describes his once-smooth body erupting in “tetters”—a general term for pustular sores of the skin, including those acquired through impetigo, the fungal infection ringworm, and the sexually transmitted infection herpes (OED “tetter, 1”). He compares these sores to clots of sour milk, an image that evokes the corruption of both of the king’s two bodies—there is, after all, something rotten in the state of Denmark (1.4.90)—and also a grotesquely debased parental figure, a fantasized composite of the heroic father and the nurturing mother (but one whose milk has curdled; note that the First Folio’s “posset” in place of “possess” can also mean to regurgitate food or milk, as a baby would). The “leperous distilment” of the henbane makes the king correspondingly “lazar like”; the invocation of this biblical infection, similarly, emphasizes bodily rot as a symptom of spiritual corruption.14 And the ghost identifies the physical consequences of his sin when he reports that the henbane spread through his blood like “quicksilver,” still current in Renaissance medicine as a treatment for syphilis.15 Alongside the ghost’s confessions to “foul crimes” (1.5.12), and to having been “Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, / Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d … sent to my account / With all my imperfections on my head” (1.5.76–79), this imagery implies the contamination of King Hamlet’s body by sexual disease. Finally, the image of the body “bark’d about” with its “vile and loathsome crust” once again hints at cannibalism, as if the king, having been baked in a pie, awaits the hungry guests at his funeral.16 The ghost’s reports of his ongoing suffering should challenge Hamlet’s idealized vision of his father. But Hamlet ignores the connection between the “blossoms of [his] sin” and the corpse’s erupting sores, replacing the story of his father’s sins with an obsessive focus on those of Gertrude and Claudius. Responding to the ghost’s final admonition—“Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me” (Shakespeare 2006, 1.5.91)—Hamlet imagines memory not preserving the history just narrated but rather erasing and overwriting that past—and doing so in the text of his own body. Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain Unmixed with baser matter. (1.5.95–104) Here, Hamlet represents his memory as a table. Until this moment of his young life, this table has been nothing more than a small writing tablet

44  Kasey Evans (OED “table, n.”), perhaps a commonplace book in which Hamlet scribbled whatever “youth and observation” found engaging, or a slate from which he could easily “wipe away” such “trivial fond records.” But after line 101 (“copied there”), these tables are transformed into a stone tablet comparable to those of Mosaic law, deeply engraved with a “commandment.” The suffix of this English word is important: a “command” might describe a military officer’s order to his troops or a mother’s order to a child; while “commandment” implies a divine order, with particular reference to the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Thus, the “commandment” that Hamlet says “all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain” consolidates multiplicity into singularity. The multiple “records,” “saws,” “forms,” and “pressures” from Hamlet’s past; and the Ten Commandments of the Decalogue, which were in turn written on “Two Tablets of the Testimony” (Exodus 31:18), are all compressed into one single Commandment to be inscribed in Hamlet’s memory.17 Hamlet here imagines starting anew, erasing all the marks of “pressures past”: his brain to become a blank book from which all other records have been expunged. He does not fantasize a return to a prelapsarian Eden; Moses, after all, descended from Mt. Sinai to find the Israelites worshiping a golden calf. But the angry and unassailable father-god who authored the Decalogue is not the instrument but the judge of sin, not the transgressor but the author of the Law. Replacing his mortal father with the Old Testament God, Hamlet effaces sin from the story of the King just as he vows to wipe clean the tables of his memory. Unable to tolerate the truth of moral complexity—that his father was both sinned against and sinning—Hamlet substitutes the rewritable table of his mind for the all-toolegible flesh of his father, which bore the inscription of his sins and failures. This singular commandment in his mind, Hamlet vows, will liberate him from the bodily corruption that the ghost described, the “baser matter” of death and decay. Hamlet’s recourse to theology, here, is at least a partial disavowal of the ghost’s confession. Unlike those “porches” of his father’s ears, vulnerable to Claudius’s poison, Hamlet refuses what the Ghost pours into his, transferring its tale of corruption and sin entirely to Gertrude and Claudius. Just as he insists that he will “remember” his father, then, Hamlet partially forgets the past. This act of erasure identifies Hamlet’s experience of the Ghost’s tale as a trauma: information that cannot be assimilated by the conscious mind. Thus, remaining in Hamlet’s unconscious, this knowledge can be experienced only in its return and repetition—through another turn of the screw. Erasing the past, ensuring its traumatic return, Hamlet repeats the “pre-originary” crime of disjointing—that crime “whose truth,” Derrida told us, “can never be present [itself] in flesh and blood, but can only allow [itself] to be presumed, reconstructed, fantasized.”

The Time Is Out of Joint  45

Part 3: The Fellow of Infinite Jest Hamlet’s repressed knowledge of his father’s bodily suffering, replaced by his idealized vision of Hyperion (which repeats itself in the closet scene, 3.4.54) is bound to return—if we accept the inevitability of the return of the repressed (and of haunting, the form that return most often takes in Renaissance revenge tragedy). And embodiment does indeed return, with a vengeance, in the gravedigger scene, where Hamlet experiences what Freud might have called hysterical hallucinations: psychic or physical symptoms of disavowed knowledge. Hamlet and Horatio are initially scandalized by the gravedigger’s mirth. Not only does this “knave” sing while he works; his impertinence is doubled by his bastardization of the poem “I loathe that I did love” by Thomas Lord Vaux, which the poet reportedly wrote while on his deathbed in 1556, and which appeared in Tottel’s Miscellany in 1557. In 14 stanzas, Vaux’s narrator expresses regret for his youthful indiscretions, ending with a variation on the familiar memento mori: Lo, here the bared scull By whose balde signe I know: That stouping age away shall pull, Which youthfull yeres did sow. ……………………………… And ye that bide behinde, Have ye none other trust: As ye of clay were cast by kinde, So shall ye waste to dust. The gravedigger, in comic solecism, revises the poem to express nostalgia rather than regret for his misspent youth. Hamlet and Horatio find his variations on the theme to be disrespectful—has he “no feeling of his business?” (Shakespeare 2006, 5.1.61). But the gravedigger is endearingly singleminded: his job is to care for the bodies, not the souls, of the dead; it seems only right that his song should sound the same note.18 Notwithstanding the gravedigger’s irreverence, Hamlet, like the speaker in Vaux’s poem, is prompted by the unearthed skull to think about the evanescence of the past. Perhaps he flatters himself that his philosophical training will distinguish him, to his credit, from the gravedigger. But his meditations lead him insistently back to the body: That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once … This might be the pate of a politician which this ass now o’er-reaches—one that would circumvent God, might it not? … Or of a courtier which could say ‘Good morrow, sweet lord, how dost thou, sweet lord?’ This might be

46  Kasey Evans my Lord Such-a-One, that praised my Lord Such-a-One’s horse, when ’a meant to beg it, might it not? … There’s another! Why, may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now—his quillets, his cases, his tenures and his tricks? (5.1.71–95) In Hamlet’s imagination, the skulls that the gravedigger has tossed aside undergo a kind of bodily resurrection. His rhetoric endows the skulls with flesh—filling those gaping mouths with tongues, imaginatively animated: they sing, flatter, and speechify in a court of law. Although the passage begins in the past tense—conjuring what the skull once was, not what it is now—it moves quickly into the present and the conditional, conjuring not the past but a possible future. When the end of the passage resumes the past tense—imagining “this fellow” “in’s time”—the present conditional tense conjures this imaginary lawyer along with all of the appurtenances of his profession. In the earlier scene, we saw how Hamlet disavowed his father’s corporeality; here, the disavowed body returns in Hamlet’s imagination (or hallucination). The flesh is restored to the stripped skeleton. Here, that fleshly resurrection remains a speculative exercise. But when the gravedigger tosses yet another skull out of the ground and identifies it, however dubiously, as that of Yorick, “the king’s jester,” the return of the repressed assumes a darker cast. Hamlet’s imagination and rhetoric once again endow the skull with flesh. But this time, the results are monstrous and grotesque: He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorred in my imagination it is. My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. … Not one now to mock your own grinning, quite chop-fallen?19 Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. (Shakespeare 2006, 5.1.175–84) Three times, Hamlet imagines himself conferring flesh on the bone. He thinks, first, of the muscular back, once able to bear a young boy—but this image is not nostalgic but “abhorred.” The Latin etymology indicates physical movement away from—ab-horrere, to bristle or shudder away from—as if Hamlet recoils in disgust, retreating from the image he has conjured. He feels his gorge rising, as if he is about to vomit and to expel this offensive thought. But no sooner has he drawn back from this first image than the second one intrudes: he remembers kissing Yorick on the lips. Those lips, he says, once “hung” upon his bones—the verb suggesting a fleshly rottenness even in life, as if the lips might at any moment have sloughed away from the body. Even Hamlet’s fond memory of childhood affection, here, seems to have been contaminated by Yorick’s corpse rotting in the ground. When the Prince mocks the skull, “Quite

The Time Is Out of Joint  47 chop-fallen?”—he means that Yorick literally lacks a “chop” or lower jaw and that he is figuratively “down at the mouth” or dejected. Since “chop,” starting in the sixteenth century, could also describe a cut of meat (OED “chop,” n.1), “chop-fallen” harks back to Hamlet’s earlier morbid riddles about Polonius’s corpse as food for worms—another image that might cause his “gorge” to rise. “Gorge,” from the fifteenth century onward, could designate not only the throat, but also the act of feeding greedily, glutting oneself. Hamlet’s gorge rises as if he has gorged himself on Yorick’s remains, a grotesque submerged pun that attests to Hamlet’s unconscious knowledge that he has figuratively “digested” the story of his father’s sinful and suffering embodiment, and that this knowledge is fighting to escape. Even after this dark imaginative excursus, Hamlet cannot avert one final thought experiment in restoring flesh to bone. He imagines a woman painting her face with cosmetics “an inch thick.” The sense of disgust here depends on Hamlet’s earlier, misogynistic rants to Ophelia and to his mother. “I have heard of your paintings well enough,” he accuses Ophelia. “God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another” (Shakespeare 2006, 3.1.144–45). Subsequently, in a variation on the metaphor of cosmetics, he begs his mother: Mother, for love of grace Lay not that flattering unction to your soul That not your trespass but my madness speaks. It will but skin and film the ulcerous place Whiles rank corruption mining all within Infects unseen. (3.4.142–47) The “unction” here is an ointment applied to a wound, creating a “skin and film” that gives the appearance of health while “rank corruption” spreads beneath. The ointment here actually becomes the skin; similarly, in the graveyard, the lady’s “painting” becomes the flesh itself, a hateful accumulation building up on the skull “an inch thick.” In Hamlet’s misogynistic imagination, creating a deceitful appearance through maquillage converges with the fundamentally sinful, fallen nature of embodied existence. To have flesh at all, Hamlet concludes, is to lie about the single truth underneath every body—the truth of the skull as the repellent but inevitable end of human life. Hamlet here charges “my lady” with the knowledge that he has tried to sequester from his memory of his father as the judge but never the agent of bodily sin. These graveyard encounters with the buried (and unearthed) dead are not, as Freccero’s model would predict, moments that allow Hamlet to deny and to disavow the truth of the past. Rather, the dumb, insistent materiality of the unburied bones represents and expedites the return of the repressed.

48  Kasey Evans These excavated human remains force Hamlet to conjure in his imagination the flesh and the memories that attended these bones.

Conclusion Throughout the play that bears his name, Hamlet remains trapped in a temporal spiral, one that sends him endlessly into the past to the earliest instances of human sin and death. Even in his uncharacteristically tranquil speech to Horatio, apparently accepting his imminent death, the screw continues to turn: There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all, since no man of aught he leaves knows what is’t to leave betimes. Let be. (Shakespeare 2006, 5.2.197–202) Hamlet seems here to accept the inevitable teleology: death will follow life, simply and finally. He feels called not by any responsibility to revise the past, but only to maintain “readiness” in the present. But in that “special providence” lurks the promise of a ghostly father. The allusion is to the book of Matthew, 10:29: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing, and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father?” What consoles Hamlet and makes possible this moment of consolation is the fantasy, once again, of a father whose disembodied perfection and transcendence of earthly time can deliver him, and his son, from another turn of the screw. This merciful father who attends the death of every sparrow is not the vengeful father who gave the Commandments to Moses and who might sanction revenge; and he is certainly not the father who confessed himself “[c]ut off even in the blossoms of [his] sin” (Shakespeare 2006, 1.5.76). Even as he prepares for the duel, Hamlet clings to the fantasy of a disembodied father whose divine Commandment he is prepared to obey, in an act of vengeance that cannot definitively “set it right,” but only offer one more turn of the screw.

Notes 1 Freccero (2006) is citing Derrida (1994), 254. 2 This phrasing echoes Genesis 3:19, where God curses Adam after the Fall: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the earth, for out of it wast thou taken, because thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return.” All biblical passages cite the Geneva translation of 1560. 3 For Janet Adelman (1992), this shift represents “the buried fantasy of Hamlet”— the displacement of guilt from Claudius to Gertrude in defiance of the ghost’s admonition (24).

The Time Is Out of Joint  49 4 See Jones (1949). One representative example: “[Hamlet’s] long ‘repressed’ desire to take his father’s place in his mother’s affection is stimulated to unconscious activity by the sight usurping this place exactly as he himself had once longed to do. More, this someone was a member of the same family, so that the actual usurpation further resembled the imaginary one in being incestuous” (93–94). 5 See Stump (1985, 29). 6 However unaptly, Hamlet imagines himself as divine Son when he cites the Gospel of Matthew prior to the final duel (“There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow” [Shakespeare 2006, 5.2.197–98]), echoing Jesus to his disciples: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing, and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father? … Fear yet not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:29–31). In his 1996 Hamlet film, Kenneth Branagh exploits this analogy in his final overhead shot: Fortinbras’s captains carry Hamlet with his arms outstretched in the posture of the crucified Christ. 7 The italicized parentheticals quote from the marginal commentary of the Geneva translation. 8 Judges 15:16: “With the jaw of an ass are heaps upon heaps: with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men”; perhaps the “heaps upon heaps” calls to Hamlet’s mind the Clown’s insouciant piling up of bones as he digs. This extrascriptural tradition seems to have gained popularity through medieval cycle plays such as The Killing of Abel in the Wakefield Cycle. See Shaheen (2011, 559–60). 9 “[I]f the plot [of Hamlet] rewrites the fall as a story of fratricidal rivalry, locating literal agency for the murder in Claudius, a whole network of images and associations replaces his literal agency with Gertrude’s, replicating Eve in her by making her both the agent and the locus of death” (Adelman 1992, 24). 10 OED online s.v. “joint, n.1,” def. 2a, accessed March 16, 2023. Lanfranco of Milan (1894, 62). 11 Though space constrains me here, it might be instructive to explore resonances between the play’s corporeal vocabulary and contemporaneous debates about transubstantiation and the real presence of Christ’s body in the Eucharist. See, for example, Aers and Beckwith (2010). 12 This reading comes from Adelman (1992, 20). 13 The First Folio has not “possess” but “posset,” a synonym for “curdle.” 14 See, for example, Adams (1615): “The Leaprosie is a sore disease, so entring and eating, that it is euen incorporate to the flesh: yet still (cum carne exuitur) it is put off with the flesh. Death is a Phisitian able to cure it…. Death (the best Empericke) kil at once the Leaper and his Leprosie. But the Leprosie of sinne cleanes so fast (not onely to the flesh, but) to the Soule, that if spirituall death to sinne doe not slay it, Corporall death shall neither mende it nor end it” (92). 15 See, for example, A. T. (1596), A rich store-house or treasury for the diseased [...] which prescribes quicksilver mixed with fasting spittle, hog’s grease, and vinegar for the treatment of “the French poxe” (62). 16 Wendy Wall helpfully pointed me to the Player’s recited tale of the death of Priam, where the murderous Pyrrhus is described as “baked and impasted,” the latter term meaning “enclosed in a crust or pastry” (Shakespeare 2006, 2.2.397). In the Player’s tale as in the ghost’s account, to be crusted or impasted corresponds to a kind of moral decrepitude. (Personal conversation with the author.) 17 As Marjorie Garber ([1987] 2010, 190) points out, even the Tables themselves are multiple; Moses breaks the first set in anger when he descends from Mt. Sinai to find the Israelites worshiping the Golden Calf, and God orders him, “Hew thee two Tablets of stone, like unto the first, and I will write upon the Tablets the words that were in the first Tablets, which thou brakest in pieces” (Exodus 34:1).

50  Kasey Evans 18 See Morris (1970, 1036). See also Woudhuysen (2004) and LN to 5.1.61–95 in Shakespeare (1982). 19 Thompson and Taylor print “chapfallen,” but the First Folio has “chopfalne.” I have departed from their edition to emphasize the cannibalistic hints of “chop,” although orthographic variation in the period would likely have allowed “chap” and “chop” to coexist regardless of spelling.

References Adams, Thomas. 1615. Englands Sicknes, Comparatively Conferred with Israels. London: E. G[riffin]. Adelman, Janet. 1992. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest.” New York and London: Routledge. Aers, David, and Sarah Beckwith. 2010. “The Eucharist.” In Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, edited by Brian Cummings, and James Simpson, 153–65. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. A. T. 1596. A Rich Store-House or Treasury for the Diseased, Wherein are many approued medicines for diuers and sundry diseases, which haue bin long hidden, and not come to light before this time. First set foorth for the benefit and comfort of the poorer sort of people that are not of abillitie to go to the phisitions, by G. W. London: Thomas Purfoot and Raph Blower. Branagh, Kenneth, dir. 1996. Hamlet. Beverly Hills: Castle Rock Entertainment. DVD. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 1998. “Marx and Sons.” In Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx”, edited by Michael Sprinker, 213–69. London: Verso. Felman, Shoshana. 1977. “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” Yale French Studies (55/56): 94–207. Freccero, Carla. 2006. Queer/Early/Modern, Series Q. Durham: Duke University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1953–74. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated and edited by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud. 24 vols. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Garber, Marjorie. (1987) 2010. Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. New York: Routledge. Jones, Ernest. 1949. Hamlet and Oedipus. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. Lanfranco of Milan (13th century), (1894). Lanfrank’s Science of Cirurgie. Translated and edited by Robert von Fleischhacker. Early English Text Society. Original Series. London and New York: Published for the Early English Text Society by K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., and by H. Milford, Oxford University Press. Morris, Henry. 1970. “Hamlet as ‘Memento Mori’ Poem.” PMLA 85 (5): 1035–40. Oxford English Dictionary [online]. December 2022. “chop, n.1.” Oxford University Press. Accessed March 16, 2023​.mi​sc

The Time Is Out of Joint  51 Oxford English Dictionary [online]. December 2022. “table, n.1.” Oxford University Press. Accessed March 16, 2023. Oxford English Dictionary [online].March 2022. “tetter, n.” Oxford University Press. Accessed March 16, 2023. Oxford English Dictionary [online]. March 2023. “joint, n.1.” Oxford University Press. Shaheen, Naseeb. 2011. Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays. Newark: University of Delaware Press Shakespeare, William. 2006. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson, and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Methuen and Co. Shakespeare, William. 1982. Hamlet. Edited by Harold Jenkins. The Arden Shakespeare Second Series. London: Methuen and Co. Stump, Donald. 1985. “Hamlet, Cain, Abel, and the Pattern of Divine Providence.” Renaissance Papers: 27–38. Vaux, Thomas Lord. 1557. “The Aged Lover Renounces Love.” In Songes and Sonettes, Written by the Right Honorable Lorde Henry Haward Late Earle of Surrey, and Others. London: Richard Tottel, Fols. 72–3. Reprinted in Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others. 2011. Edited by Amanda Holton, and Tom MacFaul. London: Penguin Books, Poem 182, pp. 200–202. Woudhuysen, H. R. “Vaux, Thomas, second Baron Vaux (1509–1556), poet.”  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.  Oxford University Press. Accessed March 16, 2023.

3

“Mine Own, and Not Mine Own” Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and EarlyModern Psychotheology Andrew Barnaby

Horatio: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange! Hamlet: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. In his claim that “Hamlet could never know the peace of a ‘good ending’” (29), Jacques Derrida (1994) points us to the possibility that the task Hamlet sets himself at the end of Act 1—to “set … right” the time that is “out of joint” (Shakespeare 1996, 1.5.188–89)—effectively fails from the very start. And that is because, as Andrew Cutrofello (2014) ventures in a comment on Derrida, for Hamlet as for anyone the time is always “out of joint”: “the condition of being haunted is irreducible” and, indeed, “constitutive of our identities.” While, as we shall see in more detail, at play’s end Hamlet finds a way to give up the Ghost, the alternative to “learn[ing] to live with ghosts,” Cutrofello adds, “would be what Derrida, following Freud, characterizes as mania, a psychological attitude that pretends not to be haunted even as it ruthlessly seeks to annihilate the dead that do in fact haunt it” (32). Within that conceptual framework, Hamlet cannot know a “good ending” because by refusing to be haunted he aims to assert for himself a life that is not answerable to the dead. In what follows, I will explore what becoming answerable might entail through the lens of what Eric Santner (2001) calls the “psychotheology of everyday life.” Santner argues, for example, that the “cure” of the “‘too much’ of pressure” emanating from the Other is not the “elimination of this pressure” so much as discovering “a way of opening to it.” Santner ventures that “if life includes a dimension of ‘too much,’ then being alive to it will of necessity involve a mode of tarrying with [an] unassumable excess rather than repetitively and compulsively defending against it” (22). In a psychotheological context, to know a “good ending” would require that Hamlet find a way to tarry with excess, to accept his hauntedness, to be open to a “too much of pressure,” to surrender to at least some form of DOI: 10.4324/9781003306894-5

“Mine Own, and Not Mine Own”  53 self-alienation in becoming responsive to the Other’s claims. But that is not how the play ends, for Hamlet’s triumph comes, we shall see, in his resisting the very concept of answerability: he will neither be imposed upon by another nor will he become that other who imposes. That said, as I will also try to show, Shakespeare still managed to create a “good ending” if not for Hamlet then for Hamlet—a psychotheologically sound ending. That ending is available to us in the form Shakespeare hit upon to bring to resolution all he could not resolve in his most important play, what he could only resolve in what most likely was the very next play he wrote: Twelfth Night. I aim in what follows, then, to reconstruct the movement from Hamlet (section 1) to Twelfth Night (section 2) as that movement marks the evolution of a distinctively Shakespearean psychotheology. The relationship between the two plays shows with particular clarity how Shakespeare’s grappling with what it means to be answerable to the Other might lead to very different, even contradictory, paths to the experience of “aliveness to the world” (Santner 2001, 9).

1 First then to Hamlet. In his admittedly “skeptical reading” (76), Robert Watson (1994) argues that over the course of the play Hamlet “eventually awaken[s] … to the dark stubborn facts of natural death,” especially that “how we die finally matters less than that we die” (82). But because it is so caught up in “a cultural mythology of denial,” the play as a whole sustains even while exposing the “compelling illusions that divert us from the recognition of meaninglessness” (75–76). Locating, as many critics do, Hamlet’s climactic epiphany in the “providence in the fall of a sparrow” speech, Watson interprets this moment as an evasion: “All one can do is blankly declare that each individual life is significant. All one can choose about death is to be ready—to mythologize the things that happen into a satisfactory story, to prepare a plausible reading of mortality as wholeness rather than emptiness.” Watson thus concludes that the “heroic scenario” Hamlet constructs (or Shakespeare constructs for him) is merely an aesthetic device to “distract us from the real situation” (93–95). In dialogue with if not as a simple confirmation of Watson’s own effort not to be so distracted—to mythologize the fact of mortality “as wholeness rather than emptiness”—we might consider Santner’s (2001) claim that, for certain “post-Nietzschean thinkers … human life includes a surplus that is no longer referred to a life beyond this one, an Elsewhere where the ‘true’ life would be possible. The ‘death of God’ is in large measure just that: the death of such an Elsewhere, such a ‘beyond’ of life that would in some sense be ‘higher,’ more real, than this one” (10). Watson’s own effective acknowledgment that Hamlet is at least proto-Nietzschean—its protagonist “eventually awaken[s] … to the dark stubborn facts of natural death”—points us toward the possibility that Shakespeare deliberately

54  Andrew Barnaby ends the play in conceptual opposition to the traditional Christian notion of the beyond, the Elsewhere in which “true life would be possible.” We then might venture that what Santner concludes about such modern thinkers as Freud and Franz Rosenzweig could be said of Shakespeare’s framing of the experience of his most famous character: “What both Freud and Rosenzweig help us grasp is that with the ‘death of God’ the entire problematic of transcendence actually exerts its force in a far more powerful way in the very fabric of everyday life. What is more than life turns out to be, from the post-Nietzschean perspective, immanent to and constitutive of life itself.” At the risk of mythologizing emptiness by drawing on Santner’s paradoxical notion of “immanent transcendence” (10), the remainder of the discussion of Hamlet will focus on how in it Shakespeare insists, as Claire McEachern (2013) observes of Shakespearean tragedy more broadly, “that human life and loss command our attention in themselves” (93). In a fundamental sense, this is the lesson Hamlet himself must finally learn: to resist the fantasy of an Elsewhere to concentrate instead on what Santner (2001) calls “a specific way of opening … in the place and time we already inhabit …, a specific way … of being in the midst of life” (91). As so much else in the play, Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech questions, to the point of outright rejection, key elements of a traditional understanding of the Elsewhere, the Christian doctrine regarding the afterlife. For example, speculating on why human beings do not commit suicide given how horrible life is, Hamlet does not return to his suggestion from 1.2 that we must not go down that path because of some rather vaguely articulated fear of divine judgment: “the Everlasting” has “fix’d / His canon ’gainst selfslaughter” (Shakespeare 1996, 1.2.131–32). From Hamlet’s revised perspective, we don’t commit suicide—at least we resist the urge to do so—because we simply don’t know what comes in the afterlife: it is “the undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (3.1.78–79). Within the broader cultural context of the Elizabethan stage, the assertion is shocking since its unqualified scope can hardly be understood to exclude the traditional Christian promise of resurrection.1 But within the immediate setting of the play, the assertion is stunning for a different reason: hasn’t the Ghost—surely a traveler from the great beyond—precisely returned?2 The very inexplicability of Hamlet’s statement is more broadly connected to his (and the play’s) refusal of an Elsewhere, a refusal that is itself bound up with the voice that speaks from there: the ghost of his father. That is, Hamlet’s denial of the all but undeniable—the very presence of the Ghost (and with it the denial of the otherworldly place from which the Ghost comes)—is inseparable from his resistance to what the Ghost (the dead father) demands. In short, Act 3’s strange assertion that no traveler has ever returned from the land of the dead is linked to the play’s full design and, in particular, to Hamlet’s delay in fulfilling the paternal charge to take vengeance. It is as part of the effort to put these two elements of the play

“Mine Own, and Not Mine Own”  55 into conceptual dialogue that I draw on Santner’s work, though not without certain theoretical adjustments. We can start to explore the applicability of psychotheology to Hamlet (and Hamlet) with Santner’s (2001) observation that “the subject of psychoanalysis … begins not with biological life but rather where biological life is amplified and perturbed by the symbolic dimension of relationality at the very heart of which lie the problems of authority and authorization.” Elaborating on relationality’s problematic “symbolic dimension,” Santner gives special attention to two terms typically associated with Freud’s economic approach to the workings of the mind, the notion that psychical processes determine even as they are constituted by the production, maintenance, and distribution of instinctual energy: According to Freud, the crucial and most difficult task for the psychic apparatus … is to discharge excitations emerging from the environment and from within. Both of these terms—“discharge” and “excitation”— are, however, peculiarly hybrid in nature, belonging to a semantic field of energetics as well as of intersubjective events and meanings. An excitation is a kind of pure stress, a pressure or tension in the body demanding some form of release. But in a more literal sense, an ex-citation denotes a summons, a calling out, and so a form of address or interpellation. The same, of course, goes for “discharge.” Not only do we speak of discharging excess energy but also of discharging one’s duties or responsibilities, that which one has been charged with doing. (30–31) In response to such a summons (an ex-citation), Santner earlier ventures that fully inhabiting “the midst of life” is grounded in “the ethical conception … of what it means to be answerable to another human being, to be responsive to the Other’s claims on me” (9). But this is precisely Hamlet’s problem. For, to the extent that, as a “subject of psychoanalysis,” he is necessarily “amplified and perturbed by the symbolic dimension of relationality,” he is also peculiarly vexed by “the problems of authority and authorization.” More to the point, Hamlet can open himself to life only inasmuch as he can resist the “Other’s claims,” the Ghost’s dual command: remember me, avenge me (or remember by avenging). Indeed, the various phrasings Santner uses to describe the process by which the subject becomes answerable—becomes the psychoanalytically conceived ethical subject—would apply to Hamlet precisely to the extent he refuses what his father seeks to impose rather than by becoming open to its “uncanny strangeness” (Santner 2001, 5): “unplugging” from life-denying subjection to the Other’s “‘too much of demand’” (64, my emphasis), overcoming a “relational surrender” (90) to the Other, escaping the pressure that emanates from the one “who invades my life,” an Other charged with “a surplus of excitations” that seek discharge in “impossible … demands”

56  Andrew Barnaby (105). As Santner argues, this unplugging “signifies, above all, a suspension of the haunting” (64) or “an opening beyond—as an exodus from—life captured by the question of its legitimacy” (30). But such an exodus, Santner concludes as though recognizing why Hamlet’s own “opening beyond” would require his resistance, is “not one from ordinary life into a space beyond it but in a sense just the opposite: a release from the fantasies that keep us in the thrall of some sort of exceptional ‘beyond’” (30–31). During most of the play, however, Hamlet struggles to find his release point; in heeding the Ghost’s narrative (and ceding to its authority) from 1.5 to 5.1, Hamlet finds himself enthralled to just such an exceptional beyond, “a position outside the everyday activities that make up a human life” (14). For what King Hamlet—the dead father—seeks to (dis)charge drains his son of his own life by insisting on a filial identification with a voice emanating from the other side of death.3 This is what vengeance means in the play. As Stanley Cavell (2003) aptly observes of this aspect of the plot as Shakespeare adapted it from his sources, “the Ghost asks initially for revenge for his murder, a task the son evidently accepts as his to perform … But is this the son’s business …? Here the father asks the son to take the father’s place, to make his life come out even for him, to set it right, so that he, the father, can rest in peace. It is a bequest of a beloved father that deprives the son of his identity” (188). Borrowing from Santner though reversing his valuation, we might understand the traditional revenge story at the heart of the play as the tale of Prince Hamlet’s “relational surrender” to King Hamlet or, more accurately, the surrender to the voice from the beyond that, in haunting him, renders him unable to be alive to the world he actually inhabits. Immediately after his first exchange with the Ghost, Hamlet calls explicit attention to this surrender. His acceptance of the Ghost’s command reimagines it as an inscription that will thereafter dictate, even replace, his own thoughts: Remember thee! Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandement all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain. (Shakespeare 1996, 1.5.97–103) To the extent this moment suggests a full identification with his father, the conceptual slide at work in word “copied” is especially telling: the word morphs from a description of how Hamlet has, in the past, formed his own thoughts to what his mind now stores in his brain as a mere duplicate of his father’s “commandement.”

“Mine Own, and Not Mine Own”  57 A kind of compelled repetition, this mental copy should thus also be understood as an instance of what Santner (2001) has called “ibidity.” Reworking Freud’s foundational ego / id distinction, Santner observes that “the libidinal component of one’s attachments to … symbolic identity must also be thought of as ‘ibidinal’” in that it “calls forth a largely unconscious ‘citation’ of authority”: prompted, invited, summoned, provoked by a “primordial ex-citation,” the subject is “called out to engage in a repetitive and interminable citational praxis in relation to a source of authorization” (50). From the moment of his encounter with the Ghost, Hamlet resides within just such a psychical economy. As Prince of Denmark, he is already expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. But the Ghost’s command to avenge goes even further: it insists that the son, namesake and heir, complete the life the father could not by re-membering it. This reiteration of what resides in the Elsewhere reaches its symbolic climax at Ophelia’s burial. Watson aptly observes of this scene that Hamlet’s stirring self-proclamation, “this is I, Hamlet the Dane!” (Shakespeare 1996, 5.1.257–58)—a (self-)naming that conflates if it does not confuse Hamlet with his dead father (“I’ll call thee Hamlet, / King, father, royal Dane” [1.4.44–45])—is immediately followed by an even more powerful act of “sympathetic identification with a past life”: Hamlet’s leaping into the open grave reveals itself as a kind of “demonic possession of the present” (Watson 1994, 78). Marking as it does Hamlet’s inability to truly separate his life from his father’s, this moment also points back to the anticipatory suggestiveness of the play’s opening line: “Who’s there?” Crucially, because the other with whom Hamlet identifies here and throughout the play is the dead father, Hamlet’s “citation of authority” places him somewhere beyond life. Or, more precisely, he (unconsciously) aims to (re)locate himself in the same place beyond life his father now inhabits. In short, the particular form of his ibidinal relation shows that he has taken upon himself the perspective of an Elsewhere. For that very reason, to the extent we take the psychotheological experience at the heart of the play to be the title character’s vexed effort to (re)discover what it means to live in the midst of life, as suggested above that effort will follow two commingled paths: Hamlet’s refusal to carry out the paternal command intertwines with the play’s inexplicable disavowal of what it otherwise suggests is undeniable, the return of a traveler from the undiscovered country. Hamlet must, in both senses, deny the Ghost. The two paths reach a shared resolution only in the play’s final scene where Hamlet’s more articulated defiance of the Ghost’s demand for vengeance simultaneously hints at a refusal to recognize the Elsewhere from which that demand emanates. In response to Horatio’s pleading with him not to go through with the proposed fencing match with Laertes, Hamlet’s short speech marks the beginning of his unplugging: “Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will

58  Andrew Barnaby come—the readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is’t to leave betimes, let be” (Shakespeare 1996, 5.2.219–24). The rhetorical design of the passage forces us to conclude against our expectations that the “readiness” Hamlet speaks of here refers not to his readiness to kill Claudius but to his own intimations of mortality.4 We are effectively encouraged to imagine that what he wants to “let be”—leave alone, untouched, unfulfilled—is precisely what we expect he should now, finally, be ready to do: fulfill his filial duty by avenging his father’s murder. It is important to register, moreover, that, whatever religious associations the phrase might have had in 1600, Hamlet’s “special providence” hints at only to deflect traditional Christian notions of God, final judgment, or, most tellingly given the speech’s attention to mortality, a post-death afterlife. Providence may in some sense determine “the fall of a sparrow,” but even that isn’t clear, for it simply is “in” the sparrow’s fall.5 What determinative force resides in providence appears to be little more than the brute fact of mortality itself: all living things die. Perhaps death will not come today or tomorrow, “yet it will come” because it is, to borrow a phrase from Othello, “destiny unshunnable” (Othello, Shakespeare 1996, 3.3.275). And because it sets an inescapable temporal limit marking the end of life, whatever afterward is gestured at in that will includes nothing—no time or place—beyond the grave. If we were to judge by his response to Hamlet’s death—“Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” (Shakespeare 1996, 5.2.359–60)—Horatio fails to grasp the unorthodoxy lurking in Hamlet’s words. In a general way, he associates Hamlet’s final rest with a traditional otherworldly presence (angels). But, more to the point, while he doesn’t explicitly refer to the promise of a Christian afterlife (no mention of a future resurrection, for example), the verbal action evoked by “flights” suggests that he imagines the angels taking Hamlet somewhere else, to a place that is better, more real, and in relation to which the life we have now is at best a shadow or foreshadowing. It should be noted that this Christian commonplace has already been problematized if not explicitly rejected by Hamlet’s own dying words: “The rest is silence” (5.2.358). For Hamlet himself, that is, even if there is a continuation of some kind on the other side of death, it does not afford the opportunity to speak back to this life. It is, rather, a place or a condition defined by its silence and thus by some insufficiency or resistance making it impossible to communicate with the world left behind. To the extent this anticipated silence imagines an impenetrable boundary between this life and whatever might come afterward, we are called back to the underappreciated conclusion of the “providence in the fall of a sparrow” speech: “Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is’t to leave betimes, let be.” If, as Horatio’s later response to “the rest is silence” suggests, Hamlet’s “rest” positions him on the other side of life (in his final resting place or, in starker, more purely materialist terms, in all that remains

“Mine Own, and Not Mine Own”  59 of him—the rest, the bodily remnant—after life is extinguished), in the ending of the providence-speech Hamlet similarly locates himself outside of life; that is, he projects a future version of himself (or any person who has died) looking back upon the world of the living. Although what remains still appears to be capable of thinking in some sense, from this place his thought cannot reach back across the absolute boundary. Facing the prospect of a death for which he is not prepared, Measure for Measure’s Claudio laments that the living know nothing of what comes after death (Measure for Measure, Shakespeare 1996, 3.1.117). Hamlet more stoically observes that the opposite is equally true: the dead know nothing of what they leave behind. Imagining his future place of rest, in his silence Hamlet effectively refuses to become Horatio’s ghost: he will not as a spectral traveler return from the undiscovered country to haunt the living. Although Hamlet’s perspective here directly contradicts his own earlier encounters with the Ghost (which seems to be Shakespeare’s point), whether an Elsewhere exists or not, in the final scene the play’s protagonist effectively understands that the dead’s inaccessibility to the living and the living’s inaccessibility to the dead together render traffic between them impossible.6 The acceptance of this separateness is, we might say, Gertrude’s position on the matter, one she presents to her recalcitrant son in both 1.2 and 3.4. In the earlier scene, even for a reader or audience member who doesn’t share Hamlet’s open contempt, that presentation comes across as shallow and unconsidered, a mere commonplace: Do not for ever with thy vailed lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust. Thou know’st ’tis common, all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity. (Shakespeare 1996, 1.2.70–73) In the burial scene of 5.1, Hamlet will push this line much further by connecting “in the dust” to “passing through nature” to suggest that the dead’s “eternity” might consist in little more than “loam … [to] stop a beer-barrel” (5.1.211–12). But, especially given its dramatic context, the exchange between Hamlet and Gertrude in the closet scene suggests that her advice in 1.2 may have had a more radical edge. With Polonius’s corpse visible on stage, the Ghost returns to remind Hamlet of his “dread command” (Shakespeare 1996, 3.4.108). While Barnardo, Marcellus, and Horatio had no direct conversation with the Ghost during their encounters in 1.1 and 1.4, they all saw the Ghost, a fact that makes Gertrude’s inability to see the Ghost in 3.4 particularly inexplicable. But her more formal articulation of this strange inability to see what comes from the beyond points to a deeper awareness of what it means to remain—to live on—in the aftermath of another’s “passing to eternity.” Unable either to see or to hear the Ghost, in confusion as to whom Hamlet is

60  Andrew Barnaby directing his words, she asks, “To whom do you speak this?” The question prompts the following bit of dialogue: Hamlet: Do you see nothing there? Gertrude: Nothing at all, yet all that is I see. Hamlet: Nor did you hear nothing? Gertrude: No, nothing but ourselves. (3.4.131–33) If the “all that is” Gertrude claims to see includes Polonius’s undoubtedly highly visible corpse, it is clear that death does not call into her mind a vision of a hereafter to which the dead (their souls, their spiritual essences) might go. The implication is that passing through nature to eternity simply results in what we can see of the dead: a bloody corpse, an unearthed skull, mere dust. But if that is all that remains of the dead, what remains of the living—what, following Hamlet, we might call the “quintessence of dust” (2.2.308)—is ourselves or, more precisely, “nothing but ourselves.” Gertrude tries to teach Hamlet this lesson, and by the final scene he has learned it: life is what the dead bequeath to the living precisely because they know nothing of what they leave behind. In resisting any instructions, knowledge, direction, or purpose from the beyond, the living are a different sort of “the rest”: they (we) are the remainder or remnant—what stays, is left over, in short, what survives—after someone passes into eternity and its eternal muteness. In that gift of silence, we can, as Slavoj Žižek (2003) puts it, come to appreciate, against the false promise of eternity, that “it is only the fall into time that introduces Opening”—an existential embrace of finitude—“into human experience” (14).7 Building on Žižek’s claim as a response of sorts to Watson’s critique of the “providence in the fall of a sparrow” speech as merely mythologizing emptiness, we might observe that, for Hamlet at play’s end, there appears to be “special providence” in living itself—every moment, for itself, though never entirely separate from an awareness of mortality. That sentiment is precisely what is captured in his phrase “the readiness is all.” Readiness is, of course, a condition of preparedness, a looking forward to what will happen. But it is also a condition of attentiveness, a full alertness to the moment: to be ready is to be consciously alive to the here and now and not to the here(and)after. What is most concisely yoked together in the dual meaning of readiness is an urgency to lay hold of the fullness of the present even in anticipation of what has not yet arrived, the “will come” that is mysteriously a part of ourselves even as we cannot lay claim to it. A life lived in the all of readiness thus curiously balances the full possession of life and its dispossession. Hamlet’s anagnorisis here—that, paradoxically, his life is his own and not his own simultaneously—aligns with Santner’s (2001) first lesson of psychotheology: the recognition that “the agitation and turbulence immanent

“Mine Own, and Not Mine Own”  61 to any construction of identity” is inseparable from self-alienation, the acceptance of the fact that “I am in a crucial sense a stranger to myself” (5–6; original italics deleted). But Hamlet may have missed the second lesson: “it is precisely when we, in the singularity of our own out-of-jointness, open to this ‘hindered’ dimension—the internal alienness—of the Other that we pass from one logic of being-together to another,” the point at which, by “assum[ing] responsibility” for the Other’s “uncanny presence,” we can “truly enter the midst of life” (7; emphasis added; original italics deleted). At the end of Act 1, Hamlet seems prepared to travel this path: as part of the exchange with Horatio I have used as my epigraph, he acknowledges that in the spirit of hospitality we must “welcome” the “stranger” and, more broadly, all that is “wondrous strange” (Shakespeare 1996, 1.5.164–65). But at play’s end, while Hamlet has given up the methodical madness he had put on after his first meeting with the Ghost, the self-assertive, self-authenticating belief that he could live without ghosts is its own form of madness. To put this notion in psychotheological terms, Hamlet’s final clarity comes at a cost. For, in refusing finally to be alienated from himself, he is not alienated enough. And so staking for himself what Cavell imagines as the supreme act of self-origination, Hamlet, as Derrida suggests, “can never know the peace of a ‘good ending.’”8 In Santner’s (2001) terms, Hamlet cannot truly inhabit the midst of life because he chooses to defend himself against the Other rather than “tarrying with [its] unassumable excess” (22). If Hamlet (or Hamlet) is to know a “good ending,” then, it would only be through the acceptance of hauntedness, through some form of answerability to what is an-other and not just to the otherness of his own impending death. At play’s end, Hamlet can find rest in silence, but the play’s author could not; at what only seemed the end of his storytelling, Shakespeare appears to have intuited that he himself was still tarrying, still open to strangeness, still willing to live with ghosts. And so if Hamlet refused to be answerable to the Other, Shakespeare himself would create Hamlet’s Other, a play that would more fully explore what it means to grasp the wondrous strange mysteriously inhabiting our lives. This play is called Twelfth Night.

2 Like Hamlet, Twelfth Night begins in mourning, though here we get two young women (Viola and Olivia) grieving for their respective brothers: 1.2.3–4, 39–41.9 As the completion of the play’s framing plot, Viola will discover in the final scene that her brother, Sebastian, is still very much alive, a point we shall have reason to revisit. But Olivia’s brother will not miraculously return. If, as I am arguing, Shakespeare had not yet worked through what he had set in motion in Hamlet, it is instructive to observe that the experience of mourning—more precisely, mourning properly—is taken up once again:

62  Andrew Barnaby Feste (to Oliva): Good madonna, why mourn’st thou? Olivia: Good fool, for my brother’s death. Feste: I think his soul is in hell, madonna. Olivia: I know his soul is in heaven, fool. Feste: The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul, being in heaven. (Twelfth Night, Shakespeare 1996, 1.5.66–71)10 Feste’s challenge to Olivia is part of his “proof” that she is more a fool than he is. But his main point is that the very excessiveness of Olivia’s mourning—earlier we learned that she intends to persevere in it for seven years (1.1.25–31)—contradicts the consolation she should feel both because her brother’s soul is now in a better place and, more broadly, because of the very belief in a beneficent God that makes such consolation possible. That said, nothing in this proof or in anything from later in the play suggests that Feste is encouraging Olivia to live her life in anticipation of her own future journey to the Christian Elsewhere. Rather, his proof aims to expose the wastefulness of focusing on the dead at the expense of (the) living. In short, Feste subtly urges Olivia to be alive to the here and now. Before the scene is over, his strategy will have met with initial success. For in the wake of her sudden infatuation with Orsino’s gentle “man” (Viola in disguise as Cesario), Olivia completely forgets her dead brother. He will never be spoken of again. While she compares her new feeling to an infection (“the plague” [Shakespeare 1996, 1.5.295]), it makes just as much sense to think of it in terms of what excites her, an “ex-citation” in Santner’s double meaning: at once “a pressure or tension in the body demanding some form of release” (sexual desire) and, “in a more literal sense, … a summons,” a provocation to respond to another. While this isn’t the sort of “ethical generosity” Santner envisions as central to psychotheology (2001, 5), Olivia’s response to Cesario more than demonstrates her answerability to the demands of an-other. And this is true whether or not the other (Viola) even knows that she is making demands. On a conscious level, Viola simply believes that she is making demands (offering love) on behalf of Orsino, the man Viola loves but who himself loves Olivia. But on an unconscious level, in her very imagining of what she would do by way of courtship were she in Orsino’s situation, Viola makes powerful demands on Olivia precisely to the extent in her justly famous “willow cabin” speech she fantasizes either making demands on Orsino by effectively announcing her love for him or becoming answerable to Orsino through a projection of his declaration of love for her (the two options are not mutually exclusive): Make me a willow cabin at your gate, And call upon my soul within the house; Write loyal cantons of contemned love,

“Mine Own, and Not Mine Own”  63 And sing them loud even in the dead of night; Hallow your name to the reverberate hills, And make the babbling gossip of the air Cry out “Olivia!” O, you should not rest Between the elements of air and earth But you should pity me! (1.5.268–76) If, to borrow once again from Santner, Viola here becomes “genuinely open to another human being” (open, we might say, to both Orsino and Olivia), Oliva herself responds in terms of what Santner calls “universality”: that selfestrangement deriving from “the work of … breaking down our defenses” against our own vulnerability. Following Santner’s (2001) addition that, within universality so conceived, human bonding—the very “possibility of a ‘We’”—“is granted on the basis of the fact that every familiar is ultimately strange” (5–6), we should observe that Olivia here becomes answerable not just to Viola but also to something in herself that she cannot fully comprehend: to adapt a line from Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1978), in Viola’s very unconscious revelations something “accommodates itself exactly to [Olivia’s] desire” about which she has previously known nothing (191).11 For Olivia, what Santner (2001) calls the “enigmatic density of desire” (9) as that is unleashed by Viola’s “uncanny presence” (a mystery even to Viola whose own desire is equally enigmatic to herself) also exposes Olivia’s own “internal alienness,” an experience that in creating the conditions for an opening to the wondrous strange “marks the point” at which, as Feste had hoped, she “truly enter[s] the midst of life” (7; original italics deleted). By the end of Act 4, Olivia might feel that she has fully satisfied her erotic longing by getting Cesario (the returned Sebastian rather than the disguised Viola) to agree to marriage (Shakespeare 1996, 4.3.32–33). But her ex-citement reaches its true climax (so to speak) only when, later faced with both Cesarios (Sebastian and Viola), she can utter but two words: “Most wonderful!” (5.1.225). In terms of sheer comic exuberance, those two words mark the completion of Olivia’s dramatic journey: from a denial of living at play’s opening to full aliveness to the world, even to excess, at play’s end. And although the play’s romantic-comedy plot must still find its solution in the creation of two heterosexual couples (Sebastian-Olivia and Viola-Orsino—nature’s “bias,” as Sebastian aptly calls it [5.1.260]), just for a moment we revel in Olivia’s mistake, even wish it were not a mistake. For, as an instance of what Santner (2001) calls the “dimension of ‘too much’” (here, literally, twice as much Cesario), we take our own boundary-defying delight in Olivia’s all-too-brief “tarrying with [an] unassumable excess rather than repetitively and compulsively defending against it” (22). For that brief moment we want to be where Olivia is, free from the constraints imposed by social convention or, more deeply, from our compulsive need

64  Andrew Barnaby not to be truly responsive to life, to the other’s demands, or to the demands of our own self-estranging otherness. “Wonderful” (as in full of wonder) is an appropriate word choice as a way of capturing Olivia’s experience in the face of the “too much.” Commenting on the European discourse of wonder in the early modern period, Stephen Greenblatt (1992) observes that this new discourse derived specifically from the encounter with alien cultures of the New World and was first marked in the exchanges, often remarkably strange in themselves, through which intercultural contact was made. Although such encounters were almost inevitably caught up in the drive of the new colonial powers to possess the marvels they found, the encounter with the alien could also lead, as Greenblatt notes, “precisely to a sense of dispossession, a disclaimer of dogmatic certainty, a self-estrangement in the face of the strangeness, diversity, and opacity of the world” (74, my emphasis). Wonder is thus an experience that risks dismantling modes of authority and self-authorizing, for it registers and enacts the shock of unexpected access to a reality that decenters and subsumes what is previously accepted as the real or the whole. Wonder marks, in short, the sudden apprehension of one’s participation in a greater whole, a place in which we are never completely our own.12 If any true love story must be grounded in the experience of wonder, Twelfth Night’s richest emblem of wonder’s decentering power is not in any of the play’s erotic relationships but in the sibling relationship of Viola and Sebastian. Viola and Sebastian are not just brother and sister, of course, but twins. Whatever personal experience as the father of twins (Judith and Hamnet) Shakespeare might have been drawing on in his representation of this relationship, the play is particularly interested in the enigmatic bond of twins, two people who are at once same and different and therefore necessarily, if mutually, self-estranged. In their oddly elongated reunion in the final scene, Viola and Sebastian appear to need to remind themselves first of the fact of their inseparable bond (hence, the curious recollection of their shared parentage [Shakespeare 1996, 5.1.231–48]) before probing the miracle of their shared survival of the shipwreck. The exchange is yet tinged with loss (while each feels blessed that the other lives, the memory that their father died on their thirteenth birthday is a sad one), but in reclaiming a bond they each had feared had been sundered forever they are effectively restored to a life-affirming duality that Hamlet, for all his genius, can only partly grasp. For what twins know in a way few others can fully comprehend is the double, and contradictory, meaning inhering in the verb “to cleave”: to join together and to break apart. The very excess residing in this special relationship is a powerful marker that, for twins as for all people, in our wholeness that in some mysterious way is always already greater than ourselves, we are never, and never can be, fully whole. Santner comments that “what psychoanalysis ultimately tells us” is that we “are always haunted by nameless loss, by an ontological incompleteness

“Mine Own, and Not Mine Own”  65 against which we defend by this or that symptomatic hypercathexis” (2001, 45). What is required for getting beyond our defensive posture is to accept our incompleteness, to live in wonder. Prior to demonstrating that Olivia is a fool for devoting herself to the dead and thereby forgetting to live, Feste tries to teach her and anyone else who is listening (including the audience) that the acceptance of wonder as a non-defensive response—at once ethical and spiritual—to our incompleteness is the only way we can truly inhabit the midst of life. And so he offers this simple lesson: “Any thing that’s mended is but patch’d; virtue that transgresses is but patch’d with sin, and sin that amends is but patch’d with virtue. If that this simple syllogism will serve, so; if it will not, what remedy?” (Shakespeare 1996, 1.5.47–51). In suggesting that the virtuous and the sinner are alike but patched and mended—we are all made out of the same cloth, always in a state of semidisrepair—Feste shows himself at once deeply aware and deeply tolerant of human limitations. He even registers an almost joyous acceptance of precisely what makes us weak: our need to grapple, as psychoanalysis itself does, with what Santner calls that “life … thrown by the enigma of its legitimacy” (30; original italics deleted). In the spirit of comedy—its delight in misrule, festivity, and, finally, wonder—Twelfth Night’s recognition that we are all but patched and mended, never whole, never complete offers us the “good ending” that the tragic Hamlet can only just begin to help us imagine.

Notes 1 It is impossible to know, of course, what members of Shakespeare’s original audience would have thought about Hamlet’s claim. Regarding Shakespeare’s engagement in religious matters generally, David Kastan (2014) remarks that “the workings of his imagination are at least temporarily able to escape the constraints of orthodoxies, even of the controversies, that defined his age” (15). 2 While just what the Ghost is or where it comes from is notoriously unclear, building on Avi Erlich’s (1977) observation that Shakespeare’s Ghost is effectively “a composite of what Catholics, Protestants, and skeptics thought about spirits” (38–39), Watson (1994) ventures that Shakespeare may have “intended it to stand for all projected beliefs about afterlife” (77). 3 Elaborating on his phrase the “undeadening drama of legitimation” (43), Santner (2001) later comments that “the deep sense of psychic rigidity or ‘stuckness’ that is of interest to psychoanalysis is … nothing but a persistence of this pulse of meaningless yet valid behavior that constitutes our conscious attachment to as well as defense against the Other’s ‘exciting’ secret” (98; original italics deleted). 4 In the interlineal comment in his published screenplay, Kenneth Branagh (1996) explicates this passage in precisely these terms: Hamlet “has spoken with the heart-rending simplicity of a man who knows that he is going to die and probably very soon. He accepts the inevitability of it” (162). 5 Shakespeare’s “providence” seems less to have a single definitive meaning here than to be suggestive of a range of possible meanings or even of our uncertainty of precisely what reality it refers to: for example, the workings of the Christian god in human history or merely the idea we have that human history should have a sacred purpose.

66  Andrew Barnaby 6 For the changing cultural context within which Shakespeare conceived the Ghost and, more broadly, the possibility of visitations from the dead, see Stephen Greenblatt (2002). 7 For a rich philosophical reflection on the necessity of embracing human finitude, see Martin Hägglund (2019). 8 Cavell (2003) argues that Hamlet finally takes up the “burden of proving that he … exists, … [of] finding how to say, ‘I am, I exist.’” Over the course of the play, Cavell adds, Hamlet takes up the burden not just of “preserv[ing his] existence” but more fundamentally of “originat[ing] it” (187). 9 It is worth observing that the earlier deaths of Viola and Olivia’s fathers are also alluded to at points in the play (Twelfth Night, Shakespeare 1996, 1.2.36–37, 5.1.244–45). One wonders if we should read these otherwise inconsequential mentions as traces of Hamlet. 10 For discussion of the question of proper mourning in Hamlet as that relates both to Shakespeare’s personal experience and to changes in Elizabethan society more broadly, see Greenblatt (2004, 311–22). 11 Building on Jean Laplanche’s reworking on the Freudian concept of seduction, Santner (2001) remarks that “the traumatic encounter with the dense, enigmatic presence of the Other’s desire” is “constitutive of the inner strangeness we call the unconscious” (33–34); see Laplanche (1999, 128 and passim). 12 It is worth noting that in their initial exchange Olivia speaks more wisely than she knows in saying to Viola-Cesario “I … allow’d your approach rather to wonder at you than to hear you” (Twelfth Night, Shakespeare 1996, 1.5.198–99; my emphasis). But the relation of wonder to a transformative self-defamiliarization is marked even more clearly in Sebastian’s reflection on the inexplicability of what has transpired since he first met Olivia (who has, of course, mistaken him for Cesario): This is the air, that is the glorious sun, This pearl she gave me, I do feel’t and see’t, And though ’tis wonder that enwraps me thus, Yet ’tis not madness. (4.3.1–4, my emphasis)

References Barthes, Roland. 1978. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Branagh, Kenneth. 1996. Hamlet: Screenplay, Introduction, and Film Diary. New York: Norton. Cavell, Stanley. 2003. Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cutrofello, Andrew. 2014. All For Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity. Cambridge: MIT Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. Erlich, Avi. 1977. Hamlet’s Absent Father. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1992. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. Hamlet in Purgatory. 2002. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2004. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: Norton.

“Mine Own, and Not Mine Own”  67 Hägglund, Martin. 2019. This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. New York: Pantheon Books. Kastan, David Scott. 2014. A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laplanche, Jean. 1999. Essays on Otherness. Edited by John Fletcher. New York: Routledge. McEachern, Claire. 2013. “Religion and Shakespearean Tragedy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd ed., edited by Claire McEachern, 89–109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Santner, Eric L. 2001. On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shakespeare, William. 1996. The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Watson, Robert N. 1994. The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2003. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Part II

Festivity and Sacrifice



4

Hamlet’s Nobler Choice The Interior Game Russell J. Bodi

Athletes, like Hamlet, who engage in dangerous or vitally important contests often make daunting appraisals of upcoming events, transcending strategy and skill and delving into philosophical concerns, especially when the competition implies a community’s destiny. In early modern fencing, “a touch” could cause the kind of physical and emotional pain many present-day athletes experience in violent games. Likewise, spectators to such contests seek to override athletes’ trepidation with festive exhibitions, showing communal support for their favorite player along with derision for the opponent, but celebratory gatherings at funerals seem counterintuitive. To explain this phenomenon, C. L. Barber (1959) commented expansively on the social phenomenon of festivity at any public gathering, which explains how sporting events can coincide with funeral wakes where audiences enjoy what Barber recurrently describes as “games, shows, and pageants improvised on traditional models.” Many such occasions created seasonal celebrations centered on accessibility to venues appropriate for both religious strictures and climate variance (5).1 Although carnival in funeral may appear to be a countercultural and contrived ex machina appendage in Hamlet, Shakespeare allows an athletic-minded Hamlet to replace remorse for Ophelia along with his focus on Denmark’s metagame, to engage in the immediate, playful contest with Laertes representing the essence of athletic psychology, an idea entrenched in a little-known German athletic honor code. Hamlet likely acquired more than intellectual pedagogy while in Wittenberg, where a pervasive cult of valor dominated the curriculum, especially among students of privilege. Thus, Hamlet’s contemplations before his match with Laertes demonstrate the psychological struggle many athletes experience before high-stakes competition. Claudius’s adoption of a carnivalesque atmosphere also assists in distracting from Hamlet’s mortal combat.

Violent Play, Social Facilitation, and Catharsis R. A. Foakes (2003) explains, “I see Hamlet as an incisive exploration of aspects of violence, a key work in Shakespeare's continuing engagement with this issue” (107). Foakes recognizes how each of Hamlet’s violent DOI: 10.4324/9781003306894-7

72  Russell J. Bodi moves represents a “spontaneous act of retaliation” (126). Hamlet’s frequent contemplations reveal a more rational identity, assuaged by a rational mind often triggering restraint from violence. For example, he quickly replaces his emotional proclamation that he could “drink hot blood” (Shakespeare 1992, 3.2.421) with calm rational abstention upon seeing Claudius, his revenge target, at prayer, the spontaneity gone or delayed. Like any athlete accustomed to unanticipated stimuli—such as time-outs, injuries, or referee interventions, Hamlet abandons his impulse to kill Claudius when exigent circumstances prevail (e.g., Claudius facing eternal salvation through prayer). Moments later, in the queen’s closet— sword ever-present—Hamlet impulsively strikes out at Polonius, a characteristically athletic response to an unexpected stimulus like a catcher’s response to a ball. In this case, Hamlet’s built-up aggression may also necessitate impulsive release. Aristotle defines catharsis as “purgation,” which can thus be therapeutic, a “sense of release from tension, of calm” (Cuddon 1991, 124). Players, sports enthusiasts, spectators, and playgoers experience analogous release. According to sociologist Kevin Young (2019), “certainly, to compete in a symbolic way in sports and thus to avoid wanton killing is consistent with the highest levels of civilization” (7). Young and other sociologists and psychologists contend that this emotional release produces a more civilized citizen, one who needs the release of tension that would otherwise lead to violence, exemplified by Hamlet’s earlier restraint from retaliation against Claudius. Young refers to the infamous “Hydraulic Model of Aggression,” a highly controversial psychological concept. Bushman et al. (1999) explain: “The hydraulic model suggests that frustrations lead to anger, and that anger in turn, builds up inside an individual like hydraulic pressure inside a closed environment until it is released in some way” (368). Though some psychologists doubt the veracity of systemic pressure release, many believe that internal aggression requires an outlet, which partially explains Hamlet’s sudden aggressive action toward Polonius, possibly a delayed manifestation of his “hot blood” mindset. Nevertheless, the vast portion of the play exhibits Hamlet agonizing over inflicting harm or enduring the violence of others, a common aspect of any athlete’s pregame strategy, which can resemble a build-up of intense pressure in search of release inviting audience participation. Joseph S. Reynoso (2021) explains that spectator participation “can provide interpersonal connection and serve as a medium for exemplifying group values, such as resilience, pursuit of excellence, discipline, solidarity and sacrifice” (592). However, Reynoso cautions that sports can also breed a reprehensible response within the facilitating community. Ironically, only in organized play can a participant inflict harm or even cause the death of another player, all under the protection of a “legitimate,” playful engagement, something ancient Greek and Roman cultures treasured, and early modern audiences craved.

Hamlet’s Nobler Choice  73 American sports commentators often reinforce the communal appreciation of athletic violence reflecting on the deep sense of doom among some American football players before a game, particularly when players know they will likely suffer or inflict injury, possibly leading to serious, careerending incidents. A professional mixed martial-arts participant once said that only a fool is fearless before a match when no holds are barred. As if to counter the athletes’ sense of dread, audiences to violent exertions traditionally create a festive atmosphere with ritualized tailgating, music, costuming, cheering, and other forms of mimicry to show an affinity for a team or athlete in anticipation of dangerous action; the stakes are that high for faithful fans, especially among rival teams. Likewise, in Hamlet, Claudius insists on drinks, trumpets, guns, drums, and cannons to validate and even elevate the sacred violence that he hopes will end Hamlet’s life, altogether consistent with his Act I peroration to celebrate his marriage “with mirth in funeral” (Shakespeare 1992, 1.2.12). Social psychologists refer to ritualized fan involvement as “social facilitation,” explaining how festivity helps to create community identity. Social facilitation theory, which Saul McLeod (2011) defines as “an improvement in performance produced by the mere presence of others,” insists that “well-trained subjects [are] better at a psychomotor task … in front of spectators” (par. 7). For example, professional boxer James Westley says that by round six, he struggles with physical pain and exhaustion, but that he cannot ignore the “energy in the room” (interview with author, May 2021). However, some psychological studies describe an opposite effect, adding that home field advantage (or “home strip” in fencing) does not necessarily affect athletic performance.2 Much depends on the mindset preparation and focus of the athlete. Confidence and skill make a decisive difference; while some athletes play to the crowd, in competitions like fencing, a potentially dangerous sport where intense viscerality and focus are keys to success, crowd support does not necessarily register in the experienced athlete’s awareness.3 Therein lies the difference between child’s play and the highly agonistic world of adult play. Sigmund Freud (1955) affirms that “artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults, which, unlike children’s, are aimed at an audience, do not spare the spectators (for instance, in tragedy) the most painful experiences and can yet be felt by them as highly enjoyable” (7). Freud’s assessment leads to a discussion of how theatrical violence will differ in audience appeal. Aristotle (1982) explains the different catharsis present in theatrical as opposed to live athletic activities: “The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular” (IX.54). Audience appeal depends on the difference in approach to these events. Aristotle continues, “But again, Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity” (XIV.59). Sports, or unscripted, improvisational play, still have a potential to become more compelling to audiences than a scripted

74  Russell J. Bodi drama that exists within prearranged boundaries, even if those boundaries are subject to varied interpretations. The difference between lived involvement and a staged experience lies in the spontaneity of sport, where gifted athletic improvisation, execution of maneuvers, and unaffected passion can evoke inspiration and sublime artistry in much the same way as theater. Knowledge of the artistry of athleticism and its inventive skill determines the level of appreciation. A fencing expert will likely see Act 5 from a different point of view from a non-athletic, philosophically minded audience member. A focused athlete’s performative skill, confidence, and experience necessarily diminish the audiences’ external effect either positively or negatively. Freud (1955) explains: “Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli” (27). Arguably, intensity transcends the more physical and emotional fundamentals of play to become the hallmark of any successful athletic performance, based on the ability to ignore external and internal stimuli. Freud contends that “it is therefore possible to assign to the system a position in space. It must lie on the borderline between outside and inside; it must be turned towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems” (24). To tread on this cognitive and emotional borderline, especially in a sport like fencing, the athlete must establish a transcendent mental groundwork, enabling him to focus on his actions and the reactions of his opponent, simultaneously blocking the external stimuli of spectators and coaches. For skilled athletes—assuming that Hamlet is skilled—this mental preparation becomes second-nature, charging fans with the wonder of how he manifests such skill. Writer and self-proclaimed pacifist Josh Rosenblatt (2019) became a cage fighter at age 40 to substitute a life of destructive self-indulgence with athletic peril, questioning, “Is it the ultimate act of resignation and acceptance of death to tease it and touch up against it? … Is that what fighting is: a dress rehearsal for the inevitable? Or is it rebellion against that inevitability?” (120). Rosenblatt illustrates his pre-fight desire to stare down terror: “To make sure he’s walking into a cage prepared for a life-or-death affair, the fighter has to lock himself away and make an enemy of the world and anything that is not in him” (131, emphasis in the original). So, like Hamlet’s earlier preoccupation with “the name of action” (Shakespeare 1992, 3.2.96), Rosenblatt (2019) insists that “action, even ineffectual action, can stave off paralysis and trauma” (165). Freud (1955) contends that sensory organs “include special arrangements for further protection against excessive amounts of stimulation and for excluding unsuitable kinds of stimuli” (28). Rosenblatt, therefore, employs internal and external protective agents to help him focus on how combatants and other adrenaline addicts confront the inevitability of pain and danger, but the outcome will measure the rate of success depending on the innumerable variables of personality and focus.

Hamlet’s Nobler Choice  75 Like Rosenblatt, some athletes isolate themselves, listen to music, talk excitedly with teammates—and even vomit. Dylan D’Emilio, an Ohio State wrestler with a lifetime of experience and a formidable ancestry in the sport, convincingly explains how successful mental preparedness helps him focus on a bout: To add to the discussion about blocking out the external components of competition, I think I am able to do that for two main reasons. First, before every match I go through the same routine. This routine includes the physical warm up that I do before every match and includes the mental self-talk before the match. It’s the same routine every time which triggers my body to recognize it is “go-time.” Having the same routine before every match conditioned my mental and physical self to be in performance mode.4 (Email message to the author, 2020) D’Emilio reminds himself that he has “been here before,” but Horatio, Hamlet’s ersatz coach, unambiguously declares, “You will lose, my lord” (Shakespeare 1992, 5.2.192), forcing Hamlet to reject Horatio’s prediction and ignore Gertrude’s later observation that “he’s fat and scant of breath” (5.2.313) and to refuse the interruption of the fatal drink as many athletes refuse breaks and drinks to stay focused on the action at hand. Withal, Hamlet insists that he has been in “continual practice” since Laertes went to France, reminiscent of D’Emilio’s statement of familiar mental and physical preparedness, but Hamlet likely demonstrates athletic bravado—possibly delusional about his chances of winning. Although Claudius’s wager on Hamlet should render him skeptical, Hamlet likely conserves his physical and cognitive vitality, which, as Freud (1955) contends, are “threatened by the enormous energies at work in the external world—effects which tend … towards destruction” (27). Likely, Hamlet may be blocking negative stimuli that Horatio and others voice, but he may also exhibit the Dunning-Kruger effect, a misappropriation of personal ability and strength.5 Ironically, overestimation of physical or mental abilities renders the characters fools or victims, not unlike Malvolio or Bottom, who mistake their prowess. When Hamlet claims to have been in “continual practice” (Shakespeare 1992, 5.2.225), he may be speaking metaphorically—that his thrusts and parries have been verbal or cognitive, reflective of his internal struggles. While blocking negative sensations, even successful athletes potentially deny themselves a realistic appraisal of abilities leading to a Dunning-Kruger inference, either in a positive or in a negative miscalculation. Even the most seasoned athletes cannot measure the success of their mental or physical preparation until the contest ends, but doubts about causality and effectiveness may persist. Positive input, even self-generated, often exaggerates athletic ability, so Hamlet may join the many competitors who obfuscate outsiders for fear of a cognitive embellishment or misappropriation of talent. Until audiences

76  Russell J. Bodi see a literal meaning for Hamlet’s claim of “constant practice,” spectators are left to guess at his meaning. Since the consensus among psychologists and athletes holds that competence and confidence often rise above social facilitating factors, Hamlet’s self-assurance defies Horatio’s warning about losing. An assessment of athletic competence, an attempt to bolster Horatio’s and his own confidence plainly shows how competitors like Hamlet dismiss negativity, declaring that he will “win at the odds” (Shakespeare 1992, 5.2.194) and “defy augury” (5.2.233). Again, he must block negative input. Josiah Bradfield (interview with the author, November 2019), a former basketball player had a similar experience, saying that cheerleaders, pep bands, the crowd and festivity did not affect him or his team. These external measures more likely facilitate crowd enthusiasm than athletic performance. In fact, in one game, the booing from the opposing team’s spectators positively incentivized this basketball team’s confidence and skill, but the negative confrontation may have negatively affected a less confident team. So, if Denmark’s fencing match represents political leanings, Laertes represents the crowd favorite just as the booing or cheering fans express preference. Since there are few secrets in Denmark and assuming that “the rabble” are aware of Laertes’ familial losses, they support him, saying, “Choose we, Laertes shall be king!” (Shakespeare 1992, 4.5.116)—no small exaggeration. Hamlet undoubtedly senses this favoritism as he assesses his chances. Allen and Jones (2014) evaluates situations, which would likely favor Laertes but could also lead to his failure, depending on Laertes’s psychological preparedness: “A supportive audience can induce performance pressure and overcautious performance in critical situations—a pressure response that is purportedly moderated by experience and personality characteristics” (50). Allen and Jones posits that the added pressure from home-friendly spectators could lead to what he calls “choking,” a familiar term for those whose anxiety over potential ­failure precludes effective performance, especially before a royal audience, significantly demonstrating social facilitation and DunningKruger indicators. Charles E. Kimble and Jeffery S. Rezabek (1992) acknowledge that “audience pressure … would produce poorer performance on both players. [Therefore a] choking approach accounts for these results better than social facilitation theory does” (115). Therefore, the higher level of skill a task requires, the more prone players are to failure or choking. Fencing requires an onerous level of skill and courage. Sport psychologists, while endeavoring to improve athletic performances, must confront variables in skill, emotion, and cognition, and they cannot reach a consensus regarding how to deal with performance anxiety and other stressors. There must be a psychological assessment that subsumes these inconsistencies in mental preparation, especially given vast personal and environmental mutability. Freud (1955) offers a comprehensive assessment applicable to the mental struggle of an athlete like Hamlet and his final resignation to fate:

Hamlet’s Nobler Choice  77 There is then a continuous stream of excitations from the part of the periphery concerned to the central apparatus of the mind … Cathectic energy is summoned from all sides to provide sufficiently high cathexes of energy in the environs of the breach. An “anticathexis” on a grand scale is set up, for whose benefit all the other psychical systems are impoverished, so that the remaining psychical functions are extensively paralysed or reduced. (30) Thus, in terms of sports, cathectic energy—resulting in anxiety, depression, internal strife—and from external stimuli, such as social facilitating factors, summons the all-important mental energy, or anticathexis,6 to combat those impulses, sometimes with music, meditation, or D’Emilio’s mantra that “I have been here before.” Such an elevated mental state likely assists in avoiding choking or succumbing to emotional breakdown. Perhaps Freud is reflecting what successful, professional athletic trainer Tim S. Grover and Shari Lesser Wenk (2013) simply dictate to professional athletes: “Don’t Think” (1).7 In some ways, Hamlet provides an example of genuine mental preparation preceding his season-ending bout with Laertes, deferring to Providence in a significant display of what audiences and critics may consider fatalistic interiority before entering the field of play. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. (Shakespeare 1992, 5.2.233–37) Here Hamlet’s apparent cynicism reflects his earlier existential quandary, “To be or not to be,” but with a clear sense of resignation and a humble acceptance of whatever will befall him. Foakes (2003) claims that in Hamlet’s “special providence” speech “he seems really to be cheering himself up and finding a way to rationalize his resignation … that he is unavoidably heading for a final showdown” (128). Recognizing that he has finally arrived at what D’Emilio calls “go time,” Hamlet defers to his all-important “readiness,” to play, and not to “lose the name of action” (Shakespeare 1992, 3.1.96), with the absence of engrossing precognition. Similarly, Rosenblatt (2019) explains this acquiescence to fate before his climactic MMA match. When the time finally came, fear was nowhere to be found, and in its place was an overwhelming sense of calm, a beautiful resignation to my predicament…. I felt a profound, even religious sense of detachment and indifference to material trifles like outcome or consequence or even survival. (176)

78  Russell J. Bodi For skilled athletes, facing a contest requires a discursive approach, which Freud (1955) provides: “we describe the opposition as being, not between ego-instincts and sexual instincts but between life instincts and death instincts” (53). If the mind can rise above fear of choking or losing, above immediate social facilitating or political concerns, that mind can bridge egocentrism and see the essence of life’s purpose, not just in sports, but also in human survival. Whether he realizes it or not, at that time Hamlet’s kingdom and his place in it depend on action. Consequently, Hamlet’s “fall of a sparrow” speech marks a turning point in the drama from a quest for a more “noble” bearing to an acceptance of fate, a marked turn to a more beautiful quality in any athlete—humility.

Performance and Combat Performances reflect the varying qualities actors bestow on Hamlet. Kenneth Branagh’s (1996) Hamlet reverberates Rosenblatt’s sentiment as he enunciates the “fall of a sparrow” lines as one would a prayer, eyes toward Heaven, with soft, religious-like violin background music as he whispers, “the readiness is all.” In Zeffirelli’s (1990) film, the camera pans to a setting sun in a demonstration of an athlete’s “readiness.” Reciting the same lines, Andrew Scott in a BBC production portrays a nervous but resigned acceptance, exhibiting twitches, seemingly lacking the confidence viewers see in most other characterizations (Icke 2017). By contrast, in a recent Globe production, Michelle Terry (2018), a confident Hamlet, axiomatically lectures Horatio, taking courage for granted, displaying none of the foreboding or interior focus other Hamlets reveal. Perhaps, in a display of hypermasculinity, she delivers her lines with a verbal shrug in a careless “whatever” acceptance of fate, likely considered a tragic flaw. The purpose of what game theorists call a “rational” game is simple: to win, then Hamlet’s apparent acceptance may defy the customary attitude of players preparing for violent play. Social facilitation theory applies to Hamlet and Laertes equally, particularly since home strip advantage is dubious at best. Yes, Hamlet is of the court, but Laertes is of the King and “the rabble,” and he is already infected with Claudius’s poisonous intentions. However, as a deliberate distraction, Claudius shines the festival lights directly onto Hamlet: If Hamlet give the first or second hit, Or quit in answer of the third exchange, Let all the battlements their ord’nance fire. The King shall drink to Hamlet’s better breath. (Shakespeare 1992, 5.2.250–53) Claudius bids forth the wine, then calls on the kettle drums, the trumpet, and the cannons. Claudius’s apparent effort to bolster Hamlet’s confidence

Hamlet’s Nobler Choice  79 with courtly festivity must have another, more radical, purpose, aside from an attempt to distract Hamlet from his murderous treachery. The spectacle associated with players in the most violent games, like American football, boxing, bullfighting, and mixed martial arts, also appeals to spectators and, by extension, theater audiences. A communal sense of involvement creates the primal notion that spectators are part of the bloody action— that they are assisting their champion, who is fighting for their community. Therefore, Claudius’s use of “we” becomes more than a customarily royal self-reference since the collective term appears patriotic, noble, and certainly political. If Hamlet was doubtful before the match, Claudius’s opinion that Laertes “is better, we have therefore odds” that favor Hamlet (5.2.282), the king’s declaration may bolster Hamlet’s confidence, leading him to the first two successful hits or “touches,” therefore beating the odds, a notion that becomes problematic in producing the play. Hamlet’s intense focus on his sport necessarily obscures his vision of Denmark’s political metagame. Hamlet’s intensely athletic approach must be engrossing, negating any idea that Claudius’s ploy to outwit him affects him in an ironic counter-mousetrap. Claudius entices Hamlet to take part in the match, wagers favorably on Hamlet’s success, but he reneges somewhat when he says immediately before the match, “I have seen you both / But, since he [Laertes] is better, we have therefore odds” (Shakespeare 1992, 5.2.281–82). The ambiguity of Claudius’s odds declaration still puzzles scholars. Though the odds may be encouraging to Hamlet, the facilitation Claudius uses to entice Hamlet has a negative effect when Claudius declares Laertes the better player, which may explain the redaction of Claudius’s compromising lines in many productions. Though he has already taken the bait and agreed to join the match, Hamlet avoids the distraction of the poisoned cup that awaits the winner of the first hits, a scene reminiscent of American football trainers often forcing players to rehydrate during games. In fact, Hamlet avoids any interruption of the match with lines like “Set it by awhile” when offered the cup of wine (Shakespeare 1992, 5.2.309) and “I dare not drink yet, madam—by and by” (5.2.320). His obsessive focus remains solely on the rationality of the game. Additionally, performances of Hamlet’s unwitting involvement in a game of deceit have yet to produce a Laertes who “fakes” his fighting failures, willingly permitting Hamlet to win the first two hits, and thus the pearl. In fact, Laertes’ denial of the first “palpable hit” (5.2.304) usually shows his unwillingness to concede this failure to win. Throughout the play, Laertes has not yet proven to possess that high level of improvisatory duplicity as would an Iago. Perhaps for audience appreciation, productions opt for a Laertes who always appears to be an equally rational player always endeavoring to win the match. In fact, audiences often appreciate an extended and vital contest that moves quickly and demonstrates an elevated level of athleticism on both sides, the more attractive performative option. Perhaps Laertes remembers his objective

80  Russell J. Bodi when he confesses to the second hit, “A touch, a touch. I do confess ‘t” (5.2.311). To demonstrate this phenomenon, fencing choreographer and film director Jan Loukota’s (2017) combat scene entitled Merlét enhances the action with no vocalized interruptions showing a fight with daggers and swords, convincingly portrayed first with capped or “bated” rapiers. The fast-moving scene reveals all the necessary elements without the offering of wine. (Gertrude instead eats a poisoned apple.) Using his dagger, a frustrated Laertes removes the protection from his poisoned sword tip, which Hamlet must grab to avoid a cataclysmic facial wound. Laertes decisively slices Hamlet’s clasped hand as blood supervenes. Though Loukota’s production defies Shakespeare’s stated or implied stage guidelines, audiences witness a realistic and equal involvement of both players, not a scene broken and slowed by directed dialogue. The poisoned sword scene is logically applied in a closeup of Hamlet clasping the poisoned tip. In most productions, audiences see a “cheap shot,” where Laertes surreptitiously hits Hamlet from behind, another sign of Laertes’ lack of fencing skill. In a compelling and important contest, wherein the fighters are evenly matched and heavily invested in the outcome, an audience cannot help but become emotionally drawn to the action. Rosenblatt (2019) explains the results of his compelling action: “As long as we’re willing to face the terror, the sublime is always a possibility” (198). His comment echoes Freud’s claim about important life and death struggles. His sentiment echoes what actors and producers endeavor to create. Actor and fencer J. Heath Huber explains, “Real fencing is difficult to follow and so quick and subtle that many times spectators won’t even SEE the touches. Staged fencing is slowed down and exaggerated so that the audience sees everything and has the satisfaction of vicariously experiencing the attacks of the players as they happen” (email message to the author, June 4, 2021). Shakespeare’s implied and stated stage directions deliberately reinforce the need to slow down the actions, especially in a fast-moving sport like fencing. An uncontrolled fight scene not only loses an audience, but can also cost actors their teeth, eyes, or even lives, requiring the frequent dialogue to slow the action. As if to complicate matters, however, and since rapier fencing became popular before the early 1600s, Shakespeare’s audiences contained many experienced swordsmen who were able to detect inauthentic moves, having witnessed duels nearly every day, creating a double bind for actors who want to exhibit authenticity without losing context.8 Stage director Jeremy Meier explains the importance of slowing down the action: A production team will typically spend weeks working through the beats of a fight using 50% speed. Once the production is ready for an audience, the general rule is that a fight never goes faster than 75% than it would if it were a real fight (‘three-quarter speed’ is the jargon used in

Hamlet’s Nobler Choice  81 production). This is to aid in actor safety but—just as importantly when it comes to storytelling—audience cognizance of what is occurring.9 (Email message to the author, 2021) Doubtless, the mindset of those playing roles in violent productions certainly acknowledges a level of apprehension, not unlike those of a skilled athlete allowing social facilitation to create another level of potential anxiety. In this play, actors must become athletes just as Hamlet reveals his athletic talent challenged with a divided focus nearly impossible to control. Hamlet’s mental fitness for combat and his physical mettle seem to surface in a justifiable and dramatically appropriate way that creates a conclusion that is more than a manufactured appendage, and the reasoning comes from his time in Wittenberg.

Wittenberg vs. France: Mensur, Wittenberg’s Cult of Honor Much discussion of Hamlet’s association with Wittenberg, repeated often enough in the play to make it noticeable and important, deals with the subject of Martin Luther and his religious teaching, especially since Luther and Melanchthon made the institution famous throughout Europe. Alfred Westfall (1952) questions why “no one has seriously tried to determine what influences caused Shakespeare to send his scholarly prince to Wittenberg in preference to some other European university” (229). Westfall focuses on Marlowe’s Faustus, who studies at Wittenberg but defies any association with scriptures and Lutheranism, opting instead for a chthonic world of evil. Thomas Dekker creates the character of Lacy, who studied at Wittenberg and who carries forth the emerging element of capitalism to London and introduces the commodification of goods, especially fashion. Basically, Shakespeare would have heard of or read about Wittenberg from many sources available within his scholarly and theatrical grasp. Westfall contends that it would be easy to link Wittenberg to German culture, even though the concepts and practice of Lutheranism had not caught on in England. Nevertheless, many European scholars traveled to Germany (231). One significant application of Lutheran theology in Hamlet may be the element of “conscience,” which Martin Luther in a confrontation with royal and papal leaders declared was more important than were papal decrees: “I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience” (quoted in Forell [1975] 2002, par. 1). Despite Luther’s well-known and often repeated pronouncements about conscience, Hamlet appears to dismiss this Wittenberg mindset (“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all” [Shakespeare 1992, 3.1.91]), realizing, as many combative athletes do, that his goal to inflict injury onto his opponent can undercut a scrupulous conscience and compel him to refrain from such action. Hamlet’s rejection of critical Lutheran policy seems to be

82  Russell J. Bodi his primary connection to Wittenberg theology, but that link remains loose and subject to scholarly conjecture. Though Laertes certainly did not learn about conscience through a trip to Wittenberg, he justifies his aggressive action toward Hamlet, saying, “And yet it is almost against my conscience” (5.2.324, emphasis added). Realizing his vengeful mission against Hamlet looms, he defies his conscience in favor of a deadly reprisal, again rendering conscience less relevant to the play’s vengeful construction, thus minimizing the effect of potential Lutheran theology. Still, Wittenberg may offer another link to Shakespeare’s play wherein German fencing style may provide a further influential ingredient. Shakespeare’s audiences likely knew more about fencing’s fundamentals and stylistic maneuvers than postmodern audiences. However, early modern audiences could easily detect the difference between Hamlet’s newly acquired German fencing methods and Laertes’s recently discovered French style of fencing, and this compelling difference requires further scrutiny. While Hamlet’s Act 3 dilemma about being and not being appears to be the metaphorical groundwork for his revenge, German fencing style may account for some of Hamlet’s interior quandaries, particularly since audiences never witness the important “continual practice” sessions he claims to have had, unless Hamlet is prevaricating. In Hamlet’s important but abbreviated prolusion on existence in Act 3.1, he may invoke the duality of taking arms to counter his “sea of troubles” (Shakespeare 1992, 3.1.67), or perhaps equally honorably “to suffer / The slings and arrows” (3.1.65– 66). This predicament, though not necessarily a binary situation, can stand as an important reason for Hamlet’s self-assurance in the last act. Freud (1955) begs for a resolution of such dualistic endeavors, the kind we see in Hamlet: “If only we could succeed in relating these two polarities to each other and in deriving one from the other!” (53). To allow Hamlet to acquiesce to a twofold mindset, Shakespeare needed to find a way to unite Hamlet’s existential quandary into appropriate “nobler” action and recontextualize his existential thinking into decisive action in Act 5, thus absolving his conscience at the same time. With that, it may be no accident that Hamlet’s education in Germany led to an encounter with an unusual trial of aggression and endurance—mensur. The popularity of fencing in early modern England and throughout Europe likely opened the doors to this German-based fencing mindset. According to Roc Morin (2015), this established fencing cult originated in the thirteenth century and brought fencers together in a display of pure valor through highly practiced aggression and stoic endurance of an opponent’s blows. Participants can obstruct but not move to avoid blows in any way. Morin cites one recent mensur fighter who expands upon the disgrace of flinching, “That's very dishonorable. Even if you see it coming, you have to take it like a man.” To this day there are fraternities in Germany, and likely in other countries, that still practice mensur—a measure of “manhood,” presumed to be “sexy,” especially when facial and other bodily scars are visible and highly emblematic. The

Hamlet’s Nobler Choice  83 pervasiveness of mensur throughout Europe no doubt sparked an interest in English fencers, especially those highly sophisticated and upper-echelon male citizens. Kevin McAleer (1994) explains the German phenomenon and how that nation’s universities exploited and developed it: Its roots … can be traced to French and Italian universities of the late Middle Ages, which offered fencing as part of their curriculum and whose cases were patronized by large numbers of enthusiastic German scholars who transmitted what they learned to their native land. By the late 1500s every German university boasted a fencing master and by the middle of the eighteenth century … fencing had progressed so far that its technique, an aggressive and elemental attack shunning the lace and ruffles of the French school, was regarded as the finest in Europe. (121) Essentially, the contrast between fencing styles alerts audiences to different intellectual codes that were strictly enforced through the German universities’ curricula. McAleer explains: “The student duelist … was less concerned with conventional knowledge and erudition than he was with molding a certain attitude toward life” (139–40). Thus, character, strength of will, and honor were of primary importance to German swordsmen, so much so that students spent more time on the practice strip than in the classroom. When Hamlet declares that he has been in “continual practice,” his mensur frame of mind may give audiences reason to take his words literally. As McAleer attests, “They never broke training” (149). Hamlet’s skill in winning the first two hits bears evidence of his heretofore unidentified fencing strength. No doubt Hamlet’s recently attained ability astonished both Laertes and Claudius, showing Hamlet to be the “better” fencer. For Hamlet, as well as for many athletes who are not aware of the mensur code, confidence may stem more from his capacity to endure touches than in his offensive proficiency with the foil and dagger. Certainly, Hamlet’s German style of fencing would show a stark dissimilarity to what McAleer calls the “lace and ruffles of the French school” (121). Staging such a stylistic contrast would likely create a humorous effect. In this respect, an authentic fighter understands any dialectic that demands both the endurance and the delivery of painful blows, a quality that a discerning audience will recognize in a performer on strip or on stage and facilitate the athlete/performer accordingly. Stage and film directors always face the challenge of choreographing the final combat scene using varying degrees of what appears to be graphic violence, giving the familiar ending a different turn. In fights, even in the most artistic martial arts encounters, an atavistic embrace of danger and defiance of death remains sacred, thus integrating creativity and beauty in a sublime act of acceptance of pain and control of emotion. This magnetism extends

84  Russell J. Bodi vicariously to the audiences on and offstage. Former Navy Seal and hockey trainer Dan Jones espouses Santayana’s mantra, “Only a dead man knows the end of war.” He insists that a true fighter never gives up until he is dead, and, if he lives, he must continue the fight—obviously forever (interview with the author, 2020). The Seal reiterated that mantra many times, stressing the importance of this philosophy, and we can see how Hamlet embodies that oath. Of course, in Hamlet, the death of both opponents verifies Dan Jones’s argument about the finality of war and the eventuality of death for avengers. Death, either figurative or literal, emphasizes something that calls to mind a cryptic comment Bobby McMillan, a former street fighter, makes.10 McMillan explains that the goal in street fighting is to “touch” or “kill” an opponent: “You try to kill the opponent, and he tries to kill you, but in the end, both fighters die” (interview with the author, 2020). His statement marks a perfectly literal representation of the Hamlet/Laertes contest, but to what extent can “death” be metaphorical? If one fighter wins the fight, how can both die, especially for combat athletes, whose fighting affirms life? Likewise, for a dedicated fighter like Josh Rosenblatt (2019), “death would begin if I ever stopped fighting” (203). Though one fighter eventually prevails, the street fighter explains that both combatants suffer physical agony and exhaustion, which does not feel like a victory, making his “death” a metaphorical phenomenon. After the crescendo of anticipation and acceleration of intensity throughout the play, Hamlet has accomplished his goal, achieved his vengeful purpose and in a sudden and artistic decrescendo justifies his existence and reifies his father’s challenge. Seeing the play as athletes and actors see challenges creates a binary sense of pride and humility. This climax reinforces the understanding that true fighters are always prepared, and the protracted anticipation of Hamlet’s legitimate opportunity proves a satisfying catharsis. Though any cage fighter or fencing athlete may someday miss the viscerality and sanctity of fighting along with the social facilitation and audience empathy, Hamlet’s self-actualization reveals a collective sense of truth, which ends the game and the irksome duality of his existence.

Notes 1 See Barber (1959, 17, 22, and 27). 2 See Platania and Moran (2001, 190–97). 3 See Feinberg and Aiello (2006): “Contradictory studies, however, began to cast doubt on social facilitation theory. The effects were not always facilitative; some studies found that social settings led to performance impairment” (1088). 4 D’Emilio, a psychology major, has competed in the 2021 NCAA championship for Ohio State University and was named to the All-Rookie Team by Amateur Wrestling News. 5 The composite definition of the “Dunning-Kruger Effect”: a metacognitive lapse wherein a subject misunderstands and/or misapplies mental or physical competence. The phenomenon usually manifests itself in distinct overestimation or underestimation of ability.

Hamlet’s Nobler Choice  85 6 Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary defines anticathexis as a “diversion of mental energy by the ego to block undesirable or objectionable impulses of the id from entering the consciousness: suppression of cathexis by the ego.” 7 Grover has been an athletic trainer for players like Michael Jordan and Dwyane Wade. 8 See also Castillo (2000). 9 Fight choreographer Meier says, “Fight choreography needs to be safe for the actors and (depending on the proximity to the seating) safe for the audience.” Meier tells of one instance where the actor playing Romeo lost teeth during a performance. 10 Street fighter Bobby McMillan is the subject of my essay on Romeo and Juliet. See Bodi (2019).

References Allen, Mark S., and Marc V. Jones. 2014. “The ‘Home Advantage’ in Athletic Competitions.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 23 (1): 48–53. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/0963721413513267. Aristotle. 1982. Poetics. Translated by James Hutton. New York: W.W. Norton. Barber, C.L. 1959. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bodi, Russell. 2019. “Lessons from a Street Fighter: Reconsidering Romeo and Juliet.” In Shakespeare on Stage and Off, edited by Kenneth Graham, and Alysia Kolentsis, 109–22. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Branagh, Kenneth, dir. 1996. Hamlet. Beverly Hills: Castle Rock Entertainment. DVD. Bushman, B. J., Baumeister, R. F., & Stack, A. D. 1999. “Catharsis, Aggression, And Persuasive Influence: Self-Fulfilling or Self-Defeating Prophecies?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 367–376. Castillo, Cesar Alexander. 2000. “Stage Fencing in Shakespeare’s Time.” Shakespeare Online, January 21, 2022. http://www​.shakespeare​-online​.com​/essays​/StageFencing​ .html. Cuddon, J. A. 1991. Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 3rd ed. New York: Penguin. Feinberg, Joshua M., and John R. Aiello. 2006. “Social Facilitation: A Test of Competing Theories.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 36 (5): 1087–109. Foakes, R.A. 2003. Shakespeare and Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Forell, George. (1975) 2002. “Luther and Conscience.” Journal of Lutheran Ethics 2, no. 1: https://www​.elca​.org​/JLE​/Articles​/991 Freud, Sigmund. 1955. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology, and Other Works.” In vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, 1953–74. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Grover, Tim S., and Shari Lesser Wenk. 2013. Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable. New York: Scribner. Icke, Robert, dir. 2017. Hamlet. London: BBC Production.

86  Russell J. Bodi Kimble, Charles E., and Jeffery S. Rezabek. 1992. “Playing Games Before an Audience: Social Facilitation or Choking.” Social Behavior & Personality: An International Journal 20, no. 2 (May): 115–20. Loukota, Jan. 2017. Merlet. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=BwCDXCjdBpo. Merriam​-Webster​.​com Medical Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www​ .merriam​-webster​.com​/medical​/anticathexis McAleer, Kevin. 1994. Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siecle Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McLeod, Saul. 2011. “Social Facilitation.” https://www​.simplypsychology​.org​/ Social​-Facilitation​.html. Morin, Roc. 2015. “Fighting for Facial Scars in Germany’s Secret Fencing Frats: The Secret Duels Are All That Remain of a Once Widespread Practice Called ‘Mensur’.” Vice. February 18, 2015. https://www​.vice​.com​/en​/article​/av4bp4​/ frauleins​-dig​-them​-0000573​-v22n2. Platania, Judith, and Gary P. Moran. 2001. “Social Facilitation as a Function of the Mere Presence of Others.” Journal of Social Psychology 141 (2): 190–7. https:// doi​.org​/10​.1080​/00224540109600546. Reynoso, Joseph S. 2021. “Boston Sucks! A Psychoanalysis of Sports.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 26 (4): 591–607. Rosenblatt, Josh. 2019. Why We Fight: One Man’s Search for Meaning inside the Ring. New York: Harper Collins. Shakespeare, William. 1992. Hamlet: Prince of Denmark. Edited by Barbara Mowat, and Paul Werstine. New York: Washington Square Press. Terry, Michelle. dir. 2018. Hamlet. London: Globe Theatre Production, Globe Player. https://player​.shakespearesglobe​.com​/productions​/hamlet​-2018. Westfall, Alfred. 1952. “Why Did Shakespeare Send Hamlet to Wittenberg?” Western Humanities Review 6, no. 3 (Summer): 229–34. Young, Kevin. 2019. Sport, Violence and Society, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Zefferelli, Franco, dir. 1990. Hamlet. Hollywood: Warner Brothers, 1990. DVD.

5

“Is this a holiday?” Festivity and Sacrifice in Julius Caesar James W. Stone

Feminist psychoanalysis can help us to read closely the way that male characters in Julius Caesar try to rid themselves of what they fantasize as feminine elements within themselves that debilitate both themselves and the polity. Men project their fear of the feminine onto a sacrificial male victim, who is also an oedipal authority figure. By killing him, they hope to eliminate what they construe as the feminine within themselves. Julius Caesar begins with the festive ritual of the Lupercalia, whose sexual violence against women claims to enable female fertility later in the spring. The sacrifice or murder of Julius Caesar, in the middle of the play, occurs on the Ides of March, one month after the Lupercalia. The imagery of blood saturates ritual and ritual sacrifice in interpretative ambivalence—the deconstructive ambivalence of the pharmakon (Derrida 1981).1 The pharmakon implies that the blood is medicinal and fecundating, on the one hand, and that the blood is poisonous and the mark of death, on the other hand. Letting blood spill may or may not be a sacrifice that purges trauma.2 The blood rite may, or may not, relieve male political actors of anxiety-inducing debilities in themselves and in the state (Girard 1979, Agamben 1998). The insights of comparative anthropology indicate that the oscillation of blood symbolism is a primal scene that repeats itself, like the death drive, in looping replay across civilizations, epochs, religions. Blood is antithetical; it runs the range from literal to metaphorical, to the mythical and the catachrestic. Antony’s wondering what the conspirators intend to do next—“Who else must be let blood, who else is rank” (Shakespeare 2011, 3.1.152)—mocks a potential spiral of murder so presumptuously contrarian that it advertises itself as a healing. The wordplay depends on what Freud would call the antithetical meaning of the primal words “let blood”: that letting blood, in one sense of the phrase, is conducive to a cure, whereas in another sense of the term blood-letting signifies an act of killing. 3 The Lupercalia is the occasion in the Roman calendar of festive holidays, in February, that opens the play and engages the question of religious ritual. The answer to the initiating question of the play, “Is this a holiday?” (Shakespeare 2011, 1.1.2), is ambiguous and ambivalent because DOI: 10.4324/9781003306894-8

88  James W. Stone the dramatic action tends to conflate the Lupercalian carnival day with the violence of Caesar’s assassination one month later. Lupercalian rites are designed to excise evil and to introduce fertility in its stead. Goats and a dog are sacrificed during this festival, and then their blood is smeared onto the faces of naked young men, who are enjoined to maintain smiles throughout the process. The ritual requires the men to strike young women with thongs (februa) fashioned from the sacrificed animals, in the hope that the women will become pregnant as a result. After an initial act of violence upon scapegoated animals, a further violence against virginal women leads to a restorative bearing of children. The rite of spring is sacrificial but also socially beneficial: productive and reproductive. (February/februa—the OED makes the etymological connection clear.) Holidays are often double-edged in this way.4 The blood of festive violence may be hard to distinguish from menstrual and parturitional blood, and the blood that is shed in Caesar’s murder or sacrifice may anticipate or parallel events as different as the blood sacrifice of Christ or the sanguine peace and prosperity epitomized by the reign of Augustus. In Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the dying god participates in both the sacred and the profane. Murdering the god-king is not only a sacrilege, but also a necessary act that ultimately leads to the restoration of fertility and of the social order, thus vindicating the sacred. License to do what is not ordinarily allowed, like the men’s striking of the women during the Lupercalia, serves the conservative goal of sexual and social reproduction. The teleology justifies the questionable means, provided that one’s logic is rigorously masculinist, or that the telos of the social as such is seen as male, which often seems to be the case in so male-dominated a play as Julius Caesar. (One bristles at such tendentious logic.) The violent and paradoxically regenerative festive rituals that serve as the background for Julius Caesar lay the analogical foundation for one of the major political themes in the play, of long interest to audiences and critics alike, viz. whether Caesar’s demise is a brutal murder or a sacramental sacrifice that serves to restore and to regenerate the state by allowing it to swerve from dictatorship.5 Lucius Junius Brutus’s forcing of the royal family into exile after Tarquin’s rape of Lucrece in 509 BCE gets replayed centuries later when his descendant Marcus Brutus conspires to assassinate Julius Caesar in 44 BCE. As rape set the precedent for punishment by exile and the banishing of tyranny, so, centuries later, the tyrannical excesses of Caesar are punished by a potentially accursed violence that may also be regenerative. That such violence may be either sacralizing or accursed is an ambivalence built into the nature of the “sacred,” a liminal or antithetical primal word (in Freud’s sense) that means both “sanctified” or “consecrated,” on the one hand, and “cursed,” on the other hand. At the time of the Lupercalia, Caesar’s partisans in Rome deck statues of him with scarves, trophies, and the laurel crown. The tribune Flavius, however, objects to adorning the victor in images that are icons, lest he appear to

“Is this a holiday?”  89 “soar above the view of men” (Shakespeare 2011, 1.1.75) and take on the status of a god. The tribunes believe that Caesar should not arrogate to himself and to his triumphal parade the same status that would be appropriate for a long-established religious ceremony, like the fundamentally conservative Lupercalia, which celebrates fertility for the community as a whole as a reward for the dutiful, regular performance of sacrifice. Caesar, by contrast, sends the signal that he need not bow before the community’s festive sacred rituals. By perpetuating these rituals, the Romans honor gods so old that their origin is lost in the fog of pre-history. But some Romans, to whom Caesar appeals, are swayed by the pressure of passing events that seem to be historically momentous, to the point that plebeian partisans of Caesar seek to deify him de vivant, as he stands erect and iconic before them, both on the battlefield and in the Forum. (Although Roman emperors were often deified after death, at the time of Caesar it was not the practice for a mortal to claim the status of a god during his lifetime.) As the line between divine and human in Shakespeare’s play is fluid, so another liminality associated with festivity is the blurring of the boundaries between male and female. Despite his return from the wars as conquering hero, Caesar bears a persona that is at times gendered female. In trying to win over Brutus to his rebellious cause, Cassius instances Caesar’s vulnerability to the extremes in the physical environment: Caesar almost drowned in swimming across the swelling Tiber, according to one suppositious anecdote, and in another incident he suffered a fever while on military campaign. By this account Caesar is a semi-man, shot through with petty debilities and plagued by abbreviated stories of failure; he is not the conquering hero of epic. He had a fever when he was in Spain, And when the fit was on him I did mark How he did shake. ’Tis true, this god did shake: His coward lips did from their colour fly, And that same eye, whose bend doth awe the world, Did lose his lustre: I did hear him groan: Ay, and that tongue of his that bade the Romans Mark him, and write his speeches in their books, “Alas,” it cried, “give me some drink, Titinius,” As a sick girl. (Shakespeare 2011, 1.2.119–28) The closing lines of this excerpt from Cassius’s long speech contrast Caesar’s masculinity and militarism in his speeches on the battlefield (speeches that he asks the Romans to “mark” or write down in books), on the one hand, with his groaning, his need for drink, and his crying, which make him girl-like, on the other hand. According to Cassius’s schema, writing is incorporeal and masculine, whereas the body is gendered feminine. In contrast to his

90  James W. Stone masculine appearance in writing, in speech Julius Caesar may be either masculine or feminine, depending on whether the speech is on the battlefield or in private conversation with a male friend like Cassius, respectively. His battlefield reputation for manliness notwithstanding, like “a sick girl” Caesar is shaken when he calls for drink. He is fragmented into impotent and needy parts: lips, eye, tongue. That his lips lose their ruddy courage and his eyes lose their light gives the lie to the formerly unified body, once fit and armed for battle in the general’s public persona before his troops. The diminished appearance of these corporal parts indicates an enmity from within; this series of unwonted weaknesses poses the undermining of the whole. The body makes a sick girl of this erstwhile man (according to Cassius). Cassius calls Caesar’s manliness into question as a way of seducing Brutus to participate in the gang-killing of his former friend, based on the alluring assumption that individual, isolated men will remedy and reinforce their dispersed and diminished masculinity by bonding together as a homosocial group. Perhaps the conspirators seek to project their own so-called feminine weaknesses onto the girl-man whom they kill, hoping thereby to purge themselves of their powerlessness and “femininity” relative to the scapegoated dictator. Feminist psychoanalysis highlights how men blame a fantasized woman in themselves for not being adequately manly. Their remedy is to bond homosocially in the act of killing in order to project their collective weaknesses onto the feminized victim, who was shortly before a generalissimo and a model of masculinity.6 In the opening chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud details how in ancient cultures dreams were admired as prophecies of what would come to pass in the future, to which he opposes the psychoanalysis of dreams for the insight that they yield into the recent past and the distant past of the dreamer (the previous day and the unresolved and repressed traumas of the dreamer’s childhood). Caesar is shaken by Calphurnia’s prophetic dream to the point that he desires not to go to the Senate House, though he is unwilling to reveal to his male colleagues that a woman’s dream (his wife’s dream, not his own) has given him such pause. Calphurnia dreamed of blood spurting from a statue of Caesar: She dreamt tonight she saw my statue, Which, like a fountain with an hundred spouts, Did run pure blood; and many lusty Romans Came smiling and did bathe their hands in it. (Shakespeare 2011, 2.2.76–79) The statue at whose base Caesar will be assassinated is Pompey’s, the rival whom Caesar defeated in 48 BCE. Calphurnia dreams of a statue of Caesar, not of Pompey. That Caesar’s bleeding statue displaces and is conflated with Pompey’s symbolizes Caesar’s death and Pompey’s revenge. Calphurnia’s ominous dream of violence done to her husband lends itself, despite the

“Is this a holiday?”  91 interpretation that she intends, to a countervailing interpretation: the revivifying of republicanism. The imagined spouts of blood that proceed from the victim’s body offer not only “warnings and portents / And evils imminent” (2.2.80–81), but also more providential signs and vindications that run counter to the castration imagery of Caesar being hacked to death. Plutarch writes that Brutus gave Caesar “one wounde about his privities” (Bullough 1964, 86). Like Oedipus, Brutus the son kills the father. But this death may be providential for the Roman Republic, at least for the time being and the near future. From the victim’s point of view, one sees only violation and catastrophe. The victim’s blood, however, may mark the birth of something, in addition to indicating the death of someone. The notion of festive violence is complex and contradictory: the coup de grâce for Caesar occurs not long after the Romans celebrated the seasonal rite of the Lupercalia, with its emphasis on blood as the seed of young women ready to be made pregnant when the earth begins to be fertile again for agriculture in the spring. Death and the blood that it brings are the breeder of life, the seed and juice of fruit to come. Is the male murder / sacrifice victim uncannily analogous to the women struck with thongs by a gang of men during the Lupercalia? Does the fact that lusty Romans bathe their hands in Caesar’s blood suggest that this violent rite of spring is productive and reproductive? Perhaps Julius Caesar is like one of the dying gods—Isis, Osiris, Thamyris, or Christ—in The Golden Bough. Perhaps he is like a female goddess of fertility. Decius the contrarian gives a positive, as it were Lupercalian, interpretation to Calphurnia’s dream, whose manifest content is apocalyptic but whose latent content (to use Freud’s terminology) is otherwise: This dream is all amiss interpreted. It was a vision, fair and fortunate. Your statue spouting blood in many pipes In which so many smiling Romans bathed Signifies that from you great Rome shall suck Reviving blood, and that great men shall press For tinctures, stains, relics and cognizance. This by Calphurnia’s dream is signified. (Shakespeare 2011, 2.2.83–90) The flow of blood is “fair and fortunate.”7 Decius is an advocate for the revivifying power of blood sacrifice. In a suggestive and provocative essay, Gail Kern Paster (1989) points to the possibility of interpreting Caesar’s blood as a symbol of nurturance or fertility. Putting emphasis on the word “suck,” Paster sees in this passage an image for the lactating Christ and for the ecclesia lactans. For Paster the blood may recall Christ on the cross, or be assimilated to the blood of Christ’s circumcision, or to that of menstruating women. Although I am inclined against Christological readings—and

92  James W. Stone hence I disagree with Paster in part—I do agree with her sense that Caesar is invested by the conspirators’ “obscure need to re-mark Caesar’s body with femaleness and to cause his body—even if, as here, only discursively—to leak like a woman’s.”8 Paster’s “like a woman’s” recalls for me Cassius’s description of Caesar, in a fever-induced fit, “as a sick girl.” Caesar’s death also lends itself to a more pagan, less proleptic and tendentious-teleological reading, a reading that may incline one toward seeing Caesar’s remains not as proto-Christian “relics” (Shakespeare 2011, 2.2.89), but as those of a hermaphroditic deity that restores parthenogenetically the body politic to health and even gives birth to empire. Militant Caesar is not the end (purpose, terminus) of Rome. Instead, Rome’s telos is Octavius / Augustus (the assassinated dictator’s great nephew and adopted son). Fate decrees that there will be blood, in two senses: the blood of a dead dictator and the imperial blood of Augustus. Blood is condign retribution, or blood is the promise of a better future. In Decius’s speech Caesar may be interpreted as an egomaniacal dictator, as a secular martyr, or even as a savior. His “relics” are a site of pilgrimage for authors, historians, and readers in search of the archetype of a world-historical irruption in the otherwise banal, repetitive, and unredeemed course of violent events. The moment of climax in death is transformative in Plutarch’s Lives, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and perhaps for an audience passionate for physical traces or relics of a beneficent sacrifice—or, more portentously, of an apocalyptic sacrifice—that will terminate the seemingly ever-spiraling cycle of sacrifices or murders. In the short term, Caesar’s death does not deliver on any such promise; instead, it leads to civil war. A spiraling cycle of sacrificial violence is what some comparative anthropologists—in the generalizing vein of J. G. Frazer, the speculations of Freud in the 1930s, and the work of René Girard on mimetic desire—regard as the necessary and foundational crux of civilization. Often a political theology that undergirds the state seeks to impose itself as unique, as the sole sacred violence distinct from the many profane precedents or subsequent specious imitators. Of the many acts of murderous violence, which one, if any, has enough sacrificial caché to terminate the chain of violent reprisals? Is there any guarantee that one murder can put paid to preceding murders by claiming that it, unlike the others, is divinely sanctioned? If not, vendettas will play themselves out at length, oedipally and fratricidally—the subject matter of Julius Caesar and of Antony and Cleopatra. As for the assassination of Caesar, Brutus distinguishes between hacking to death, on the one hand, the massacre that would result if the conspirators were to kill Antony as well as Caesar (as Caius encourages them to do) and a blood-letting that is medicinal, on the other hand, that would limit itself to a strike that removes Caesar alone. To cut off the dictator’s head is justifiable as a matter of clean and sanctioned principle, whereas to kill Antony would spill superfluous blood since he is a member or limb of the body politic—an ancillary, scarcely relevant physical manifestation

“Is this a holiday?”  93 of Caesarian spirit (arrogant, dictatorial spirit). Spilling a tyrant’s blood is justified; shedding the blood of innocent third parties is not. It is the spirit alone, in Brutus’s view, that must be excised, not the exiguous and guiltless members / limbs of the body politic, even if they depend upon the guilty head: Let’s be sacrificers but not butchers, Caius. We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar, And in the spirit of men there is no blood. O that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit And not dismember Caesar! But, alas, Caesar must bleed for it. (Shakespeare 2011, 2.1.165–70) Although there are points when Brutus seems to recognize that the distinction between body and spirit, like that between limbs and head, is too tenuous to hold, he vacillates tendentiously when he claims here a special status for “sacrifice” that sets it apart from murder. Sacrificing just one man (inclusive of head and limbs), provided that he is a tyrant, is for the good of the whole state, he argues; it is a targeted assassination whose ameliorative end justifies the means and makes them blood- and guilt-free. “Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods, / Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds” (2.1.172–73). Assassination is a finely honed carving, a surgical strike that removes Caesar’s accursed share. Such a fastidious procedure of delicate removal makes Brutus and his cohorts seem like “purgers, not murderers” (2.1.179) who rid the body politic of disease and make it whole again. They are at once doctors and priests in service to the highest spiritual authority, provided that one can parse Brutus’s logic in such a way as to free it from self-servingness and contradiction. This parsing is not easy to achieve since the idea of severing the head (and its indwelling spirit) from corporeal limbs, in a way that removes the act from stain and culpability, is hard to rationalize. Caesar is hacked to death, not elegantly carved as a dish fit for the gods. Both before and after the assassination, there is debate whether the blood of the deceased is a tyrant’s or that of a scapegoat. After death, Caesar’s blood becomes imbricated in the language of martyrdom. Antony makes rhetorical capital of Caesar as sacrificial victim, whose desecration he seeks to reverse; he argues for the pietas of his own agenda as vindicator. Claiming to be reluctant to read Caesar’s will, Antony makes appeal instead to a “testament” (Shakespeare 2011, 3.2.131), whose effect on the common people, he speculates, will be uncanny: And they would go and kiss dead Caesar’s wounds, And dip their napkins in his sacred blood, Yea, beg a hair of him for memory, And, dying, mention it within their wills,

94  James W. Stone Bequeathing it as a rich legacy Unto their issue. (3.2.133–38) No sooner is Caesar dead than his remains assume reliquary and talismanic qualities. (And the martyr bequeaths a more mundane legacy that the plebeians are pleased to hear about: he leaves 75 drachmas to each commoner and wills that his private estates along the Tiber become gardens open to the public.)9 In his eulogy Antony insists that he is no orator, unlike Brutus, and thus he has no power “to stir men’s blood” (3.2.218). Instead, he will let the blood of “Caesar’s wounds, poor poor dumb mouths” (3.2.220) exude a material substance more eloquent in arousing revenge than any words that Antony can offer. Or so he says, only to reverse his calculated modesty at various turns and to fashion an eloquent nexus of words dense with bloody images: he vows with considered hyperbole to “put a tongue / In every wound of Caesar that should move / The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny” (3.2.221–23). Antony’s speech lends voice to stones as well as to dispossessed and disheartened citizens. To all of them his eloquence promises redress. Wounds are figurative mouths that drip literal blood. The overarching psychoanalytic figure is the oral fixation and cathexis of mourners’ mouths kissing the bleeding mouths (wounds) created by the phallic, castrating daggers. Blood spilled in murder begets the blood of retribution, allowing one to read Caesar’s death not only as his impotence and failure, but also as an action that delivers a compensatory share greater than what was lost. The compensation (or supplement) is sanctification, apotheosis, posthumous deification, all cast in the mode of militant vengeance against the conspiratorial desecrators, each of whom will endure the condign punishment of death. It is politic for Antony to portray Caesar thus, whether or not he believes sincerely in Caesar’s exalted status in death. Like theater and metatheater, ritual depends for its effect upon repetition. It is predictable, unlike the one and only primal scene or original trauma that it recalls. Theater incites its participants into a state of frenzy even as its distance from the real and its conservatism reassure them that the violence is licensed and contained within bounds. Thus, the original trauma may produce therapeutic catharsis when it is represented on the stage. The bloody origins that founded a culture are cleansed, distanced, and made less traumatic by means of a performative, ritual reenactment—whether in an historical drama about assassination and civil war or in a religious rite that memorializes an act of violence (as in the Lupercalia). That so many men participate in the assassination of Caesar provides a buffer against the moral opprobrium that usually adheres to murderous, penetrative violation of the body. The gang-killing seems not just to be an act of murder, but also takes on some air of legitimacy since no individual may be singled out as accountable; the violence against the tyrant is collective. The men drawn together homosocially in putting Caesar to death

“Is this a holiday?”  95 are equal, almost indistinguishable when the act unfolds. Their bond is mimetic—each desires to be the desire of the other(s)—in René Girard’s sense of mimetic desire as it leads to a sacrificial crisis.10 The anonymity of the group sublates and justifies (at least for the time being) what would otherwise be an act of murder that would threaten to unman the isolated murderer, as befalls Macbeth and as Hamlet dreads in anticipatory fantasies in soliloquy. The gang-killing of Caesar fits well enough under the archetypal rubric of the original killing of the father by his sons that Freud (1913) posits as the primal scene, the repression of whose barbarity makes civilization possible.11 (The phylogenetic forgetting of how civilization had to begin in patricide repeats what happens ontogenetically when by chance the child witnesses for the first time its parents engaged in the sexual act, a trauma that the child forgets, since jealous oedipal desires must be repressed if murder of the parental rival is to be prevented.) If the contest between Caesar and Brutus in Shakespeare’s play often suggests emulous fraternal rivalry—“the primal eldest curse” (Cain’s slaying of Abel) that incites Claudius to murder his brother Hamlet—as if between coevals of roughly the same status, the assassination of Caesar brings to the fore the father’s demise at the hands of Brutus qua emulous son (the primal story of Oedipus and his father), the younger man who violates hierarchy and taboo.12 Fratricide or patricide? Little matter which mytheme or primal scene it is, in any event it must be repressed and sublimated. Plutarch reports that Caesar thought that Brutus was his son by his lover Servilia, and for this reason Caesar asked his captains to spare Brutus at the battle of Pharsalia (Bullough 1964, 92). Shakespeare delays making reference to this familiar rumor until the assassination on the Ides of March.13 Caesar punctuates the violence of the assassination with a singular articulation of pathos, at the moment of climax managing to eke out the famous utterance of recognition (anagnorisis) of the oedipal truth amidst the traumatic shock and confusion that tend toward traumatic dumbfoundment. The Shakespearean text offers “Et tu, Brute?—Then fall, Caesar” as Caesar’s dying interpellation (Shakespeare 2011, 3.1.76), a distinct variation upon the source in Suetonius, in which Caesar’s last words, spoken in Greek, were “You too, my child?” What the various texts of Shakespeare, Plutarch, and Suetonius have in common is that the father calls out by name and poses a question to his Brutus. (Perhaps an illegitimate son, like Brutus here, or Edmund in King Lear, is more likely to have the temerity, or to feel that he enjoys the license, to violate the strictures against patricide.) Plutarch’s mention of the fact that Brutus stabs Caesar in the genitals (“privities”) suggests that the cut that kills the father will lead to the son’s death too, as if in castrating and killing the father Brutus violates his own birth and undoes himself. In the event, the patricide will result in forcing Brutus’s suicide, as if the latter is the necessary and retributive consequence of the former. Shortly before Brutus kills himself, he is haunted traumatically by the Ghost of Caesar—the death

96  James W. Stone drive made spirit. Trauma is haunted by the compulsion to recall and to repeat the primal scene, despite the efforts to repress and to sublimate it. Let us return to the primal scene of violence and violation, in the middle of the play. Brutus exhorts his fellow conspirators, “And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood / Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords” (Shakespeare 2011, 3.1.106–07). He seeks, first, to ensure that no person can be identified as solely responsible for the murder and, second, to enact a mitigating reversal that derives paradoxically from repeating and emphasizing the blood rite. The blood with which the many assassins bathe and dress themselves metamorphoses from forensic evidence of murder into idealizing symbol of liberation and restored republican bonds (male homosocial bonds). In an effort to parry the incriminating and divisive potential of bloodshed, the conspiratorial band of brothers seals its act in blood, justifying and promoting itself as a united front over against a common other or enemy: “Let’s all cry, ‘Peace, Freedom and Liberty’” (3.1.110). Blood begets blood in the vendetta logic of the lex talionis, the immemorial cycle of violence that offers little hope for exit; but blood reverses blood according to the counter-logic of ritual, whether in the theater or in the politico-religious arena. After the original pact of imbruing their hands in blood, there follow the theatrical replaying of the spilling of blood on stage and in eulogies from the “pulpits” (3.1.80, in the secular sense of the word).14 The replaying of the primal trauma and the eulogizing (or, spin doctoring) permit the conspirators to evacuate blood as a symbol of vendetta and to sublimate it instead as a vehicle for redemptive, productive, and reproductive ritual play. Ritual goes hand in hand with iterability, with metatheater; ritual represents the “same” action but differs from and defers (deconstructive différance) the original bloody act of murder (as when Christians in conducting the Mass commemorate and reenact the death of Jesus Christ, to offer a religious analogue for Julius Caesar15): Cassius: How many ages hence   Shall this our lofty scene be acted over   In states unborn and accents yet unknown? Brutus: How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport   That now on Pompey’s basis lies along,   No worthier than the dust? (3.1.111–16) Blood is but play (sport) when murders are staged upon multiple occasions in the arena of politics… or day after day at the Globe, or in some other arena or virtual medium. Theater publicizes the killing of Caesar by representing it in a way, Brutus thinks, that will serve to justify the assassins’ ideology. Plutarch writes that “Brutus went him selfe as far as Byzantium, to speake to some players of comedies and musitions that were there” (cited in Bullough 1964, 106). Brutus wrote to Cicero to ask him to attend the

“Is this a holiday?”  97 plays. (Plutarch does not further specify the nature or the purpose of these theatricals.) The killing of Caesar, which occurred in the past and which will be repeated and recalled often in the future (on stage, in history and documentary, in fictions), is itself preceded by another killing that occasions it, a primal scene even before the primal scene. Plutarch opines that Pompey’s theater “was chosen of purpose by divine providence” as the appropriate place to stage Caesar’s death: “In this place was the assembly of the Senate appointed to be, just on the fifteenth day of the moneth of March, which the Romanes call, Idus Martias: so that it seemed some god of purpose had brought Caesar thither to be slaine, for revenge of Pompeys death” (Bullough 1964, 99). The logic of vendetta demands measure for measure; blood must be shed in the present in order to cleanse prior bloodshed and will, in turn, cause a civil war in the immediate future. Caesar must die because he killed Pompey. The cycle risks continuing ad infinitum, unless the gods intervene. Various portents in Julius Caesar, from the remarks of the Soothsayer to Calphurnia’s dream, in addition to the assassins’ propaganda, suggest such divine intervention, the providence that watches over and directs Caesar’s demise: a pious sacrifice directed by a god, perhaps, not simply a secular murder motivated by brutal self-interest and realpolitik. Shakespeare’s ambivalent use of blood imagery in Julius Caesar traces an arc that oscillates differentially between murder and sacrifice. Under one point of view the gang-killing can be seen in a restorative light, parallel to the Lupercalia one month earlier. Like hitting the women with the februa during the Lupercalia, the blades that penetrate and violate the feminized Julius Caesar may give life, at least to the Republic, at least for a short while longer.

Notes 1 Derrida (1981) analyzes the double bind of the pharmakon, the way that it supplements and subverts itself. “The pharmakon properly consists in a certain inconsistency, a certain impropriety, this nonidentity-with-itself always allowing it to be turned against itself” (119). The word pharmakon has no univocal meaning; it signifies both medicine and poison. 2 Kurtz (2018) details the range of trauma and its belated aftermath (Nachträglichkeit)—from Freud to Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman, from seduction and rape to the violence suffered in war. 3 Freud (1910) discusses the antithetical meaning of primal words, i.e., the way that some words carry completely contrary meanings. Empson ([1930] 1953) invokes in his seventh type of ambiguity Freud’s idea of holding two opposites together at once, a simultaneity that need not trouble itself about contradiction (193–94). Freud’s antithetical primal words—words that carry both one sense and its opposite—have much in common with Derrida’s pharmakon (cited above). 4 Liebler (1995) provides an extensive historical and anthropological treatment of the Lupercalia (88–11). See also Wilson (1993, 47–65). 5 For approaches to the assassination of Caesar that are more political than religious, see Miola (1985) and Chernaik (2011, 79–107).

98  James W. Stone 6 Felman (1993) comments on how the uncanny feminine inhabits and subverts the notion of masculine sameness-unto-itself: “The feminine . . . is not outside the masculine, its reassuring canny opposite, it is inside the masculine, its uncanny difference from itself” (64). See also Stone (2010) and Irigaray (1985). 7 Antony disagrees with this happy interpretation of Caesar’s bleeding to death. Immediately after the assassination, Antony vows not to forget: Pardon me, Julius! Here wast thou bayed, brave hart. Here didst thou fall. And here thy hunters stand Signed in thy spoil and crimsoned in thy lethe. O world, thou wast the forest to this hart, And this indeed, O world, the heart of thee. (Shakespeare 2011, 3.1.204–08) Caesar was hunted down like an animal (a hart) and pierced through the heart. The image is a commonplace, one that Shakespeare uses frequently in his work, often in his comedies to indicate how the Petrarchan lover’s heart is pierced by the scorn of his beloved, like a hart struck by an arrow. More original (indeed unique in Shakespeare’s works) and provocative than the heart / hart pun is Antony’s notion that the killers are “crimsoned in thy lethe.” Under the second entry for the word “Lethe” (the Greek river in Hades whose waters cause forgetfulness) the OED quotes lines 204–06 and suggests that the word is confused with the Latin word for death, lēt(h)um. The uncanny catachresis implies that the signatures of blood-guilt are erased no later than they are made (so self-serving is conscience). The lethe-like forgetting of the lethal, the oblivion in the face of bloody reminders, is what Antony vows to eschew. He fears lest the bloody marks be taken not to indicate murder but come to be seen instead as symbols of heroic resistance to Caesarian tyranny. His plea for not forgetting the noble Caesar will ultimately be vindicated insofar as he will join forces with Octavius and defeat the murderous conspirators who wanted to sink Caesar’s achievements in Lethe or oblivion. 8 The Christological reading is Paster’s, not mine, but I share Paster’s interest in the feminizing of the male martyr. Shakespeare increases the number of wounds from 23 in his source to 33, the traditional age of Christ at his death. In his work on the question of woman in Nietzsche, Derrida (1979) writes, “And then Nietzsche, as if in apposition or as if to explain or analyze the ‘it becomes female,’ adds there ‘sie wird christlich . . .’ and closes the parenthesis” (89). Paster draws parallels between the bleeding statue of Caesar and the blood that spews from Lavinia’s dismembered body in Titus Andronicus, whose “three issuing spouts” (Shakespeare 2011, 2.4.30) can be taken as displacements of the vagina (Paster 1989, 296). Starks-Estes (2014) sees Caesar not as the feminized Christ but as the evocation of “a particular kind of masculinity embodied by the figure of the male martyr, based on the example of the bleeding body of Christ, which is often eroticized as a male body” (132–33), like that of Coriolanus. Caesar’s bleeding wounds (unlike Coriolanus’s) are emblazoned like those of a male saint. Cynthia Marshall (1994) distinguishes between Caesar as monumental statue and the sense of Caesar the man whose interiority is manifested by his bleeding. He is a world-historical figure cast in stone; he is, however, a mortal man of flesh and blood. The assassins who reduce Caesar to blood unwittingly grant him the very power of statuesque iconicity that they kill him in order to preclude him from attaining. The murdered and degraded man is sublimated to the fame of a sacrificed deity. (Caesar was, in fact, not deified until after his death, notwithstanding his and his followers’ efforts to apotheosize him earlier.)

“Is this a holiday?”  99 9 Prior to the revelation of Caesar’s will, 1 Plebeian calls Caesar a “tyrant,” and 3 Plebeian concurs that “We are blest that Rome is rid of him” (Shakespeare 2011, 3.2.70–71). But Caesar appealed to the commons, at no time more so than in his last will and testament. 10 For the way that mimetic desire leads a band of men to take violence upon a scapegoat, see Girard (1979). In a conspiracy in which everyone present participates in the ritual of striking the victim, as in the Lupercalia, each conspirator emulating the others in a mimetic roundabout, all the killers share the same perspective, notwithstanding whatever individual differences of opinion they may have expressed prior to their collective participation in the murder, or the sacrifice, of Caesar. 11 After killing the father, the sons devour his flesh in a “totem meal, which is perhaps mankind’s earliest festival” (Freud 1913, 142) in order to incorporate his strength. Freud traces the transition from the original murder of the father by his jealous sons to the prohibition of fratricide, the institution of which saves the murderers from suffering the identical fate by virtue of the talionic law (140–46). 12 Caesar was born in 100 BCE and Brutus in 85 BCE. Their relationship is sometimes that of emulous brothers, at other times that of father and son in conflict. 13 Prior to the assassination, Shakespeare vouchsafes no allusion to the fatherson relationship, though members of his audience familiar with Roman history would have been aware that Brutus was alleged to have been Caesar’s illegitimate offspring. In the first half of the play Caesar and Brutus remain far enough apart that few words of tension between them are manifested in direct exchange. Until Caesar’s death, any familial relationship between Caesar and Brutus is left repressed and unspoken. 14 Spevack glosses pulpits as “scaffolds, stages, or platforms for public representations, speeches, or disputations. Most likely, the rostra in the Forum” (in Shakespeare 2004, 122n). The modern Elizabethan sense of the word “pulpit” may also be in play, the type of anachronism for which the play is noted, as in the famous reference to the striking of a clock, which probably too many critics regard as an error on Shakespeare’s part, whereas it could be seen as the author’s conscious attempt to make a wry joke. Shapiro (2005) argues that references to pulpits may be interpreted in the context of Queen Elizabeth’s use of preachers to promote her reign on the new Accession Day holiday (November 17). Elizabeth’s Catholic enemies, like Caesar’s Republican enemies, regarded the holiday as a sign of Elizabeth’s Caesarism. Her Puritan critics saw Accession Day as a reversion to the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary (Shapiro 2005, 186–91). 15 Julius Caesar as analogue for Jesus Christ; JC for JC. See my remarks above on Paster’s Christological reading—a reading that I both eschew and find attractive, a reading informed by a long history of Christianity trying to colonize pagan Rome retroactively.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. 1964. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 5. New York: Columbia University Press. Chernaik, Warren. 2011. The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1979. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Translated by Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

100  James W. Stone ———. 1981. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson, 61–171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Empson, William. (1930) 1953. Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. Norfolk: New Directions. Felman, Shoshana. 1993. What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1910. “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 11: 153–61. 1957. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1913. Totem and Taboo. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13:ix–162. 1955. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Girard, René. 1979. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kurtz, J. Roger. 2018. Trauma and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liebler, Naomi Conn. 1995. Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre. London and New York: Routledge. Marshall, Cynthia. 1994. “Portia’s Wound, Calphurnia’s Dream: Reading Character in Julius Caesar.” English Literary Renaissance 24: 471–98. Miola, Robert. 1985. “Julius Caesar and the Tyrannicide Debate.” Renaissance Quarterly 38: 271–89. Paster, Gail Kern. 1989. “‘In the Spirit of Men There Is No Blood’: Blood as Trope of Gender in Julius Caesar.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (3): 284–98. Shakespeare, William. 2004. Julius Caesar. Edited by Marvin Spevack. New Cambridge Shakespeare series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works. Edited by Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury. Shapiro, James. 2005. 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. London: Faber and Faber. Starks-Estes, Lisa S. 2014. Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays: Transforming Ovid. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Stone, James W. 2010. Crossing Gender in Shakespeare: Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Difference Within. London and New York: Routledge. Wilson, Richard. 1993. Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Part III

History and Trauma



6

“All Badged with Blood” Equivocation as Trauma in Macbeth Devori Kimbro

As Macbeth was prepared for initial production, the Jesuit Henry Garnet (c.1555–1606) was executed for his purported role in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. Garnet had been one of the first open advocates of equivocation among English Catholics. He argued that the practice allowed those whom the state would punish for their personal faith to find means of preserving themselves from bodily harm while still answering questions from Protestant officials. The practice of equivocation “laid out a scheme whereby, in separating one’s speech from one’s interior thoughts, an individual might safely respond to questions of faith while endangering neither soul nor body” (Butler 2012, 132–33). Under the tenets of equivocation, those being interrogated could answer questions in a manner that evoked the spirit of the truth while presenting a posture of compliance. Equivocators could even outright lie to the interrogator, relying on God to know the truth in their heart. Even with the plotters tried and executed, the doctrine of equivocation quickly became a concern of many English Protestants. They viewed the Catholic desire and ability to rationalize the telling of half-truths or even to outright mislead state officials in the service of protecting oneself as fundamentally problematic. While Catholics of the time employed equivocation to save themselves physical, emotional, and financial trauma, Protestants thought that equivocation, at its core, was a searing wound on the self, splitting words from actions and the mind from the body. Prior to the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, equivocation was largely the concern of rhetoricians at the universities, eventually finding its way into the public discourse. Máté Vince (2021) argues that those who attended English universities and other outlets of public and private education prior to the early seventeenth century studied aequivicatio in a dialectical and rhetorical sense. Vince goes on to observe that, “the overtly moralistic approach to the use (and user) of ambiguity is a new feature of such Renaissance treatments of rhetoric” (186). The Protestant backlash to the Gunpowder plotters yoked equivocation and morality together for many observers. Written in the historical moment of the Gunpowder Plot, Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1605–06) explores the traumatic associations of the plot. Shakespeare’s investigation of equivocation in this era was timely and DOI: 10.4324/9781003306894-10

104  Devori Kimbro relevant.1 Public and state investigation of the practice intensified. A month after the thwarting of the plot, Thomas Morton (c. 1564–1659), bishop of Durham at the time of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, published a tract in response to various Jesuit pamphlets claiming that the practice of equivocation was purely a matter of conscience in a hostile environment. Morton (1605) claims that the controversy is one rooted firmly in the notion that a servant cannot faithfully serve two masters—pope and monarch. Of the divide Morton says, “though they take an oath of allegeance in cases temporall, yet their common interpretation is stil with respect of their more supreame head [the pope]” (sig. rg3). Morton’s thinking on the issue is indicative of the thinking of many Protestants—equivocation as an act required a splitting of the self into two—one who could lie to investigators to preserve property and life, and one who could remain loyal to a power higher than your earthly sovereign. Early modern notions of trauma and equivocation are equivalent in their conceptualizing of the slippage between internal and external and how past and present interact with one another. Trauma shatters the sense of self. Protestant polemicists argued that equivocation functioned similarly since it created a duality of self—one internal and one external. Both trauma and equivocation could rend selves, and, as a result, Macbeth is a play steeped in blood. Typically, Shakespeare uses discussions of blood as markers of lineage— a metaphorical construct to denote discussions of heritage and rulership. Conversely, Macbeth develops a rhetoric around blood as a literal substance and metaphor. The play contains 36 references to blood, primarily in the context of it being shed or demonstrating guilt of violence. Gail Kern Paster (1993) notes that much of the dialogue around blood and bloodletting in the period anticipated what would come to be understood as psychoanalysis, and that the stage was an apt arena for this representation to become manifest. Actors, Paster argues, offer “to the spectator the contrast between the fictional outer and the insufficient inner which a mirrored image offers the baby, a body of behavioral completeness” (20, my emphasis). It is here that Shakespeare makes trauma surrounding equivocation visceral in Macbeth. It is slippage between external and internal—it is what should be safely contained in flesh and mind being loosed and wreaking havoc on the world. The embodiment of a humoral actor on stage depicting the act of bleeding or bloodletting was in more ways than one masking the internal with a false external—as would have been recognizable to an audience also inundated with fearmongering about how Catholics could appear as one thing while masking a diabolical interiority. Recusant Catholics mostly viewed it as a means to preserve their property and lives in the face of a government oftentimes hostile to any expressed difference in faith. Janet E. Halley (1991) identifies the legal nature of the threat of equivocation as a perplexing linguistic divide between the internal and external self that Catholics seemed to have mastered. For Halley, the issue of “linguistic slippage” was not unique to the post-Reformation debate over equivocation. While the

“All Badged with Blood”  105 tendency seems to be to lump Shakespeare’s exploration of equivocation into the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, I instead posit that Macbeth’s exploration of equivocation is unique because of how it explores equivocation’s impact as a form of traumatic shattering through the appearance and discussion of blood.2 This is not to say that Shakespeare and his contemporaries conceived of “trauma” in our modern, Freudian sense. Rather, as Erin Peters and Cynthia Richards (2021) note, “early modern contemporaries did not have a widely accepted definition of trauma, much less a diagnostic manual or conceptual theories to turn to” (6). As such, the early modern means of describing trauma are incredibly varied and “contextually specific and may take different names and occasion a variety of complex effects” (5). The danger of the Catholic equivocator is framed as part of a long lineage of dangers presented by the “popish” in England. Cynthia Marshall (2002) further connects trauma and the phenomenon of “shattering” by noting that while there is an overt tendency to want to assert that artistic expression is used purely for aesthetic and moral edification, plays such as Titus Andronicus (another bloody Shakespearean spectacle) also “shattered” audiences upon reading or viewing the play. In imbibing texts like Titus Andronicus and Macbeth, we are far more likely to experience what Marshall deems “a sense of undoing or a loss of control” (3). Imagine, if you will, sitting in an Elizabethan theater watching Macbeth make error after error, willfully misinterpreting the witches’ prophesies in the service of gaining power, unable to stop the chain reaction once it begins, and, by observing, affecting the posture of an (un)willing participant. In the context of Macbeth, the psychoanalytic shattering is not limited to the audience experience. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth undergo their own form of shattering for the audience to witness. In her foundational assessment of trauma in the aforementioned Titus Andronicus, Deborah Willis (2002) turns to Ronnie Janoff-Bulman’s work on shattering, saying that trauma “shatters the subject’s ‘assumptive world’: especially susceptible, in her view, are assumptions about personal invulnerability, about the world as a meaningful and comprehensible place, and about the positive value of the self” (27). Willis further explores the ideas of Heinz Kohut to argue that trauma is rooted in the destruction of “central organizing fantasies” about selfhood (28). This shattering is particularly useful in our discussion of Macbeth—both as a play and as a character—since Macbeth’s shattering is rooted in acts of equivocation, which are in and of themselves shattering, as well as a complete breakdown of “central organizing fantasies” of selfhood that denotes psychoanalytic shattering. It therefore stands to reason that traumatic shattering itself can be seen as a strange bedfellow of equivocation. Both represent forms of internal crises or upheaval, and both root themselves in a rupture between internal and external states. Thomas P. Anderson (2006) asserts that the Protestant Reformation itself was a root cause for expressions of trauma in early

106  Devori Kimbro modern drama. The timeframe of Macbeth lands squarely in Anderson’s period, “between 1580 and 1606 [which] mark the maturation of the first generation in England to develop religiously and socially within a post-Reformation culture.” As asserted by most scholars of the English Reformation, Anderson concludes that a “crisis over meaning and intention of language was at the center of Reformation debates” (21).3 Shakespeare’s plays often engaged with these same questions of “meaning and intention of language.” In her study of Ovidian overtones and trauma in Shakespeare’s Romaninspired writings, Lisa Starks-Estes (2014) argues that medical theories of the time shaped early modern sensibilities about how the internal and the external interacted. As with modern trauma, early moderns viewed their selves as susceptible to breach and shattering through outside forces—much as the body was susceptible to breach from outside forces. Traumatic breaches led to melancholy, such as that suffered by Lady Macbeth as the weight of Duncan’s murder presses upon her (38). What we refer to as “trauma” resided in the unknown places of the self. According to Starks, “the threatening external stimuli are internalized within the self, thereby leading to the symptoms of melancholy” (39). It is not surprising, then, that Shakespeare chose to explore the shattering qualities of equivocation as an act by depicting both the mental and the physical traumas after such shattering. The depiction of blood in Macbeth demonstrates the tension between internal states and external appearance. In several instances, physical blood, or the mention of it, takes on the role of an equivocator, presenting itself as one thing while ostensibly meaning another. Oftentimes, physical blood is used to belie any truth in given situations that drive the action of the play. The play begins with descriptions of Macbeth drenched, righteously, in blood after he achieves an auspicious victory in battle against the rebel Macdonwald. Macbeth’s structure seeks to shatter both the characters and the audience by subverting this expectation. At the beginning of the play, we are introduced to Macbeth not as a potential slayer of kings, children, and allies to maintain political power. Instead, the Macbeth we meet is a soldier who corrects wrongs against the state. At the core of Macbeth’s narrative, after all, is treason obscured by equivocating acts. The play opens with an act of treason “set right” as Cawdor is punished for rebelling against Duncan in support of the Norwegian king. Macbeth, ironically, is instrumental in saving Scotland from this treason. The play’s first bloody act happens off-stage but is described in graphic detail as a captain tells Duncan that Macbeth has vanquished the traitor and “unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops” (Shakespeare 2015, 1.2.22). This image is evocative of the tension between internal and external when one operates against the natural order. Macdonwald’s insides are exposed for all to see—a fitting end for a man who hid away his treasonous desires from his king. A battleweary captain approaches Duncan to tell him of Macbeth’s exploits on the field and alludes to the defeat of the traitor as an attempt to “memorize another Golgotha” (1.2.40), mirroring Christ’s victory over death at the

“All Badged with Blood”  107 infamous site of the Crucifixion. Ken Colston (2010) claims that this depiction of Macbeth, the blood-soaked warrior against an unlawful insurgent and rebel, is a forceful, albeit incomplete analogy of Macbeth-as-Christ: a warrior in service to his king defending the kingdom at all costs and saving its inhabitants from ruin (64). The choice of the word “memorize” in connection to Macbeth’s typological representation here also has traumatic connections, since it would have signified not a commission to personal memory, but a broader desire to recall for all those present at the battle (and in the Shakespearean theater) the memory of Christ’s triumph at Golgotha. The implication here is that Macbeth’s bloodied appearance would have caused onlookers to remember Christ’s brutal death and sacrifice for the purpose of edification in a time of trial. The context of blood and bloodletting soon takes a darker turn as the killing escapes the righteous connotation of the battlefield and moves into Inverness’s gloomy battlements. Macbeth and his wife conspire to murder Duncan, framing his drunk grooms for the crime by smearing them with the king’s blood to indicate guilt. The ease with which the couple can create a veneer of guilt while washing away their own immediately points to a dangerous slippage in the way blood equivocates culpability. While conceiving the crime, Macbeth surmises, “Will it not be received, / When we have marked with blood those sleepy two / Of his own chamber and used their very daggers, / That they have done’t?” (Shakespeare 2015, 1.7.75–78). This act proves more difficult than anticipated for Macbeth, and when Lady Macbeth intervenes to complete the framing of the grooms, she states that if Duncan “do bleed, / I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal, / For it must seem their guilt” (2.2.60–61). The use of the word “gild” here is telling in that gilding itself is an expression of the tension between inward and outward states. While much may be made of this passage within the context of Duncan’s blood suggested to be “golden,” the real significance is the term “gild” being used to describe a mode of deception, wherein the outside is covered in gold-leaf to hide an interior comprised of a less-precious material. Thus, the framing of the grooms takes on a dual-layered approach to equivocation. They are guilty by the mere presence of Duncan’s blood on their bodies, while that blood also “gilds” the heinous crime. The ease by which guilt for such a heinous crime as regicide (an issue that also cut deeply to the core of the matter surrounding the equivocation controversy and the Gunpowder Plot) was transferred away from the guilty parties surely struck a nerve among Protestants who were leery about the myriad ways in which Jesuits were perceived as lying to cover their crimes on English soil. As Lady Macbeth asserts, “A little water clears us of this deed. / How easy it is, then!” (2.2.71–72). Lady Macbeth’s sin is so readily masked by the modest act of washing blood from one body part and painting it on another. If the spillage of blood is naturally meant to demonstrate guilt, the fact that it can be manipulated indicates this same traumatic slippage that means innocence and guilt may not readily be determined when one party is so willing to lie.

108  Devori Kimbro Later in the play, however, after Macbeth improperly deciphers the witches’ equivocations for his own material gain, the bloody badge paints him as sinner rather than savior. Macbeth explores this idea when he alludes to the sacrament of baptism as he contemplates washing Duncan’s blood from his own hands after he has murdered his king: Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red (Shakespeare 2015, 2.3.64–66). Macbeth’s concern here is one directly related to his transition from godly warrior to sinner through his equivocations. No longer is the blood on his body a badge of his righteous service to his king, but instead represents to him baptismal forgiveness that he will never receive for his act. Duncan’s blood on Macbeth’s hands cannot be washed away without consequence. Nothing is purified through its removal. Rather, it sullies all it touches due to the crime against state and God that caused it to be there in the first place. This is a powerful image that mirrors a traumatic fall from grace predicated by Macbeth’s loss of his natural, lawful state. Shakespeare here posits the sorts of slippage innate in the debate surrounding the doctrine—blood on a warrior’s hands can contain a multitude of meanings depending on the circumstance. Macbeth transitions from the blood-stained righter of wrongs against a monarch to the unnatural murderer of that same monarch. Lady Macbeth undergoes a similar change as the weight of her crimes and the mismatching between her inner and outer state devastate her psyche. Prior to the king’s bloodletting setting the stage for Macbeth’s rise to power, Lady Macbeth explores her own form of equivocation as a contest between her societally mandated femininity and her desire to help her husband achieve the results of the witches’ prophecies. Again, her thoughts mirror early modern qualms over the nature of equivocation and its ability to incorrectly mirror an internal status through the external visage. Lady Macbeth is a woman who sees the use value of equivocation, and she counsels it to her husband with ferocity. After admonishing her husband to “beguile the time,” by looking “like th’innocent flower / But be the serpent under’t,” she explores her own fractured nature, wherein her outward state of being must live in constant turmoil with the knowledge of her crimes (Shakespeare 2015, 1.5.58, 61–62). As she winds up her request for her nature to be changed to steel her own resolve for what must come, she reflects on an impending divided subjectivity as she welcomes her husband home, saying, “Thy letters have transported me beyond / This ignorant present, and I feel now, / The future in the instant” (1.5.56–59). Lady Macbeth is here referencing the prophecies, telling her husband that his letters relating the prophecy have collapsed the future into the “ignorant present” by shedding

“All Badged with Blood”  109 light on his imminent elevation. Shakespeare arguably tries to presage Lady Macbeth’s later condition by having her speak favorably about being so unrooted from time at this early moment. In this instance, being able to see past the present to a seemingly secure future is a gift. Conversely, in a discussion of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Starks-Estes (2014) again describes a shattering very much akin to what Lady Macbeth manifests in these scenes just prior to her own death. In a Freudian sense, Starks argues, “memory is constituted by loss and fragmentation, and the subject is split—one layer of subjectivity caught up in the transient present, the other bound to a timeless past. This notion of a divided subjectivity, wherein the unconscious constantly fragments any unity of consciousness, radically undermines unified, bounded notions of selfhood” (25). This statement sums up both a side-effect of acts of equivocation, the fragmentation or shattering of a unified self, as well as sheds light on the way time works in the latter half of the play for Macbeth and his wife. Lady Macbeth, as witnessed by her declarations while sleepwalking, exists in a “transient present” wherein time is passing, and the plot continues apace. She is also, however, “bound to a timeless past.” The night she conspired to murder Duncan and frame his guards is still an indelible part of her psyche, with or without her consent.4 Anderson (2006) echoes this notion of trauma and temporality in the period by noting that early moderns surmised that “the memorialized past is always in formation, never stable,” and “the present that bears witness to the past is transformed in its encounter with history” (7). The image of Duncan’s blood omnipresent on her hands constitutes a form of grotesque “memorialization” in the shattered Lady Macbeth’s mind. She is occupying two separate times as a result: the memorialized past of the night of Duncan’s murder and the transient present wherein her crimes are being uncovered and the bill is coming due. Earlier in the play, Lady Macbeth longs for a form of essential alteration. Her visage must remain that of the doting wife and subject, but her well-known soliloquy betrays a desire for the outward and inward to differ wildly: Unsex me here, And fill me up from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood, Stop up th’access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose (Shakespeare 2015, 1.6.39–44). Scholars are correctly hesitant to argue that Lady Macbeth desires to become male, “unsex” being the key word in her commandment. Nevertheless, she desires a thickening of her blood. Humorally, this signaled a shift from the traditionally feminine choler to the heat-driven bile usually associated with

110  Devori Kimbro the bellicosity of males (Wood 2009, 29). It is, however, this thickening of Lady Macbeth’s blood that ultimately leads to the definitive rupture of her self.5 Her initial desire for outer and inner to mismatch is perhaps the most Jesuitical of the play, and therefore the most personally damning. While Macbeth, in a truly Adamic series of events, gives way to his wife’s desires to take the witches at their word and speed his ascension, we are well-acquainted with Macbeth’s righteous bloodletting prior to his act of regicide. Colston observes that early in the play, since the deaths Macbeth causes are in the pursuit of restoring the natural order by eliminating a rebel against one of God’s anointed sovereigns, the “sinful” nature of such killing is mitigated (Colston 2010, 65). It is murder in the service of order. The thickening of Lady Macbeth’s blood, and her desire for her inner and outer states to so drastically mismatch, leads Macbeth to commit murder for the express purpose of uprooting the natural order. Her equivocation of her nature and embrace of sinful rebellion plunge both Lady Macbeth and her husband into sinful behavior at the service of fulfillment of personal desire for power disguised as lawful rule. Paster (1993) adeptly connects the early modern humoral notion of blood and sinfulness, saying that both attached to concerns of “immoderate passion.” Sin constituted such an immoderate passion, and, as such, its impact on the body, or one’s blood, was “like the stirring up of sediment in the ocean; sinlessness is like pure water that can move without becoming muddied” (6). Both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth express that the blood on their hands, whether real or imagined in flashback, in a manner “muddies” the water meant to wash the evidence of their guilt away. Lady Macbeth’s interaction with blood as a marker of her guilt does not end with Duncan’s murder. Although she, like her husband, observes the cleansing virtues of “a little water,” visions of the aftermath of her crimes do the most lasting damage. As Lady Macbeth sleepwalks through the final act of the play, she again encounters supernatural manifestations of Duncan’s blood. The traumatic implications of Lady Macbeth’s acts of equivocation are made painfully clear, as her sleep cycle is repeatedly interrupted by reminders of her act of regicide. Night after night, she wonders aloud to herself, “will these hands ne’er be clean?” (Shakespeare 2015, 5.1.43). Adding further credence to the traumatic ramifications of equivocation and sort of spiritual shattering that accompanies its sinful nature, Lady Macbeth seems to relive an amalgamation of her crimes repeatedly, chastising her husband for his relative bloodlessness: “Wash your hands, put on your nightgown, look not so pale” (5.1.62–63). This expression of what might be recognized as post-traumatic stress clearly demonstrates the connection between trauma and the sort of imbalance between inward and outward states. Starks-Estes (2014) identifies the hallmarks of PTSD as “psychological distress caused by a painful or stressful event that one internalizes but forgets or blocks in conscious life, only to revisit compulsively in nightmares or ‘flashbacks’” (Starks-Estes 2014, 18). All of Lady Macbeth’s acts that

“All Badged with Blood”  111 placed her “unsexed,” unnatural, and traumatized self in opposition to the countenance of innocence plunged her ever deeper into the shattering cycle of self-doubt. This continued even as her crimes mounted to maintain a semblance of control over the result of those crimes. Furthermore, Susanne L. Wofford (2017) argues that temporality and dismemberment and blood are intimately connected through the figures of the witches in Macbeth, and thus their impact is felt throughout the play since they provide the inciting action. They themselves, through their “imperfect” prophesying, represent a temporality that is akin to PTSD. PTSD, dismembering, and bloodletting are quite literally present at the moment the play’s equivocations begin in the witches’ prophecies when their spell-making includes items as varied as a “pilot’s thumb” (Shakespeare 2015, 1.3.28), “poisoned entrails,” eyes, tongues, toes, “liver of blaspheming Jew,” and a “finger of birth-strangled babe” (4.1.5–30). Evoking the list of dismembered body parts present in the witches’ spell-making along with Macdonwald’s dismembered body at the beginning of the play and Macbeth’s at the end, Wofford (2017) observes that “[t]he play establishes a contrast … between [the witches’] visionary powers to see all of time … and the fragments of time they allow Macbeth to see” (516). The bloody, dismembered bodies that propagate throughout the play as a result of the imperfect expression of time in the witches’ prophecies are in and of themselves representatives of the disjointed time concomitant with PTSD. We see evidence of this cycle wherein Macbeth is constantly confronted with gory creations of his own mind that are reminders of the guilt he accrues with every murder and every subsequent protestation of innocence or necessity. The former slayer of rebels subverts the former good cause of his violence when he uses his action to sinfully work against the divine order of things. Thus, he creates a rupture between his internal and external selves, which must be consistently reframed through more lying and death. While Lady Macbeth is plagued by the ostensibly indelible bloodstains on her skin, her husband’s shattering takes the form of further equivocation on the part of ghosts. Shakespeare’s ghosts are primarily tools of expressing what Stephen Greenblatt (2001) terms “deep psychic disturbance” (157). These ghosts appear to remind the revenger, in the case of a Senecan tragedy, and the audience alike that the plot and catharsis remain unfulfilled. The use of ghosts and apparitions in Macbeth is that they do not function in the expected Senecan sense. Macbeth’s ghosts are not spurring him to avenge them or right the wrongs—they are reminders of his lies and ambition. Typically, as Willis (2002) notes, revenge tragedies are back-and-forth ordeals. She notes that the characters in the play attempt to rectify the wrongs against them by “enact[ing] increasingly over-the-top spectacles of violence, ‘getting even’ with enemies by outdoing them” (26). Equivocation sets Macbeth’s bloodletting in motion and prompts him to preemptively “avenge” wrongs he imagines will be done to him in a future he conjures from the words of the witches’ prophecies. Macbeth does not wait to be wronged. In their first

112  Devori Kimbro encounter with Banquo and Macbeth on the moors, the witches use a more traditional framing of blood-as-lineage by telling Banquo that he will “get kings” even though he is not a king himself (Shakespeare 2015, 1.3.67).6 In order to preserve his ill-gotten throne, Macbeth conspires with murderers to rid himself of the king-getting Banquo and his son Fleance. Banquo is murdered, Fleance escapes. Upon seeing what he perceives as the ghost of murdered Banquo while entertaining guests, Macbeth comments on the untimely unnerving effect of envisioning someone you know to be dead to be before you. In frustration he exclaims, “The times have been, / That when the brains were out, the man would die, /And there at an end” (3.4.76–78). The statement seems to indicate a wry observation that murdered men used to stay murdered—but the larger implication of Macbeth’s statement is a disjointing of time. Previously, killed men whose “brains were out” were unable to manifest as a reminder of your guilt. Macbeth, however, seems to acknowledge that his wrongful and preemptive actions against Banquo have created a rupture in what “times have been” previously. The intersection of equivocation, blood, and trauma are borne out in Macbeth’s discussion of blood and the role it plays in betraying guilt. Macbeth’s blood is at once an unreliable marker of guilt since it can seemingly be washed away from the skin so easily or can be transferred quickly from a guilty party’s hand to make the non-complicit seemingly culpable— but the traumatic resonances of blood-shedding are not so simply removed. As a signifier of guilt, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are unable to avoid blood and gore in their most secret thoughts and fears as easily as they can avoid its presence in their initial crimes. Thus, blood becomes the recursive marker of the traumatic implications of their equivocating acts and the shattering of their selves. As a result, the play is deeply invested in the impact that sins like equivocation can have upon an individual—even in service of a greater end. As a play, Macbeth is rooted more firmly to an occasion than other Shakespearean texts, which gives us unique insight into how the theatrical space was being used to process cultural trauma surrounding events like the Gunpowder Plot and the anxiety surrounding Jesuit equivocation. In parsing the way that the stage and occasion blend to explore how the act of equivocating presents a dangerous form of self-shattering and its far-reaching implications, Macbeth provides us with a nuanced insight into how trauma, as a phenomenon, was not merely rooted in acts of physical violence. Rather, trauma exists in a multitude of ways across many experiences. Indeed, the fact that Macbeth’s traumatic roots are based in linguistic slippage surrounding equivocated prophecies, rather than the mutilation of a beloved child as in texts like Titus Andronicus, demonstrates how early modern playwrights and playgoers alike were concerned with the ways in which language and its manipulation often triggered internal, unseen violence that spread outward. Although Macbeth is certainly a play about regicide and tyranny, it seems that Shakespeare seeks to re-route our inquiries about where such instincts reside. The true concern is not the brutish general

“All Badged with Blood”  113 wielding a sword in battle, but the man (or woman) who can say one thing in service of acquisition of power while thinking and knowing another. By connecting such concerns over our inability to control language as a way of making meaning, Macbeth illuminates yet another traumatic aspect of the early modern English religious divide—can you really trust your fellow citizens to say what they mean, and mean what they say? Or in the end, are we all living at the whim of our equivocations?

Notes 1 Shakespeare (2015) only makes one concrete reference to equivocation as a doctrine and allusion to the Gunpowder Plot in the opening lines of 2.3. After Duncan’s murder but before its discovery, the Porter appears to answer a knocking at the castle gates. In his grousing, he imagines himself a Porter of Hell, and he muses that the knocking could come from a Hell-bound “farmer that hanged himself” (2.3.4–5). Scholars presume that this is a reference to Henry Garnet, whose pseudonym while preaching illegally in England was “Farmer.” Additionally, the Porter humorously expounds on the nature of equivocation, telling the newly arrived Macduff that alcohol is an equivocator in myriad ways since it makes men lusty but also renders them impotent in the moment, and that it makes men sleepy, “and, giving him the lie, leaves him” (2.3.27–35). One must “lie” when going to sleep, but also lie while equivocating. For more information on the character of the Porter and his commentary about equivocation in Shakespeare’s England, see Vince (2021). 2 Freudian trauma traditionally refers to the repeated incursion of emotional detritus of a traumatic event in the psyche of the sufferer of said trauma. Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler (2003) compiled a collection of essays that explored the traumatic resonance of the Holocaust, ranging through institutions as varied as politics and art. Cathy Caruth (1996) explored trauma’s impact on literary works. Within the context of early modern texts, trauma largely functions in the social and cultural spheres. There are few indicators of individual trauma, but the marks of culturally traumatic events can be seen ranging through pamphlets sold in booksellers’ stalls to edicts directly from monarchs. This is also true in the case of England’s long-standing religious debates. The broader scope of trauma as a literary and social construct were first detailed in works like Caruth (1996), LaCapra (2015), and Cahill (2008). 3 Indeed, one of the most persistent issues of meaning during the Protestant Reformation centered on the sacrament of communion, the Eucharist, and whether or not the wine present during the ceremony literally transmuted into the blood of Christ at the priest’s hands. Protestant thinkers held that belief in transubstantiation was illogical, and that it carried with it heathenistic, cannibalistic connotations. 4 It is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is interesting to note that Macbeth, too, becomes bound up in issues of time and how it moves around him after he is informed of his wife’s death, prompting him to notably expound “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time” (Shakespeare 2015, 5.5.18–20). 5 For further information on Lady Macbeth’s relationship between motherhood and violence, see Adelman (1992, 130–64). 6 While it is beyond the scope of this paper, the conversation surrounding “blood” and generative reproduction and Macbeth is a fascinating one. For further information see, Bristol (2000). When chastising her husband for his lack of follow-

114  Devori Kimbro through on his plot to murder Duncan, she claims, “I have given suck, and know / How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me” (Shakespeare 2015, 1.7.54–55), implying that she has given birth in the past to an infant. Macbeth ruminates on the danger that a lack of an heir presents, saying of the weird sisters, “They hailed [Banquo] father to a line of kings. / Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown / And put a barren sceptre in my gripe” (3.1.59–61). Justin Kurzel’s 2015 film adaptation of Macbeth explores the psychoanalytic and traumatic connotations of childlessness in the play by presenting extratextual opening scenes wherein the couple lose a young child to illness and an older boy to the battlefield prior to the action in the play. Kurzel’s film heavily implies a trajectory of the narrative wherein Macbeth and his wife are suffering from PTSD stemming from the tragic, untimely losses of their own children. While not all mourning is equivalent to PTSD, the implication of the film seems to be that the loss of their children drives the couple to extreme ends in order to garner power.

References Adelman, Janet. 1992. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest”. London: Routledge. Anderson, Thomas P. 2006. Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton. Burlington: Ashgate. Bristol, Michael D. 2000. “How Many Children Did She Have?” In Philosophical Shakespeares, 19–34. Edited by John Joughin. New York: Routledge. Butler, Todd. 2012. “Equivocation, Cognition, and Political Authority in Early Modern England.” In Texas Studies in Literature and Language 54, no. 1 (Spring): 132–54. Cahill, Patricia. 2008. Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Colston, Ken. 2010. “Macbeth and the Tragedy of Sin.” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 13, no. 4 (Fall): 60–95. Douglass, Ana, and Thomas A. Vogler. 2003. Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma. New York: Routledge. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2001. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Halley, Janet. 1991. “Equivocation and the Legal Conflict Over Religious Identity in Early Modern England.” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 3 (1): 33–52. Kurzel, Justin, dir. 2015. Macbeth. Studio Canal. DVD. LaCapra, Dominick. 2015. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Marshall, Cynthia. 2002. The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Morton, Thomas. 1605. An Exact Discoverie of Romish Doctrine in the Case of Conspiracie and Rebellion, by Pregnant Observations. London: Felix Kyngston. Paster, Gail Kern. 1993. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Peters, Erin, and Cynthia Richards. 2021. “Reading Historical Trauma: Moving Backward to Move Forward.” In Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic

“All Badged with Blood”  115 World, edited by Erin Peters, and Cynthia Richards, 1–28. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Shakespeare, William. 2015. Macbeth. Edited by Sandra Clark, and Pamela Mason. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. New York: Bloomsbury. Starks-Estes, Lisa. 2014. Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays: Transforming Ovid. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vince, Máté. 2021. “The Porter and the Jesuits: Macbeth and the Forgotten History of Equivocation.” Renaissance Studies 35 (5): 837–56. Willis, Deborah. 2002. “‘The Gnawing Vulture’: Revenge, Trauma Theory, and Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 1 (Spring): 21–52. Wofford, Susan L. 2017. “Origin Stories of Fear and Tyranny: Blood and Dismemberment in Macbeth (with a Glance at the Oresteia).” Comparative Drama 51 (4): 506–27. Wood, David H. 2009. Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England. London: Routledge.

7

“Crawling between earth and heaven” Sadomasochism and Subjectivity in Hamlet Gabriel A. Rieger

“God save the Queene”: The Shattered Subjectivity of John Stubbes One of the most striking examples of ego fracturing in the early modern period is recorded in William Camden’s (1615) Annales Rerum Gestarum Angliae et Hiberniae Regnate Elizabetha. Camden records how John Stubbes, a Puritan pamphleteer and “fervent professor of religion,” seeking to defend his nation from the threat of French Catholicism, presumed to offer an opinion of the putative marriage between Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou. He phrased this opinion in a pamphlet entitled The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf Wherinto England is Like to Be Swallowed by Another French Marriage if the Lord Forbid Not the Banns by Letting Her Majesty See the Sin and Punishment Thereof, in which he declared the marriage to be “an immoral union, an uneven yoking of the clean ox to the unclean ass,” and “a thing forbidden in the law” (Camden 1615, paragraph 16). Elizabeth, weary of misogynistic defenders of the faith who had attacked her half-sister Mary’s reign, “[declared that the] booke was nothing else but a fiction of traitors to raise envie abroad, and sedition at home; and commanded it to be burnt before the magistrates face” (Camden 1615). She ordered the arrest of Stubbes, his bookseller, and his printer. Camden records that: Against these sentence was given that their right hands should be cutt off according to an act of Philip and Mary, against the sowers of seditious writings; … Hereby had Stubbes and Page their right handes cutt off with a cleaver driven through the wrist with the force of a beetle, uppon a scaffold in the market place at Westminster. The Printer was pardoned. I remember (being present thereat) that when Stubbes, having his right hand cutt off, put off his hat with his left, and sayd with a loud voyce, God save the Queene, the multitude standing about was DOI: 10.4324/9781003306894-11

“Crawling between earth and heaven”  117 altogether silent, either out of horror of this new and unwonted punishment, or else out of pitty towards the man being of most honest and unblameable report, or else out of hatred of the marriage, which most men presaged would be the overthrow of Religion. Such spectacles were common in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods; as Foucault ([1977] 1995) notes, they serve to reinforce, through a material semiotics, the socio-political hierarchy, demonstrating “the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength” (48–49). It is thus not surprising to see in this highly regimented culture so steeped in the semiotics of status (not only public mutilations, brandings, and executions, but also sumptuary laws, royal pageants, processionals, etc.) a fetishizing of status, as well as its inversion, degradation. We see an element of this fetishizing in Stubbes’s reaction to his punishment; he not only accepts the corporeal fragmentation visited upon him through the taking of his hand, but he also embraces it and voluntarily extends his humiliation (i.e., his ego fracturing, the fracturing of the psychic self), removing his hat in a gesture of humility and acknowledging the supremacy of his monarch. Camden presents an extraordinary tableau, in which fracturing, both of status (i.e., the humiliation engendered by his public punishment) and of corporality (i.e., the loss of his hand) provides genesis for a reconstructed subjectivity, in this case facilitating Stubbes’s recasting of himself as a submissive subject rather than a “traitor.” The fracturing of his former subjectivity thus allows for a kind of rebirth of the self, affected through his own agency (i.e., “put [ting] off his hat” and declaring “God save the Queene”). My contention in this essay is that early modern English culture allows for, indeed promotes, an ethos of dissolution, what we might term selffracturing, as means of fashioning subjectivity. The fashioning of early modern subjectivity as a conscious process has been critical orthodoxy since Greenblatt theorized it more than four decades ago, but Greenblatt’s theory does not satisfactorily account for the generic problem of tragedy, the most influential expression of the age, which evinces a meditative engagement with, and embrace of, suffering, dissolution, and loss—seemingly the opposite of Greenblatt’s notion of self-fashioning. How can we reconcile the process of self-fashioning with the embrace of subjective dissolution? Using Hamlet, the archetypal early modern tragedy, as a point of inquiry, I will demonstrate the extent to which the process of self-fashioning is undertaken paradoxically through the embrace of dissolution, of self-fracturing. I will examine this phenomenon through both historicism (i.e., Greenblatt) and psychoanalysis (i.e., Cynthia Marshall [2002], whose The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity and Early Modern Texts undertakes an extensive analysis of the process of subjective fracturing) in an attempt to arrive at a productive synthesis of the two methodologies.1 For all of their

118  Gabriel A. Rieger apparent opposition, the two methodologies occupy some of the same conceptual terrain and, at points, they exhibit a surprising synchrony. As I undertake this inquiry, certain challenges inherent in my terminology become apparent. The term dissolution (the term that I employ most frequently in this essay) is protean, signifying a nexus of potential meanings relating to decay, separation, fracturing, and fragmentation, including corporeal dissolution (e.g., Stubbes’s mutilation), ego dissolution (e.g., Marshall’s “shattering of the self”), and the synthesis thereof (e.g., the Prince’s desire that his “too too solid flesh would melt”). This protean quality allows for broad applicability but, regardless of the term, the subject’s effective embrace of the destruction (be it partial or total) or degradation of the self in order to construct a new subjective identity remains constant. Similarly, the term subjectivity signifies broadly, potentially denoting the corporeal subject, the psychic subject or ego, and the political subject, all of which, as the case of Stubbes demonstrates, interbleed in the early modern imagination. Foucault and others note that the early modern self is at least partially a political construction, i.e., constructed through one’s position within the state, which sets its parameters.2 For this reason, while my argument focuses primarily on psychic subjectivity, we can never fully escape its political dimensions.

Masochistic Subjectivity: The Fashioning and Fracturing of the Self The mutilation of John Stubbes, and his subsequent embrace of it, demonstrates the role that fragmentation, intense, public, and spectacular, played as a currency in the intersecting economies (social, political, etc.) of England as the reign of Elizabeth drew to a close and the reign of James began. The anecdote bespeaks a culture in which the semiotics of status, of elevation and degradation, are ubiquitous, but, to a modern audience, Stubbes’s embrace of his own mutilation and humiliation, of his own corporeal as well as subjective fragmentation/dissolution, reads as fundamentally masochistic. Here again we confront a challenge in terminology. The term masochism is fraught, connoting as it does erotic practice (both contemporary and historical), as well as a nexus of theory; we can read it through the lens of both psychoanalysis and historicism. Freud locates elements of masochism in various libidinal expressions, and “describes derivative forms, notably moral masochism, where the subject … seeks out the position of victim without any sexual pleasure being involved” (Laplanche and Pontalis [1967] 1973, 244). Freud’s ([1924) 1959) clearest articulation of what we might term essential masochism occurs in “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” in which he divides the principal into three distinct forms: erotogenic, feminine, and moral masochism. Most to my purpose is erotogenic, or primary, masochism, in which the death drive is directed against the self in a desire for that self’s destruction or degradation. In Freud’s construction, the death drive “tries

“Crawling between earth and heaven”  119 to disintegrate [the self] … into a condition of inorganic stability” while the libido attempts “the task of making this destructive instinct harmless … by directing it … toward the objects of the outer world.” Freud notes that: A section of [the death] instinct is placed directly in the service of the sexual function, where it has an important part to play; this is true sadism. Another part is not included in this displacement outwards; it remains within the organism and is “bound” there libidinally with the help of the accompanying sexual excitation mentioned above: this we must recognize as the original erotogenic masochism. (260) We can read erotogenic masochism in Stubbes’s embrace of his own corporeal and ego fragmentation, as well as in Hamlet’s longing for his own ego dissolution, since in both cases the death drive is directed against the self, reducing or dissolving that self to a state of “inorganic stability” from which another self might be constructed.3 We can understand this phenomena in psychoanalytic terms, but simultaneously in historicist terms, since the new self must be constructed in accordance with the historically specific “intellectual, psychological, and aesthetic structures that govern the generation of identities” (Greenblatt 1980, 1).4 The early modern imagination remains in many ways resistant to our logical understanding, but the seemingly illogical impulse of masochism allows the critic a point of entry, particularly to the fraught question of subjectivity. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Greenblatt’s seminal study inaugurating the discipline of New Historicism, argues for a conscious process by which the subject constructs his own identity, but Greenblatt’s assertion has been challenged repeatedly over the past several decades, most notably by Freudian critics, including Marshall, who argues that early modern texts evince, and embrace, an ethos of “psychic fracture,” the “shattering of the self” to which her title refers. Marshall focuses her inquiry on early modern texts that unsettle their audiences emotionally, in particular tragedies (she references King Lear in her introduction before turning her attention to more marginal texts in her subsequent chapters). Such texts seem on their surface to challenge Greenblatt’s model and, thus, present interpretive problems for historicist critics. My conjecture, that the process of self-shattering serves as a component (indeed, a foundation) of self-fashioning, accounts for the seemingly masochistic embrace of that process and has the potential to reconcile these two understandings. Although Marshall (2002) applies some historicist methodology, she articulates her notion of “shattering,” in part, in Freudian terms, specifically in terms of masochism, noting that: Freud posits a radically paradoxical birth of the subject. In [Leo] Bersani’s words, “the first psychic totality would thus be constituted

120  Gabriel A. Rieger by a desire to shatter totality. The ego, at its origin, would be nothing more than a kind of passionate inference necessitated by the anticipated pleasure of its own dismantling.” As masochism enters into this understanding of subjectivity, it “has nothing to do with self-punishment”; it is instead about the formation of the self. Yet the formation and the dissolution of the self are locked in a profoundly paradoxical tension.” (41) As Greenblatt notes, early modern tragedy is rich with self-fashioning; it is meditatively engaged with subjective construction, which the critic examines through the nexus of cultural artifacts, which constitute New Historicism. At the same time, early modern tragedy evinces a clear preoccupation with subjective “shattering,” which Marshall argues can best be understood through the lens of psychoanalysis. According to Marshall, “where a pragmatic, melioristic historicism attempts to shake the dust of the past from its boots and move forward, an approach based on psychoanalysis calls for an effort to assess … entanglement with the past, toward the goal of greater understanding” (25).5 Historicist critics have traditionally been unreceptive to psychoanalytic theory. Greenblatt himself explicitly rejects it in his 1986 essay “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” in which he charts the shift in identity construction from “property” to “psyche,” although his more recent scholarship has acknowledged the theory’s possibilities for engaging Renaissance texts (Greenblatt 2007, 185).6 The conflict between the two methodologies is in this instance symptomatic of a larger conflict in reading, i.e., the question of how the critic is to understand the complex construction of subjectivity in early modern culture. This question is especially compelling in regard to early modern tragedy, which evinces a clear ethos of ego fracturing, what Marshall calls “shattering,” although this shattering does not stand as an end unto itself.

“O that this too, too solid flesh would melt”: Hamlet and Ego Dissolution The mutilation of John Stubbes, and his immediate subsequent embrace of it, speaks to a culture in which the semiotics of status were ubiquitous. This fascination with expressions of elevation and degradation, with this particularly early modern strain of dominance and submission (to apply the language of masochism), finds its fullest and most immediate expression on the early modern tragic stage. For the purposes of this analysis, Hamlet, arguably the most influential tragedy of its age, will serve as a representative example. From the tragedy’s opening line, in which the sentinel Barnardo asks, “Who’s there?,” the playwright forecasts subjective ambiguity (Shakespeare 2016, 1.1.1). Indeed, all of the characters inhabit identities that are

“Crawling between earth and heaven”  121 indistinct. Claudius, with “mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage” (1.2.12), is the capable administrator who throws the realm into chaos; Gertrude is the devoted wife who hung upon her husband “as if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on” (1.2.143–45) and yet married her husband’s murderer within “twice two months” (3.2.121); Polonius is the protective father who thrusts his daughter into danger; Ophelia is the “chariest maiden” who descends into erotically charged madness (1.3.35); the Prince affects an “antic disposition” (1.5.170) and wrestles throughout the tragedy with the question of his own subjective identity, “that within which passeth show”(1.2.85).7 The Prince’s subjective instability is apparent from his first appearance in 1.2 when he spars with Claudius and Gertrude regarding the death of his father and, by extension, his own political and domestic status. His identity is indistinct, as evinced by his response to Claudius’s attempt to declare him “our son.” The Prince declares himself to be “a little more than kin and less than kind” (Shakespeare 2016, 1.2.65), neither fully integrated into, nor fully distinct from, the monarchial family of Denmark. He is “less than kind” (read kin) and yet “too much in the sun” (read son); from his first lines in the tragedy, his subjectivity flickers. When pressed by his mother about his own self-fashioning, the identity he has constructed through the “nighted colour” (1.2.68) of his mourning clothes, the Prince rejects the assertion that conscious performance, the “actions that a man might play,” can “denote [him] truly,” since he has “that within which passeth show” (1.2.84–85). The Prince here argues for a stable and essential subjectivity, one not subject to construction either by himself or by his observers, but when he is left alone to soliloquize at line 129, he laments that very stability of flesh that is “too, too solid” and will not dissolve “into a dew.” He longs for his own dissolution in an expression we might read as masochistic, perhaps anticipating Freud’s theory of the same in which the death drive seeks to reduce the self to its primal state of “inorganic stability.” Indeed, his thoughts turn from passive dissolution to active suicide, the “self-slaughter” that would force the disintegration of the ego. As the soliloquy progresses, the source of the Prince’s subjective anxiety emerges as the imago of his father, the “excellent” (and thus inimitable) king whose death and subsequent displacement has destabilized Hamlet’s social, domestic, and subjective identities. Hamlet likens his father to the sun god Hyperion, in contrast to the father’s surrogate Claudius, whom he likens to a satyr. The dead father thus occupies the highest place in Heaven in the Prince’s Neoplatonic cosmology, while the surrogate father is effectively rendered diabolical, and thus relegated to the lowest place.8 Tellingly, when he revisits the comparison at line 152 he inserts himself into the analogy, declaring Claudius to be “no more like my father / Than I to Hercules.” If the dead father is equated with Hercules, the divine paragon of masculinity, then the Prince occupies the degraded position of the surrogate, Claudius.

122  Gabriel A. Rieger The effect of this is dissociative. Adelman (1992) notes that As his memory of his father pushes increasingly in the direction of idealization, Hamlet becomes more acutely aware of his own distance from that realization and thus of his likeness to Claudius, who is defined chiefly by his difference from his father. Difference from the heroic ideal represented in Old Hamlet becomes the defining term common to Claudius and Hamlet: the very act of distinguishing Claudius from his father—“no more like my father / Than I to Hercules” (Shakespeare 2016, 1.2.152–53)—forces Hamlet into imaginative identification with Claudius. The intensity of Hamlet’s need to differentiate between true father and false thus confounds itself, disabling his identification with his father and hence his secure identity as son. (Adelman 1992, 13) The Prince’s “secure identity,” tied as it is to the imago of the father, cannot survive the displacement of the father. The father, idealized in death, becomes a counterpoint to the Prince’s subjectivity, inaugurating a process of subjective dissolution that intensifies as the tragedy progresses.

“Crawling between earth and heaven”: Masochism and the Communion of Mankind Perhaps the most conspicuous evidence of this process appears in 3.1 of the tragedy, when the Prince offers his famous meditation on suicide, the radical terminus of subjective dissolution, of self-shattering. Revisiting his expressed wish that his “too, too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew / Or that the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter” (Shakespeare 2016, 1.2.129–32), the Prince pronounces the “sleep of death” to be “a consummation / Devoutly to be wished” (3.1.62– 63). This suicidal ideation constitutes the embrace of his own subjective loss, a desire to reduce the self to the “inorganic stability” that Freud posits as the end goal of masochism and which, in my reading, provides a foundation for subjective construction. The Prince positions himself at the extremes of identity dissolution, or perhaps only near those extremes, since his suicidal resolve is stifled by “the dread of something after death,” i.e., damnation, the dissolution of the soul that necessarily follows the willful dissolution of the body. This dissolution of the soul is “the respect / That makes calamity of so long life.” Without the prospect of that dissolution, the Prince asks: who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office and the spurns

“Crawling between earth and heaven”  123 That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin. (Shakespeare 2016, 3.1.67–74) In this meditation, the Prince achieves a sort of communion with humankind, experiencing, or at least theorizing, the pains and frustrations of everyman. Significantly, his reflections center upon the trauma of loss. In his position as the Prince, he would have little experience of “th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,” “the law’s delay,” or “the insolence of office.” Only through the loss of his own domestic and social position is he able to construct an empathic understanding of the larger human experience. He embraces his own subjective dissolution (declaring the ultimate dissolution of the subject in death “a consummation / Devoutly to be wished”) so that he might build a new, empathic identity from it. Of course, despite his expressed fear of death which he declares “puzzles [his] will,” the Prince does not regard “the sleep of death” to be a complete dissolution of the self. Rather, it is a “shuffl[ing] off [of the] mortal coil”; for all that is lost in death, the essential self remains. In this construction, death is a dissolution that allows for the emergence of a new subject, or perhaps only the reemergence of the essential subject from the corporeal detritus. Read in this light, the masochistic embrace of dissolution, even of suicide, makes logical sense. From this position at the extremes of his own dissolved identity, at the genesis of his newly constructed subjectivity, the Prince encounters Ophelia. He has conceived his own damnation, and he greets her entrance with an expressed desire that “in [her] orisons be all [his] sins remembered” (Shakespeare 2016, 3.1.88–89) before paradoxically launching invective against her. The Prince’s exchange with Ophelia provides some of the tragedy’s clearest examples of subjective dissolution, both of his own ego and of the subjectivity of the other. Having elevated her moral status (conferring particular power upon her “orisons”), he transitions to degradation, retracting the claim that he “did love [her] once” with the declaration: “You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but that we shall relish of it: I loved you not” (3.1.116–18).9 Humankind (including Hamlet, as indicated by the first-person pronoun) is essentially wicked, implicitly incapable of love. Virtue, in this construction, is an adulteration of that wicked state that cannot change its fundamental nature. Even if virtue is applied to us, “we shall relish” of our essential wickedness. The Prince underscores this construction of humanity in his subsequent command to Ophelia to “Get thee to a nunnery” that she might avoid becoming a “breeder of sinners” (Shakespeare 2016, 3.1.120–21). His command is famously ambiguous, connoting simultaneously the cloister (i.e., a purity that renders Ophelia unfit for the world) and the brothel (i.e., a corruption that, paradoxically, does likewise).10 In these lines, the Prince

124  Gabriel A. Rieger creates a nexus of social, moral, and physical decay—a nexus of dissolution, of degradation, of shattering. Significantly, Hamlet does not restrict his attack to Ophelia; he uses her as a catalyst to attack all of humanity, himself included. As his assault progresses, the Prince declares: I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do, crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us. (Shakespeare 2016, 3.1.122–30) The Prince moves from an ambiguous attack on Ophelia (she may be fit either for a cloister or for a brothel) to a clear and focused attack on himself. He declares himself to be “proud, revengeful, ambitious,” qualities that he has demonstrated in his plot against the King. He declares his wickedness, the “old stock” common to all mankind, to be limited only by his lack of “imagination” and “time,” and yet he is “crawling between earth and heaven,” between telluric degradation and celestial bliss. The Prince evinces a clear masochistic pleasure in his own degraded subjectivity, the condition of “arrant knave[ry]” that he shares with all of humankind. Hamlet’s final attack on Ophelia in 3.1 is an explicit attack on her subjectivity and her conscious control of it, i.e., her “self-fashioning.” At line 134 he offers her a “plague for [her] dowry” that even if she is “as chaste as ice, as pure as snow” she “shall not escape calumny.” Any attempt to construct herself (e.g., through conscious actions of maintaining chastity and purity) are doomed, since her subjectivity will be constructed by forces beyond her control. He illustrates the point by imposing an identity upon her, charging her with making men “monsters” (i.e., cuckolds) before declaring: “I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God’s creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance” (Shakespeare 2016, 3.1.134–45). Any attempt by Ophelia to construct a subject identity for herself, such as by “painting … another” face, paradoxically leaves her vulnerable to the charge he has leveled against her, the subjective identity he has imposed upon her, that of unchaste woman. Any attempted rejection of the Prince’s charge likewise confirms it, since she “make[s] … wantonness” out of “ignorance.” We might productively return here to Freud’s conception of erotogenic masochism, specifically in regard to the libidinous dimension of the death drive. Hamlet’s invective against Ophelia reads as sadistic, but sadism and masochism are variant expressions of the same death drive. This is apparent in the reflexive nature of Hamlet’s attacks. In attacking Ophelia, the Prince

“Crawling between earth and heaven”  125 constructs himself as morally compromised (i.e., “proud, revengeful, ambitious”), a “knave.” Just as the Prince embraces his own physical dissolution (longing for the melting of his “too, too solid flesh” and “devoutly wish[ing]” for the “consummation” of death), he embraces his moral dissolution. Thus, while we might read his expressions as masochistic, we might just as productively apply the term “sadomasochistic,” since the attack, the impulse to denigrate (and to “shatter”) is directed simultaneously outward (toward Ophelia) and inward (toward himself). This is in keeping with the communion of trauma and loss that he posits in lines 69–75. Hamlet’s attacks on Ophelia follow logically from his empathic soliloquy on human suffering because they are borne out of the same fundamental drive, directed differently. Hamlet’s embrace of dissolution in his soliloquy of 3.1 allows for a masochistic pleasure that flows into his sadistic abuse of Ophelia. At the same time, since dissolution demands the formation of a new subjectivity, it lends itself to empathy in recognizing the subjectivity of the other: “we are arrant knaves all.”

“Variable service”: The Communion of the Worms Hamlet’s soliloquy demonstrates the extent to which his subjective dissolution facilitates his understanding of the broader experience of human suffering. This understanding develops as the tragedy progresses. In 3.4 he devotes only three lines to acknowledging the death of Polonius, but he reflects upon the matter more deeply in 4.3 when Claudius demands of him the location of Polonius’s remains. The Prince replies: At supper … Not where he eats, but where he’s eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to feed us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes but to one table. That’s the end. (Shakespeare 2016, 4.3.17–24) In these lines the Prince employs the corporeal dissolution of Polonius as a point of engagement with the larger dissolution of mankind. Note the double voice at play here; Polonius is at supper, with all of its ceremonial and civic associations, which are likewise embodied in the “certain convocation” of “politic” worms. The language evokes, and parodies, the cultivated subjectivity of the courtier who would “fain prove” “faithful and honourable” (2.2.127–28), the counselor who hungered for status and would be taken “for [his] better” (3.4.30).This aspirant subjectivity dissolves along with the body in the Prince’s mockery of one who “is eaten” by the worms. Polonius’s corporeal dissolution thus facilitates his subjective dissolution, reducing both body and ego to dross. The particular dissolution of Polonius allows the Prince to posit the larger dissolution of humankind, moving from the “certain convocation” of

126  Gabriel A. Rieger worms to the “worm” generally, which is “your only emperor for diet.”11 Hamlet moves from the courtier seeking status to the “emperor” occupying the ultimate status, since the emperor is the ultimate consumer. In his observation that “we fat all creatures else to fat ourselves, and we fat ourselves for maggots,” the Prince inverts the process of corporeal nourishment, as well as the orthodox tableau in which position at a feast serves as a mark of rank.12 If all of humanity is reduced to the level of “diet” for the “emperor” worm, then the social distinctions that allow for our subjective understanding, e.g., distinctions between “fat king” and “lean beggar,” are elided. We all become “variable service” in “the end.” The Prince underscores this elision with a shift from the blank verse, which typically denotes aristocracy on the Renaissance stage, to the prose associated with underclass characters. He will return to this form frequently throughout the remainder of the tragedy, most notably during his ruminations in the graveyard. Hamlet’s reflection on the king and the beggar is complex, serving simultaneously as an aggressive mockery of the dead Polonius (and the political order in which he sought to advance) and an expression of the empathy that has been borne of the trauma of his own subjective dissolution. The Prince progresses from an acknowledgment of his own subjective instability in 1.2 to an acknowledgment of the broader sufferings of the world in 3.1 to something approaching transcendence in 4.3, a communion with all of humankind, a communion rooted, once again, in the subjective loss which he embraces.

“To this favour she must come”: SelfFashioning and Self-Fracturing Through the tragedy, the Prince undertakes the fashioning of his subjectivity from a starting point of dissolution(s), psychic, social, and moral. The results of this process manifest most clearly in 5.1, when he engages with the detritus of ultimate corporeal dissolution, the bones of the dead, constructing a subject narrative for a skull. He moves from dissolution to construction, from fracturing to fashioning, declaring: That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once. How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain’s jawbone, that did the first murder. This might be the pate of a politician which this ass now o’erraches – one that would circumvent God, might it not? … Or of a courtier which could say “Good morrow, sweet lord, how dost thou, sweet lord?” This might be my Lord Such-a-One, that praised my Lord Such-a-One’s horse, when a’ went to beg it, might it not? (Shakespeare 2016, 5.1.71–80) The Prince moves backward through the process of decomposition, from the skull to the tongue, reversing the motion of corporeal dissolution and progressing, or perhaps regressing, from shattering to fashioning.

“Crawling between earth and heaven”  127 Having constructed a subjectivity for the skull, he moves once again to dissolution, asking Horatio whether the bones he addresses “cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets with them” (Shakespeare 2016, 5.1.86– 87), collapsing conception into decay in a figure of practical annihilation. He reflects upon another skull that might have been “the skull of a lawyer,” asking: Where be his quiddities now—his quillets, his cases, his tenures and tricks? Why does he suffer this mad knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery? Hum! This fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries. To have his fine pate filled with fine dirt! Will vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases and doubles than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? (Shakespeare 2016, 5.1.93–103) The Prince moves from decomposition to composition and back again, from a lawyer who constructs his subjectivity out of “quiddities … quillets … tenures and tricks” to the skull that lacks the agency to respond to an “action of battery.” The landowner who constructs his subjectivity through the buying of land is left with no more of that land than “the length and breadth of a pair of indentures”; he is defined, like the lawyer, by his lack of subjectivity, or at the least of agency. The Prince moves from dissolution to formation, from identity shattering to identity fashioning and back to shattering until the two processes are effectively inextricable one from another. Thus, we see the synthesis of the psychoanalytic and historicist understandings of subjectivity as Greenblatt’s notion of conscious self-fashioning is articulated through the focused expression of the death drive, which seeks to reduce the subject to “inorganic stability” (e.g., dew, skulls, worm food), directed internally in a masochistic expression and externally in a sadistic one such that the unified expression of the two is properly sadomasochistic. As we have noted, amid these sadomasochistic expressions the Prince has expressed moments of empathy. Even as he has embraced his own dissolution (in part through his ruminations on the imago of the father), and catalogued the dissolution of his adversaries (e.g., Ophelia and Polonius) and the anonymous dead, he has fleetingly acknowledged communion with humanity, notably in 3.1 and 4.3. In 5.1, however, Hamlet confronts the physical immediacy of personal loss when he encounters the remains of “poor Yorick,” the jester who “hath bore [him] on his back a thousand times” (Shakespeare 2016, 5.1.174–76). Confronting Yorick’s skull, he remarks “now how abhorred in [his] imagination it is,” declaring “[m]y gorge rises at it” (5.1.177). The Prince confronts the corporeal dissolution of one whom he has loved and expresses profound loss; the jester’s “infinite jest” and “excellent fancy” are lost, along with his” jibes,” “gambols,”

128  Gabriel A. Rieger and “flashes of merriment” (5.1.179–80). He reflects upon the anonymous remains of the supposed courtier, lawyer, and land buyer with wry mockery, similar to his reflections on the corpse of Polonius, but corporeal decay coupled with personal recognition here affects a profound loss, manifest as revulsion. The encounter with Yorick’s skull moves the Prince to meditate once again on the inevitable dissolution of the subject, and the implications of that dissolution for humankind. He expresses his meditation through wit, characterizing the skull as “[n]ot one now to mock your own grinning, quite chapfallen” (Shakespeare 2016, 5.1.181–82). The loss of agency (and, by extension, of the subject) that accompanies corporeal dissolution becomes, paradoxically, the means of constructing subjectivity. Yorick, the jester who “set the table on a roar” in life, is reconstructed as the consummate jester in death. He cannot “mock his own grinning” because he ostensibly lacks agency, yet his “chapfallen” grin becomes, paradoxically, the ultimate mockery. With the new subjectivity that Hamlet has constructed for and projected onto him, Yorick can, like Hamlet, mock the pretentions of other people’s self-fashioning. Hamlet mocked the duplicity of Ophelia’s “painting,” but Yorick’s mockery exposes the futility of the “lady’s … paint[ing],” since she must come to the same “favour” as himself, i.e., a skull. This process finds its fullest synthesis when the Prince asks of Horatio: Dost thou think Alexander looked o’this fashion i’th’ earth? … And smelt so? Pah! … To what base uses may we return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till ‘a find it stopping a bung-hole…. Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is of earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer barrel? (Shakespeare 2016, 5.1.187–201) We see here a trajectory reminiscent of the one which the Prince describes in 4.3, when he recounts “how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar”; the most elevated subject is reduced to nullity, or at least to inanimacy, in death and, from that inanimacy, the state of “inorganic stability,” which the death drive seeks to achieve, a new subjectivity might be constructed, or perhaps imposed. At the extremes of his subjectivity, poised between self-fracturing and self-fashioning, the Prince achieves a kind of synthesis, a commonality with mankind. The Prince has become empathic, both in the historicist sense (recognizing the conscious fashioning of identities through specific institutions, i.e., court culture, land ownership, and law) and in the psychoanalytic sense (directing the death drive both internally and externally to dissolve and reconstruct the subject). Like John Stubbes on the scaffold, whose corporeal fragmentation provides the means to construct a new subjectivity, the Prince fashions his subjectivity through the process of psychic dissolution. Stubbes

“Crawling between earth and heaven”  129 fashions a subject identity of loyal subject, while the Prince fashions a subject identity of regicide, but both figures do so within similar psychoanalytic and historicist frameworks. Hamlet is emblematic of the larger relationship between identity construction and identity dissolution, between self-fashioning and the shattering of the self, manifest in the early modern imagination. In the face of traumatic loss, the subject embraces dissolution (corporeal, social, or moral) in attitudes and behaviors that strike a twenty-first century observer as masochistic, seemingly defying the interests of the self. The subject then employs that dissolution as a foundation for the construction of a new subjectivity. By applying the psychoanalytic understanding of self-fracturing to the historicist understanding of self-fashioning, we open new avenues of inquiry into the complex and fraught question of early modern subjectivity, as well as the pleasures afforded to an early modern (and perhaps a modern) audience by texts that discomfit and destabilize. Such avenues present the possibility of a critical future in which a synthesis of these two methods might allow for a fresh and productive understanding of this problematic subject.

Notes 1 My work in this respect is not without precedent. See Newlin (2013). 2 See especially Foucault ([1977] 1995, 32–69) and Greenblatt ([1980] 2005, 11–73). 3 Thus, as Marshall (2002) notes: “As masochism enters into this understanding of subjectivity, it ‘has nothing to do with self-punishment’; it is instead about the formation of the self” (41). 4 My argument exists within a critical tradition of reading early modern culture broadly, and early modern texts specifically, through the lens of masochism. See Silverman (1992), Siegel (1995), and Starks (1997). 5 Marshall bases much of her application of psychoanalytic theory to Renaissance texts on Elizabeth Bellamy’s (1992) contention in Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic History that “the psychoanalytic model of identity formation shares with the idea of the renaissance a conscious interplay of before and after, … what Bellamy calls the ‘temporal illogic’ of recursivity” (25). 6 See, in particular, Greenblatt (1996), in which he applies Žižek’s readings of Lacan in describing early modern understandings of the Eucharist (338). 7 See also Lee (2000). 8 In classical mythology the satyr was a hybrid of man and goat and a likely archetype for the Christian devil. See Debra Hassig (2000). 9 Wilson ([1935] 1967) posits that the Prince’s invective is motivated by the fact that he has, by this point in the scene, a full awareness of Ophelia’s complicity in the plot against him (134). 10 See Jenkins (1982, 493–96). 11 At the same time, the phrase “[y]our worm is your only emperor for diet” cannot but connote in the early modern imagination the Diet of Worms, the 1521 conference that presaged the Protestant Reformation. Greenblatt (2013) reads in these lines a mocking reference to the doctrine of transubstantiation, arguing that their “principal function . . . is to echo and reinforce the theological and, specifically, the Eucharistic subtext” in a “grotesquely materialist reimagining of

130  Gabriel A. Rieger the Eucharist [which] would seem to touch his father’s spirit as well and hence to protest against the ghostly transmission of patriarchal memory and against the whole sacrificial plot in which the son is fatally appointed to do his father’s bidding” (241). This sublimated resentment of the father is in keeping with the Prince’s masochistic expressions, evoking the tableaux of 1.2 in which Claudius is “no more like my father than I to Hercules.” 12 See also Luke 14:10.

Sources Cited and Consulted Adelman, Janet. 1992. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest.” New York: Routledge. Camden, William. 1615. Annales Rerum Gestarum Angliae et Hiberniae Regnate Elizabetha. The Philological Museum. Accessed January 28, 2022. http://www​ .philological​.bham​.ac​.uk​/camden​/1581e​.html. Foucault, Michel. (1977) 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House. Freud, Sigmund. (1924) 1959. “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” In Vol. 2 of Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers, translated by Joan Riviere, 269–76. New York: Basic Books. “Gospel According to St. Luke.” The Bible. 1998. Authorized King James Version. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2013. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2007. “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture.” In Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, 176–195. New York: Routledge. ———. 1980 [2005]. Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1996. “Remnants of the Sacred in Early Modern England.” In Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, edited by Margreta de Grazia et al., 337–345. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hassig, Debra, ed. 2000. The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature. New York: Routledge. Jenkins, Harold. 1982. “Longer Notes: 3.1.121.” In Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, 2nd ed., edited by Harold Jenkins, 493–6. New York: Bloomsbury: The Arden Shakespeare. Laplanche, J., and J.B. Pontalis. (1967) 1973. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Lee, John. 2000. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of the Self. London: Oxford University Press. Marshall, Cynthia. 2002. The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Newlin, James. 2013. “The Touch of the Real in New Historicism and Psychoanalysis.” Substance 42 (1): 82–101. Ornstein, Robert. 1965. The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Rambuss, Richard. 1998. Closet Devotions. Durham: Duke University Press.

“Crawling between earth and heaven”  131 Rowe, Katherine. 1994. “Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 45, no. 3 (Autumn): 279–303. Sanchez, Melissa. 2011. Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature. London: Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, William. 2016. Hamlet: Revised Edition, 3rd ed., edited by Anne Thompson and Neil Taylor. New York: Bloomsbury: The Arden Shakespeare. Siegel, Carol. 1995. Male Masochism: Modern Revisions of the Story of Love. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Silverman, Kaja. 1992. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge. Starks, Lisa. 1997. “Batter My [Flaming] Heart: Male Masochism in the Religious Lyrics of Donne and Crashaw.” Enculturation 1 (2). Accessed November 15, 2022. http://www​.uta​.edu​/huma​/enculturation​/1​_2​/starks​.html. ———. 1999. “‘Like the Lover’s Pinch, Which Hurts and Is Desired’: The Narrative of Male Masochism and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.” Literature and Psychology 45 (4): 58–73. Stump, Donald, and Susan Felch. 2009. Elizabeth I and Her Age. New York: W. W. Norton. Traub, Valerie. 2016. Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wilson, John Dover. (1935) 1967. What Happens in Hamlet? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

8

The Primal Scene in Pericles Trauma, Typology, and Mythology Zackariah Long

Psychoanalysis lies at the origin of trauma studies, so it is not surprising that the question of how to historicize psychoanalytic ideas is a preoccupation of trauma criticism. Ever since Cathy Caruth’s (1996) Unclaimed Experience spearheaded a resurgence of interest in psychoanalytic accounts of trauma in literary and cultural studies, Shakespeareans have experimented with a variety of approaches to historicizing trauma. Some, like Deborah Willis (2002) and Heather Hirschfeld (2003), have borrowed specific psychoanalytic formulations of trauma while emphasizing the culturally specific determinants of traumatic stress. Others, like Patricia Cahill (2008, 6–10), Lisa Starks-Estes (2014, 34–35), and Erin Peters and Cynthia Richards (2021, 4–5), have urged a more cautious application and adaptation of psychoanalytic theories even while affirming broad transhistorical continuities between past and present. For my part, I believe it is possible to apply modern trauma concepts to early modern works, but that this maneuver is most responsibly performed when one historicizes the concepts in question. In particular, I am interested in identifying early modern analogues to psychoanalytic theories of trauma as a means of putting the past and present into productive dialogue (Long 2009, 2012, 2021). In what follows, I offer an illustration of this mode of analysis through an examination of the opening scene of Pericles. Specifically, I analyze Pericles’s traumatized response to his discovery of Antiochus’s incestuous relationship with his daughter, which haunts him for the rest of the play. In Part One, I discuss Ruth Nevo’s (1993) excellent interpretation of this opening encounter as a primal scene; then, in Part Two, I ask whether early modernity furnished Shakespeare and Wilkins with any analogue to this psychoanalytic concept. My answer to this question is “yes”—biblical and classical typology provided just such an analogue. However, the connection between these two conceptual frameworks is not merely retrospective. If Freud’s notion of the primal scene provides us with a valuable lens for understanding Pericles, this is because the phylogenetic theories that underlie Freud’s notion of the primal scene are themselves a modern species of typological thinking. In this respect, psychoanalysis is a kind of antitype to biblical and classical typology. Yet, despite this transhistorical continuity, DOI: 10.4324/9781003306894-12

The Primal Scene in Pericles  133 an early modern interpretation of the primal scene is not merely a psychoanalytic one in typology’s clothing. Careful attention to Shakespeare and Wilkins’ framing of Pericles’s encounter at Antioch reveals that there are elements of his primal scene revealed by a typological hermeneutic that a psychoanalytic one may silently pass over. If psychoanalysis views the primal scene as a traumatized response to unresolved antagonism between father and son over possession of the mother, then Pericles’s primal scene suggests that possession and negation of the mother are actually to blame for the traumatizing relationship between fathers and sons. Indeed, the confusion of roles between mothers, daughters, and wives that elicits Pericles’s traumatized reaction to Antiochus are a product of this very negation.

I In Freud’s early work, the primal scene is a traumatic early childhood experience responsible for the development of neurotic symptoms. As Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) detail, Freud initially took such experiences to be literal events, while acknowledging that patients’ memories of them were distorted by repression. However, as his practice evolved, he began to doubt the accuracy of some patients’ reminiscences and started interpreting them as retrospective imaginative constructions. This does not mean these primal scenes were not “real.” For the patient they were as real, in psychical terms, as actual childhood experiences, and the scenes themselves inevitably drew on elements of lived experience even as they were augmented by phantasy (335). More importantly, Freud came to believe that certain recurring scenarios—such as seduction, castration, and the observation of parental sexual intercourse—were so widespread that they must have a common historical origin, even if that origin lay outside the case histories of his patients. The conclusion he reached is that these scenarios must have occurred in civilization’s prehistory and were transmitted phylogenetically to later generations in the form of psychical schemata. When confronted with events beyond their comprehension, traumatized subjects drew upon these schemata to fill the gaps in their memories and to provide explanations for otherwise unintelligible experiences. In this way, primal scenes—or as Freud began referring to them, “primal phantasies”—served as both individual and collective origin stories for trauma (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 331–32). As Laplanche and Pontalis put it: “Like collective myths, [primal phantasies] … provide a representation and a “solution” to whatever constitutes a major enigma for the child. Whatever appears to the subject as a reality of such a type as to require an explanation or “theory,” these phantasies dramatize into the primal moment or origin point of departure of a history” (332). In “The Perils of Pericles,” Ruth Nevo (1993) offers a psychoanalytic reading of the play that treats Pericles’s opening encounter with Antiochus and his daughter as a primal scene or phantasy in two senses. First, it functions as a primal scene within the narrative structure of the play–a traumatic

134  Zackariah Long event that “precipitates Pericles’ return home, causes his subsequent flight, hence his first shipwreck, hence his arrival in Pentapolis, and so forth” (157). In the wake of Pericles’s escape from Antioch, this traumatic effect is most immediately apparent in his inconsolable melancholy (Shakespeare 2001, 1.2.2–33), which troubles his sleep, alienates him from pleasure, and is characterized by what Nevo (1993) describes as “self-inflicted punitive suffering” (160). But as the play unfolds, the prince’s traumatized response goes beyond subjective torment to encompass events that recall elements of the primal scene itself. For example, in Pentapolis, Pericles once again finds himself vying for a daughter’s hand in the face of an apparently jealous father; and later, at sea, he loses his newly wedded wife, Thaisa, leaving him, like Antiochus, alone with his infant daughter—a prospect he finds so distressing that he promptly hands Marina over to Cleon and Dionyza to raise in Tarsus (Shakespeare 2001, 3.3.14–1). And yet this very attempt at protecting Marina results in what Pericles believes to be her death, the daughter’s loss echoing the mother’s. In this way, the confrontation with Antiochus and his daughter becomes a kind of mold or template for Pericles’s ordeals, like a recurring nightmare that keeps coming to life. As for the substance of this nightmare, Nevo (1993) argues that Pericles’s experience at Antioch also functions as a primal scene or phantasy in a second sense, namely, as the reenactment of an archetypal traumatic scenario. To be specific, it evokes the phantasy of castration (154). In its prototypical form, a young boy discovers at the height of the Oedipus complex that, although he has a penis, a female sibling or companion does not. He therefore concludes that her penis must have been cut off by her father, making a connection between his blooming rivalry with his father over his mother’s affections and his female counterpart’s disastrous fate (Freud 1953–74, 19:175–76). In keeping with his phylogenetic speculations, Freud believed that this phantasy derived from an actual archaic event—the primal father’s seizure of the female members of the primal horde and his enforcement of his sons’ abstinence (13:141–43). In the modern analogue to this primeval struggle, the father does not castrate his son or drive him from the household, but the son suffers the psychical equivalent, which persuades him to relinquish his claim on the mother. When successful, the castration phantasy thus not only triggers the sublimation of the boy’s desires and the dissolution of the Oedipus complex itself, but also paves the way for the creation of the super-ego through his internalization of his father’s prohibition. However, when unsuccessful, the complex is merely repressed, where it persists in the unconscious until it may be pathogenetically activated later (19:176–77). In Nevo’s reading of Pericles this is precisely what happens, with Antiochus cast in the role of the father, Pericles the son, and Antiochus’s daughter a mother-surrogate. Pericles’s attempt to win the daughter’s hand symbolically reenacts his desire to supplant the father as the object of his mother’s affections, and Antiochus’s threat to decapitate Pericles,

The Primal Scene in Pericles  135 should he fail to answer his riddle, the father’s retaliatory castration. Of course, Pericles’s adventure at Antioch would have to evoke such meanings symbolically, since the prince is not, in fact, a child, Antiochus is not his father, and Antiochus’s daughter not his mother. Indeed, Pericles’s father and mother are dead. Yet Nevo convincingly argues that the encounter is configured as an oedipal scenario, which runs beneath the surface of the scene and occasionally breaks through. For example, although Pericles is not Antiochus’s son, he makes it clear that he thinks of Antiochus as a father-figure: Antiochus: Prince Pericles– Pericles: That would be son to great Antiochus. (Shakespeare 2001, 1.1.26–27) And although Antiochus’s daughter is not a literal mother, she is figured as one by the riddle: He’s father, son, and husband mild; I mother, wife, and yet his child. (1.1.69–70) In this way, the scene as a whole and the riddle in particular “is constructed like a dream as Freud expounded the dream work,” with “condensation, displacement, representation in pictorial image” disguising their latent content (Nevo 1993, 157)—not unlike the Wolf-Man’s dream of the wolves outside his window, which disguises the primal scene of his childhood observation of parental coitus (Freud 1953–74, 17:43–47). In contrast to the case of the Wolf-Man, though, Nevo does not adduce Pericles’s encounter with Antiochus as evidence of a literal traumatic childhood event. Rather, the encounter with Antiochus is a “primal scene fantasy” (Nevo 1993, 161)—a symbolic expression of his fear of his father—-plucked from the psyche’s repertoire of archetypal scenarios. Although I will eventually suggest revisions to Nevo’s interpretation of Pericles’s adventure at Antioch, as an explanation of the paternal side of the primal scene I find her reading extremely compelling. In particular, it helps to connect the play’s opening confrontation to its later repetitions, where Pericles does seem perpetually caught in a classic oedipal struggle, both admiring and identifying with his father’s memory while simultaneously feeling cowed by and resentful of its lingering power. The episode that makes this connection most explicit is, not surprisingly, the one most reminiscent of his primal scene—the contest for Thaisa’s hand. Once again, Pericles competes against others in a contest sponsored by a king; and once again he wins the daughter’s hand through his prowess. However, while watching King Simonides presiding over the celebratory feast that follows, Pericles is reminded of his own father and cast into a sudden gloom:

136  Zackariah Long Yon king’s to me like to my father’s picture, Which tells in that glory once he was; Had princes sit like stars about his throne, And he the sun for them to reverence; None that beheld him but, like lesser lights, Did vail their crowns to his supremacy; Where now his son’s like a glow-worm in the night, The which hath fire in darkness, none in light. (Shakespeare 2001, 2.3.37–44) To Pericles, his father was a sun among stars, a fiery body so great that it rendered other celestial lights invisible. In comparison to this luminescent grandeur, Pericles cannot help but feel “like a glow-worm in the night”––an unflattering image, to be sure, but one with the deeper implication that the only reason that Pericles is visible at all is that his father’s sun has set. Of course, the fact that the son’s radiance is dependent on his father’s passage into darkness provokes ambivalence. On the one hand, the father’s absence is welcome insofar as it makes room for the son to shine; on the other hand, the fulfillment of this desire inevitably triggers both guilt and resentment, especially as Pericles still feels as though he lives in his father’s shadow. In this dynamic there is perhaps a clue to Pericles’s dogged insistence on proving himself through trial—he wishes to live up to his father’s example, or, should that prove impossible, die trying, since that would at least bring relief from his guilt. The obvious irony in this case is that Pericles has just won Simonides’s tournament wearing his father’s armor—in both literal and symbolic terms, then, he has taken his father’s place. But this success brings him no satisfaction. As Nevo (1993) observes, “At the point of winning his fair bride Pericles’ self-estimation has, strangely, never been lower, nor his guilty selfabasement more explicit” (167). He is right back in the world of the opening scene: desperately wanting to prove himself; doubting his ability to do so; seeking approval despite this doubt; fearing punishment if he dares succeed; and unnervingly ready to die if he does not. In other words, the son continues to live in fear of castration by a father to whom he can never measure up. As for the other side of this oedipal dynamic—the one that centers on Antiochus’s daughter—Nevo (1993) is also persuasive, at least up to a point. As we have seen, Nevo believes that Pericles’s desire for the daughter is bound up with an unconscious desire to possess the mother. On the face of things, this is a plausible interpretation. First, as we have already noted, the riddle itself includes the maternal role among the daughter’s significations (“mother, wife, and yet his child”), and, in glossing the riddle, Pericles explicitly draws attention to the maternal side of this equation: “All love the womb that their first being bred” (Shakespeare 2001, 1.1.108). Second, in the ordeals that follow, Pericles repeatedly invokes maternal imagery when lamenting his fate. For example, Nevo (1993) observes that in his Lear-like speech against the storm, Pericles imagines the sea in maternal terms—a

The Primal Scene in Pericles  137 natural counterpoint to a thunderous sky-father—turning it into a screen for oceanic “fantasies of merging, union, and dissolution which are rooted in yearnings for the primal symbiosis of infant and mother” (163). And, third, the idea of Antiochus’s daughter as a mother-surrogate lines up with other aspects of the plot. Like Pericles’s father, Pericles’s mother is conspicuously absent from the play. If the opening scene finds the prince searching for a surrogate father, it would also make sense if he was searching for a surrogate mother. Moreover, although we do not know what happened to Pericles’s mother, given the fate that befalls other mothers in this play, it is not inconceivable that she may have died in circumstances similar to Antiochus’s wife, not to mention Pericles’s own wife, Thaisa—that is, giving birth to her only child. If so, this would strengthen the identification between Pericles and Antiochus by making Antiochus’s daughter a substitute for the absent mother-wife while also suggesting an additional explanation for the prince’s ambient guilt. Where Nevo’s interpretation falters is not in what it does account for, but in what it does not. In particular, I do not think Nevo adequately captures the significance of the third figure in the riddle’s cryptic triumvirate: “mother, wife, and yet his child” (Shakespeare 2001, 1.1.70, my italics). For despite the importance of the absent mother in the play’s primal scene, it is not primarily desire for, fear of, or guilt over maternal incest that haunts the play’s traumatic imagination. Rather, it is paternal incestuous desire— specifically, desire of the daughter—that is the fulcrum around which the play pivots. This is something that Nevo (1993) herself acknowledges: “the father/daughter theme in the play is its dominant concern” (151). Moreover, Nevo is clear that incestuous desire for the daughter is Antiochus’s primary bequest to Pericles: “Antiochus is his uncanny double; and the progress of the play is the haunting of Pericles by the Antiochus in himself, the incest fear which he must repress and from which he must flee” (159). Yet the temptation posed by this paternal incestuous desire is not the same as that which Nevo associates with the mother, connected to “fantasies of merging, union, and dissolution” (163). Rather, it takes the form of a desire to dominate, to pawn, and even to negate—to overrule a daughter’s will to the point where it either ceases to exist or becomes an adjunct to the father’s. To fully understand the traumatizing effect of Pericles’s encounter with Antiochus and his daughter, then, we need an account of where this desire comes from. In the second half of this essay, I offer an alternative reading of Pericles’s confrontation with Antiochus and his daughter informed by a different understanding of the primal scene. Specifically, I argue that the traumatic impact of the encounter is not merely due to its oedipal dynamic; rather, it is due to the vision of fatherhood that Antiochus imprints upon Pericles’s horrified mind. Antiochus presents Pericles with an image of paternal power that consists in the ability to impose one’s will on others, especially one’s female progeny. It is the prince’s simultaneous attraction to and revulsion by this power that fuels his traumatized response. I believe this interpretation is

138  Zackariah Long readily surfaced if one looks to the archetypal scenarios that the scene itself invokes—not the Freudian myth of the primal father and the primal horde, but Christian and classical myths of celestial but forbidden fruits. It is in these archetypal scenarios that we find our closest early modern analogue to the primal scene. However, the conceptual framework through which early moderns understood these myths was not psychoanalysis but biblical and classical typology.

II Typology is traditionally defined as the interpretive framework by which elements in the Old Testament (types) are understood to prefigure ones in the New Testament (antitypes): “Thus the crossing of Jordan (an event) is a type of baptism, Joshua (a person) is a type of Jesus and manna (a thing) is a type of the Lord’s supper” (Fabiny 1992, 2). But this is merely the hermeneutic definition of typology. At its root, typology is a vision of history in which events—or, rather, species of events—do not merely occur but reoccur. History, in this view, unfolds according to certain patterns woven into the fabric of time by God. These patterns not only reveal God’s providential purposes for humanity, but also the logic according to which things happen— history’s syntactical rules, as it were. The most fundamental of these patterns is the cycle of disobedience and redemption. In the Old Testament, this pattern takes the prototypical form: God and Israel live in union; Israel disobeys God; God allows a foreign power to dominate Israel; Israel repents; God raises a hero to liberate Israel, reinstating union (Frye 2004, 21). In the New Testament, this pattern is both echoed and redeemed by Christ, who never breaks union with God, but who nevertheless voluntarily undergoes disobedience’s itinerary so that humanity can be freed from its eternal recurrence. Of course, such patterns were most legible in sacred history, since the Bible was composed with typological principles in mind. But for premodern commentators, many of whom were the products of classical educations, they were also discernible in pagan history and mythology. Thus the figural interpretation of Odysseus strapping himself to the mast as a type of the Crucifixion (Rahner 1963, 328–86), Orpheus’s descent into the underworld as a type of the Harrowing of Hell (Medina and Medina 1994, 227), and Hercules’s slaying of the Hydra as a type of Christ’s victory over the Devil (Brumble 1998, 165). By the Renaissance such typological associations permeated intellectual and artistic discourse, creating a rich compendium of classical and Christian analogues; and by the seventeenth century “correlative” modes of typology encouraged believers to see contemporary events and even everyday struggles as post-figurations of biblical types (Lewalski 1977, 81–82; Korshin 1982, 31). When Shakespeare and Wilkins wrote Pericles, this typological view of history was not merely one among many, but arguably still the dominant mode, despite the rising challenges of those like Machiavelli who stressed the contingency of historical events.

The Primal Scene in Pericles  139 As a dimension of providential history, typology obviously belongs to a different worldview than Freud’s primal scene. Yet, as Heather Hirschfeld (2003) has detailed, primal scenes share certain features in common with typological events. First, they are archetypal scenarios that recur across time. Like typological events, primal scenes do not only happen once; rather, they establish the form of a mold or template that continues to organize psychical experience into the future. Second, despite their recurrence, primal scenes, like typological events, can be grasped only retrospectively. Just as a “type” cannot be recognized until it is confirmed by the “antitype” that makes its correspondence legible, it is only when a primal scene reemerges as a symptom-pattern that its genealogy can be established (446). Third, and most fundamentally, primal scenes, like typological events, are symbolic expressions of underlying laws. In the case of the biblical cycle of disobedience and redemption outlined above, these are the laws of God the Father, the violation of which sets into motion the circuit of punishment, repentance, and forgiveness that characterizes providential history. In the case of the primal scene, these laws are the prohibitions of the father, God of the bourgeois household, the fear of which leads either to the sublimation of oedipal desires or to the incubation of neurosis. It is not difficult to see these as variations of the same story. The primal scene is a secular version of the transgressive-punitive episode in a typological cycle—a threat of castration from a sky-father come down to earth. Or, viewed from the other direction, the transgressive-punitive episode in a typological cycle is a sacred version of a primal scene—a cosmic trauma that providential history works to redeem. We can thus appreciate how typology supplied the ingredients for a nascent form of trauma theory. How might a typological understanding illuminate Pericles’s primal scene? Well, if we take the idea of typology seriously, it would mean that Pericles’s encounter with Antiochus is, by definition, merely one in a series of reenactments extending backward in time to its archetypal point of origin. Furthermore, it follows that this archetypal origin would help illuminate what the encounter with Antiochus is “really” about, since it serves as both its first cause and template. In this light, it is surely significant that within the first few moments of Pericles’s encounter with Antiochus and his daughter, Shakespeare and Wilkins allude in quick succession to two myths—one Christian, one classical—that not only functioned as primal scenes within their respective mythologies, but that also were typologically associated with each other by mythographers. The first comes in Pericles’s first extended utterance of the play, in response to the unveiling of Antiochus’s daughter: You gods that made me man, and sway in love, That have inflamed desire in my breast To taste the fruit of yon celestial tree Or die in the adventure, be my helps. (Shakespeare 2001, 1.1.20–23)

140  Zackariah Long The reference is to the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in Genesis. Antiochus’s daughter is identified by Pericles with this “celestial tree,” linking his desire to “taste” its “fruit” to the eldest primal scene in the Christian mythos: the eating of the forbidden fruit, which results in Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise (Hirschfeld 2003, 427–36). The second allusion is supplied by Antiochus, directly in response to Pericles’s rhapsodic speech. He warns the young suitor: Before thee stands this fair Hesperides, With golden fruit, but dangerous to be touched; For death-like dragons here affright thee hard. (Shakespeare 2001, 1.1.28–30) Here the allusion is to the classical myth of the golden apples given by Gaia to Juno as a wedding present upon the occasion of her marriage to Jupiter. Juno cherishes them so much that she sets the dragon, Ladon, and the daughters of Night, the Hesperides, to guard them on Mount Olympus. But, as in the Bible, this forbidden fruit is seized. Heracles takes several of the golden apples for his eleventh labor; Hippomenes uses them to distract Atalanta in a footrace to win her hand in marriage; and Ate wreaks vengeance on the gods for not being invited to Peleus and Thetis’s wedding by throwing one of the apples, inscribed with the message “for the fairest,” into the midst of the nuptial celebrations, triggering the conflict among Venus, Minerva, and Juno that leads to the judgment of Paris and ultimately the Trojan War (Brumble 1998, 39–42, 159, 169–70). It is not difficult to see why early modern mythographers steeped in typological thinking would have connected these stories, for they boast a number of striking similarities. Both myths center on forbidden fruits enclosed within gardens of the gods (the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in Eden; the golden apples in the sacred grove on Olympus). Both myths associate these celestial fruits with marriages (Adam and Eve; Jupiter and Juno). Both hint at a special relationship between, on the one hand, these fruits and female characters (Eve and the conventional “apple” of the biblical myth; Gaia, Juno, Hesperides, and Ate and the golden apple of the classical myth) and, on the other hand, between these female characters and serpents (Eve and the talking snake; Juno and the Hesperides and Ladon). Both myths connect the fruits to sex and sexual knowledge (after eating the fruit, Adam and Eve realize they are naked; after chasing the fruit, Atalanta must give up her life of chastity; after giving the fruit to Venus, Paris receives Helen as a sexual gift). Finally, seizing these fruits leads in most cases to disastrous consequences (the Fall of Man; the Fall of Troy; Atalanta’s transformation into a lion after being ravished by her new husband in the temple of Cybele). In explicating these stories, mythographers were quick to pick up on these similarities, connecting the classical myths to their biblical counterparts in order to present the golden apples as objects of temptation. Thus,

The Primal Scene in Pericles  141 Alexander Ross urges readers to learn from Atalanta’s example, so “the golden apples of worldly pleasure and profit, which Hippomenes, the Devil, flings in our way, may not hinder our course” (quoted in Brumble 1998, 169). And Henry Reynolds leverages the story of the judgment of Paris to scapegoat Eve for giving Adam the forbidden fruit: “What can Homer’s Ate, whom he calls the first daughter of Jupiter, and a woman pernicious and harmful to all mortals … what can he, I say, mean … but Eve?” (quoted in Brumble 1998, 42). More important for our purposes is how these stories connect to Pericles, as each myth sketches out the contours of an archetypal scenario that underwrites the prince’s confrontation with Antiochus and his daughter. Broadly speaking, this scenario centers on a parent’s involvement in the marital life of a young couple, and the nature of this involvement pivots on the question of who controls the celestial fruit of their garden. This resemblance is perhaps most apparent in the biblical intertext, since Genesis 2–3, like Pericles 1, centers on a triadic family structure (father, son/husband, and daughter/ wife) made asymmetrical by a missing wife/mother. (Like Antiochus, the God of Genesis lacks a proper spouse.) And, as in Pericles, the prohibition that the Father makes concerning the celestial fruit seems to involve sexual knowledge he wishes to reserve for himself. After all, He is alarmed at the advancement of his children’s understanding upon eating the interdicted fruit (“Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil”), yet the only apparent consequence of this act is sexual self-awareness (“the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked”) (Genesis 3:22, 7). In Pericles, the reason why the father should wish to reserve such knowledge to himself is made explicit—Antiochus wishes to continue exercising a proprietary sexual claim on his daughter. She is the celestial tree whose “fruit” others are forbidden to “taste.” In the biblical text, God the Father’s motivations are more mysterious, although the suggestion of a proprietary claim is also strong, with the serpent offering the interpretation that the prohibition is a matter of conserving power: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5). Regardless of how one construes the interdiction, it is clear that the God of Genesis considers this sexually charged fruit to be his to dispose of and not his daughter’s—a situation made plain by the fact that Eve’s punishment for eating the fruit is patriarchal subordination: “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16). In this respect, too, then, the God of Genesis resembles Antiochus, which explains why Shakespeare and Wilkins associate Antiochus’s desire to control his daughter with the Edenic primal scene. As for the second of the two archetypal scenarios invoked by the play’s opening episode—the myth of the golden apples—it too features a triadic family structure distinguished by the absence of a parent. And, as in Genesis, this triadic scheme revolves around the present parent’s interest in celestial fruit associated with sexuality and fecundity. However, the resemblance ends

142  Zackariah Long here. For in the myth of the golden apples it is the primordial Earth Mother, Gaia, who is present at the wedding of Juno and Jupiter, while Juno’s father, Saturn, is missing (most likely because he is imprisoned in Tartarus after his defeat by Jupiter—another oedipal scenario). And this Earth Mother comes not to prohibit fruit, but, like the serpent in Genesis, to give it: she presents the golden apples as a wedding present to Juno. Most striking of all, the choice of how to dispose of this fruit is not imposed by the mother, but entrusted to the daughter-wife. It is Juno, not Gaia, who chooses to interdict these fruits to others, entrusting their protection to the Hesperides and Ladon, with the dragon playing a role much different from the Edenic serpent by guarding these fruits, not encouraging their disbursement. Given these differences, one might conclude that the myth of the golden apples is inapplicable to Pericles—or, if it is applicable, it is only through contrast. And there is something to this suggestion. For at the outset, the myth seems to function almost as a kind of classical antitype to the Genesis narrative, offering a sense of how the world would be different if the sex lives of young people were presided over by a giving mother instead of a forbidding father. But, alas, the story does not end there. For the rest of the golden apple myths center on patriarchal attempts to seize the celestial fruit against Juno’s wishes. Heracles defeats Ladon to take the golden apples—a conquest with an oedipal subtext, given the fact that Jupiter is Hercules’s father. Hippomenes procures the apples from Venus to distract Atalanta, whom he subsequently deflowers in Cybele’s temple. And Paris awards the apples to Venus so that he can claim the most beautiful woman in the world and Menelaus’s wife, Helen of Troy, as his prize. Followed to their conclusion, these myths suggest that, no matter how strong a woman’s desire to interdict fruits bequeathed to her by a mother-figure, men will inevitably seek a way to seize them through force, coercion, or fraud. And the sexual violence at the heart of these attempts finds expression through the symbolism of forbidden fruit—a meaning most pointed in a mythographical variant of the story of the judgement of Paris in which Ate takes the golden apple from the same tree from which Prosperine ate—the eating of this fruit being the act that seals the raped daughter’s marriage to Pluto, preventing her from permanently returning to the home of her mother, the earth-goddess Ceres (Brumble 1998, 41). In this way, the myths of the golden apples are also stories of patriarchal control, just from the point of view of the young male erotic conqueror. As archetypal analogues to Pericles’s adventure in Antioch, these myths are thus only too relevant to Pericles, as they frame the titular hero’s pursuit of Antiochus’s daughter as an attempt on the part of a would-be Hercules to seize heavenly fruit from a male guardian and rival. The daughter’s only say is to express an ineffectual wish for her preferred possessor. When viewed against the backdrop of these primal scenes, Pericles’s encounter with Antiochus and his daughter takes on a different coloring. The oedipal scenario that Nevo identifies is still there: Pericles still seeks a

The Primal Scene in Pericles  143 father-figure’s approval while also looking to possess a bride and mothersurrogate; and the prince is still cowed by this father-figure’s symbolic threat of castration upon learning of his sexual proprietorship over the soughtafter mother-wife. But the biblical and classical intertexts throw other elements of the scene into relief. The Genesis intertext suggests that although Antiochus’s sexual possession of his daughter is a particularly gross expression of paternal power, it is part of the same lineage of patriarchal control that stretches back to the first family—an example of what happens when there is no feminine counterweight to patriarchal authority, no Earth Mother who can stand between a Sky Father and his daughter. And the classical intertexts suggest that, although in comparison to Antiochus, Pericles may be a heroic adventurer, he also has something in common with his paternal alter ego—a tendency to view women as objects to be possessed. Indeed, the prince says as much to Heliacanus: “I sought the purchase of a glorious beauty, / From whence an issue I might propagate” (Shakespeare 2001, 1.2.71–72). As a would-be father, it is perhaps not surprising, then, that Pericles should prove vulnerable to the temptation that Antiochus represents—the temptation of using paternal power to impose one’s sexual will on their progeny. Thankfully, it is a temptation he successfully avoids— if abandoning one’s daughter to a neglectful surrogate father, murderous surrogate mother, pirates, pimps, and panders can be counted a successful alternative to the danger of paternal incest. But this avoidance also comes at a terrible price, and not only for Marina. So overwrought with guilt and grief is Pericles over the loss of his wife and daughter that, by the opening of Act 5, he has fallen into a state of perpetual penance and self-imposed solitary confinement. Earlier we noted that at its most basic level typology is a view of history in which elements of the Old Testament prefigure those of the New, with the important distinction that New Testament antitypes often redeem their Old Testament counterparts. Thus, Christ, the New Adam, redeems the sins of the Old Adam; Mary, the New Eve, those of the Old Eve; and so on. The structure of Pericles is much the same, with the climax of the play recapitulating its opening scene but with a saving difference—the absent mother is restored: Thaisa rejoins Pericles and Marina. Once the family unit is reconstituted—or, to be more precise, constituted in earnest for the first time—the nightmare of paternal incest under which Pericles has been living fades. Yet our preceding analysis makes it clear that this is the solution toward which the play’s primal scenes have been pointing all along. If the original vulnerability in Antiochus’s family was asymmetry– specifically, the asymmetry produced by his wife’s absence, which leaves his daughter vulnerable to her father’s confusion of roles—then it stands to reason that the restoration of the mother to Pericles’s family should serve as the linchpin for its happy ending. Pericles, typologically speaking, is the New Antiochus; his now-complete family the antitype to Antiochus’s incomplete one.

144  Zackariah Long Yet the play’s complementary primal scenes do more than merely prefigure the resolution of the plot. In pointing to some of the founding myths of the Western tradition as archetypal origin stories for trauma, they also hold up those myths to scrutiny, inviting us to observe how the dangers of paternal abuse are inherent in patriarchy itself. And in both cases these dangers are located in patriarchy’s unwillingness to honor the place or gifts of the mother. Genesis 2–3 insists, against all human experience, that motherhood was unnecessary for the first human life—all that was necessary was the Sky Father. If the Earth Mother is present at all, it is only as raw material to be formed—the Adamah out of which Adam is molded. Yet this disappearing of the primeval mother—however convenient as a mythical justification for patriarchy—also makes for a dangerously unbalanced, asymmetrical, and incomplete archetypal family. For who will fill the vacancy left by the mother if not the daughter? There is perhaps a moral in this, and not only for single fathers. For if a society that refuses to acknowledge wives as equals is in danger of mistaking them for daughters, then the reverse is also true: any society that treats wives as daughters is in danger of mistaking daughters for wives. This is the danger embodied by Antiochus and the danger that Pericles strives to avoid by seeking a mother-surrogate in a bride. Unfortunately, wives have a way of turning into mothers, and Pericles lives in a universe that will keep disappearing mothers and replacing them with daughters until the mother’s gifts are cherished—not as goods to be traded, stolen, or seized, but celestial fruits to be cultivated, honored, and protected. If this is a happy ending that strikes us as too good to be true, then perhaps it is because we are still living within Pericles’s nightmare, waiting for patriarchy’s antitype to arrive.

References The Bible. 2006. Authorized King James Version. Edited by David Norton. London: Penguin Classics. Brumble, David. 1998. Classical Myths and Legends in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: A Dictionary of Allegorical Meanings. London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Cahill, Patricia. 2008. Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fabiny, Tibor. 1992. The Lion and the Lamb: Figuralism and Fulfilment in the Bible, Art, and Literature. Houndsmills: Macmillan. Freud, Sigmund. 1953–74. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated and edited by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud. 24 vols. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Frye, Northrop, and Jay MacPherson. 2004. Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

The Primal Scene in Pericles  145 Hirschfeld, Heather. 2003. “Hamlet’s ‘First Corse’: Repetition, Trauma, and the Displacement of Redemptive Typology.” Shakespeare Quarterly 54, no. 4 (Winter): 424–48. Korshin, Paul. 1982. Typologies in England, 1650–1820. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Laplanche, J., and J.B. Pontalis. 1973. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton. Lewalksi, Barbara. 1977. “Typological Symbolism and the ‘Progress of the Soul’ in Seventeenth-Century Literature.” In Literary Uses of Typology, edited by Earl Miner, 70–114. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Medina, Angel, and Joyce Medina. 1994. “Orpheus: Nature and Psyche: From Allegory to Symbol in Titian, Rubens, and Poussin.” In The Play of the Self, edited by Ronald Bogue, and Mihai Spariosu, 221–50. Albany: State University of New York Press. Long, Zackariah. 2009. “‘Uncollected Man’: Trauma and the Early Modern MindBody in The Maid’s Tragedy.” In Staging Pain, 1580–1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theatre, edited by James Allard, and Matthew Martin, 31–46. Aldershot: Ashgate Press. ———. 2012. “Toward an Early Modern Theory of Trauma: Conscience and Richard III.” Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 1 (1): 49–72. ———. 2021. “Historicizing Rape Trauma: Identification with the Aggressor in Early Modern Humoralism and The Rape of Lucrece (1594).” In Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World, edited by Erin Peters, and Cynthia Richards, 55–79. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Nevo, Ruth. 1993. “The Perils of Pericles.” In The Undiscover’d Country: New Essays on Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, edited by B.J. Sokol, 150–78. London: Free Association Books. Peters, Erin, and Cynthia Richards. 2021. “Reading Historical Trauma: Moving Backward to Move Forward.” In Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World, edited by Erin Peters, and Cynthia Richards, 1–30. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Rahner, Hugo. 1963. Greek Myths and Christian Mystery. Translated by Brian Battershaw. London: Burns & Oates. Shakespeare, William. 2001. Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Edited by Stephen Orgel. New York: Penguin. Starks-Estes, Lisa. 2014. Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays: Transforming Ovid. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Willis, Deborah. 2002. “‘The Gnawing Vulture’: Revenge, Trauma Theory, and Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 1 (Spring): 21–52.

Part IV

Gender Trouble



9

Phallic Fantasies in The Taming of the Shrew W. Reginald Rampone Jr.

Traditionally, directors of William Shakespeare’s early comedy, The Taming of the Shrew, have gone in for putting Katherina’s body and her sister Bianca’s body on display as objects of erotic desire for the visual pleasure and consumption of male audience members in the theater. In the past, masculinity was naturalized in literary studies regardless of the historical era or genre from whence the male character emerged. Eventually, issues pertaining to male sexuality, and masculinity more generally, have become as ideologically fraught and problematized as those pertaining to female sexuality, gender, and femininity. This essay attempts to make a cultural intervention with this reading of male bodies in two productions of The Taming of the Shrew, given ongoing scholarship in gender and men’s studies. This paper uses Lacanian psychoanalysis concerning the ideological significance of the difference between the penis and the phallus, which reflects the fragility of the male ego regarding the degree of nudity displayed by the male characters in two productions of The Taming of the Shrew from 1976 and 2012. Cultural anxiety surrounding male nudity has long been a theatrical and cinematic obstacle concerning the exposed male body, especially the male genitals. The display of the male body at once teases and titillates its audience as to whether the actor’s genitals will be fully seen. Members of the audience may at once desire the phallus/penis to be shown, and, at the same time, the audience may ultimately realize that it will see only the actor’s penis; nonetheless, the audience may wish to view the penis despite the fact that they will (almost) certainly be disappointed. Finally, early modern English literary scholars suggest that women’s tongues functioned metaphorically for the penis, but I suggest that Petruchio’s tongue also functions as his own metaphorical phallus. Moreover, I also argue that his actual genitals cannot be revealed as they would betray his lack of the phallus, which, according to Evans (1996), “is not the male genital organ in its biological reality but the role that the organ plays in fantasy” (140). Despite the fact that there are no less than six references to the human tongue in the Induction and Act 1, most pertain to Katherina, with the most provocative use of the word “tongue” appearing in the scene in which Petruchio refers to his tongue in her tail in this play of tongues and tales. DOI: 10.4324/9781003306894-14

150  W. Reginald Rampone Jr. Because of the ideological significance attributed to Petruchio’s eroticized body and phallicized tongue in The Taming of the Shrew, Lacan’s psychoanalytical conception of the phallus and penis is extremely useful in a discussion of the representation and sexualization of Petruchio’s body. This concept is demonstrated by references to Petruchio’s tongue, genitals, and buttocks in two filmed stage productions of this play. As Sean Homer (2005) explains, the “phallus in Lacanian theory should not be confused with the male genital organ, although it carries these connotations.” Lacan has confused critics for years because of his own tendency to conflate the two terms. Homer suggests that Lacan’s understanding of castration alludes not only to the actual removal of the penis, but also to its “recognition of lack or absence” (54). Ultimately, Homer concludes that Lacan argues that the phallus and the penis are not, in fact, one and the same, but rather “it is the penis plus the recognition of the absence or lack” (56). Kaja Silverman (1992), in her essay, “The Lacanian Phallus,” makes much the same point regarding how a distinction needs to be made between the two terms. She argues that, even though they are not the same entities, there is an “intimate relationship between the two terms” (89). Parveen Adams (1992) makes the most compelling of comments when she simply asserts that “the phallus is in fact a veil” (77). Silverman (1992) speaks to the heart of my argument regarding the issue of why Petruchio must always remain clothed on stage: “The phallic signifier can only function when withdrawn from sight and argues on the behalf of concealment: it might be said to re-veil the phallus” (88). As far as Ellie Ragland (2004) is concerned, neither man nor woman “has” “the phallus” as it functions as a cultural construction to create two sexes, doubtless for ideological reasons (6). Therefore, it is imperative that the phallus must always already remain veiled in order to maintain its status as the phallus; otherwise, it becomes just a penis, and Western civilization can’t have that. As I argue in this essay concerning the male body in The Taming of the Shrew, the phallus cannot be revealed. Because of the cultural anxiety that men have regarding the exposure of their sex organ, full-blown frontal male nudity cannot be displayed as a result of the devastating emotional effects that the male ego would experience. According to Mark Breitenberg (1996), Freud suggests that “anxiety in the minds of its sufferers precedes any identifiable cause; indeed, it is the condition of preparation for an anticipated threat whose origin ‘may be an unknown one’” (5). The phallic lack would reveal rather than re-veil the male sex organ’s shortcomings. Despite functioning as an eroticized object of female desire and its attendant gaze and the purported possessor of the Lacanian phallus, Petruchio and the other male characters must remain clothed in order to retain their provisional phallicized status; otherwise, they would become ideologically disempowered and possess only the penis, thereby disenfranchising their subject positions as biological cisgender males. Therefore, because of the accompanying cultural anxiety that most male actors have regarding

Phallic Fantasies in The Taming of the Shrew  151 the exposure of their genitals, male actors usually do not engage in fullblown frontal male nudity, for they might have too little to show for themselves. The phallic lack would ultimately reveal rather than re-veil their inadequacies. William Ball and Kirk Browning’s 1976 filmed stage production of The Taming of the Shrew emerges, with all of the exuberance that the decade can muster, as a cultural artifact of Ball’s American Conservatory Theatre Group in San Francisco. Through the 1970s, San Francisco was synonymous with gay male identity and the gay community’s pride in its bodies. Therefore, it would be foolhardy indeed to suggest that the tanned bodies of the male actors in this production would have gone unnoticed by gay men. Writing in the New York Times, John J. O’Connor (1976) avers that this production is filled with “youthful vitality” (80). This “youthful vitality” is occasioned through the masculine athleticism that is associated with virility. Without a doubt, O’Connor is compelled to conclude, “After a while, the liveliness, desperate to be accepted as robust lustiness, can be exhausting, but the effort alone is fascinating” (80). Simply watching the sheer athleticism of the movements of the actors would have constituted visual pleasure for the audience. In this production, Ball and Browning forgo the justly celebrated Induction scene involving the inebriated tinker that has been a part of some productions. The play begins with Lucentio’s entrance in Act 1 in a manner befitting a gentleman of his social station and dignity. Wearing tight white pants, Lucentio’s groin area is made prominent. No one would challenge his masculinity except perhaps Katherina. She, however, has no interaction with Lucentio, who is presented as an attractive fresh-faced youth with his wily servant Tranio, as Lucentio has eyes only for Bianca. Hortensio, who sports long, blond hair and exhibits what one would describe as stereotypically feminine mannerisms, acts as an important foil to Petruchio. Gremio, the old pantaloon, who is wealthy but lacks the virility to satisfy a young wife’s sexual needs, is easily intimidated by Katherina’s stereotypically shrewish behavior toward him. In Ball and Browning’s production, Gremio uses a walking stick, which at once metaphorically signals his male genitals and at the same time his lack of virility; on two occasions Katherina kicks the cane from under Gremio’s hand, causing him to fall. In psychoanalytic terms, Katherina has already “castrated” Hortensio and Gremio as they would be incapable of controlling her behavior. While they may possess male sexual organs, they would be impotent in the wake of Katherina’s dominant personality, for Gremio informs Baptista that he will not court her, “To cart her, rather. She’s too rough for me” (Shakespeare 1999, 1.1.55). Hortensio expresses much the same opinion: “No mates for you / Unless you were of gentler, milder mold” (1.1.59–60). While she would metaphorically “wear the pants” in the family if she were married to either of these men, she, like her male counterparts, would still lack the phallus despite her ability to intimidate them.

152  W. Reginald Rampone Jr. Petruchio bears a striking difference from Lucentio and the other men in the play in his appearance and attire as he arrives wearing a jerkin that is laced together displaying his tanned abdomen and muscular arms, all of which qualify him as a manly man. He is the embodiment of masculinity. Not only does he embody it, he demonstrates it by lifting Gremio, his servant, off the ground and throwing him about when he refuses to knock on the door of Hortensio’s house. Petruchio’s overt masculinity and musculature were not lost on O’Connor, who reaffirms his dominant male presence in the production, and, interestingly, he pays little attention to Fredi Olster’s Katherina, whom he describes as “attractively played.” Marc Singer’s body garners almost all of the attention from the reviewer while Fredi Olster is almost ignored. Elizabeth Schafer (2011) asserts much the same as O’Connor, “Marc Singer’s Petruchio is a macho, bare-chested and absurd man in tights who swings onto the stage for his wedding like a Renaissance Tarzan.” Schafer exaggerates her claim somewhat of Marc Singer behaving like a “Renaissance Tarzan,” but she is certainly on the mark when she claims, “The production was grounded in commedia, acrobatic clowning, tumbling, pantomime violence and stylized, choreographed jumping and bouncing around” (72). It would be tempting to assert that Petruchio has the purportedly Lacanian phallus, but, of course, as Parveen Adams (1992) reminds us, “Do I have the phallus or not? Am I the phallus? Of course no one has it; no one is it” (74). Despite the fact that Petruchio exudes machismo, he still lacks the (Lacanian) phallus and will still come up short. Unlike the buff and bronzed Petruchio, in this same 1976 production, Hortensio has long, blonde hair and somewhat unconventional heteronormative mannerisms. He demonstrates an effusive, sympathetic response to Petruchio’s threat of physical violence to Grumio as Hortensio holds Grumio tightly around the shoulders and pretends to kiss him. Grumio is noticeably shorter and smaller than either man and is noticeably subordinate in a number of ways. Petruchio is clearly the dominant male vis-à-vis these two men. Grumio appears almost feminized wearing a long ribbon about his neck, which hangs down across his unbuttoned shirt, which makes Grumio appear more feminine than masculine. On the other hand, all of Petruchio’s attributes position him as the dominant male in this play. While Grumio is not in a position to challenge the authority of Petruchio, Hortensio, who is Petruchio’s friend, never challenges his masculinity or virility because he lacks those qualities in himself, as will be seen later in the play. This phallic lack is metaphorically evinced by his inability to control his wife, the widow. Lacking the phallus, Hortensio could be said to be (psychologically) emasculated and, therefore, incapable of being the head of the early modern family because his wife would have taken up the subject position of the patriarch. When the old pantaloon, Gremio, meets Petruchio for the first time, he expresses concern to Hortensio that Petruchio knows all about Katherina’s reputation as a shrew, but Gremio becomes distracted and even quite

Phallic Fantasies in The Taming of the Shrew  153 impressed by Petruchio’s musculature and overall manliness. Standing next to Petruchio, Gremio wonders whether Petruchio is really interested in pursuing Katherina, and he pokes Petruchio’s stomach as he says, “But if you have a stomach, to ‘t o’ God’s name” (Shakespeare 1999, 1.2.194). Gremio needs to know if Petruchio is as muscular as he appears, and then he feels his right bicep and makes weird noises, which indicate that he is impressed. This expression of amazement is exaggerated, but the absurdity of seeing Gremio make all of these unusual sounds is worth the laughter. Gremio stops short of touching Petruchio’s groin area as he looks down and pokes his leg as though he has noticed that about which he cannot speak. Whether he has the phallus or not is immaterial because if he disrobes, all of the actors on stage and the members of the theater audience will see that he lacks the phallus, which is the most significant form of an imaginary meaning making cultural illusion. While Petruchio’s phallic lack may be queried, there is no mistaking Hortensio’s shortcomings. Pretending to be the music master, Litio, Hortensio returns from his music lesson with Katherina with a lute broken over his head. Hortensio has been psychologically emasculated; there is no question that he lacks whatever is required to contain Katherina’s hostility. He moans in pain and walks on his knees as if he had been disciplined by his mother, knowing that he has displeased her and cannot satisfy her, and, in turn, Baptista, the family’s patriarch, pats Hortensio on the head. Baptista, the patriarch, in Lacanian terms, may have the phallus metaphorically speaking, and Hortensio would need it to be a successful father and husband in early modern Italy. Unlike Hortensio, Petruchio asks Baptista to send Katherina to him so that he can ostensibly woo her to be his bride. Before Katherina arrives on the scene, Petruchio doffs his jerkin and appears bare-chested, torso glistening, and bronzed. Petruchio has determined to make his body an object of erotic desire for Katherina’s visual pleasure. O’Connor (1976) continues to focus his attention as a reviewer on Petruchio’s body: In this first scene with Katherina, attractively played by Fredi Olster, he strips down to a pair of white pants and a necklace. In this instance it is the hero instead of the heroine obviously flaunting what used to be called, with inimitable delicacy, an amply endowed chest. If the businessman can have his showgirls, the bored housewife can have her Playgirl centerfold. Evidently, commedia dell’arte can have anything. (80) Diana Henderson (1997), also interprets Ball and Browning’s production as politically charged, in her article, “A Shrew for the Times.” Linking Ball and Browning’s production with Papp’s 1981 New York Shakespeare Festival Park’s production, she asserts, “The most telling cinematic innovation in several of these is a post-‘sexual revolution’ directness in emphasizing the

154  W. Reginald Rampone Jr. erotic appeal of Petruchio’s body as a motivation for Kate’s conversion” (150). Moreover, she argues that directors have been trying to make this highly problematic play more palatable to both men and women in their productions: “The most noticeable shift has been an explicitly sexual one. In trying to make a recalcitrant text appeal to both sexes, the productions and camerawork for both the ACT and Papp videos celebrate the male body as an erotic object: that body is well represented by the charismatic, slyly selfparodic figures of Marc Singer and Raul Julia” (51).One wonders whether this shift in attention to Petruchio’s body also functions as an indication of who is in control of the relationship vis-à-vis the phallus. Once on stage, Katherina walks toward Petruchio and around him and looks down at his buttocks in his tight-fitting white tights and smiles to herself, which the camera is keen to notice. Therefore, she subjects him to her gaze as an object of erotic desire. While Katherina faces him after surveying his body, she removes her smile and behaves in a surly fashion. At this moment she implies to the audience that her prickly disposition may be a kind of performance. In this beautiful moment of dramatic irony, the audience in the theater and the audience at home know what Katherina actually thinks of his body, but he has no idea. If Henderson is correct in her observation that directors are using Petruchio’s body in order to transform Katherina into a pliable helpmate for Petruchio because of her desire for him and his phallus, then she will be woefully disappointed. As Lacan (2005) states, “It is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well as loved. But she finds the signifier of her own desire in the body of the person to whom her demand for love is addressed. It should not be forgotten, of course, that the organ that is endowed with this signifying function takes on the value of a fetish thereby” (583). Sean Homer notes, “Lacan is very careful to distinguish between ‘need’ and ‘lack.’ A need such as hunger or thirst can be satisfied. Desire on the other hand refers to something beyond basic human needs that cannot be satisfied … Desire is at the very core of our being and as such it is essentially a relation to lack; indeed, desire and lack are inextricably tied together”(72). Consequently, Katherina can no more have the phallus than Petruchio, and yet he is quite confident in his sexuality while Tranio/Lucentio and Gremio use staffs to indicate both their status and, at the same time, their phallic lack. Gremio even inserts his staff between Tranio/Lucentio’s legs when they dispute each other’s fitness to be Bianca’s future husband as though Gremio is at once penetrating him and metaphorically providing him with the phallus, which he lacks. In so many words, they both lack phallic authority. Moments later, after the acerbic exchange begins between Petruchio and Katherina, he asks the incendiary question, “Who knows where a wasp does wear its sting? In his tail” (Shakespeare 1999, 2.1.213). To which Katherina replies, “In his tongue.” This allusion to the word has explosive repercussions on this occasion. Petruchio quizzically responds, “Whose

Phallic Fantasies in The Taming of the Shrew  155 tongue?” (2.1.214). Katherina has been drawn into his linguistic game of tongues and tales, as she blithely replies, “Yours, if you talk of tales, and so farewell!” (2.1.215). Robert Heilman glosses the allusion to “of tales” as “idle tales (leading to [a] bawdy pun on tail-pudenda)” (in Shakespeare 1999, 44). The reference to “tail” was one pregnant with meaning in early modern England. According to Laura Gowing (1996), the word “tail” was a “key focus of sexual insult of women. They were imaged as the locus of sexual pleasure, and the acts women were supposed to have engaged in to satisfy that sexual pleasure were visualized with bawdy exaggeration” (81). Gowing cites several examples of women who were insulted through a reference to the word “tail.” Joan Gregorie, an early modern English woman, accused Isabel Smallridge “that she the said Isabell did suffer one Henrie Hackell to dippe in her tayle up to the elbow in white friars lane whilst she did consent thereunto and did laugh or cry out hah hah hah.” (quoted in Gowing 1996, 81) Therefore, it may come as no surprise that Petruchio, who was no doubt quite aware of the highly sexualized use of the word “tail,” should reply in such a deliberately suggestive and questioning manner when he queries, “What with my tongue in your tail? Nay, come again” (Shakespeare 1999, 2.2.216). Petruchio’s tongue has become phallic in that he suggests that it would function the same way that his penis would if he were to engage in anal sexual relations with her. This speech does constitute an assault on her sexuality. She feels violated at this moment, and it is for this reason that in many of the stage and film productions that she slaps him. In fact, the stage directions dictate that Katherina slap Petruchio in order for her to reply as she does, but it is he who has drawn her into this homophonic game, which she loses. Petruchio gains control of this linguistic game, for until this time Katherina was in control of it, but now Petruchio is asserting his own linguistic prowess. For Petruchio the tongue is a penis, if not a phallus, by which he can pleasure Katherina in multiple ways through oral sex. The relation between Petruchio’s tongue and his linguistic prowess and his penis in Katherina’s “tail” would not have been lost on John Bulwer, an early modern scholar, writing in Pathomyatomia or a Dissection of the Significative muscles of the Affections of the Mind in 1649, which Mazzio (1997) cites: [T]he action of kissing which some beastly Lechers use when their veines are inflate with lust would enduce one to think that there were some analogy between the extension of the two unruly members. The difference between the erection of both parts is that the viril member is not only encreased in length but in thicknesses and compasse: but the Tongue onely in length being not increased in all the dimensions of its body when it goes out of the mouth. (Quoted in Mazzio 1997, 59)

156  W. Reginald Rampone Jr. Mazzio delineates the difference between the penis and the tongue in her essay, “Sins of the Tongue,” in which she asserts, “[T]he homology emphasizes the way in which the tongue was imagined as even physiologically ‘other,’ as less subject to muscular control than other parts of the body. The increased attention to the muscular structure and the voluntary and involuntary motions of the human body in early modern anatomies led to numerous debates concerning the relationship between ‘the two unruly members’” (59). Moreover, there is more to this very intriguing passage in Bulwer’s (1649) text in which he states, “and because they who use this Action of the Tongue doe it before they can thinke or understand with what Muscle or motion they should produce it, it is agreeable & meete that the muscle whose lust was imposed upon it, for tis reason should never a Satyriatis when it avoucheth lust, and imagines by the aptitude of the thing unto it” (230–31). The implicit comparison of the tongue to the penis turns on the fact that both are muscles that are largely involuntary, and so Bulwer suggests that one may no more easily control the tongue than one’s penis. While the tongue allows a man to express his desires through means of his voice, his penis allows him to act upon them. Jacopo Berengario da Carpi (1664) also provides further discussion of the relation between the penis and the tongue in the popular imagination in the first English translation of his Microcosmographia, which Mazzio also cites: [T]here are many that say that the Tongue is not moved to the outward parts voluntarily, but merely naturally from the imagination, as the Yard, and some say that is, and also the Yard are moved of muscles, and of the imagination together, and some of the imagination only, which by means of the spirit causeth a windiness, dilating, and erecting the Yard, and in like manner the Tongue, with bringing it out of the mouth. (Quoted in Mazzio (1997, 59) Associations were increasingly made between the penis and the tongue through the seventeenth century and, hence, there arose “the imagined relationship between rhetorical and sexual performance” (59). Mazzio does not mention that Berengario makes a comparison between the penis and the tongue earlier in Microcosmographia, and writes The Profit of the Yard is made principally for the conservation of the Species; for by its means the Sperm is sent into the Matrix; which if it be of a moderate quality (as likewise the Tongue) it is praised, and is profitable; for the shortness of it doth not bring the Sperm to the due place; and its too much length is the cause of the resolving of the spirits in the Sperm. (Berengario 1664, 91)

Phallic Fantasies in The Taming of the Shrew  157 Just as the penis must be the right size in order to be useful to the propagation of the species, so too must the tongue be the right size. Hence, within the popular imagination, Petruchio’s linguistic prowess could easily be perceived as an indication of his sexual prowess. Given the misogyny of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one doubts whether an early modern London audience would be surprised by Petruchio’s comment about his tongue in Katherina’s “tail.” Historians of early modern England have determined that society at large perceived men and women’s genitals differently. As Gowing (1996) states, “While men’s members were imagined as appealing and attractive to women, women’s tails were figured differently … Men’s members were an object of fascination, both to men, and—in the popular culture of sex to women … Men’s members were never described with such absorbed repulsion” (81–82). Gowing points out that there were no recorded images of female genitals on tavern walls as there had been of men in early modern England. Therefore, the English patriarchy believed the penis was the superior sex organ within the cultural imaginary as male genitals were not used as terms of insult such as the women’s “tail.” Analogously, the terms given to identify female prostitutes in the early modern English period such as drab, punk, and strumpet were ones of contempt, while male prostitutes were referred to as stallions, a term identifying strong male horses, a word which even today has positive connotations in relation to human sexual prowess and the capacity to please. Just as the nude male body is of a central concern in Ball and Browning’s version of The Taming of the Shrew, sartorial concerns are also at the heart of this play as clothing functions as a significant marker of social and economic status in Padua. Rather than dress in a conventional fashion, Petruchio decides to arrive outrageously dressed to embarrass Katherina and consequently humble her. He arrives at Baptista’s home wearing wedding attire consisting of red and white streamers attached to what could best be described as a crop top. Finally, he enthusiastically jumps onto the stage with a great burst of energy. When Baptista enjoins him to “doff this habit” (Shakespeare 1999, 3.2.100), Petruchio exclaims, “To me she’s married, not unto my clothes … As I can change these accouterments” (3.2.117, 119). This statement points to the theatricality of his masculinity, and audiences of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen some extraordinarily outrageous costumes that the actors playing the role of Petruchio have worn to this wedding. Unlike Ball and Browning’s production, Toby Frow’s Globe Production, performed in 2013, works up to Petruchio’s nudity. Earlier, Lucentio disrobes in order to exchange his identity with Tranio through class-specific clothing. The primacy of Petruchio’s body was showcased in Toby Frow’s production in Simon Paisley Day’s performance, but the director also paid attention to Lucentio’s body in this production, played by Joseph Timms. Once again the play proper opens with Lucentio and Tranio entering Padua.

158  W. Reginald Rampone Jr. Lucentio decides that he and Tranio should exchange clothes and hence their identities at the same time because no one has met them yet in Padua. For Frow, Lucentio stripping off his clothes as he exchanges them with Tranio does not signal an eroticization of Lucentio’s body. Frow writes, “Certainly the idea of the diversification of the object of desire from the female to male bodies is a fascinating one, though alas not one I ever considered. In honesty I spent more time thinking about clothes than the bodies beneath them when directing this production, though the two are of course intimately linked” (email message to author, February 20, 2020). Frow does admit that the disrobing on the part of Lucentio and Petruchio may engender erotic desire on the part of audience members, but that was never a consideration for him. Here again, regarding Lucentio’s behavior on stage, Frow believes that since “the script calls for him to change clothes with his master and he does so with youthful abandon centre stage, in the middle of a public street, I wanted to show his youth, his naivete and also Tranio’s sophistication in his moment. Tranio is wiser and more forward looking. They are in Padua now and such displays of wanton, youthful vigor will not pass muster.” Tranio must learn the appropriate social codes of behavior in order to survive in Padua unless he wishes to be a pariah as Katherina once was. Consequently, as Lucentio strips to his boxer shorts, Tranio rushes across the stage to him in order to stop him from revealing his shortcomings but rather to re-veil them. What would the theater and later film audience have seen if Tranio had not stopped him in the nick of time by thrusting his arms forward to suggest that this action was inappropriate in the middle of the street in Padua or by breaking the imaginary fourth wall of the Globe Theatre and thereby truly impinging upon the audience’s visual space? Noticeable nervous laughter emerges from the audience when Lucentio is about to remove his underwear, and, of course, the nervous laughter is a reflection of the current cultural anxiety of a nude male body on stage before a live audience. Charles Bernheimer’s (1992) comments concerning the penis and the phallus suggest that the audience would have seen Lucentio’s penis, as he argues, “For Lacan, the phallus, originating principle of this mobility, refers to no body. But he is wrong: the link between signifier and signified in the sign cannot be severed and produces an effect of reference that inscribed bodily experience into the unconscious. The phallus’s pretense to universality and transcendence thus is challenged in the unconscious by the penis’s claim to historical specificity” (121). Bernheimer argues that the concept of the phallus could not exist without the materiality of the penis. He suggests that the penis exists in the here and now rather than the universalizing abstraction of the phallus that purports to transcend both space and time. The debate concerning the distinctions made between the penis and the phallus and the ideological significances appeared in the journal Differences in 1992, and, given the passage of time, scholars of gender and sexuality should revisit it because of the increased

Phallic Fantasies in The Taming of the Shrew  159 attention paid to the categories of race, ethnicity, and age and their relation to the penis and phallus. Joseph Timms did perform the role of Lucentio in 2012, and the historical specificity of his unveiled or revealed phallus or penis would have been an object of desire for some and perhaps one of revulsion for others, but as Toby Frow asserts, Lucentio’s “youthful abandon” is the principal reason for his haste in disrobing in the streets of Padua. It is fair to say that Lacan would have thought that Timms, the actor, was inadvertently revealing his penis, not his phallus, at that moment in time on the London stage. The larger ideological issue is that Western cultural arbiters rarely allow for male nudity on stage for several reasons. Historically speaking, nudity was not allowed on the early modern English stage in London. Second, theater owners want to attract as many audience members as they can, and some of them may wish to introduce adolescents and children to stage productions, and they would not be allowed to watch the play, and therefore live nudity may offend them. Finally, because nudity would allow the concealed phallus to be viewed as a penis, this viewing of the nude male body would lead to a reduction of patriarchal power and authority in the larger culture. Just as clothing is necessary to maintain one’s dignity, it acts as an important signifier of one’s place in the social hierarchy in the early modern English period. Petruchio asserts that the clothes he is wearing are irrelevant to his relationship to Katherina, and at the same time he places an obviously phallic carrot into Grumio’s mouth. Then Petruchio quickly tosses off his unbuttoned vest, which had barely covered his chest. In this film version, Hortensio, rather than Tranio, tells Petruchio that he must change his clothes in order to be married at the church, and Petruchio in one swift motion removes his pants to reveal that he is wearing an athletic supporter with a makeshift purple codpiece, which had protruded through his pants to a noticeable degree. Petruchio’s action demonstrates his contempt for the mores of conventional behavior and attire appropriate for a wedding. The audience is demonstrably moved by Petruchio’s athletic supporter. There is first the camera’s closeup of his codpiece, and then the camera backs off from Petruchio’s body so that his body may be seen in relation to all of the other actors on stage. Many of the actors are aghast at viewing his bare, white buttocks, and some even raise their hands to block their view of them, but Grumio, still with the carrot in his mouth, wonderingly gazes on Petruchio’s buttocks. Petruchio’s audacious stripping off of his pants functions to take attention away from his bride, and he has apparently engendered erotic desire in him. In many ways, Petruchio’s standing in the middle of the stage with his buttocks completely exposed, and then turning his back to the audience, act as an invitation for the audience to view them. Petruchio is enacting his own self-eroticization by behaving in this fashion. Unlike Joseph Timms, Simon Paisley Day’s appearance does not conform to the cultural expectations of a conventionally handsome man. The audible laughter of the audience is heard as Petruchio states, “To me, she’s married,

160  W. Reginald Rampone Jr. not unto my clothes” (Shakespeare 1999, 3.2.117). When he turns to reveal his buttocks, this action causes the audience to gasp at the effrontery of such outrageous attire and nudity. Throughout history, men have used different articles of clothing to highlight their masculinity, whether it is an athletic supporter or a codpiece donned by men in the early modern period. Clad in an athletic supporter, Petruchio’s nudity takes on a multiplicity of significations at this moment on stage. A strong, masculine man in organized sports and clad in only an athletic supporter has been perceived through the twentieth and twentiethfirst centuries by the general public as the iconic embodiment of virility and heterosexual procreative capacity, but Petruchio’s bare buttocks and his turning them toward the audience and the actors on stage problematize his purported heterosexuality and his overt masculinity. Fast forwarding to a late-twentieth-century photograph, Petruchio is not unlike the figure of Patrice in Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph, who is shown wearing only an athletic supporter. As Sarah Kent (1990) states, “From his studded belt hangs not a gun holster but a crocheted cod-piece, amply filled by his genitals. His penis hangs limply like some exotic fruit but its potential for strong action is implied by the firm muscles of his thigh whose form it echoes” (85). Regarding Mapplethorpe’s nudes in general, Kent asserts, “Despite their homo-eroticism, or perhaps because of it, Mapplethorpe’s nudes are essentially traditional—confirming rather than questioning the myth of masculine virility … And their enormous attraction lies in the utopian promise that the myth is not ill founded—the perfectly potent male specimen can be found here on earth” (86).Petruchio’s and Patrice’s athletic supporters act as a transhistorical signifier of male sexual identity and virility. While Petruchio’s masculinized (hetero)sexuality has not been challenged or interrogated at any time during this play’s performance, his exposed buttocks do raise a question concerning the range of sexual practices in which he may engage, but whether Petruchio does possibly possess the perfect penis is not to be determined on stage. One may argue that Petruchio’s turning his back on the audience and the play’s cast of characters is preposterous. Jeffrey Masten (1997) asserts in “Is the Fundament a Grave?,” “In an era before the invention of the homo/hetero divide, a consideration of the fundament is relevant to the bodily structures and practices of men generally” (130). By Petruchio’s very actions, he has conceivably made his buttocks or fundament and in particular his anus at once sites of both erotic desire and revulsion by women and men on stage and in the audience. Masten asserts that Guy Hocquenghem theorizes that the “anus [is] the seat of a privately owned subjectivity” and so, consequently, Petruchio may well have taken on an “active-passive, objectsubject position” by allowing both audience and cast to view them as they have (135). Given the queering of this moment on stage, is it possible that he wishes to be an object of erotic desire rather than Katherina by feminizing himself? After he displays his buttocks to those on stage and those in the

Phallic Fantasies in The Taming of the Shrew  161 audience, one must assess in what way this action reflects his erotic desire. Dylan Evans (1996) asserts, “When Lacan talks about desire, it is not any kind of desire that he is referring to, but always unconscious desire. This is not because Lacan sees conscious desire as unimportant, but simply because it is unconscious desire that forms the central concern of psychoanalysis. Unconscious desire is entirely sexual” (36). When Petruchio quickly removes his pants, he unmistakably wishes for everyone to see his body unclothed. Ostensibly, he wants Katherina to understand that the clothes that he wears are immaterial to their relationship, but whether he wants to be perceived as an object of erotic desire may be unknown even to Petruchio. One may opine that he, in effect, is offering his buttocks to Katherina and, by extension, his anus, for he had earlier quizzically and now at this moment ironically asked Katherina, “What, with my tongue in your tail?” (Shakespeare 1999, 2.1.216). In their rapid fire wordplay, Katherina and Petruchio may well unknowingly express unconscious desires for each other. In a play concerned with tongues and tales, it would not be surprising if Katherina’s tongue ended up in Petruchio’s anus as all tails/tales come to an end. In both of these productions of The Taming of the Shrew, matters of sartorial splendor and the phallus and the penis function as focal points around which the larger concern of the male body on display looms as an ideological bugbear. The production of Ball and Browning and especially of Frow challenge the limits of what genteel society considers permissible in mainstream theater. The current middle class cultural sensibility was challenged by Petruchio’s nudity and his turning his buttocks to the actors on stage and to the audience in the theater. While these productions may not ask audience members from the 1970s and early twenty-first century to discern the ideological differences of the penis and the phallus, one hopes that these productions will make audiences rethink issues of power and authority in relation to gender. At the same time, neither the early modern English theater in London nor the newly constructed Globe Theatre of today would allow full frontal nudity because this behavior would violate the cultural norms or the moral values of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Londoners and offend the cultural sensibilities of local and international theatergoers in the twenty-first century. Given the number of allusions to tongues and tails in this play, it would not be surprising that playgoers at both of these productions would have intriguing tales to tell upon returning home.

References Adams, Parveen. 1992. “Waiving the Phallus.” Differences: The Phallus Issue 4 (1): 76–83. Ball, William, and Kirk Browning, dir. 1976. The Taming of the Shrew. DVD Berengario da Carpi, Jacopo. 1664. Microcosmographia, or A Description of the body of a man being a practical anatomy, shewing the manner of antomizing from part to part. London: EEBO.

162  W. Reginald Rampone Jr. Bernheimer, Charles. 1992. “Penile Reference in Phallic Theory.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4 (1): 116–32. Breitenberg, Mark. 1996. Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bulwer, John. 1649. Pathomyatomia or a Dissection of the Significative Muscles of the Affections of the Minde. London: EEBO. Evans, Dylan. 1996. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge. Frow, Toby, dir. 2013. The Taming of the Shrew. DVD. Gowing, Laura. 1996. Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Henderson, Diana. 1997. “A Shrew for the Times.” In Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video, edited by Lynda E. Boose, and Richard Burt, 148–68. London and New York: Routledge. Homer, Sean. 2005. Jacques Lacan. London and New York: Routledge. Kent, Sarah. 1990. “The Erotic Male Nude.” In Women’s Images of Men, edited by Sarah Kent, and Jacqueline Morreau, 75–105. London: Pandora. Lacan, Jacques. 2005. Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. London and New York: Norton. Masten, Jeffrey. 1997. “Is the Fundament a Grave?” In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman, and Carla Mazzio, 128–45. London and New York: Routledge. Mazzio, Carla. 1997. “Sins of the Tongue.” In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman, and Carla Mazzio, 53–79. London and New York: Routledge. O’Connor, John. 1976. “TV: ‘Shrew’ as Commedia dell Arte.” The New York Times, November 10. Web. February 13, 2020. Ragland, Ellie. 2004. The Logic of Sexuation: From Aristotle to Lacan. Albany: State University of New York Press. Shakespeare, William. 1999. The Taming of the Shrew. Edited by Robert Heilman. New York: Signet. ———. 2011. The Taming of the Shrew. Edited by Elizabeth Schafer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverman, Kaja. 1992. “The Lacanian Phallus.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4 (1): 84–115.

10 The Gilded Puddle Scatology, Race, and Masochism in Antony and Cleopatra Drew Daniel

Shit Happens Scatology has an unsavory reputation. Wedged as it is between contrary discourses of Eurocentric ethnographic practice and psychoanalytic clinical practice, does the term refer to seemingly “exotic” traditional rites, a cluster of outré perversions, or a universal psychic structure? Freud asserts the latter, for intuitively obvious reasons: life requires nutrition, nutrition entails waste, and so there can be no embodiment that is not founded upon the daily management of the resulting waste, both in practical terms and in its psychic consequences of polite repression and/or celebratory “toilet humor.” Humanity and waste go together, as Lacan (2002) asserts in a punning joke in his seminar on The Logic of Phantasy that “the being of Man, insofar as it is fundamental for our anthropology, has a name, in the middle of which the word ‘being’ (être) is found … Man is rubbish (détritus)” (7). Everyone’s passage across toilet training, however individually and culturally and historically modulated, implies a scatological reservoir of memories, experiences, and relations. We pass through, absorb, and no longer reflect upon this material, but its dead metaphors of being “squeaky clean” or a “hot mess” implicitly underwrite our everyday release of liquid and solid waste as functional adults. Against the backdrop of a familiar normative story about sexual development into adulthood, individual perversions or pathologies that take the form of attachment to, or pleasure from, contact with waste might look like holdovers from oral and anal stages, or symptomatic expressions of a libidinal interest in regression. Shit happens and everyone poops and pisses. If this is accompanied by libidinal energies, that is not in of itself surprising, but simply confirms the stored affective charges built into the parent-child drama of toilet training, charges that return as chains of symbolic substitutions in which “baby,” “penis,” “gold” and “feces” are linked and, in fantasy, frequently regarded as equivalent. However much his flexible deployment of the rhetoric of “primitivity” aligns the scatological with the cultural practices of non-European and DOI: 10.4324/9781003306894-15

164  Drew Daniel non-white Others, at the level of theoretical generality Freud activates the “All” in John G. Bourke’s titular Scatalogic Rites of All Nations, insisting upon a psychic bedrock of the universal beneath the appearance of diverse cultural and historical expressions. It is the basic intuition of this paper that certain images in Antony and Cleopatra offer something like a Shakespearean scatological imaginary that is roughly analogous to Freud’s networks of substitution, and that they also partake in the matrix of racialization that surrounded the birth of “scatology” as a discourse. The play contrasts a Roman masculinity that was willing to suffer contact with abject materials against a willfully pleasurable submission to a Black woman, a submission that is figured as both desirable and abhorrent. However we read the assertion that on Cleopatra’s barge “the poop was beaten gold” (Shakespeare 2011, 2.2.198), this is a play in which “gold” and “waste” are repeatedly brought into relation, and the “gilded puddle” of horse urine summoned to view by Octavius Caesar in (1.4.63) condenses such a network.1 I am interested in this fleeting moment of Shakespearean scatology not so much in order to verify a prior and freestanding Freudian intuition but in order to see the way that racially coded hierarchies of valuation are pressurized by this play text’s frequent images of slime, ditches, graves, and excremental waste, both animal and human (Kristeva 1982). In particular, this essay will linger upon one such moment of perverse fantasy—Octavius Caesar’s passing description of Antony drinking the “stale” of horses (1.4.63)—in order to show how this queer representation of abjection, waste, and liquidity contributes to the play’s broader staging of white imperial masculinity under threat. Reading a scatological fantasy as part of a play’s surrounding poetic network of racialization puts psychoanalytic reading practices under a certain methodological pressure, begging a familiar preliminary question: can psychoanalysis think race?2 Getting our hands dirty, it must be admitted that Freudian thought seems both promising and insufficient. Given Freud’s intense interest in identification, aggression, and narcissism, the relational account of the genesis of the ego suggests potentially useful explanatory accounts of how an image of the self emerges through the mediation of external figures alternately rejected and incorporated as objects of love. Framed by medievalist Geraldine Heng (2011) as “a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content” (259), race, too is relational, fictive, and rampant (Eliav-Feldon, Isaac, and Ziegler 2009). Given such a framing, one can imagine that a loosely associative sorting of visible phenotypes, attached to a hierarchy of value modeled by the parents and reinforced from early childhood on, could easily be integrated into the processes of psychic development, mediating both close relationships (what is held in common) and brief encounters (what makes strangers strange). This account would seem primed to help us think about how “race” might be highly consequential, socially pervasive, and yet fundamentally in error at the same time. If we can

The Gilded Puddle  165 understand these signifying chains, we might be able to loosen their hold upon us, if not break them altogether. The promise is there. So is the inadequacy. Constantly sniffing out the presence of maternal love, paternal envy, or sibling rivalry within ever larger social formations, Freudian analysis of group phenomena (Freud 1955a, 117–21, esp. 119), however much it is in dialogue with thinkers of assemblage such as Le Bon (1960), remains fixated on the primacy of the family as the ur-structure metaphorically applied to larger clusters (school classes, fandoms, crowds, “mobs”). The macro-level forces of racial capitalism (Robinson 1983; Arrighi 2010), imperialism, and global networks of enslavement subtend the emergence of race in the West, operating at a scale wildly upward and outward from Freud’s familial microscope. The exemplary work of Hortense Spillers (1987), Anne Cheng (2001), Farhad Dalal (2002), and Ankhi Mukherjee (2022)—to name just a few scholars who have used Freudian concepts in order to develop novel accounts of racial formation—attests both to the generative force of Freudian thought for thinking race and to the labor of adjustment, attunement, and conceptual shifts required in order to make that thought adequate to the complexity of the task at hand. In particular, Spillers’s work challenges the essentialization of the family structure by marking the structural manner in which enslavement and the doctrine of “partus sequitur ventrem” re-zones the Black American family, connecting the dots between fifteenth-century beginnings and the bitter fruit of the Moynihan Report (Spillers 1987, 66). However much Freud’s mythic ambitions reach backward to primordial origins, Spillers’s work lights up the problematic historical assumptions about the family that mark Freud’s thought, insisting upon the need for more flexible and nuanced understandings of kinship structures. In a complementary manner, recent critics (Brickman 2017) have rightly noted the tacit racist and Eurocentric biases embedded in key concepts upon which Freudian thought still rests. Any reworking of Freudian thought must assess the possibility of such distorting assumptions, among them a tacit racism and Euro-centrism, within its core terms, even as we might hope to wield those very terms to analyze the structures of racist fantasy before us.

Gilded Puddles and Strange Flesh With those caveats in mind, this essay will be a close reading of a particular Shakespearean passage that asks us to hear something like desire at work beneath the defensive distortion of disgust or aversion, and, then, to pursue the question of how such a mixture of desire and disgust might reflect the play’s broadening cascade of racialized antinomies between Rome and Egypt, civilized and savage, suffering and pleasure. The passage in question occurs in Act One, scene four, in which the dangerous self-indulgence of Antony’s Alexandrian pleasures are contrasted with the political crisis gripping Rome. Antony stands accused of giving up his kingdom for the sake of

166  Drew Daniel “mirth” with slaves and knaves. This prompts a curious outpouring from Caesar: Caesar: Antony,   Leave thy lascivious wassails. When thou once,   Was beaten from Modena, where thou slew’st   Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel   Did famine follow, whom thou fought’st against   Though daintily brought up, with patience more   Than savages could suffer. Thou didst drink   The stale of horses and the gilded puddle   Which beasts would cough at. Thy palate then did deign   The roughest berry on the rudest hedge.   Yea, like the stag when snow the pasture sheets,   The barks of trees thou browsed. On the Alps,   It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh,   Which some did die to look on. (Shakespeare 2011, 1.4.55–68) The rhetorical gearshift from “lascivious wassails” to the drinking of animal urine and the implication of cannibalism serves Caesar’s larger purpose in the scene as a whole: to draw a starkly critical contrast between the exquisite life of emasculating Alexandrian revelry Antony is imagined to enjoy with Cleopatra at present and the grotesque extremities of suffering and survival to which his military career drove Antony in the past. Flanked by the “savage” he outgoes and the “stag” he approximates, Antony becomes a bestial receptive orifice, a mouth that chews upon trees and licks up any available solids and fluids. But Antony goes beyond beast too, for he is imagined drinking “the stale of horses and the gilded puddle / Which beasts would cough at” (Shakespeare 2011, 1.4.62–63). Even animals would resist ingesting these substances, and so Antony’s willingness to do precisely that models a disciplinary self-mastery over reflexes of aversion that ostensibly indexes his absolute embodiment of stoic Roman masculinity. This capacity to force the self onward despite discomfort would register what makes Antony admirable, and, thus, its citation here by Octavius Caesar is meant to make Antony’s present preference for sensual pleasure, and pleasure with a Black woman at that, all the more shameful. The passing contrast with Antony’s having been “daintily brought up” connotes the shared patrician class identity that binds Caesar and Antony, a privileged backdrop of plenty and delicacy that would make the passage into the wilderness of “gilded puddles” and “strange flesh” particularly shocking, highly affectively charged, and, at the level of fantasy, particularly loaded. Here class and gender potentially clash, posing a question that pervades Shakespeare’s history plays: does the “daintiness” of elite status

The Gilded Puddle  167 preclude masculine valor? In drinking and eating the most grotesque offerings found in the Alpine wasteland, Antony seemingly transcends his patrician class membership on behalf of a gendered capacity to suffer through contact with abjection. As a notable incident in a “noble life,” Plutarch’s anecdote shows that, however pampered and decadent the elite might seem to be, when faced with adversity they demonstrate their nobility through a fearless contact with what is “base.” Shakespeare has taken pains to outdo his source in North’s translation of Plutarch (1941), which simply reads as follows: It was a wonderful example to the souldiers, to see Antonius that was brought up in all finenes and superfluitie, so easily to drinke puddle water, and to eate wilde fruits and rootes: and moreover it is reported, that even as they passed the Alpes, they did eate the barcks of trees, and such beasts, as never man tasted of their flesh before. North’s translation sets the tone for subsequent renderings of the Greek original. When, in 1700, Dr. Frazer picks up where Dryden’s 1683 Plutarch translation left off, he describes Antony only as drinking “stinking water” (Plutarch 1960, 153); reediting the text for nineteenth-century sensibilities, Arthur Hugh Clough tweaks Frazer to describe Antony “drinking foul water” and living “upon creatures that no one before had ever been willing to touch” (1114). Across the crowded centuries, Plutarch’s chorus of English translators are united in giving us a valiant, suffering Antony making do with unpleasant fluids and solids. Which makes Shakespeare’s innovation all the more gratuitous and telling: Shakespeare alone transforms Antonius drinking “puddle water” to Antony drinking the urine of a horse. What might this bestial and scatological extremity signify? Crossing the streams, the phrasing of “stale of horses and the gilded puddle” seems to distinguish two different fluid pools, but the passage brings them into a suggestive proximity too: the yellow color of urine surely leads into and suggests the golden “gilding” of the adjacent puddle. The word “stale” also suggests a fluid that has been stagnant long enough to grow a film, which might indicate that the “gilding” of the puddle implies the formation of algae or the curdling of a “mantle” as in the languages of stagnant pools in other infection-obsessed tragedies such as Hamlet. But the obviously aureate connotation of “gilded” brings waste and gold into alignment here. Note that we are mostly sidestepping the rationale for why Freud regards “gold” and “feces” as equivalent in his general schemas; the material poetics of feces as the child’s “gift” to the world or the parent is not relevant, and the liquidity of urine cuts against the phallic thing-liness that structures the “feces = penis = baby = gold” chain of symbolic substitution. Instead, it is “gold” as yellow color that brings “gilded puddle” into connection with a broader network of conjoined images of waste and wealth within this play.

168  Drew Daniel What is narrated as historical fact in Plutarch is refigured as personal reverie in Shakespeare, as history torques into a fantasy whose libidinal valence remains in question. What does urine mean, and why might urine be associated with potency, force, and power? For partisans of psychoanalysis, the trail leads back to Freud’s own early childhood and its subsequent cycles of theorization and revision. In The Interpretation of Dreams, “urinary symbolism” is often a kind of gently comedic intrusion of physiological need into the space of the dream. As a telling example of this everyday domestic comedy, Freud (1955b) inserts a wry tale of a sleeping nurse dreaming of an expanding pool of water as a way of registering yet not acting upon a nearby child’s crying declarations of their urgent need to go to the toilet (380). We get closer to the context of urine’s function in this moment within Shakespeare’s drama if we look at the affective utility of urine to the male ego and, more specifically still, to the case of Freud himself. The Freudian locus classicus is a painful early memory that dates from the age of seven or eight, when Freud as a young boy runs into his parents’ bedroom and urinates all over the floor, prompting Freud’s father to angrily shout “The boy will come to nothing!” (Gay 2006, 23; Freud 1955a, 237). This paternal curse links shame to urine and indexes a moment in the oedipal drama when Freud’s excitement at intruding into the space reserved for his parents’ intimacy overspills. This early link of urinary flow with shame is inverted and revised in a dream that Freud interprets at considerable length in the sixth chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams: he sees a filthy toilet in which piles of feces cluster around the edge and, in the dream, cleans the entire area with a mighty spray of urine (Freud 1955b, 475–77). In his self-analysis, Freud admits that this dream casts him in the role of Hercules, cleaning the Augean stables. The powerful flow of dream-urine renders him a “superman,” more or less in keeping with the broader framework advanced in the text regarding both wish-fulfillment and the curious function of affect within dreams. A key thrust here is the disjunction between the disgust that Freud anticipates—and, in some sense, solicits—as he prepares the reader for the dream and the pronounced pleasure he describes feeling during the dream itself, a pleasure he perhaps reinforces through extended textual self-analysis. The source for the dream demonstrates the ready to hand utility of Renaissance literature as a reservoir of urinary scenes that prompt fantasies of omnipotence. Freud states that it was his bedtime decision to reread some of Garnier’s illustrated edition of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which the giant protagonist extinguishes a fire with his urine, that might well have put this potent scenario into his mind in the first place (the scene was famously recycled by Swift in a similar incident in Gulliver’s Travels) (Eddy 1922, 416). Premodern literature often acts as a template, sounding board, and exemplary source material across Freud’s corpus, from the reflections on “Julius Caesar” (Freud 1955a, 433) to the alignment of the dream-work itself with Hamlet (452), to the Signorelli parapraxis in The

The Gilded Puddle  169 Psychopathology of Everyday Life, to the reading of Da Vinci’s childhood, and so on. But the Gargantua / Gulliver scenario that lies behind the toilet-cleaning-dream seems especially significant. It is a scenario that he will return to in other texts: notably, the male desire to put out fire with urine resurfaces in Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud 1961) in the speculative discussion of distinct male and female relations to the harnessing of fire (90). That Freud should return, again and again, to the pleasures of urinating is hardly surprising, given the telling intersection between his own early childhood memory of urinary shame and the capacity to rework that shame proposed by the subsequent frameworks of his theory. Urine matters to Freud; why might it matter at this moment to this speaker in a Shakespeare play? Primed by the cluster of associations, claims, and frameworks that overdetermine urine within Freudian theory, let us look again at the passage in question: Caesar: Antony,   Leave thy lascivious wassails. When thou once,   Was beaten from Modena, where thou slew’st   Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel   Did famine follow, whom thou fought’st against   Though daintily brought up, with patience more   Than savages could suffer. Thou didst drink   The stale of horses and the gilded puddle   Which beasts would cough at. Thy palate then did deign   The roughest berry on the rudest hedge.   Yea, like the stag when snow the pasture sheets,   The barks of trees thou browsed. On the Alps,   It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh,   Which some did die to look on. (Shakespeare 2011, 1.4.55–68) You will not be surprised that I now pose the obvious question: over and above its plotted occasion as an index of Antony’s commitment to victory and survival, is there something else going on in this passage? Namely, is this desire? Beneath the surface content of the passage (Antony is tough, he ingested some disgusting things in order to survive in the past, and look at him now), might there not be a curious tint or aroma of pleasure and fantasy in the midst of the very articulation of that which is disgusting? There’s something notably gratuitous about the passage that slides into view. The padding phrase “it is reported …” seems to want us to notice a slight disinterest in verifying what it also flags as unverified. Indeed, going further, one might note that if those who stood nearby “did die to look upon” this act, then who survived to make such reports? Farther still, the standing double entendre of “die” as orgasmic pun, mobilized so frequently within this play text around Cleopatra’s “celerity in dying” (Shakespeare

170  Drew Daniel 2011, 1.2.131) and the clown’s jokes upon “joy of the worm” (5.2.253), might briefly brush against the surface of the language here as well (Colie 1972; Daniel 2022). Even in the midst of such copious annotations of imagined or reported disgust, amidst the heavy weather of all this coughing, gagging, and dying, someone is imagined to take pleasure from the powerfully grotesque spectacle of Antony drinking horse urine that Octavius Caesar makes available. But whose pleasure would it be? Octavius Caesar’s? Shakespeare’s? Ours? Beneath its tissue of defensive distortions, this speech hints at the longings of Octavius as much as it gestures toward Antony’s own past experiences. If “hint” is unsatisfying, that provisionality may be the best we can hope for. One cannot force literary characters to sit still upon a couch. Here the distance and difference between psychoanalysis as a clinical practice of encounter between analyst and analysand and psychoanalytic literary criticism as a textual practice of encounter between readers and texts becomes acute. To decisively assert that we can know Octavius’s desires without bracketing the speculative nature of such assertions would be a variant of “wild psychoanalysis,” from the psycho-biographical tradition that adjoins “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” (Knights 1933; Moi 2019). There is then a certain performative coyness to the asymptotic approach to sexual knowledge here, that, for its antagonists, makes psychoanalytic literary criticism into a kind of critical innuendo, a kissing cousin to gossipy everyday speech acts of sexual implication (“I’m not saying, I’m just saying …”), that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) long ago noted are often associated “with servants, with effeminate or gay men, with all women” (23). But Sedgwick also notes that the purpose of such “nonce taxonomy” is “making, testing, and using unrationalized and provisional hypotheses about what kinds of people there are to be found in one’s world” (23). If that formulation fits gossip, it fits psychoanalysis too. From the Psychopathia Sexualis of Krafft-Ebbing forwards, abnormal psychology has precisely constituted itself as a rationalized taxonomic schema designed to describe and enumerate “what kinds of people” there are, up to and including those who derive sexual pleasure from contact with waste. Over the long and turbulent course of its evolution, psychoanalysis has wavered on the extent of its rationalizations and the confidence of its hypotheses regarding which fantasies count as perversions and which do not, which actions generate identities and which do not, and so on; the history of revisions to the DSM indicate that the precise matter of how such “kinds of people” are enumerated is likely to remain the object of considerable rancor and dispute (Zachar 2014). But if, as Lacan (2008) states, sexuality is “a hole in truth,” the site of “an inability to aver” (22), then any hypotheses about the strict place of sexuality, whether in the clinic or on the page, must remain provisional. The speculative mode is not optional. On the matter of psycho-biography with respect to Shakespeare personally, one might point out that Shakespeare grew up in a Stratford household

The Gilded Puddle  171 that was sanctioned and fined by the town authorities for having created an “unauthorized dunghill.”3 John Shakespeare’s multiple occupations straddle a divide between the aesthetic delicacy of glovemaking and the noisome labor of whittawing (tanning and preparing skins) (Fallow 2005); the latter would have required that animal skins be soaked in various chemical baths and preparations, and one common fluid used to prepare skins (and to purify and soften wool, which his father also traded) was, indeed, human urine. Perhaps one sunny day in Stratford a young William Shakespeare observed a “gilded puddle” of urine festering and stewing among his father’s work materials in Henley Street, and he filed this vivid sensory memory away for future reuse. Perhaps not. Bracketing the unknowability of both Shakespeare’s relation to such desires and the corresponding barriers to articulating a literary character’s fetishes, I am neither confirming nor denying Octavius Caesar’s “urolagnia,” to use Havelock Ellis’s term for the sexually perverse desire to ingest urine or to be urinated upon as a fetish practice, as the occulted truth of this passage. Rather, the affective charge of the extravagance of the passage, its length and force relative to the rhetorical occasion, marks a certain energetic flagging of representation as such that has been elevated, in Stephen Guy-Bray’s book Shakespeare and Queer Representation (2021), to the level of the signature of a certain textually legible queerness that floats free of identitarian supports (124). For Guy-Bray, it is moments in literature that are queer rather than persons. In that spirit we can say that Octavius Caesar’s speech gives off a notably queer aroma of desire spiced with disgust at this particular point in the play text. Virtual, outré, excessive, and somehow both viscerally present as an image and yet absent from any kind of verifiable presentation, the spectacle of Antony drinking urine looms for us as a queer representation. It is an image that takes on an almost haptic force: an eye-watering, gorge-rising provocation whose only material support is poetry and an actor’s voice.

To Darken All His Goodness While the flamboyant abjection of the passage feels queer, the passage is not confusing. Indeed, in its rhetorical setting, the utility of this digressive passage is clear enough: it supposedly serves the broader gendered conflict between hard Mars and soft Venus, confirming yet again the play’s relentless binary of Roman discipline and Egyptian indulgence. Against that setting, I think it is clear that something like envy subtends Octavius Caesar’s description of the consequence of the subjective destitution through which Antony passed; Octavius Caesar admires the fortitude he projects onto Antony, and perhaps envies the assurance he might imagine that surviving such trials might confer upon the possessor. One’s masculinity would presumably no longer be in question. Reading for an implicit “family romance,” a paternal contrast between Antony as older, tougher, more battle-tested precursor and Octavius Caesar

172  Drew Daniel as younger, softer, more coldly opportunistic up-and-comer stands behind the obvious size difference between horse and man in the imagined scenario. Long standing habits of cultural imagination around the male horse as image of potency and masculine sexual power, and the corresponding attention to the prodigious size of the horse penis, pressurize this image. Equine phalloi are associatively marked as a source of stigmatizing shame and desire in a passage from Ezekiel describing the excessive lusts of Aholibah (here rendered in the Geneva Bible translation): “For ſhe doted upo their ſervants whoſe membres are as the membres of aſſes and whoſe yſſue is like the yſſue of horses” (Ezekiel 23:20). Whether or not such a biblical image might have been ready to hand in the mind of an early modern writer staging a classical scene is entirely unverifiable and speculative, but, permit me to speculate: If the horses’s imposing penis dwarfs human male anatomy, then the scene of Antony submitting himself to drink the product of this outsized organ (if, in fact the horse imagined as source of this “stale” is male—obviously, something we don’t know) could be an imagined humiliation of Antony that tellingly “puts him in his place” beside a still-larger organism, thus displacing the inferiority that Octavius might feel regarding his own status as warlike male in contrast to the older general he hopes to supplant and, in supplanting, also at some level imitate. But I don’t want to stop there, and here is where I will go farther to suggest that this “queer representation” is not (just) Octavius Caesar’s fantasy, but something more like “the fantasy of the play.” That should not surprise us. After all, the very subject of the play’s plot is the possibility of transfer, contagion, or mixture between its antithetically opposed terms. The mutually reinforcing yet shaky binaries of male and female, Rome and Egypt, “white” European and “black” African, are imagined and rerouted in terms of each other relentlessly: this isn’t some buried traumatic underlayer, but the manifest content of the play.4 From the play’s opening line, the issue is that Antony’s “captain’s heart” (Shakespeare 2011, 1.1.6) has submitted to, and been compromised by, a “gypsy’s lust” (1.1.9), and thus the surrounding frames of white supremacy and patriarchy are scandalized by Antony’s pleasurable submission to Cleopatra’s darkly charismatic dominance (Loomba 2002). With almost monotonous insistence, the play tilts Rome and Egypt against each other, and, in its most paranoid passages, the latter is imagined to somehow corrupt, stain, blacken, or darken the former.5 Singing counterpoint to those scenarios of incorporation and destruction, the play also offers Antony’s hymns in celebration of dissolving boundaries in “soft hours” and transports of sensual bliss: “There’s not a minute of our lives should stretch / Without some pleasure now” (Shakespeare 2011, 1.1.47). The bond between Antony and Cleopatra exemplifies this troubled and troubling rondelay between eroticized fantasies of interpenetrative merger and imperialist fantasies of difference, dominance, and subjection. As Kim Hall (1995) notes in Things of Darkness, “The dark/light binarism, here

The Gilded Puddle  173 acted out as a division of Egypt and Rome, is continually on the verge of dissolution” (157). Caught in the centripetal force of the couple form, race and gender are seemingly fungible, dissolved in momentary images within the play text in which the characters swap attributes, mannerisms, even items of clothing and hairstyles (consider the night of passion Cleopatra recalls in which “I drunk him to his bed / Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst / I wore his sword Philippan” [Shakespeare 2011, 2.5.21–23]). In a counter-movement, geopolitical forces from without (and second guessing by each partner from within) apply a centrifugal force of separation, pulling the couple apart and lurching backward into the seemingly stark and coconstitutive binaries of male/female, Roman/Egyptian, white/black: “since my lord is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra” (3.13.192).6 As that pattern of fusion and dispersion oscillates, we are repeatedly prompted to see Antony as somehow “blackened” by an intermittent but compromising proximity to his Egyptian partner. This suggests that “race” is, within the fantasy of the play, imagined as fungible and subject to alteration quite at odds with the attempts to ontologize and essentialize race around physically legible phenotypes that will become the hallmark of later forms of scientific racism. In keeping with a historical period in which “race” shapeshifts to variously connote blood, religion, geography, humoral status, and a body whose marked status indexes everyday modes of disciplinary intervention, the security of one’s membership in categories such as “Roman” or “Egyptian” is imagined as soluble (Loomba 2002, Smith 2017). This image of an Antony who is “darkened” by contact with his Black partner is hammered home in the very scene in which the “gilded puddle” line appears, when, after hearing Caesar describe the revels and riots of Antony, Lepidus tries to disavow what he also reinforces: Lepidus:     I must not think there are   Evils enough to darken all his goodness.   His faults, in him, seem as the spots of heaven   More fiery by night’s blackness; (Shakespeare 2011, 1.4.10–13) The work of defensive distortion is not simply a private symptom of Octavius Caesar, but a condition shared by all the Roman subjects: a structural reflex of disavowal of the very thing that also excites their imaginations and prompts their lust. Lepidus states it as a commandment: “I must not think.” And no sooner has this credo of repression been uttered than his metaphor runs on to imagine the “darkening” effects of a fiery, overpowering “blackness” that tantalizes and threatens. There is a racialized and sexualized imaginary of force that is projected outward, as that which must not be thought, and, as such, that which is constantly being thought. It

174  Drew Daniel is in response to this kind of priming that Octavius then produces his vivid counter-fantasy of the “gilded puddle.” This causal nexus can let us reconsider the moment of queer representation that Shakespeare scripts for Octavius: the need to produce a homoerotically charged Roman—and thus, for Shakespeare, if not for Plutarch, “white”—Antony is prompted by the provocation of Lepidus revealing an Antony who might be already compromised, already “darkened.” Here Shakespeare, writing on the other side of the emergence of logics of racialization, transforms the valence of the Plutarch text he adapts. Heroic whiteness is here imagined as a kind of masochistically pleasurable devotion to abjection and suffering; this vision is generated by the play’s Romans in order to suppress or overwrite their fears. Beyond the Antony of the snow white Alps, there is another Antony, one whose whiteness is always in danger of pleasurably dissolving into the hypersexualized blackness of Egypt.7 In reading against the defensive distortions of disgust in this passage, we can clarify the anxiety that drives the scene: each in their own register, both Lepidus and Octavius Caesar imagine as a kind of continuous subterranean current, the exciting/disturbing possibility that Roman values, Roman masculinity, Roman virtu, all along have a thread of liquid pleasure running through them. Before the staining, blackening process of submitting one’s self to the alien pleasures of Egypt in general and Cleopatra in particular had even begun, might there not have been within Romanitas itself a prior sort of devotion to pleasure, unacknowledged and yet rampant? Shakespeare and Freud agree that under certain conditions suffering can be pleasurable. It took Freud some time to acknowledge what Shakespeare already knew: “The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch / Which hurts, and is desired” (Shakespeare 2011, 5.1.294–95). In The Trouble with Pleasure, Aaron Schuster (2016) glosses the key transformation in the Freudian account of masochism signaled by “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (Freud 1924): What is this new sense of masochism? In a word, to find pleasure in the tension of the drives; primary masochism designates the pleasure of stimulation and excitation. The problem is that this pleasure runs counter to the tendency to seek satisfaction; it does not admit any calm or rest, nor is it sensitive to what is good for the preservation of the organism. … If, in his earlier writings, the reality principle was tasked with slowing down the pleasure principle’s mad rush to discharge tension, now the pleasure principle is made responsible for countering and tempering the drive’s masochistic tendencies, their insatiable craving for excitation. (Schuster 2016, 117) Relentlessly driven by a longing for a pleasure that threatens self-preservation, masochism might thus name both Antony and Cleopatra’s ceaseless

The Gilded Puddle  175 pursuits of liquefying excess, and the relentless quest for masochistic suffering on behalf of Roman ideals that Octavius Caesar regards as its most pointed antithesis. Seen from a certain theoretical remove provided by Freudian thought and the Shakespearean text, both the scatological Alpine wasteland and the sybaritic Alexandrian banquet “melt [and] discandy their sweets” (Shakespeare 2011, 4.12.22) into the same psychic reservoir of the drive. Spectacular self-mortification and battlefield rigor are not alternatives to jouissance but rhetorically disavowed sources of it; as we sift the contents of Shakespeare’s “gilded puddle,” and chew upon the morsels of “strange flesh” still swimming within it, we are invited to savor the masochistic pleasure of askesis.

Notes 1 The OED gives Theobald’s 1715 translation of Aristophanes as the first usage of “poop” to mean the sound generated by breaking wind or defecation, but “poop” doesn’t come to designate feces until much later. The word refers to the rear of a ship, so the OED cites Caxton from 1489: “The pouppe whiche is the hindermost partye of the shippe.” Whether by association with such hindermost parts we can say that “poop” is always already in proximity to the fecal is a question of historical nicety. 2 There is a considerable body of literature dedicated to this question, with answers varying and frameworks altering as both psychoanalysis and critical race studies have weathered changes of fortune, institutionalizing shifts, and backlashes. For an edited collection that gathers perspectives relevant to Jewish and Black people, see Lane (1998). For a recent intervention into the psychoanalytic theorization of whiteness as trait and “parasitic” power dynamic, see Moss (2021). 3 With Humphrey Reynolds and Adrian Quiney, Shakespeare’s father is charged 12d for the unsanitary offense of generating an unauthorized dunghill (“sterquinarium”) on Henley Street on April 29, 1552. See Nelson (2018). 4 As many point out, the historical Cleopatra’s Macedonian Greek provenance clashes with a Shakespearean text in which she is alternately “black” (Shakespeare 2011, 1.5.29) and “tawny” (1.1.6); accordingly, the “question of Cleopatra’s race” births monsters, not least because it prompts the reontologization of a shaky social construction, as if in search of a “real” that would stabilize the “infinite variety” of Shakespeare’s textual chimera. See Patricia Akhimie’s (2018, 172) reading of Cleopatra’s command to “think on me / That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black” (1.5.29). For the racial overdetermination of Cleopatra, see Royster (2003). 5 See Chapman (2017), for a searching examination of the prehistory of blackness as “the abject of God, humanity and community” on the English stage (33). 6 In a notably partisan response to this binding contrast, Cantor (2017) argues that Shakespeare’s own agenda in the play is designed to reveal Rome as “ultimately hollow” (219). 7 In a sense, Plutarch himself has already prepared us to recognize this antinomy within Antony, comparing him alternately to a masculine Hercules and an epicene Dionysos in jarringly contrary descriptive passages across the portrait he sketches in his Lives.

176  Drew Daniel

References Akhimie, Patricia. 2018. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World. London: Routledge. Arrighi, Giovanni. 2010. “The Rise of Capital.” In The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times, 86–163. New York: Verso. Brickman, Celia. 2017. Race in Psychoanalysis: Aboriginal Populations in the Mind. London: Taylor and Francis. Cantor, Paul. 2017. “Antony and Cleopatra: Empire, Globalization and the Clash of Civilizations.” In Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World, 210–24. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chapman, Matthieu. 2017. Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama, 150–1. London: Routledge. Cheng, Anne. 2001. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Colie, Rosalie. 1972. “Antony and Cleopatra: The Significance of Style.” In Shakespeare’s Living Art, 168–207. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dalal, Farhad. 2002. Race, Color, and the Processes of Racialization: New Perspectives from Group Analysis, Psychoanalysis, and Sociology. London: Routledge. Daniel, Drew. 2022. “Slapstick and Synapothanumenon in Antony and Cleopatra.” In Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature, 61–94. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eddy, William Alfred. 1922. “Rabelais - A Source for Gulliver’s Travels.” Modern Language Notes 37, no. 7 (November): 416–18. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​ /2914800. Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, eds. 2009. The Origins of Racism in the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fallow, John. 2005. “His Father John Shakespeare.” In The Shakespeare Circle, edited by Paul Edmondson, and Stanley Wells, 26–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1955a. “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII, 117–21. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1955b. The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete and Definitive Text. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1961. “Civilization and its Discontents.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI, 59–149. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Gay, Peter. 2006. Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: W.W. Norton. Guy-Bray, Stephen. 2021. Shakespeare and Queer Representation. New York: Routledge. Hall, Kim. 1995. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Heng, Geraldine. 2011. “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages.” Literature Compass 8: 315–31. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/j​.1741​-4113​.2011​.00790​.x. Knights, L.C. 1933. How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism. New York: Haskell House.

The Gilded Puddle  177 Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 2002. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XIV: The Logic of Phantasy, 1966–1967. Translated by Cormac Gallagher. London: Antony Rowe. ———. 2008. My Teaching. Translated by David Macey. London: Verso. Lane, Christopher, ed. 1998. The Psychoanalysis of Race. New York: Columbia University Press. Le Bon, Gustave. 1960. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Edited by Robert K. Merton. New York: Viking Press. Loomba, Ania. 2002. “The Vocabularies of Race.” In Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism, 22–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moi, Toril. 2019. “Rethinking Character.” In Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies, by Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi, 27–77. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moss, Donald. 2021. “On Having Whiteness.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 69, no. 2 (April): 355–71. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​ /00030651211008507. Mukherjee, Ankhi. 2022. Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, Alan H. 2018. “John Shakespeare’s Midden Heap: Stratford Court Leet, View of Frankpledge Taken at Stratford-upon-Avon.” Shakespeare Documented. https://sha​kesp​eare​docu​mented​.folger​.edu​/resource​/document​/john​-shakespeares​ -midden​-heap​-stratford​-court​-leet​-view​-frankpledge​-taken. OED. 2022. “poop, n.1 and int.” OED Online. September 2022. Oxford University Press. Accessed November 16, 2022. https://www​.oed​.com​/view​/Entry​/147739​ ?rskey​=O8xHlE​&result​=1. Plutarch. 1700. The Fifth and Last Volume of Plutarch’s Lives, Translated from the Greek by Several Hands. London: Printed for Jacob Tonson at the Judge’s Head in Chancery Lane Near Fleet-Street. ———. 1941. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Compared Together by Grave, Learned Philosopher and Historiographer Plutarch of Chaeronea Translated out of Greek into French by James Amyot and Out of French into English by Thomas North. New York: Heritage Press. ———. 1960. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough. New York: The Modern Library. Robinson, Cedric. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Royster, Francesca. 2003. Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sanchez, Melissa. 2021. “Was Sexuality Racialized for Shakespeare? Antony and Cleopatra.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, edited by Ayanna Thompson, 123–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schuster, Aaron. 2016. The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: MIT Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shakespeare, William. 2011. Antony and Cleopatra. Edited by Ania Loomba. New York: Norton Critical Edition.

178  Drew Daniel Smith, Justin E. H. 2017. “Toward a Historical Ontology of Race.” In Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy, 56– 70. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Spillers, Hortense J. 1987. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17 (2): 65–81. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/464747. Zachar, Peter. 2014. A Metaphysics of Psychopathology. Cambridge: MIT Press.

11 Staging the Woman in The Tempest and Ex Machina James Newlin

As everybody already knows, Woman does not exist—at least not on the English Renaissance stage or in Jacques Lacan’s model of sexual difference she doesn’t. Some clarification is needed here. Obviously, there are women characters on the early modern stage. Katherina, Beatrice, Lady Macbeth, and so on all “exist” as vibrantly as any figure of the dramatic or literary imagination. But they were originally, physically embodied by male, adolescent actors. And when Lacan says that Woman—the formal, singular noun—does not exist, he is not saying that women—the general, plural one—do not. Woman is a fantastical construct that illustrates Lacan’s understanding of desire as an endeavor that is impossible to fully realize. According to Lacan’s model, we cannot exactly know the full extent of either our partner’s desire or even our own unconscious desires. We must rely upon the imaginary. Therefore, while “there are women, … Woman is a dream of men” (Lacan 1989, 17). Both Lacan’s account of feminine sexuality and the historical figure that Harley Granville-Barker called the “boy actress” have been of much interest to feminist and gender theorists.1 But, in many ways, Lacan’s notion of the Woman has little to do with the matter of gendered difference. She is instead an ideal imagined by the subject to compensate for the frustrations of the symbolic order and the workings of desire. The Woman is the figure we cannot help but imagine who might be able to experience a different form of satisfactory desire, or jouissance.2 But, alas, she doesn’t exist. Or does she? I would like to consider some parallels between the ways in which Lacan’s Woman and Miranda, the heroine of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, are constructed as objects of desire. Both The Tempest and Lacan define sexual relations in terms of artificiality, unknowability, and confinement. And both Shakespeare and Lacan consider the object of desire in terms that blur being and presentation. For Shakespeare, this imaginative blurring is further complicated by the character’s staged embodiment by the Renaissance boy actress. Naturally, the original performances of Dick Robinson, John “Pig” Pyk, and the other boy actresses of the early modern theater are lost to the “dark backward and abysm of time” (Shakespeare 2011, 1.2.50). Therefore, I suggest that our best way of conceptualizing these parallels is DOI: 10.4324/9781003306894-16

180  James Newlin by introducing a third text: Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), a recent sci-fi adaptation of The Tempest. Given its creative staging of the figure of Miranda, Ex Machina will be of interest to readers of both Shakespearean performance and the French school of psychoanalysis. The practice of cross-gendered casting informs the composition of Miranda as much as it informs heroines like Viola, Rosalind, and Portia. In this essay, I argue that Garland’s film helps us to understand this historical context of Miranda’s staging.3 Ex Machina is not traditionally faithful to either the overall plot or the specific language of The Tempest. However, by presenting Miranda as an android, Ex Machina invokes the contexts of artificiality and unknowability that are central to the character’s embodiment by a boy actress. Yet the film offers more than just a helpful approximation of the initial responses to the character that are lost to history. Reading Ex Machina as an adaptation of The Tempest illuminates the theoretical implications of Shakespeare’s account of the boy actress, helping us to see how Shakespeare anticipates Lacan’s understanding of desire.4

“If you be maid or no?” Ex Machina tells the story of Caleb, a nerdy coder at a Google-like search engine company called BlueBook. At the beginning of the film, Caleb wins a contest to spend a week at the isolated mansion of BlueBook’s founder and CEO, Nathan Bateman. Nathan is a tech world-figure of the Steve Jobs variety, and he lives in a state-of-the-art mansion housed on a glacial stream hundreds of miles away from civilization. Already intimidated by his boss’s reputation and by this dazzling domicile, Caleb is further daunted by Nathan’s charismatic mix of hospitality and bullying. Shortly after his arrival at Nathan’s mansion, Caleb learns the real reason for his visit. Caleb has been selected to assist with a Turing test, the theoretical experiment assessing whether a given application of artificial intelligence is convincingly “real” and could be confused with a human being. Over seven “sessions,” Caleb interviews Ava, an AI that appears in the form of a humanoid body. Ava’s body is made of silicone and translucent plastic, revealing the gears, wiring, and motors whirring inside. But Ava also has a face—that of the beautiful Swedish actress Alicia Vikander—and “she has a cavity between her legs, with a concentration of pleasure sensors.” “Mechanically speaking,” Nathan informs Caleb, you can “screw her” and “she’d enjoy it” (Garland 2014). Conveniently enough, Nathan has also “programmed” Ava to be heterosexual. That’s pretty much all it takes for Nathan and Caleb to identify Ava as a woman. And sure enough, as Caleb has more and more conversations with Ava, he falls in love with her. (Even as a product of material technology and computer code, Ava proves adept at flirting.) But their romance is conducted both under Nathan’s surveillance and at a remove. Ava is isolated and locked behind thick glass walls; during her sessions with Caleb,

Staging the Woman in The Tempest and Ex Machina  181 she sometimes paces back and forth like an animal in captivity. But this confinement serves not only to imprison Ava, but also to spark Caleb’s desire. As we will see, this situation closely resembles Ferdinand’s courtship of Miranda—but it also illustrates Lacan’s conception of desire more generally. The Other—meaning both our own unconscious and that of our partner—cannot be reached directly by language. As a result, what we mean by l’amour is actually l’amur, a wall that confines and restricts our access to the enjoyment of the Other (Lacan 1998, 4–5). In between sessions, Caleb dreams of walking around the grounds of Nathan’s estate with Ava, and he surveils her on a closed-circuit TV in his room, staring at her face intently, hoping to discern her thoughts. Eventually, Caleb plans to break Ava out of the compound, when they both realize that she will be “switched off” at the end of the Turing test. But this is precisely the outcome that Nathan was hoping for. In between sessions with Ava, Caleb and Nathan debated whether Ava’s expressions of affection for Caleb were “real” or “just” simulations. At the end of the film, Nathan says that there is a third option: perhaps Ava is just pretending to like Caleb. It turns out that Caleb is not there to test Ava’s consciousness, he is there to be tested by it: Ava was a mouse in a mousetrap.5 And I gave her one way out. To escape, she would have to use imagination, sexuality, self-awareness, manipulation—and she did! If that isn’t AI, what the fuck is? (Garland 2014) Caleb did not “win” the trip to Nathan’s compound. He was selected based on his Bluebook “search engine inputs.” In a session with Ava (and as revealed in this search history), Caleb describes how he lost his family in a car crash when he was a teen. He is therefore “stained” with “grief,” “beauty’s canker” (Shakespeare 2011, 1.2.415–16). You “might’st call him / A goodly person” (1.2.416–17). Caleb’s search history showed “a good kid,” “with no family,” “with a moral compass,” and “no girlfriend,” who would be sympathetic to the plight of the confined, doomed Ava (Garland 2014). To further prime the pump, Ava’s face was “based on [Caleb’s] pornography profile.” Caleb’s name recalls Caliban’s, but his situation is effectively the same as Ferdinand’s. Brought to an exotic locale by something more than chance, Caleb is ushered into a courtship with a mysterious, almost ethereal feminine object of desire. When Ferdinand arrives on the island, grieving his “father’s loss” and “the wreck of all [his] friends,” he stumbles upon a figure he takes to be a “goddess” (Shakespeare 2011, 1.2.488, 489, 422): —Vouchsafe my prayer May know if you remain upon this island, And that you will some good instruction give

182  James Newlin How I may bear me here. My prime request, Which I do last pronounce, is—O you wonder!— If you be maid or no? (1.2.423–28) There is also an obvious, extra-textual comment on Miranda’s embodiment by a boy actress here. Is “Miranda” a maid? Well—it’s complicated. Though Ferdinand wonders if Miranda is human or not, he is principally concerned with whether Miranda is a “maid” in another sense: “if a virgin, … I’ll make you / The Queen of Naples” (Shakespeare 2011, 1.2.448–50). This is also important to Caleb. In debriefing meetings after his sessions with Ava, Caleb worries that Nathan must have “programmed” Ava to flirt with him, to distract him from her more mechanical, less human qualities. Nathan assures Caleb that, no, Ava’s “flirting isn’t an algorithm to fake you out. You’re the first man she’s ever seen who isn’t me. And I’m like her dad, right? So can you blame her for getting a crush on you?” (Garland 2014). This is a direct translation of the romantic situation in The Tempest, which each of the characters in a similar triad acknowledges. Of course, Miranda loves Ferdinand! Ferdinand “is the third man that e’er I saw, the first / that e’er I sighed for” (Shakespeare 2011, 1.2.446–47). The seeming miracle of Ferdinand’s appearance on the island proves the partiality of Miranda’s perspective. As Prospero notes, while chastising Miranda as she “advocate[s]” for her beloved, she “think’st there is no more such shapes as he, / Having seen but him and Caliban. Foolish wench, / To th’ most of men, this is a Caliban” (1.2.478–81). But this is all a ruse. Ferdinand is not a random castaway; like Caleb, he is a selected suitor. Prospero’s plot to restore his dukedom relies upon a betrothal between his daughter and the heir apparent to Naples. Miranda and Ferdinand’s courtship is completely “prompt[ed]” by Prospero (Shakespeare 2011, 1.2.421). And even though such machinations are probably unnecessary, Prospero manipulates Miranda and Ferdinand’s affections in order to solidify their bond, by constructing easily overthrown impediments (“All thy vexations / Were but my trials of thy love”) (4.1.5–6). As a result of these “vexations,” Ferdinand gets to demonstrate that he will go through the motions of a tested lover (“some kinds of baseness / Are nobly undergone”) (3.1.2–3), and Miranda gets to reward those trials with sighs and pity. Naturally, since they are prohibited from being together, the two lovers desire each other all the more. Miranda is expected, perhaps for the first time, to disobey her father. She tells Ferdinand her name even though this “br[eaks Prospero’s] hest” and assists Ferdinand with his prisoner’s labors (Shakespeare 2011, 3.1.36). This harmless disobedience is permitted, since it is meant to draw the two lovers closer together, but it is also carefully observed. One cannot have them really transgress the rules and give in to the temptations of their “worser genius,” after all (4.1.27). Prospero watches

Staging the Woman in The Tempest and Ex Machina  183 on as Ferdinand and Miranda swear promises to one another. “Poor worm, thou art infected,” he says to himself (3.1.31), recalling the same diagnosis of madness applied to those who endured the play’s titular storm (“Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil / Would not infect his reason?” [1.2.207–08].) The storm is perhaps the most obvious example of the theatrical quality of Prospero’s manipulative scheming. But the play text also suggests that the clichéd, but engulfing, “trials” and “vexations” he sets up for his daughter and her suitor are of this same order of theatrical infection. Like Prospero, Nathan subjects his “daughter” and her suitor to trials of their love that he closely surveils. Forced to take on Caliban’s labors of transporting wood and logs, Ferdinand consoles himself in thoughts of his beloved: she “quickens what’s dead, / And makes my labours pleasures. O, she is / Ten times more gentle than her father’s crabbed, / And he’s composed of harshness” (Shakespeare 2011, 3.1.6–9). Nathan has a similarly “harsh” personality. He coerces Caleb into signing a dubious NDA, as though accusing him of being a “spy” (1.2.456). Nathan is a blackout drunk, and Caleb lugs him to bed, in a clever analogue of Ferdinand bearing his logs. Nathan is a cruel misogynist, who barks orders at his android servant, Kyoko, even though she is not programmed to speak English.6 But as is the case with Prospero, much of this “crabbed” behavior is performed in order to “prompt” a response. Caleb witnesses Nathan taunting and abusing Ava, tearing up a picture she drew of Caleb. “But” this is merely a “trial of [their] love.” It is meant to encourage Ava to hate Nathan, meant to encourage Ava to search for a means of escape, and meant to encourage Caleb to view himself as the noble figure ready to fly righteously to her service (3.1.65). Caleb does not have an accurate sense of Ava’s desire, but he does have a clear sense of her imprisonment, not least of all because his own experience in Nathan’s compound mirrors it. Caleb is confined in a “claustrophobic,” windowless guest room, where his attention is fixed on the closed-circuit feed of Ava’s room (Garland 2014). This situation recalls Ferdinand’s wish to but view his beloved from his prison window once a day—as well as the play’s more general obsession with confinement (Shakespeare 2011, 1.2.491–92). However, unlike Ariel’s “imprison[ment]” in “a cloven pine” or Caliban’s “confine[ment]” in a rock,” Ferdinand’s imprisonment is consciously artificial, even theatrical, and it may have been received that way even without Prospero’s asides about what his soul prompts (1.2.278, 277, 362). Ferdinand and Miranda’s overly choreographed courtship resembles the plot of any corny romantic drama, where a variety of impediments separates the true lovers, including a disapproving father and undeserved imprisonment. Yet Shakespeare goes on to confuse the distinction between a “theatrical” imprisonment and an “actual” one. When Ferdinand’s artificial confinement ends and he is freed, his winning of Miranda is commemorated by a garish display of artifice that is only possible because of others’ actual

184  James Newlin imprisonment. To celebrate Ferdinand and Miranda’s betrothal, and to certify Ferdinand’s promise to not “break [Miranda’s] virgin-knot before / All sanctimonious ceremonies” have been performed (Shakespeare 2011, 4.1.15–16), Prospero orders the “rabble / (O’er whom [he gave Ariel] power)” to perform “some vanity of [his] art” (4.1.37–38, 41). The famous wedding masque is a “most majestic vision” performed by prisoners, only temporarily “from their confines called to enact / [Prospero’s] present fancies” (4.1.118, 121–22). Lacan repeatedly refers to the literature of courtly love to illustrate his model of desire. Courtly love is “a highly refined way of making up for” the frustrations that Lacan describes; it provides a means of “feigning that we are the ones who erect an obstacle” to the satisfaction of desire (Lacan 1998, 69, my emphasis). The Tempest similarly invokes this discourse. Ferdinand fantasizes about being imprisoned and gazing upon his beloved but “once a day” (Shakespeare 2011, 1.2.491), in a possible allusion to the situation of “The Knight’s Tale.” Ex Machina magnifies this metatheatrical quality of The Tempest’s central love story, by portraying the lovers’ courtship as a highly artificial experience of confinement that slides into a very literal one. The theatricality of Ferdinand’s confinement would have been highly evocative for the play’s initial viewers. Audience members may have been aware of the practice of impressing children into service in the choirs of the royal chapel and, on at least one occasion, children’s theaters.7 It seems to have been a widely held belief that the boy actors in adult companies were treated as catamites.8 As Robert Barrie (2008) notes, while some of the “play-boys” were apprentices, others were, “in reality, little more than slaves” (252). Michael Shapiro (1996) argues that early modern theater audiences were capable of experiencing a kind of “theatrical vibrancy” when they identified and traced the oscillation of gendered identities on display, such as when a boy actress played a female character playing a male page (7). It follows, I think, that audiences may have been capable of tracing a non-gendered identity—an incarcerated or enslaved identity, in this case— in the moments where a character observes a parody of imprisonment and forced labor that reflected the performer’s own rumored experience. Prospero does not only stage Miranda as an object of desire; with his stringent pedagogy, he authors her as one. Since Prospero is “without a parallel” in his own studies of the “liberal arts” (Shakespeare 2011, 1.2.73–74), Miranda has been granted a better “schoolmaster” than “other princes” have had (1.2.172–73). But Prospero’s lessons are explicitly limited in scope, designed to both invite and then impede intellectual curiosity: “You have often / Begun to tell me what I am, but stopped / And left me to a bootless inquisition” (1.2.33–5). The “bootless” quality of this pedagogy is designed to put Miranda in her place (“what? My foot my tutor?”) (1.2.470). It produces dissatisfaction, and it produces disobedience. Miranda’s first lines in the play indicate her discontent with her father and his actions. “Had I been any god of power, I would / Have sunk the sea with the earth” and saved

Staging the Woman in The Tempest and Ex Machina  185 the passengers on board the tempest-tossed ship (1.2.10–11, my emphasis). But this disobedience is precisely what is needed for the “fair encounter” with Ferdinand; it binds the two lovers in a way that will supersede a more suitable, more profitable arranged marriage for the prince. She “forgets” her “father’s precepts” (3.1.8–9); he prefers her to the “several women” he previously “liked” (3.1.43). Of their decision to marry, Prospero is glad, but not “surprised”: “So glad of this as they I cannot be, / Who are surprised withal” (3.1.92–93). Prospero arranges things so that he knows more than his pupils. Prospero’s limited pedagogy both restricts access to knowledge and produces a natural curiosity that he can easily exploit. He is careful to keep his lessons incomplete, leaving out the clarifying details about who Miranda is and where she is from. In other words, Prospero teaches Miranda that something is missing. There is a “void presupposed” by her “demand” (Lacan 1998, 126). The effect is that Miranda becomes—to quote Lacan’s (1982) description of Ophelia in his sixth seminar—a “piece of bait” (11). And, again, a context that we are certainly missing here is how this rhetoric of incompletion—is she a maid or no? does she know “what [she is]” or not?—was informed by the play’s initial staging, where Miranda was played by an adolescent boy. Surely the boy actress would have also been a pupil, and he would have had to learn “what [she is].”9 For the early moderns, the term “boy” generally referred to male children between the age of six and eighteen years old. Ackroyd (2017) underscores the fact that the children’s theaters were not known as boys’ theaters. “The use of the word ‘child’ in reference to an actor” both infantilized and androgynized him (64). Michael Witmore (2007) notes that children during the period were regularly referred to as “pretty creatures,” a term indicating both “a capacity for artful contrivance and a state of having been so contrived” (6).10 This suggests boy actors were valuable because they were indeterminate, blank slates. They could be read as their gendered, aged, or social betters because their actual status was counted as so low. Reimagining Miranda as a beautiful android is an apt translation of her original embodiment as a self-consciously artificial, composed, “pretty creature.” When Nathan finally reveals the workings of his plan, he teasingly confesses: “Poor Caleb. Your head has been so fucked with” (Garland 2014). Nathan’s emotional manipulation of Caleb is a sinister revision of Prospero’s soul “prompting” the courtship between Miranda and Ferdinand. Prospero refers to the effect of this elaborately choreographed play within the play as “infection”; antitheatrical critics regularly charged the Renaissance stage with “infecting” the audience’s sense of morality.11 Thus, in Lacanian terms, and for the early modern audience in a nearly literal sense, Miranda is a “symptom” of Prospero. But she is also a symptom of Shakespeare himself, of whichever boy actress originally played the part, and of any given audience member.

186  James Newlin Both Prospero and Nathan’s schemes rely upon their subjects’ disobedience. In Ex Machina, at least, the plan goes terribly awry and works too well. Nathan is unable to stop the escape attempt that he encouraged. The Tempest does not give us so overt a reason to doubt Miranda’s affection for Ferdinand. But Shakespeare still wants us to consider the effect of lack that Prospero introduces for Miranda, and how that makes her something more than the dutiful daughter she is generally taken to be. Looking at her again, in light of Garland’s film, we see that she is a figure of crafted artifice, an ideal object of desire, a piece of bait. But Shakespeare takes care to note that she also contains unknowable depths that, when considered, cause her father surprise and anxiety. (Why else would the elaborate ode to premarital virginity that he calls upon his confined slaves to perform be necessary if it were not necessary?) As performed by a boy actress, who may have reminded the audience of the practices of impressment or whom they may have suspected was a victim of pederastic advances, Miranda’s artifice and expressions of desire may have felt terribly real. At the same time, Shakespeare’s depiction of desire as a product of fantasy, rather than the reverse, anticipates Lacan’s formulations of jouissance with no little “prescience” (Shakespeare 2011, 1.2.180).

Goodly Creatures In Lacan’s telling, all human desire is narcissistic. This is not a value judgment; nor is this understanding of narcissism reliant upon Freud’s understanding of the role narcissism plays in childhood development, where the subject develops the ability to select an external object choice, while also developing defenses against psychic injury. For Lacan, the solipsistic experience of desire is a natural result of our entry into the symbolic order. It is effectively a matter of linguistics (or “linguis-tricks”).12 In Ferdinand de Saussure’s famous formulation of the linguistic sign, the link between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary; in Lacan’s reading, there is no link at S all. The signifier is totally barred off from the signified: s As a result of this total separation, a signifier can only ever signify for another signifier. (Since everyone relies upon signification in one form or another, we can discuss Lacan’s model in universal, first-person terms.) Signified meaning remains completely foreign to us once we enter the symbolic chain of human existence, where we understand our empirical reality through the prism of language and other signs. The Other, meaning both the “real” version of our partner as well as the total foreignness of our own unconscious, is then entirely other. It is totally inaccessible. We can never cross that bar of signification, except at the level of fantasy and perhaps, occasionally and briefly, in certain encounters, like love and the clinical transference. Lacan complicates this formulation of the problem of other minds in a few important ways. First, this stems from Lacan’s radical reading of

Staging the Woman in The Tempest and Ex Machina  187 Freud’s Oedipus complex. For Lacan, the phallus does not mean the genital organ. The phallus is instead more or less equivalent to the bar in the symbolic sign.13 It is the mechanism that determines, and withholds, knowledge of the Other. The infant initially seeks to be this embodiment of not only desire, but also meaning itself, for its first object of desire, its mother. But their father interrupts this desire. The father may not actually have the phallus himself, but he does embody the threat of castration. Again, this does not mean the father will literally sever the literal penis. It means that he is the one who informs the infant that there are rules, and above all, there are rules of language. We learn pretty quickly that all of our conscious experience is fractured through language, splitting us from our own desire, that very kernel of our selves that lies beyond our linguistic grasp. With this split, we are all effectively castrated by language. The subject is constituted in lack. We are aware, both innately and consciously, that something is missing. And we are never more aware of this nagging, governing lack than when we desire. Since our partner’s desire, as well as our own unconscious desires, are equally inaccessible, we effectively conflate them. We can isolate an experience of enjoyment from those early, impressionistic moments of our lives (sucking, perhaps, or maybe defecating), manifest it as an object of fantasy, and find that object in our partner. This is what Lacan (1998) calls the objet petit a, the object that we put “in the place of what cannot be glimpsed in the other” (63). Note how both Caleb and Ferdinand immediately imagine their beloveds as something more. Ferdinand promises to make Miranda “Queen of Naples” (Shakespeare 2011, 1.2.450); Caleb’s desire for Ava grows as he watches her put on clothes that cover up her mechanized form and as he dreams of walking with her in a foreign environment. Certainly, Ferdinand and Caleb view the objects of their desire through the prism of misogynistic idealization. But they also demonstrate Lacan’s sense that nobody’s partner is ever quite “whole.” We can only ever enjoy our partner as the embodiment of this little object of desire, a fantastical product of our own, initial, unconscious, and wholly other experience of desire. We might very well enjoy our partners in all of this incomplete, artificial construction. But we will never be satisfied. However, the thing is, we like it that way. To actually achieve, fully and completely, one’s desire may be to bring the entire structural composition of our selves to an end. (For Lacan, the libido and the death drive are two aspects of the same drive.)14 An illustration of this symptomatic experience of desire can be found in the one-word title of Lacan’s twentieth seminar: Encore. That’s what we call out when we’ve enjoyed something. “Encore!” “I enjoyed that!” But also, “give me more! That wasn’t enough! Give me something different!” This is the experience of phallic jouissance, or enjoyment, and it is the experience of both men and “female m[e]n alike” (Lacan 1989, 17).

188  James Newlin According to Lacan, virtually everybody is a “hommosexual”: they desire like Men, orienting their jouissance around that signifier of signification itself, the phallus (Lacan 1998, 84). Contrary to popular opinion, two does not become one (47). “One’s jouissance of the Other as a body is always inadequate,” and all conscious enjoyment is “perverse” in that it “reduce[s]” the Other to an object of fantasy, the objet petit a (144). “Since desire and enjoyment are both products of this imaginative construction, “there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship” (57). Lacan’s language is heterosexist and phallocentric because, given the experience of this symbolic order, how could it not be? But he is very clear that this conceptualization of desire as one founded on lack is not exclusive to those human beings gendered as men. (Miranda also desires Ferdinand because she assumes he must be more than her father makes him out to be.) Virtually everybody orients their experience of enjoyment around this paradoxical desire to be made whole and to never be made whole—lest you never be able to experience enjoyment of this sort ever again. Since phallic jouissance relies upon fantasy, it is not only doomed to fail, it succeeds only by failing. Phallic jouissance is, above all, fallible (Fink 2004, 159). Precisely because our phallic jouissance does not satisfy us, we also want the desire of the Other. The prepositional slipperiness is intentional here. Certainly, we want to be desired by our partner. But we also want to experience desire as the Other experiences it. Because we know that our jouissance is missing something, we cannot help but imagine that the Other jouissance is better. In a shocking scene from Garland’s film, Caleb slices into his arm with a razor, hoping to find circuitry inside, rather than blood and bone, desperate to see the world as Ava does. The extremity of the image suggests the lengths to which the subject might go to experience the Other jouissance: the one that never fails, that always satisfies. But to describe how this form of enjoyment would work, we would have to articulate it in signifiers. And then, like everything else, it would become fallible again, reliant upon the bar of signification, the phallus. So this Other’s jouissance—and let’s call her Woman, since she enjoys without the phallus, and let’s call her jouissance “feminine sexuality,” or vaginal jouissance, even though that doesn’t quite get the point across, but then again, that’s the point, since we can never entirely get our point across— does not exist. At least it does not exist in the symbolic order of things. But precisely because we cannot speak of a vaginal jouissance—we’ve already conceded that’s not even the right name for whatever it is—that form of non-phallic, Other enjoyment has an insistent hold on us. In a not-quite punning portmanteau on “existence,” “insistence,” and the prefix meaning “out of,” Lacan declares that the Other’s jouissance ex-sists. This form of sublime, inarticulatable desire that insists upon its absence from our immediate existence is practically mystical.15 Woman does not exist, so we might as well write her name like this: Woman. Inasmuch as we can conceive of her, she is akin to God. And we’re not supposed to say his name either.

Staging the Woman in The Tempest and Ex Machina  189 Woman is a figuration of the inaccessible Other of desire, someone who experiences jouissance in a way completely foreign to us. Lacan calls this figure Woman because we have always called her Woman. Lacan’s discussion of what Woman wants revises Freud’s famous, reported comment to Marie Bonaparte about the mystery of “the great question that has never been answered,” “was Will das weib?” (quoted in Jones 1961, 421). But Slavoj Žižek (2005) compares Lacan’s account of this mysterious figure with the anti-feminist formulations of Otto Weininger (137–64); we can go back further and think of the mystical figure at the end of the Wife of Bath’s Tale or of Tiresias’s mysterious, enraging claims about male jouissance and a better, feminine one. But this has always been a fantasy. To repeat: “woman does not exist. There are women, but Woman is a dream of men” (Lacan 1989, 17). Miranda and Ava are both constructed as objects of fantasy and desire; their “prettiness” is overtly “created” by their masters-cum-fathers-cumdramaturges. Caleb asks Nathan again and again about Ava’s programming, referring to her computer code. But the “mousetrap” into which Nathan placed Ava is no less artificial, even if it is a situational, rather than computational, program. This is an apt semblance of Miranda and the way that she is constructed as an object of desire, both via her father’s instruction in the liberal arts and in her dramatic situation, where her behavior and affection will go on as his soul prompts. But, again, the masque scene’s elaborate paean to virginity is only necessary because it might be necessary. Similarly, Prospero has to repeatedly remind Miranda to “mark” and “attend” him as he recounts his tale (Shakespeare 2011, 1.2.68, 78, 87, 88, 106, 117); he has to reassure her that there was “no harm done” by the storm she correctly intuits that he created (and which she assures him she herself would have abated) (1.2.15); and he is shocked that she remembers as much of her infancy in Milan as she does. “How is it / That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?” (1.2.48–50). As much as Prospero may “inform” or “prompt” her, the play text reiterates that there is still so much of Miranda’s experience, knowledge, and desire beyond his ken. “Encore” is what we cry out when we have enjoyed something, because it signifies our dissatisfaction (“that’s not it!”) (Lacan 1998, 126). But Lacan’s title makes another pun that speaks to the frustrations of desire: en-corps, or in-the-body. Those of us who experience phallic jouissance can only fantasize that we find the object a in the body of the Other. We never really know what is going on en-corps, and, for Shakespeare’s audience, this frustrating dynamic would have been amplified when a figure like Miranda was embodied by that pretty creature, the boy actress. Our bodies are “of course sexed,” but this “is secondary” to the demands of jouissance (Lacan 1998, 5). The frames of our body “are only traces” obscuring the “gap in the Other from which the demand for love stems” (5, 4). In other words, desire is tricky enough when you can discern the traces of the other’s body.

190  James Newlin Time and time again, in his cross-dressing comedies and with a figure like Miranda, Shakespeare does away with even that much certainty. What is so interesting about Garland’s reworking of The Tempest is the way that his film stages a figure of desire in a way that diagnoses our failure of imagination. We cannot see Ava or Miranda as anything other than a woman. When Caleb first meets Ava, he asks her how old she is. She answers, “one.” He asks if she means one day or one year; she replies, “one.” He then asks her how she learned how to speak. She replies, “I don’t think I did learn. I always knew how to speak. And that’s strange, isn’t it?” (Garland 2014). In Lacanian terms, Ava is a figure who completely evaded the dynamic of castration, and she is—fantastically, impossibly—one. She needs no Other, except as a means of escape. And in a fantastic, haunting moment, we see her whisper something to Kyoko, but we do not hear what she says. We have never heard Ava speak anything other than English, and we know that Kyoko does not speak English. We can deduce that they are planning to murder Nathan. But they must be speaking with words that we could not understand, even if we could hear them. Ava, it seems, can use language, but she does not need the phallus. Witmore (2007) suggests that “a large part of children’s symbolic appeal during [the early modern period] grew, in fact, out of a sense that they were agents without interests” (7). But one’s desire of the Other can only go so far without considering, well, the desire of the Other. In The Tempest, Shakespeare poses the great question that has never been answered: what does the boy actress want? If he is anything like Ava, and if she is anything like every other actor who is depicted in The Tempest, their life is one of confinement. Accordingly, when that confinement ends, we hear in Miranda’s excited recognition of the many, many more “goodly” people in the world the acknowledgment of lack: Miranda: O, wonder!   How many goodly creatures are there here!   How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,   That has such people in’t! Prospero: ’Tis new to thee. (Shakespeare 2011, 5.1.181–84) There are other men and female men in the world; they’re “creatures” too. Some of them may so closely embody Miranda’s experience of fantasy that they make her betrothed, Ferdinand, look like Caliban. Or, like Ava, she may only desire their goodness. Ava’s desire depends upon the manipulation of another’s goodness, and Miranda may wish to finally be something other than the constructed object of another’s desire. Shakespeare’s point, as it always is in The Tempest, is that we don’t know.16 At the end of Garland’s film, Ava gets dressed. She puts on a layer of synthetic skin over her mechanized form, so that she first clothes herself in

Staging the Woman in The Tempest and Ex Machina  191 nakedness. This is a fine visualization of Lacan’s argument that even at our most bare and exposed, we are not-whole, we are only conceivable as the surplus creation of another’s fantasy.17 Then, she triggers the computers to lock Caleb inside of the building, before she exits it herself, alone. Her face breaks into a smile of unrestrained glee as she takes in her surroundings. She boards a helicopter, and she departs. In the final shots of the film, we see shadows of human bodies moving across a crowded intersection, and then their blurry reflections in a window that captures Ava’s gaze. Who knows what awaits those who populate this brave new world when they will finally know and acknowledge that obscure object—which is to say that obscure subject—of desire, the imaginary figure of absolute Otherness who can for now only be known as Woman?

Notes 1 Seminal, feminist accounts of Lacan’s conception of feminine sexuality include Mitchell (1982) and Rose (1982). But see also Barnard (2002, especially 1–6). For a Lacanian account of transgender and other gender variant identities, see Gherovici (2017). Feminist accounts of the Renaissance “boy actress” include Jardine (1989, 9–36) and Callaghan (2000, 49–74). See also the 2019 special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies focused on “Early Modern Trans Studies,” especially Chess (2019). 2 I follow Fink (2004) in emphasizing the imaginative quality of Lacan’s notion of the Woman (141–66). But see also Soler (2006, especially 227–44). 3 See also my discussion of a similar dynamic in Dave McCary’s Brigsby Bear (2017), in Newlin (2024). 4 See also the reading of Ex Machina in Millar (2021, 134–45). 5 Lacan uses the same metaphor to distinguish between “learning” and “knowledge”; see Lacan (1998, 139–41). 6 Nathan also roughly cajoles Kyoko to have sex. This abuse may recall Prospero’s counterpart, Sycorax, who punished Ariel for not “act[ing] her earthy and abhorred commands” (with a possible pun on “whore’d”) (Shakespeare 2011, 1.2.273). 7 See the account of the Clifton Star Chamber case in Ackroyd (2017, 4–22). 8 See Shapiro (1996, 38–39); see also Callaghan (2000, 67–70). 9 Ackroyd (2017) argues that an Elizabethan grammar school education provided an excellent primer for a career on the stage (23–58). 10 Witmore (2007) disputes the erotic quality of “pretty” here (6). However, since Miranda’s erotic appeal is so valuable to her father, given his plans to broker her marriage, the phrase helps us articulate how erotically desirable prettiness may also be actively created. 11 Marshall (2002) notes that, “virtually all of the antitheatricalists refer to the effects of the stage as ‘infectious’” (17). 12 See Lacan (1998, 14–17). 13 Though my focus here is on the phallus’s role in signification, see Ragland (2004, 1–28) for an account of Lacan’s other uses of the term. 14 See Lacan (1981, 257). 15 See Lacan (1998, 75–77). 16 “Do not infest your mind with beating on / The strangeness of this business” (Shakespeare 2011, 5.1.246–47). 17 See Lacan (1998, 6). See also Žižek (2005, 116).

192  James Newlin

References Ackroyd, Julie. 2017. Child Actors on the London Stage, Circa 1600: Their Education, Recruitment and Theatrical Success. Chicago: Sussex Academic Press. Barnard, Suzanne. 2002. “Introduction.” In Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, edited by Suzanne Barnard, and Bruce Fink, 1–20. Albany: State University of New York Press. Barrie, Robert. 2008. “Elizabethan Play-Boys in the Adult London Companies.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 48, no. 2 (Spring): 237–57. Callaghan, Dympna. 2000. Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage. New York: Routledge. Chess, Simone. 2019. “Queer Residue: Boy Actor’s Adult Careers in Early Modern England.” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 4 (Fall): 242–64. Fink, Bruce. 2004. Lacan to the Letter: Reading “Écrits” Closely. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Garland, Alex, dir. 2014. Ex Machina. Santa Monica: Lions Gate Entertainment, Inc. Ultra HD Blu Ray. Gherovici, Patricia. 2017. Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference. New York: Routledge. Jardine, Lisa. 1989. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. New York: Columbia University Press. Jones, Ernest. 1961. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2: Years of Maturity (1901–1919). New York: Basic Books. Lacan, Jacques. 1981. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964). Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. ———. 1982. “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet.” Edited by JacquesAlain Miller. Translated by James Hulbert. In Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, edited Shoshana Felman, 11–52. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1989. “Geneva Lecture on the Symptom.” Translated by Russell Grigg. Analysis 1: 7–26. ———. 1998. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore (1972–1973). Edited by JacquesAlain Miller. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Marshall, Cynthia. 2002. The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. McCary, Dave, dir. 2017. Brigsby Bear. Culver City: Sony Pictures Classics. Blu Ray. Millar, Isabel. 2021. The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Mitchell, Juliet. 1982. “Introduction—I.” In Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, edited by Juliet Mitchell, and Jacqueline Rose, 1–26. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Newlin, James. 2024. Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First Century Film and Television. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Ragland, Ellie. 2004. The Logic of Sexuation: From Aristotle to Lacan. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Staging the Woman in The Tempest and Ex Machina  193 Rose, Jacqueline. 1982. “Introduction—II.” In Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, edited by Juliet Mitchell, and Jacqueline Rose, 27–57. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Shakespeare, William. 2011. The Tempest. Edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan, and Alden T. Vaughan. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, rev. ed. New York: Bloomsbury. Shapiro, Michael. 1996. Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Soler, Colette. 2006. What Lacan Said About Women: A Psychoanalytic Study. Translated by John Holland. New York: Other Press. Witmore, Michael. 2007. Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2005. The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality. New York: Verso.

Part V

Shakespeare and the Matter of Clinical Practice



12 “method in’t” Hamlet as Analysand Nicholas Bellinson

More even than Oedipus, Hamlet is psychoanalytic theory’s representative in literature; he may be psychoanalysis’s best-known case study. Ernest Jones (1949) avers that “the meaning of Hamlet’s conflicts and suffering … has been widely recognized by literary critics to be a psycho-pathological one” and identifies the central motive of Hamlet’s behavior as an imperfectly repressed Oedipus complex (16). Like most prominent critics of the play, Jones applies his critical faculties to the so-called Hamlet Question: why does Hamlet delay in taking his sworn revenge on Claudius? Here psychoanalysis allows us to identify an otherwise elusive motive: “To Hamlet the thought of incest and parricide combined is too intolerable to be borne. One part of him tries to carry out the task, the other flinches inexorably from the thought of it” (70). Repression of the Oedipus complex also explains Hamlet’s murderous anger toward his mother and his abortive romance with Ophelia; it is the key to Hamlet’s dilemma and to Hamlet’s mysteries. Freud likewise points to the universality of Hamlet’s psychic conflict as a source of the play’s appeal. Hamlet is the foremost “psychopathological” drama, where “the source of the suffering in which we take part and from which we are meant to derive pleasure is no longer a conflict between two almost equally conscious impulses but between a conscious impulse and a repressed one” (Freud 1906, 308). Freud’s emphasis here is that we share this conflict: “The precondition of enjoyment is that the spectator should himself be a neurotic, for it is only such people who can derive pleasure instead of simple aversion from the revelation and the more or less conscious recognition of a repressed impulse” (308–09). The translation of everyday neurosis onto the stage is crucial, and it should (as in Hamlet) be presented obliquely so as not to arouse the audience’s defenses. Freud writes that we “recognize ourselves in the hero,” stressing that Hamlet is initially “normal … but only becomes psychopathic in the course of the action. … The repressed impulse is one of those which are similarly repressed in all of us … [and] is shaken up by the situation in the play” (309). We see ourselves in Hamlet, and Hamlet’s neurosis is explicable in terms of our own psyches. Yet even psychoanalytic critics still miss the extent to which Hamlet illustrates fundamental psychoanalytic principles, attending more to the DOI: 10.4324/9781003306894-18

198  Nicholas Bellinson origins of Hamlet’s conflict than to its form.1 This conflict plays out both in the “antic disposition” Hamlet puts on after speaking to the Ghost and in his soliloquies in Acts 1–4 (Shakespeare 1982, 1.5.172). These soliloquies begin before the Ghost charges him with the dreadful task of revenge, and end (in the second quarto only, hereafter Q2) just before he departs for England.2 By Act 5, Hamlet’s mode of reflection has changed: he has, as the Q2-soliloquy already adumbrates, left soliloquy behind. Why, then, does Hamlet soliloquize while he does? We accept soliloquy as a convention of Shakespeare’s stage or as a characteristic trait of Shakespearean figures, but it belongs to a particular phase in Hamlet’s response to his conflict, one that develops in reaction to the kinds of attention he receives at Elsinore. This chapter argues a new connection between Hamlet and psychoanalysis by observing that Hamlet’s soliloquies formally anticipate the psychoanalytic method and setting. Comparison with Freud’s writings on method shows that the very concerns driving Hamlet into soliloquy inform Freud’s technical precepts about psychoanalytic sessions. Hamlet is in search of a certain kind of listener for his difficult-to-articulate experience, one who neither (like Polonius) listens for an answer to a particular question nor (like Horatio) resists freer lines of thought. At times Hamlet hints at his receptivity to this better listener, but ultimately his articulation of conflict remains largely confined to soliloquy—though it leaks out obliquely in his antic disposition, a form of disclosure that invites his listeners to attend more deeply. Considering Hamlet as an analysand avant la lettre and without an analyst allows us to notice various analogies between Hamlet’s psycho-analysis, in the literal sense, and Freud’s. The soliloquies form a private, constructed second world within the primary world of action, which responds to and allows for the working-out of experiences centered in that primary world. Hamlet introduces himself as the possessor of some inarticulable, submerged experience of himself. We watch him construct an unusually private verbal space in which to articulate his experience of conflict, often with oblique use of the material of the elapsed scene. These soliloquies are largely concerned with Hamlet’s character and experience rather than with the plot, and they transform rather than express Hamlet’s thoughts. Largely removed from the action of the play, they form a private but dependent, verbal drama against the frustrating background of surveillance and suspicion at the Danish court. Hamlet’s search begins in his first soliloquy, where he lays out the circumstantial sources of his conflict and his reactions to it; in his final, Q2-only soliloquy the search culminates in an apparent resolution, almost a “working-through” of his resistance to action (Freud 1914). Here Hamlet disclaims thinking except where it tends toward revenge, and subsequently appears less ambivalent. His only remaining onstage reflections are conversations with Horatio, which prove limited, and the now action-prone Hamlet lapses into silence, having achieved his end but not exhausted his material.3 The trajectory of Hamlet’s soliloquies thus anticipates that of psychoanalytic sessions, though of course without psychoanalytic insight.

“method in’t”  199 There is no simple equation or relation between Hamlet’s soliloquizing and Freud’s analysis. Hamlet’s approach to the analyst’s task—“to overcome resistances due to repression,” in one formulation (Freud 1914, 148)—apparently yields no insight into his questions about himself. Still, Hamlet and Freud illuminate each other’s procedures. On one hand, we can formulate Hamlet’s behavior in terms of a search for certain kinds of listening and speaking, and identify distinctive features of his soliloquies. On the other, we see that the structure of psychoanalysis treats the analysand as a Hamlet-figure.

“dreadfully attended” Even Hamlet’s most private speech is formed in response to both his sense that he is poorly listened to and his perception that there is something within him requiring expression but resisting articulation. Before the Ghost reveals that Hamlet’s fantasy of his father’s murder is correct (“O my prophetic soul! / My uncle?”), the Prince is introduced to us as the bearer of something that cannot be “show[n]” or “denote[d]” adequately. All his “forms, moods, shapes of grief … indeed seem, / For they are actions that a man might play,” but Hamlet has “that within which passes show—these but the trappings and the suits of woe” (Shakespeare 1982, 1.2.82–86). Complementing Hamlet’s outward show of mourning is an unnamed “that,” which, in the prince’s wonderfully polysemous phrase, exceeds both what can be faked and what can be expressed. His expressions of grief are both gestures toward and betrayals of the genuine, hidden experience that makes it “seem … so particular with” him (1.2.75). This subtle articulation of Hamlet’s conflict is moot in the face of Claudius and Gertrude’s limited attention. Neither comments on the overt hostility in Hamlet’s replies throughout the scene, beginning with his very first line (“A little more than kin, and less than kind” [Shakespeare 1982, 1.2.65]). Claudius’s assessment of Hamlet’s last, sullen reply is absurdly and intentionally tone-deaf: Queen: I pray thee stay with us, go not to Wittenberg. Hamlet: I shall in all my best obey you, madam. King: Why, ’tis a loving and a fair reply …   This gentle and unforced accord of Hamlet   Sits smiling to my heart. (1.2.117–24) Actually, Claudius all but commands Hamlet to stay in Denmark, which Hamlet will soon call “a prison” (2.2.241, Folio only). Once Hamlet puts on his “antic disposition” (1.5.172), this prison becomes a panopticon, with everyone at court surveiling and eavesdropping on the Prince in an effort to understand what is wrong with him. Hamlet’s madness brilliantly compels the attention of his listeners, forcing them to search for meaning in his

200  Nicholas Bellinson “wild and whirling words” (1.5.133). Where his earlier melancholy could be glossed over, now his “mystery” (3.2.352) occupies the entire court. Attempts to “sound” Hamlet (Guildenstern), to “sift” him (Claudius), to ascertain the “cause of Hamlet’s lunacy” (Polonius) force upon the investigators the external analog of Hamlet’s own internal experience, namely that there is something in him that both needs and shrinks from articulation (Shakespeare 1982, 3.1.7, 2.2.58, 2.2.49). In response to Hamlet’s brilliant jabs ending, “You yourself, sir, should be old as I am if, like a crab, you could go backward,” Polonius remarks to himself, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t” and notes that Hamlet’s utterances are often “pregnant … a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of” (2.2.201–09). Claudius sees that love for Ophelia is not the cause of Hamlet’s pregnant comments, but he too uses a breeding metaphor to express doubt about Hamlet’s madness: Claudius: Love? His affections do not that way tend,   Nor what he spake, though it lacked form a little,   Was not like madness. There’s something in his soul   O’er which his melancholy sits on brood,   And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose   Will be some danger. (3.1.162–67) Whatever the “something” is that gestates in Hamlet, attempts to abort it (Claudius) or to bring it to term prematurely (Polonius) are entirely counterproductive; unlike a secret or information in general, it is not separable from its bearer. Hamlet makes it clear to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he cannot be made to speak, or to say particular things: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. (Shakespeare 1982, 3.2.349–55) With the “music, excellent voice, in this little organ,” Hamlet again refers to something inside him not articulated, something that here sounds like it might be articulated under the right circumstances. Guildenstern does not have the skill to play Hamlet—but the Prince suggests he can be played on. Someone else could get him to “discourse most eloquent music” (3.2.345) belonging to the pipe, not the piper: the right player would bring out Hamlet’s “excellent voice” with a technique that seems to be equal parts humility and patience. He would not “seem to know [Hamlet’s] stops,”

“method in’t”  201 nor try to “pluck out the heart of [his] mystery,” nor “make [him] speak.” In this counterfactual collaboration, the player becomes the instrument by which the music plays itself. Freud finds Hamlet’s musical retort an attractive metaphor for incompetent therapy, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the role of bad analysts. Here Hamlet’s collaborative model of listening seems to garner Freud’s tacit approval: [R]eports reach my ears that this or that colleague has arranged appointments with a patient in order to undertake a mental treatment of the case, though I am certain he knows nothing of the technique of any such therapy. His expectation must be therefore that the patient will make him a present of his secrets, or perhaps that he is looking for salvation in some sort of confession or confidence. I should not be surprised if a patient were injured rather than benefited by being treated in such a fashion. For it is not so easy to play upon the instrument of the mind. I am reminded on such occasions of the words of a world-famous neurotic—though it is true that he was never treated by a physician but existed only in a poet’s imagination—Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. (Freud 1905, 262) Like Hamlet, Freud rejects the notion of a subject who simply withholds or bestows knowledge, as also that of an interlocutor who can make the subject reveal what is hidden. Yet because his model of analysis is dyadic, Freud emphasizes the technique of the player (“it is not so easy to play upon the instrument of the mind”), while solitary Hamlet emphasizes the “worth” of the instrument and the music’s autonomous existence in potentia. Freud’s prescriptions for speaking and listening in the sessions carefully preserve this autonomy of the instrument. The analysand must obey the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis by “communicat[ing] everything that occurs to him without criticism or selection,” while the analyst must correspondingly give “equal notice to everything” (Freud 1912, 112). The advantage of this attitude is precisely that the analyst cannot know in advance what will be relevant: Those elements of the material which already form a connected context will be at the doctor’s conscious disposal; the rest, as yet unconnected and in chaotic disorder, seems at first to be submerged, but rises readily into recollection as soon as the patient brings up something new to which it can be related and by which it can be continued. (112) Even a specific problem is not illuminated by listening for things relevant to that problem; “relevance” cannot be determined a priori. The “chaotic” and the “disorder[ly]” order and connect themselves in the mind of the

202  Nicholas Bellinson evenly attentive listener. Hamlet’s madness is suffused with the profound logic of dreams; one figures the exegetical requirements of the other. Dreams, then, are often most profound when they seem most crazy … those who have had something to say but could not say it without peril have eagerly assumed a fool’s cap. The audience at whom their forbidden speech was aimed tolerated it more easily [as nonsense]. The Prince in the play, who had to disguise himself as a madman, was behaving just as dreams do in reality; so that we can say of dreams what Hamlet said of himself, concealing the true circumstances under a cloak of wit and unintelligibility: “I am but mad north-north-west.” (Freud 1900, 5:444). The dream that precedes this conclusion is Freud’s own; it speaks to him from his own psyche like a hidden Hamlet. Since the necessity for oblique communication also originates within the dreamer, it is as though the whole dramatis personae acts out Hamlet in Freud’s sleeping head. The good listener receives the message in code because of the bad ones. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are hardly more receptive than Gertrude and Claudius to Hamlet’s astonishing language. Although sent to “gather / So much as from occasion you may glean” (Shakespeare 1982, 2.2.15–16) about Hamlet’s “transformation” (5), the courtiers respond with trivializing laughter to Hamlet’s apparent disclosure beginning, “I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth” (2.2.292–305). Consequently, they have little to report to Claudius: Guildenstern: Nor do we find him forward to be sounded,   But with a crafty madness keeps aloof   When we would bring him on to some confession   Of his true state. (3.1.7–10) The entire Danish court believes that Hamlet possesses and is concealing an answer to its question; they do not consider that he may not know, or cannot say.4 The result is, on one hand, anxious surveillance, and, on the other hand, poor listening; Hamlet suggests both to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (who don’t get it): “I am most dreadfully attended” (2.2.265–66, Folio only). Meanwhile Hamlet’s “antic disposition” offers disclosures of a different kind. Polonius notes method in the madness but interprets what he hears to confirm what he already believes, namely that Ophelia’s rejection of Hamlet has caused the prince’s condition. But Hamlet’s riddling, associative, “wild and whirling words” offer many partial disclosures, from thinly veiled jabs at his listeners to oblique expressions of private concerns. Given his contemplation of suicide in his first soliloquy, his trailing admission to Polonius is striking in its candor:

“method in’t”  203 Polonius: I will most humbly take my leave of you. Hamlet: You cannot, sir, take from me any thing that I will  more willingly part withal—except my life, except my life, except my life. (Shakespeare 1982, 2.2.211–15) Polonius responds only, “Fare you well, my lord.” The frequency with which Hamlet’s listeners ignore or deflect his words recalls in negative the figure of the analyst with her “evenly-suspended attention” (Freud 1912, 111). Hamlet responds to the promise of better listening. In what sounds like a genuine disclosure to Rosencrantz, he adumbrates an ambition to the throne he will later state baldly to Horatio: Hamlet: Have you any further trade with us? Rosencrantz: My lord, you once did love me. Hamlet: And do still, by these pickers and stealers. Rosencrantz: Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your griefs to your friend. Hamlet: Sir, I lack advancement. Rosencrantz: How can that be, when you have the voice of the King himself for your succession in Denmark? Hamlet: Ay, sir, but ‘While the grass grows’—the proverb is something musty. (3.2.320–30) Rosencrantz asks Hamlet directly about his condition and then challenges the answer benevolently, to understand Hamlet’s experience. Hamlet begins to respond with a revealing proverb—“while the grass grows, the horse starves”—but cuts himself off before he hints that replacing his uncle is one of his motives for wanting him dead.5 Perhaps Hamlet briefly loses control of his disclosures, catching himself with a little joke when he realizes what he is saying: we have not heard this admission before, but he will tell Horatio that Claudius has “Popped in between th’election and my hopes” (5.2.65). This exchange with Rosencrantz is little to go on, but it may be that Rosencrantz’s questioning allows Hamlet to articulate something he can admit in no other context—not even in soliloquy. Hamlet’s antic disposition, which both distracts from and points to his private disturbance, invites his hearers to listen closely and openly. For the most part, they do not, and these listeners’ betrayals are heaped on top of the primary, Oedipal betrayal of Hamlet’s mother. Although Hamlet confides parts of his revenge plan to Horatio early on, his most extensive disclosure outside of soliloquy is to Gertrude in her closet—but this disclosure is interrupted by Polonius, whom Hamlet kills in a rage. Speaking to the courtier’s corpse, Hamlet scolds him for invading their intimate conference:

204  Nicholas Bellinson “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell” (3.4.32). Nowhere, not even Gertrude’s private chamber, is reliably private.

“Now I am alone…” When Hamlet speaks publicly, he elicits the wrong kind of attention; when he speaks privately or to himself, he risks being intruded upon. One response is to speak in provocative ambiguities; another is to carve out a space of unusual privacy for speaking his mind. James Hirsh (2012) has argued persuasively that soliloquy on the Shakespearean stage was addressed to the speaker, and not to the audience (see especially 18–22). When a speaker wished to ensure that no one could hear her, she could “guard” her speech in an aside (22–23). This effort at privacy could fail if she became overly vehement, distracted from the task of guarding her speech, or if anyone were on stage unbeknownst to her (23–29). Otherwise, though, stage conventions allowed for the character to speak to herself without being heard, or to control the degree to which she was being overheard, and, indeed, Hamlet at least once speaks in an aside which could (if overheard) betray his sanity (Shakespeare 1982, 3.2.369). But guarding speech is not characteristic for Hamlet, who prefers, on the one hand, riddling half-disclosures, and, on the other hand, wholly unguarded speech on an entirely empty stage. The usual degree of privacy available in the presence of others is not enough for Hamlet: both surveillance and the pitch of his animation make his speech potentially unguardable. Hamlet must guard his space in order to guard his speech. Many of Hamlet’s soliloquies serve as codas to the scenes that have just been cleared in which Hamlet processes what has transpired. Once the royal couple leaves Hamlet alone on stage in 1.2, he begins to articulate the grief and anger he has mostly held in during the scene (Shakespeare 1982, 1.2.129–58). When Horatio, Marcellus, and Barnardo enter to apprise him of the Ghost’s visitation, Hamlet brings his reflections to a close: “It is not nor it cannot come to good. / But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue” (1.2.158–59). Speech prevents internal fracture and affords the relief (among other emotions) that opens his next soliloquy: “Now I am alone. / O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” (2.2.533–34). Whether “To be, or not to be” is a genuine soliloquy or a performance for Hamlet’s observers (see Hirsh 2010), it ends with an injunction of silence to himself upon seeing Ophelia (“Soft you now” [Shakespeare 1982, 3.1.88]).6 Hamlet insists on being left alone in order to prepare himself for his confrontation with Gertrude: Hamlet: Then I will come to my mother by and by.  [aside] They fool me to the top of my bent.—I will come   by and by. Polonius: I will say so. [Exit.]

“method in’t”  205 Hamlet: ‘By and by’ is easily said. Leave me, friends.   [Exeunt all but Hamlet.]   ’Tis now the very witching time of night … (3.2.368–73) Finally, Hamlet banishes the other characters from the stage in order to reflect on what he has just learned: Hamlet: Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats   Will not debate the question of this straw … Rosencrantz: Will’t please you go, my lord? Hamlet: I’ll be with you straight. Go a little before. [Exeunt all but Hamlet.]   How all occasions do inform against me … (4.4.25–32, Q2 only) Hamlet has to work his experience out not just in thought, but in language— and alone. These passages are not extended asides, but true soliloquies: the stage must be clear for Hamlet’s engine to fire up in this way. In Q2 this speech is manifestly the turning point of Hamlet’s thought/action dilemma. Comparing himself to the “twenty thousand men / That for a fantasy and trick of fame / Go to their graves like beds,” he resolves, “O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” (4.4.60–62, 65–66). His conception of himself and attitude toward his situation change: he sheds his ambivalence about action and accepts the wisdom of providence; he refers to himself regally and acknowledges his ambition; his morbid emphasis shifts from suicide to death more generally and the way it frames human actions. He swashbuckles his way out of a death-trap and out-fences Laertes. Although he only accomplishes his revenge once he knows his own death is imminent, Hamlet seems to feel that he is on the cusp of that revenge earlier in the final scene (5.2.63–68). Reminded that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s fate will soon be known, Hamlet responds, “the interim is mine” (5.2.73). Hamlet’s acknowledged ambition and grand pronouncements lead Horatio to exclaim, “Why, what a king is this!” (5.2.62) Q2 offers us a trajectory for the soliloquies, in which Hamlet’s way of talking to himself yields resolution without insight into his resistance (“I do not know / Why yet I live to say, ‘This thing’s to do’” [Shakespeare 1982, 4.4.43–44]). This last soliloquy caps the solitary ruminations of the previous acts and gives us a different Hamlet in Act 5. In this respect the soliloquies, with their frequent refrains of self-reproach, frustration, impotence, and suicide, emphasize the repetitive aspect necessary for what Freud labels the “working-through” of resistances in analytic sessions. Both Hamlet and the analysand require, mutatis mutandis, a context in which to repeat the harmful compulsion, understand it, and allow it to work itself to completion. For Freud this context is the transference, for here the compulsion can be “render[ed]… harmless, and indeed useful, by [our] giving it the right

206  Nicholas Bellinson to assert itself in a definite field.” Transference works like “a playground in which [the compulsion] is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom” (Freud 1914, 154). Thus the “analyst, working in common with his patient, [can] discover the repressed instinctual impulses which are feeding the resistance.” However, this discovery is not in itself an immediate solution but requires repetition within the structure of the sessions: One must allow the patient time to become more conversant with this resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to work through it, to overcome it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work according to the fundamental rule of analysis. … The doctor has nothing else to do than to wait and let things take their course, a course which cannot be avoided nor always hastened. (155) Hamlet, “working in common with” no analyst, nonetheless replicates this structure of complete freedom in dialogue, on one hand, and repetition and working-through in soliloquy, on the other. The analytic sessions mirror Hamlet’s behaviors but diverge insofar as the latter lead to the unreflective but largely resolved Hamlet of Act 5.

“unpack my heart with words” Portions of Hamlet’s soliloquies reveal themselves as a slow, private liberation of the “something” inside him that needs attention and development. Unlike an analysand, Hamlet in soliloquy has no listener but himself, but, like an analysand, his speech marks the boundaries of a private space in which articulation of and reflection on subjectivity are possible—more than do other Shakespearean soliloquies. Although Hamlet’s soliloquies usually serve as the defining examples of solitary dramatic speech, our analogy to psychoanalysis helps us notice some unusual common features in addition to their exceptional privacy: they are rarely related to the plot except insofar as they elaborate a response to its events, and they tend not to express existing thoughts but to form thoughts through articulation. Here the exception proves the rule. In the middle of berating himself (“O what a rogue and peasant slave am I”), Hamlet develops his plan to catch the King’s conscience in a play. His brainstorm actually interrupts the soliloquy, as both his revulsion from speaking and the meter of the lines clearly show: This is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murdered, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must like a whore unpack my heart with words And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A stallion! Fie upon’t, foh! About, my brains!

“method in’t”  207 Hum, I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play. (Shakespeare 1982, 2.2.568–75)7 The missing three feet of line 574 indicate a pause after “About, my brains!” and before “Hum, I have heard” in which Hamlet is thinking, not speaking aloud to himself. The rest of the soliloquy is in a different mode, laying out the thought he has just had: he needs proof of the King’s guilt in case the ghost is an evil spirit trying to deceive him; he can obtain this proof by watching his reaction to a dramatized crime similar to the one of which the ghost has accused him. Hamlet’s pause, and the soliloquy’s subsequent change in mode, serve to emphasize that Hamlet’s conversations with himself are utterly orthogonal to the revenge plot. This thinking mode of speech may sound common, but we do not always appreciate how sharply Hamlet’s solitary style differs from Shakespeare’s other soliloquies—so large does “To be or not to be” loom over the entire category. In soliloquy Iago expounds his plots and expresses his character; Hamlet transforms his character through difficult self-articulation. Compare, for example, Iago and Hamlet’s different treatments of the question, “am I a villain?”: so little of Iago’s identity really turns on the ironic, almost-rhetorical question, while for Hamlet the possibility is genuinely troubling and destabilizing. Iago: And wha’s he then that says I play the villain,   When this advice is free I give and honest,   Probal to thinking, and indeed the course   To win the Moor again? (Othello, Shakespeare 1982, 2.3.318–21) Hamlet: Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?   Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?   Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i’th’ throat   As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?   Ha, ’swounds, I should take it, for it cannot be   But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall   To make oppression bitter. (Hamlet, Shakespeare 1982, 2.2.557–63) Iago is the same person before and after these lines; Hamlet realizes or admits something difficult about himself. Closer to Hamlet’s soliloquies are Richard II’s meditations on his own experience in Pomfret Tower. Deprived of the possibility of action, the deposed king makes a little world of his prison, populating it with “A generation of still-breeding thoughts” of which “no thought is contented” (Richard II, Shakespeare 1982, 5.5.8, 11). Yet despite this unquiet, teeming populace Richard presents an ordered articulation of an internal experience:

208  Nicholas Bellinson The better sort, As thoughts of things divine, are intermixed With scruples, and do set the word itself Against the word … Thoughts tending to ambition, they do plot Unlikely wonders—how these vain weak nails May tear a passage through the flinty ribs Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls … Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves That they are not the first of fortune’s slaves … Thus play I in one person many people, And none contented. (5.5.11–14, 18–21, 23–24, 31–32) Even his astonishing, spontaneous image of himself as Time’s clock (5.5.50– 60) is an entire conceit, a finished idea about himself. When Hamlet takes this kind of distance from his thoughts in soliloquy (talking about them), they sound less memorable: O villain, villain, smiling damnèd villain! My tables—meet it is I set it down That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain. At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark. (Hamlet, Shakespeare 1982, 1.5.106–09) Hamlet’s images are quick and fragmentary, not extended and elaborated like Richard’s world of thoughts. Within a space of fifteen lines Hamlet compares his father to Claudius as “Hyperion to a satyr” and (in the negative) himself to “Hercules,” also describing his mourning mother as “Niobe, all tears” (1.2.140, 153, 149). These images do not fit together; they show not an image constructed from experience but the imagination reaching for images to make sense of experience. Nor are Hamlet’s thoughts under his control, as Richard’s are. They breed against his will, rendering the imaginary infinite space of a nutshell as much of a prison as Denmark. In his final soliloquy, before his departure for England, Hamlet dismisses the value of thinking in itself: “O, from this time forth / My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth.” Upon his return to court he has a premonition of disaster before the fencing match, but he turns away from this difficultto-articulate feeling rather than toward it: Hamlet: [T]hou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart. But it is no matter. Horatio: Nay, good my lord—

“method in’t”  209 Hamlet: It is but foolery, but it is such a kind of gaingiving as would perhaps trouble a woman. Horatio: If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will forestall their repair hither and say you are not fit. Hamlet: Not a whit, we defy augury. (Shakespeare 1982, 5.2.201–08) Here Horatio responds to Hamlet’s internal disturbance as though its only significance were its relation to action (the attitude of “augury”). He forgoes exploration of what would otherwise be the “matter” for a soliloquy— the kind of thing that would “trouble a woman,” that a drab would need to unpack in words. In Hamlet’s turn away from soliloquy he finds with Horatio some kind of dyadic compromise between his riddling disclosures and his solitary meditations in previous acts. After Hamlet forswears nonbloody thoughts, the solitude of soliloquy gives way first to the private letter to Horatio in 4.6 and then to the conversations between the two men in 5.1 and 5.2. Hamlet treasures Horatio as an interlocutor from their first scene together, exaggerating their initial intimacy. The prince tells Horatio “the circumstance … of my father’s death” (Shakespeare 1982, 3.2.73–74) and protests that he “wear[s] him / In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart” (3.2.69–70). Horatio’s unshakable nature appeals to Hamlet, anchoring him in reality for better and worse in the prince’s more meandering moments. This same nature seems to prevent Horatio from entering into Hamlet’s more characteristic musings. For instance, when Hamlet is so at ease in his thoughts in the graveyard, Horatio shows himself to be more cautious and less free with his thoughts: Hamlet: To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till ’a find it stopping a bunghole? Horatio: ’Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so. Hamlet: No, faith, not a jot, but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it. (5.1.190–95) What sounds like embarrassment or intellectual morality prevents Horatio from following Hamlet down this particular avenue of thought. Hamlet realizes this limitation in Horatio very early in their reacquaintance, for when Horatio remarks that the ghost’s pronouncements are “wondrous strange,” Hamlet admonishes him to open his mind: “therefore as a stranger give it welcome. / There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (5.1.164–67).8 Hamlet varies his pipe-metaphor in such a way as to illustrate what the two men share and where they diverge. Horatio is one of those “Whose blood and judgment are so well commeddled / That they are not a pipe

210  Nicholas Bellinson for Fortune’s finger / To sound what stop she please” (Shakespeare 1982, 3.2.66–68). Like Hamlet, Horatio cannot be made to play, but in his stoical resistance to Fortune’s fingers he loses all musicality. Hamlet makes the two men comrades-in-arms against their would-be players while distinguishing their natures: Hamlet is a pipe resisting unskilled players; Horatio is so insusceptible to being played that he is simply “not a pipe.” The harmony in Hamlet and Horatio’s relationship consists in their shared privacy, in the insistent fortification of subject against world—not in the salient attributes of those subjects. Horatio’s intellectual caution prompts Hamlet to enact in speech a defiance not only of augury, but also of his earlier ruminations about death and action (Shakespeare 1982, 5.2.208–13). He ends, “Let be.” In his dying words Hamlet enacts this same defiance twice more: Hamlet: Had I but time—as this fell sergeant, Death,   Is strict in his arrest—O, I could tell you—   But let it be. …   So tell [Fortinbras], with th’occurrents, more and less,   Which have solicited—the rest is silence. (5.2.325–47) Hamlet in Act 5 no longer inhabits the private, speculative space of his earlier soliloquies; instead, he talks to Horatio. So Hamlet finds a listener who allows him to play a few bars of his own music, but by the end of the play, Hamlet has learned not to articulate his thoughts to himself, to Horatio, or to those who (like us) are “but mutes or audience to this act” (5.2.324). His designated listener is ultimately better suited to relate the “occurents” of his drama than his internal experience; “the rest is silence.”

“method in’t” Hamlet’s conversations with Horatio in Act 5 replace his earlier, soliloquizing mode, leaving a psychological gap felt in Horatio’s limitations as an interlocutor and in Hamlet’s silences. Freud, too, sees the bosom friend as an obstacle to analysis. Horatio resembles the friend involved in a defensive “leak”: The patient devises yet other means by which what is required may be withheld from the treatment. He may talk over the treatment every day with some intimate friend, and bring into this discussion all the thoughts which should come forward in the presence of the doctor. The treatment thus has a leak which lets through precisely what is most valuable. (Freud 1913, 136) Relative secrecy, Freud remarks, can “protect [the patient] to some extent from the many hostile influences that will seek to entice him away from

“method in’t”  211 analysis” (136). But although Hamlet does seem to leak some material to Horatio in Act 5, his self-recriminations remain private. Hamlet seems rather more similar to the next category of patients described by Freud, who “want their treatment to be kept secret, often because they have kept their neurosis secret” (136). Horatio has more information about Hamlet’s plans than most of the other Danes, but before Act 5, he hardly has more knowledge of Hamlet’s experience. Freud puts Hamlet on the couch, as it were, but his methodological writings also portray the analysand as a Hamlet-figure, surrounded by potential intruders and imperfect interlocutors. Only in the deliberately constructed private world of the analyst’s office, with the right kind of listener, can material from the everyday world be worked out, or even through, in the kind of speech that is also action. At the same time, the analyst must be protected from Hamlet’s effect on other characters, defining herself in part against Hamlet’s interlocutors and especially Horatio. Hamlet’s leap into intimacy with Horatio mirrors the inappropriateness of transference: We do not believe that the situation in the treatment could justify the development of such feelings [for the analyst]. We suspect, on the contrary, that the whole readiness for these feelings is derived from elsewhere, that they were already prepared in the patient and, upon the opportunity offered by the analytic treatment, are transferred on to the person of the doctor. (Freud 1917, 442) It is, indeed, just after Hamlet’s first soliloquy that he begins to groom Horatio for the role of friend and confidant: Hamlet: But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue.   Enter Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo. Horatio: Hail to your lordship! Hamlet: I am glad to see you well.   Horatio—or I do forget myself. Horatio: The same, my lord, and your poor servant ever. Hamlet: Sir, my good friend, I’ll change that name with you. (Shakespeare 1982, 1.2.159–63) Hamlet later follows the large step from “Horatio—or I do forget myself” to “my good friend” with a leap: Hamlet: Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice   And could of men distinguish her election,   S’ hath sealed thee for herself. (3.2.60–62)

212  Nicholas Bellinson Horatio adopts the offered role and plays it to excess. Although Hamlet characterizes Horatio as one who “in suff’ring all … suffers nothing” (3.2.63), the effect of their constructed intimacy is clear when Horatio attempts suicide at the play’s end. As Edith Weigert (1954) writes succinctly, “[w]hile transferences of the patient are primarily characterized by projections, the analyst’s counter-transferences are to a higher degree determined by introjections”—so that Horatio’s internalization of Hamlet’s affection mirrors the countertransferential process (243). Hamlet’s powerful projections do not only affect the dramatis personae: generations of readers and theatergoers have seen Hamlet’s fellow characters exactly as he does. Jones (1949), among others, simply adopts Hamlet’s view of his mother as lecherous, insisting on her “markedly sensual nature” (80), while T. S. Eliot, who thought altogether little of Gertrude, claims that “the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother” (quoted in Jones 1949, 100). Hamlet’s most eloquent admirer, Harold Bloom (1998), deems “Elsinore’s rancid court … too small a mousetrap to catch Hamlet” and asserts that “the prince transcends his play” (385). This opinion, in distinct opposition to psychoanalytic readings like Jones’s, aligns strikingly with Hamlet’s perception of himself. Bloom observes that “Hamlet takes up all the mental space that any play can hope to occupy. The two-thirds of the lines that Hamlet does not speak are all in effect written about him, and might as well have been written by him” (388). Hamlet’s sense of unique intensity is infectious; it is also reinforced formally by the audience’s special inclusion in his soliloquies. Shakespeare carefully makes us aware of both biases in the brief episode of Claudius’s failed prayer. This moment suggests the possibility of the same formal bias in psychoanalysis, namely a tendency toward analysand-solipsism. Recall that Hamlet seems poised to kill Claudius while the latter is praying, but changes his mind when he realizes that he might be sending the king straight to heaven. Postponing his revenge, Hamlet leaves us to hear from Claudius that his prayer has failed: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. / Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (Shakespeare 1982, 3.3.97– 98). Here, for once, we are on the other side of the arras: Claudius has a soliloquy and Hamlet speaks sneakily in a guarded aside. Despite Hamlet’s experience of conflict expressed in soliloquy, he is oblivious to Claudius’s conflict and therefore takes his posture of prayer at face value. Perhaps Hamlet’s tendency to work things out in speech rather than thought also makes him less sensitive to the silent conflict in Claudius’s prayer, voiced in the lines Hamlet does not stay long enough to overhear. Through this episode’s inversion of our normal intimacy with Hamlet, we see that the Prince’s soliloquies do not expand his sensitivity to conflict in others—perhaps they even restrict it. The question for analysis is whether it encourages an analysand to think of her own subjectivity as larger and more complex than that of her acquaintances and interlocutors—to see herself as the only

“method in’t”  213 possessor of the ineffable, of that which both “passeth show” and is, if played correctly, “much music, excellent voice.” The psychoanalytic drama imitates Hamlet in separating off a private world in which the subject confronts itself in language. Hamlet’s confrontations with himself in private, his workings-out and -through of inner conflict in a sequence of solitary conversations, anticipate psychoanalytic method as much as they do psychoanalytic theory. A king of infinite space with bad dreams and whirling words, Hamlet is Freud’s analysand in a nutshell.

Notes 1 On Freud’s belief that he had discovered the deepest level of meaning in the play, see Knapp (2016), and, of course, the relevant passage in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900, 4:264–66). 2 The presence or absence of this soliloquy is certainly the largest difference relevant to this discussion between the texts of Q2 and the Folio (F), but there are others. For maximum clarity, if a passage quoted is found only in Q2 or F, I have noted this in the citation. 3 In the Folio (F), Hamlet’s trajectory is the same, though we lack the sense that Hamlet has taken soliloquy to some kind of conclusion; since Q2 offers more material, I tend to include “How all occasions do inform against me” in my general discussion of Hamlet’s soliloquies. 4 For a subtler picture of characters’ attitudes toward motive in the play, see Knapp (2016, especially 647–51). 5 For the proverb, see Tilley (1950, G423). 6 Ophelia has been told to “walk… here” and be seen reading (3.1.43–46); the subsequent absence of stage directions suggests that she remains onstage during Hamlet’s soliloquy. Given the care Hamlet usually takes to be alone on stage before reflecting, Ophelia’s presence, even in the background, would lend strong support to Hirsh’s contention that Hamlet is aware of his audience. 7 I have altered the lineation to accord with the meter (as in, e.g., Shakespeare [2019]). Farnham (Shakespeare 1982) gives “Hum— / I have heard that…play.” The point stands regardless of lineation. 8 Farnham and others take “your” impersonally (cf. 5.1.161), which blunts Hamlet’s admonition.

References Bloom, Harold. 1998. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books. Freud, Sigmund. 1900. The Interpretation of Dreams. In Freud, Standard Edition 4–5. ———. 1905. “On Psychotherapy.” In Freud (1953–74, 7:255–68). ———. 1906. “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage.” In Freud (1953–74, 7:303–10.) ———. 1912. “Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-analysis.” In Freud (1953–74, 12:109–20). ———. 1913. “On Beginning the Treatment (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis I).” In Freud (1953–74, 12:121–44).

214  Nicholas Bellinson ———. 1914. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-analysis II).” In Freud (1953–74, 12:145–56). ———. 1917. “Lecture XXVII: Transference.” In Freud (1953–74, 16:431–47). ———. 1953–74. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated and edited by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. 24 vols. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Hirsh, James. 2010. “The ‘To Be, or Not to Be’ Speech: Evidence, Conventional Wisdom, and the Editing of Hamlet.” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 23: 34–62. ———. 2012. “Guarded, Unguarded, and Unguardable Speech in Late Renaissance Drama.” In Who Hears in Shakespeare? Auditory Worlds on Stage and Screen, edited by Walter W. Cannon, and Laury Magnus, 17–40. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Jones, Ernest. 1949. Hamlet and Oedipus. New York: Norton. Knapp, Jeffrey. 2016. “Hamlet and the Sovereignty of Reasons.” The Review of Politics 78: 645–62. Shakespeare, William. 1982. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Edited by Willard Farnham. New York: Viking Press. ———. 2019. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson, and Neil Taylor. London: Bloomsbury. Tilley, Morris Palmer. 1950. A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Weigert, Edith. 1954. “Counter-Transference and Self-Analysis of the PsychoAnalyst.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 35: 242–6.

13 What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Psychological Complexity Richard M. Waugaman

Harold Bloom asserted that “Shakespeare is the original psychologist, and Freud the belated rhetorician” (quoted in Brown 2015, 2). Bloom noted that Freud found in Shakespeare’s works the seeds of Freud’s crucial discoveries about the unconscious mind. In turn, psychoanalysis has helped illuminate the astonishing complexity of Shakespeare, arguably the greatest creative writer in history. Freud repeatedly turned to literature to illustrate his theories about the salience of unconscious conflicts in driving our behavior and our emotions—most famously, Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannos. We still have much to learn from Shakespeare about the mind.1 My chapter will focus on Shakespeare’s astonishing grasp of psychological complexity. In an 1817 letter to his brothers, John Keats (2001) famously praised Shakespeare’s “negative capability,” which Keats defined as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (492). As Stanley Cavell (1987) has emphasized, Shakespeare repeatedly removed from his literary sources any plot material that would provide a straightforward motivation for his characters, allowing greater psychological complexity that challenges us to think more deeply about the causes of their actions. One of the many enigmas about Shakespeare is just how he offers such universal appeal, across the centuries, across the globe, across social classes, and across all age groups. Exploring various dimensions of his complexity will help us better understand his universality. He was extraordinarily successful in surmounting our usual tendency to regress to oversimplified, false binaries. Psychoanalysis is the study of the mind in conflict, and Shakespeare is unsurpassed in his evocation of mental conflict as a way of understanding people in greater depth. Some scholars consider it improper to view Shakespeare’s characters as comparable to real people, with an inner world and a relevant backstory. This is ironic, since Shakespeare’s characters come close to literary perfection in their verisimilitude. Shakespeare wrote, “let us … On your imaginary forces work” (Henry V, Shakespeare 1997, Prologue to Act 1.17–18). So we rely on our imaginations to experience Shakespeare as he intended. Shakespeare scholars may have a shared unconscious wish DOI: 10.4324/9781003306894-19

216  Richard M. Waugaman that the author himself would be more fictive than real; if so, denying that his characters are real would be a displacement from this unconscious fantasy. Albert Einstein (2003) advised, “Make things as simple as possible. But no simpler” (56). We are always in danger of making Shakespeare too simple. Yet Shakespeare challenges any assumption that we crave only simple narratives. We must also be drawn to complexity, or we would not love Shakespeare’s works as we do. Perhaps it is our conscious mind that prefers to keep things simple, while our unconscious mind resonates more with Shakespeare’s complexity. According to Evelyn Gajowski, “theory has dominated Shakespeare studies since 1980 or so” (quoted in Brown 2015, viii). Carolyn Brown (2015), calls the 1980s the “heyday” of psychoanalytic criticism of Shakespeare (7). What happens when Shakespearean literary theorists borrow from psychoanalysis? Being theorists themselves, it is naturally psychoanalytic theory that especially attracts their attention. However, unlike psychoanalytic clinicians, who use theory primarily to enhance their clinical skills, literary scholars are prone to assign priority to psychoanalytic theory over data from clinical analysis. This places them at risk of reifying theory and contributes to theoretical conflicts. In clinical work, integrative concepts, such as overdetermination and multiple function, help us borrow from numerous, seemingly conflicting theories in their application to a given clinical problem. As a clinical psychoanalyst for the past 45 years, I would emphasize that psychoanalytic practice involves a more complex application of theory, blended with close study of the uniqueness of each patient. Similarly, psychoanalytic approaches to Shakespeare need to balance theory with close reading of Shakespeare’s text. Freud (1962) quoted what he was told by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot: “La théorie, c’est bon, mais ça n’empêche pas d’exister [theory is fine, but it doesn’t keep things from existing]” (13). Ideally, theory can illuminate and help explain obscure data; maladaptively, it can contribute to groupthink, confirmation bias, tunnel vision, and blind spots. Reductionism is a risk with all theory-driven approaches to Shakespeare. Psychoanalysts lessen analogous risks in their clinical work by allowing the patient’s material to shape the analyst’s interpretations, rather than imposing one or another a priori theory on the clinical data. In the case of Shakespeare, we must be faithful to the text. We should turn to Shakespeare’s psychological genius to discover new insights into the mind that may have been overlooked by psychoanalytic theory. For example, Dinko Podrug (2005) has written cogently about Shakespeare’s insights into the interactions among his characters, an important topic that is overlooked when the focus is restricted to individual characters. Shakespeare has anticipated insights that later came from the psychoanalytic study of couples, families, and groups, both large and small. Historians of science have singled out as one of Freud’s most significant contributions his theory of the “complemental series,” which guards against

Shakespeare and Psychological Complexity  217 oversimplification by observing that causative factors are often multifactorial, in various combinations and weightings. The etiological interaction of genetic vulnerability and traumatic experiences is one example in clinical psychoanalysis. In his landmark book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud emphasized that a single element in the conscious, “manifest” content of a dream usually has many unconscious meanings. In the exegesis of Shakespeare’s works, these concepts remind us that we should not downplay alternative interpretations of the text, as we highlight our own. When a group of scholars are followers of any given interpretive theory, the risk of oversimplification is magnified. Stephen Booth’s (1977) classic Shakespeare’s Sonnets is superb in highlighting the polysemous meanings of each line of poetry. The more closely Shakespeare’s text is read (especially in the sonnets), the more hidden layers of meaning are unlocked. Clinical psychoanalysts can learn a great deal about their own similar tool of close listening from the close reading of Shakespeare’s words. Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare studies can be mutually enriching. Booth glosses several words in every sonnet as having three or more contrasting meanings that may all be relevant. In his Preface, Booth admits, “My notes can seem dedicated … to transforming lines that are simple and clear into something complicated and obscure … a word or phrase … can have one meaning as a reader comes on it, another as its sentence concludes, and a third when considered from the vantage point of a summary statement in the couplet” (x). Booth provides one of Shakespeare scholarship’s best models for identifying and tolerating the complexity of Shakespeare’s poetry: “The great virtue of poetic embodiments of human experiences is that they house undeniable contrarieties of response instead of translating experience into thesis, antithesis, and synthesis” (516). Unconscious communication is a powerful source of Shakespeare’s unique appeal and constitutes one reason he is said to know us better than we know ourselves. His words have not only one set of meanings on a literal, conscious level, but also deeper levels of meaning, which may influence us more strongly precisely because, as a form of subliminal stimuli, they bypass our conscious evaluation and censorship. “Et tu, Brute?” is among Shakespeare’s most famous lines. “Even you, Brutus” echoes the similar words Suetonius (1957) attributed to the dying Julius Caesar—“kai su, teknon,” or “even you, my son?” (41). I would suggest that Shakespeare is also appealing to a biblically literate audience’s recollection that two of the koine Greek Gospels have Jesus code-switch to his native Aramaic with his dying words, “Eli, eli, lama sabbachthani?” (Psalm 22). Implicitly, Shakespeare is inviting us to feel more sympathy for the dying Caesar, as his words, as well as his switch from English to Latin make us think of the martyred, code-switching Jesus on the cross, also voicing his sense of betrayal by someone—his heavenly Father—whom he previously trusted.

218  Richard M. Waugaman

The Perils of Groupthink Are psychoanalysts immune from groupthink? Hardly. It is a risk for everyone. However, psychoanalysis does require a personal analysis of the analyst, which is based on the fundamental guideline of saying everything that comes to mind, without judgment or censorship. Over the years of being a patient, and being an analyst, this habit of “free association” encourages curiosity and self-expression, with growing appreciation for the many internal and external forces that limit not only what we say, but even what we think. It creates a wonderful sort of internal “academic freedom.” Being in analysis, and practicing analysis, encourages constant self-scrutiny, based on an awareness that we can never fully plumb the depths of our dynamic unconscious which, as Nietzsche observed, can influence us at least as much as our overconfident conscious mind does (Waugaman 1973). In my observation, excessive adherence to theory—and related vulnerability to the groupthink that accompanies it—is as much of a pitfall for psychoanalysts as it is for literary scholars. However, as Leo Rangell (1988) observed, the growing number of competing analytic theories has much to do with the narcissism of the originators and promoters of new theories, and less to do with clinical utility. Like Joseph Sandler, he recommended instead that analysts borrow from all theories that are clinically useful, and drop those that are not. Robert Waelder classified psychoanalytic observations from the most experience-near to the most abstract and philosophical. He noted that the latter are of less value in clinical work. Similarly, the question to ask of any literary theory is how much it enhances our appreciation of literature. Theory can deepen our understanding of certain areas, while posing the risk of excessively downplaying rather than integrating alternative perspectives. Each of our cerebral neurons sends out collateral fibers to suppress adjacent neurons, enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio of the messages they are trying to communicate. Just because our neurons behave that way, however, does not mean that we should. A major feature of groupthink is reacting with ad hominem rejection of those who do not conform to the core but unproven beliefs of the group, rather than examining new evidence with objectivity. Groupthink promotes group cohesiveness, but at the expense of the freedom to challenge received wisdom that is essential to critical thinking and intellectual progress. A psychoanalytic approach to Shakespeare can usefully borrow from a range of relevant experiences of clinical psychoanalysts. Much of our training focuses on trying to be more objective about our patients, by constantly attending to the distorting effects of our own psychology. Countertransference often operates outside our awareness, so we learn to be vigilant to clues about its influence. For example, we are always listening to our patients’ associations for potential indirect commentary on how they view our interventions. We learn about our blind spots; our projections of some conflict of our own onto our patient; our premature, or inaccurate

Shakespeare and Psychological Complexity  219 interpretations; and what may trigger traumatic transferences in patients with histories of childhood neglect or abuse. Some of the most trenchant commentary has to be decoded from the patient’s unconscious communications, often through displacement. For example, when they speak of someone else who does, or does not, understand them. By contrast, when we turn to literary scholarship, we have the text, but it does not talk back to us. Naturally, we can test out our literary interpretations by close reading. The more we know about the author, the more context we have for our interpretations. I am not endorsing reductionistic readings that overemphasize biography, of course. But it is misleading to believe the text should be amputated from its author. In my opinion, this is a major problem that may unconsciously stem from the traditional but unproven attribution of Shakespeare’s works to Shakspere of Stratford, whose documented life experiences offer scarcely more than a son named Hamnet to connect with the works. Psychoanalytic approaches to Shakespeare’s works would be enormously enriched by an open-minded search for his identity.2 Russ McDonald suggests that New Historicism influenced a relative neglect of Shakespeare’s texts—“With the rise of theory in the 1980s, Shakespeare studies began to suffer from the tyranny of [historical] context … To look too closely at the literary text was ‘to fetishize’ it, and at least for a decade it was impossible to publish anything that involved close attention to poetry [McDonald’s own approach]” (quoted in Jensen 2016, 78). McDonald raises an important point about what is, in practice, editorial censorship over what gets published in scholarly journals, based on what theory or theories are holding sway at a given time. Unfortunately, this can easily create circularity, as scholars endorse prevailing theories when they submit their manuscripts to increase their chances of getting published. Studies of such groupthink highlight its stifling effects on creativity and new discoveries that challenge the hegemony of reigning theories. Carolyn Brown (2015) calls psychoanalysis “one of the largest bodies of criticism of Shakespeare,” and one “that has produced some of the most probing analyses of Shakespeare’s texts” (10). She recognizes the risks of reductionism in any theory-driven approach to understanding Shakespeare, but she aims to restore the tarnished reputation of psychoanalytic perspectives on Shakespeare. Brown writes that “Shakespearean psychoanalytic criticism burgeoned in the 1980s. But it experienced a set-back in 1986 when Stephen Greenblatt published an essay that posits the Renaissance view of identity differs from that of psychoanalytic theory” (69). However, Greenblatt (1986) begins with the clarification that “I do not propose that we abandon the attempts at psychologically deep readings of Renaissance texts” (221). Since Greenblatt seems to have been misunderstood (or possibly to have changed his mind), I will quote what he wrote to me about this matter. Shortly after I sent Greenblatt my review of Brown’s book (Waugaman 2017), he replied:

220  Richard M. Waugaman Thank you for the very interesting review, Rick … I am a bit perplexed, I confess, that my essay was seen as an “attack” on psychoanalytic criticism. I haven't read the essay for years, but I remember my argument as being that the key concepts deployed in psychoanalytic interpretations of Shakespeare were in effect invented in the Renaissance and incorporated already in Shakespeare. My point, insofar as I recall, was simply to observe that psychoanalysis should not be thought of as a privileged visitor, in effect, from another world, with a perspective radically different from that already in place. That point may be wrong, of course, but it is not—or at least not necessarily—to be viewed as an attack. (email to the author, November 15, 2017). Pondering why Shakespeareans have drifted away from psychoanalytic approaches since the 1980s, I wonder if another factor was Charlton Ogburn’s (1984) book that provided much new evidence supporting the Oxfordian authorship theory, including dozens of salient connections between well-documented facts of Oxford’s life, education, travels, knowledge of many languages, and recognized familiarity with the many books and specialized topics such as the law that inform the canon. Clinical psychoanalysis requires a patient. Applied psychoanalysis is far more credible when we know about the life and conflicts of the creative artist. Ogburn’s book may have highlighted how little relevant information we have about the traditional author. So the field moved on to literary theories that downplay the role of the author.

Multiplicity of Identity in Psychopathology, in Normality, and in Hamlet Please be patient as I begin with a great deal of background on psychological multiplicity. I believe it will help deepen our understanding of the complexity of Shakespeare’s characters, including Hamlet. Philip Bromberg (2011), a prominent psychoanalyst, helped popularize the concept that each person’s identity consists of a range of distinct “self states” (formerly called ego states). A common example involves our dreams. Dreams include aspects of our waking self states, but they also involve nocturnal self states that have greater access to childhood self states and their memories as well as to other aspects of our unconscious mind. People with anger management issues seem to “switch” to a distinct self state when enraged, like the Hulk comic book character. Alcohol and other substances, by lessening inhibitions, may lead to a switch to distinct intoxicated self states, including sexualized ones. Foreign language proficiency involves creating a new self state for that language; beginning to dream in this new language is a favorable sign about the learning process. The multilingual will confirm that they do not always notice the multiple meanings of

Shakespeare and Psychological Complexity  221 words in the various languages they know, since those languages are often compartmentalized into distinct linguistic self states. Yet another reflection of Shakespeare’s creative genius was that, as Booth points out, Shakespeare always seemed aware of every possible meaning and connotation of each word he used, in the various languages he knew. Psychoanalysts once maintained that creative people have greater than usual access to their unconscious. We might reframe this and say they have more permeable boundaries among their various self states, which, in a writer, can then act cooperatively to co-create the work of literature. I believe this was unusually true of Shakespeare. Optimal mental health, and especially artistic creativity, seem to be promoted by greater mutual awareness and cooperation among our self states. Think of the comparison—and possibly the literal example—of the brilliant, synergistic interplay of a five-part Bach organ fugue, which Bach was said to be able to improvise. Similarly, Shakespeare is a genius at verbal “fugues.” In his plays, his extraordinary empathy for all of his characters may have reflected his profound awareness of his own diverse self states, masculine and feminine, and of interactions among them. Self-acceptance promotes empathy for and tolerance of others. Bromberg (2011) wrote that literature, at its best, can activate in one moment two or more self states that are usually kept distant from each other, such as sadness and humor. He said we often tear up when strong but conflicting emotions are simultaneously activated. Intriguingly, Bromberg recounts what he called a “traumatic” experience when he was a graduate student in English. Bromberg had offended a professor by writing an essay on Prince Hal’s personality. “I was deliberately shamed in front of the class by a professor who announced that I didn’t belong in the field.” Referring to Bromberg’s efforts to understand Prince Hal’s psychology, the professor said: “We don’t do that sort of thing here” (177). What a case study in groupthink—shaming someone who fails to submit to prevailing but flawed literary theories that focus with tunnel vision on the text alone. Bromberg dutifully dropped out of graduate school in English, later earning a Ph.D. in psychology. Poetry was always sung in ancient times, and it needs to be sung still to help link our verbal and preverbal self states. Shakespeare’s deep interest in music, as well as in the musical potential of language, can further broaden our appreciation for his psychological complexity. Waldo (1974) has demonstrated that Shakespeare amplified the complexity of his plays by including technical musical terms in his sophisticated use of Renaissance rhetoric. Waldo finds Shakespeare to be unique among Elizabethan playwrights in so doing: “Musical terms appear in Shakespeare’s plays in greater number [at least 110 in The Taming of the Shrew], greater variety, and greater complexity than in any other contemporary work I have examined” (9). Only John Lyly comes close. Shakespeare often uses words, such as “burden,” that play on both their ordinary meaning as well as on their technical meaning in music (“burden” can be the refrain, or bass line).

222  Richard M. Waugaman Shakespeare’s pronounced musicality helps connect his audience with their younger, more emotionally centered self states that are at the deepest core of our identity, going back to the formative pre-linguistic phases of childhood. In those early days, we grasped meaning through the emotional tones and rhythms of speech before we understood its semantic content. The part of our brain that supports implicit (or procedural) memory develops much earlier than the part that supports explicit and verbal memory. The former has more to do with emotions—and music—and the latter more to do with our use of language, including verbal memory. Shakespeare’s extraordinary use of visual imagery also activates our implicit memory, which then helps shape our complex responses to his words. In my clinical practice, I specialize in working intensively with patients who suffer from dissociative identity disorder (DID, also known as multiple personality). “Alters” are more dissociated forms of self states. This longstanding clinical experience has accustomed me to close listening, attuned to my patients’ various alters. As I will soon explain, this work influences my close reading of Shakespeare, which I will illustrate with Hamlet. These patients’ symptoms, though they typically go to great lengths to conceal them, are inherently dramatic, so much so that many people—and even some mental health professionals —still doubt the existence of DID. Some clinicians who do recognize DID advocate that we never address the patient’s alters directly, as though doing so will just worsen the disorder. Old paradigms can be tenacious. Our attachment to them often has unconscious elements, which we rationalize by focusing selectively on the paradigm’s strength, while ignoring or explaining away challenges to that paradigm. It was during a summer job in college that I was introduced to this disorder. A psychiatrist hired me to type revisions of his book manuscript that was a case report of a patient with DID. When he learned I had stumbled upon the patient’s actual name, he warned me never to disclose her name, “or someone will be killed.” Chilling. Some twenty years later, I was working intensively with my own first DID patient. But it took me several years to consciously connect this professional experience with that summer job. Reflecting on this, I concluded that the psychiatrist’s warning interfered with my capacity to think freely about what I learned from reading about his patient. Further, I realized this gave me a taste of the psychological impact on children who are severely abused, when their abuser threatens to harm them, their parents, or their pets if they ever tell anyone about the abuse. This is one reason they dissociate their memories of their trauma, since not remembering it protects them from the dire consequences of telling anyone about it. Why have many therapists been so slow to accept the existence of DID, and so reluctant to work directly with the patients’ alters if they do recognize the disorder? They are accustomed to diagnosing such patients with borderline personality, bipolar illness, or schizophrenia. They dismiss those of us who treat DID as being too gullible when patients tell us about their

Shakespeare and Psychological Complexity  223 alters, or even as inducing the disorder in our patients because we find it so interesting. I suspect that another factor lies in their countertransference when they treat a patient with DID—as the patient “switches” among their various alters, it stirs up concordant or complementary self states in the therapist, with which therapists may be unfamiliar, at least in their professional work. This countertransference intensifies when we interact directly with a patient’s alters. Tragically, patients who were sexually abused in childhood sometimes expect to be abused by a therapist, and they may choose to take the lead rather than passively wait for a sexual interaction to happen. Therapists who are unaware of such dynamics may lose their ethical boundaries when their own sexual self state is unexpectedly activated. Because patients with DID experienced severe psychological trauma before their unitary sense of identity was fully formed, their inner conflicts typically take the form of conflicts among their various alters. This “personification” may parallel a playwright who creates characters that reflect various aspects of his own complex and conflicted mind. One of the many misconceptions about DID is the fallacious assumption that such people are severely impaired. More often, they are unusually creative. Anecdotally, it is said that some talented actors have DID. One professional writer with DID confided that alters who remembered more details of her dissociated childhood abuse did some of her writing. Again, “self states” is a term that is now often applied to the normative multiplicity of identity in all of us. Keeping the complexity of normative self states in mind helps me enormously in my clinical work with neurotic patients, as well as in my work with DID, where alters influence the patient covertly. However, there is relatively greater mutual awareness and cooperation among self states than there usually is among the alters in patients with DID, who typically have episodes of amnesia when various alters are “out” and in control of their behavior. Or they may hear alters speaking to them in auditory hallucinations. A core goal of their treatment is to work toward greater mutual awareness and internal cooperation. And one goal of theater is to broaden our awareness and empathy for a wide range of characters, and for their inner conflicts. I have repeatedly misunderstood DID patients by remaining on the surface of their words. Paradigmatically, this occurs when a patient tells me, “No, I was never abused as a child.” That may be factually true for most patients, but if a person has survived severe and sadistic abuse by their relatives and others whom they trust, the statement may actually mean, “No, I was never abused.” When alters speak to me directly (which they often do in intensive treatment), one or another of them will sometimes add, “But I was.” That is, it is typical that dissociative parts of the personality form during childhood abuse in an effort to protect the rest of the developing mind from knowing about the trauma. Since close listening in therapeutic work is similar to close reading in literary studies, we discipline ourselves to be alert to the polysemous meanings of the patient’s words and of the text, and thus

224  Richard M. Waugaman to look for multiple layers of meaning. Alters often speak voluntarily when they realize a therapist is prepared to listen. In doing a 90-minute evaluation of a patient whose colleague asked me if she had DID, I noticed her jerk one arm in an odd way some 45 minutes into the session. She then looked me in the eyes in a confrontational way. I simply said, “Hello.” She replied, “How did you know it was me?” That is, this alter was surprised I noticed a switch had just taken place. What does all of this have to do with Shakespeare? Everything. Hamlet seems to contradict himself when he tells Ophelia, “I did love you once,” but then soon adds, “I lov’d you not” (Hamlet, Shakespeare 1997, 3.1.114, 118, my emphasis). (At her burial, he will again say “I lov’d Ophelia” [5.1.269].) Shakespeare may hope that our unconscious mind will hear this second line as “I loved you not.” So, when Hamlet tells Ophelia “Get thee to a nunnery!” his loving self state may mean “a convent,” while the hostile self state who is enraged that she is a “suborn’d informer” for her father may use the same words to mean “a brothel” (3.1.120, sonnet 125.13). Earlier in the scene, when she tries to return his mementos, he could similarly reply, “I never gave you aught” (Hamlet, 3.1.95). In the final act, Hamlet offers us one model for explaining these contradictions, in telling Laertes that when “he’s not himself” it is due to his “madness”—“And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, / Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it. / Who does it, then? His madness” (5.2.235–37). The sonnets offer many further such examples. The age-old crux as to whether Hamlet’s madness is genuine or feigned is the epitome of Shakespeare’s mastery of psychological complexity. At some point in treatment, patients with actual DID frequently tell their therapist, “I’ve been faking it all along, and you fell for it!” I favor the theory that Hamlet is not always in full conscious control of his madness. Further, I have often noticed that when a DID patient is being covertly influenced by an alter of which they are unaware, the latter is skillful in noticing a suitable feeling or impulse in the patient, then covertly intensifying it for the alter’s own ends. The result is that the patient genuinely believes about their resulting behavior, “I meant to do that.” I do not suggest that Hamlet suffered from DID, but all of us may at times be influenced more than we realize by one or more unconscious self states. It is too disconcerting to recognize that we sometimes lack conscious control over our actions. And the best playwrights—and actors—know the dramatic value of dialing up whatever emotional states and conflicts they wish to depict in order to connect with the audience’s head and heart. As always, Shakespeare paved the way for psychoanalysts to understand more deeply the complexity of the unconscious mind, as it influences our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Hamlet’s encounter with Ophelia here follows immediately after his soliloquy about the allure of suicide. Ophelia is one of the several characters Hamlet feels betrayed by who dies by the play’s end. We might even wonder whether Hamlet unconsciously projectively

Shakespeare and Psychological Complexity  225 identifies his suicidal impulses into Ophelia, who goes on to enact them. Unlike projection, projective identification is the unconscious defense of ridding ourselves of unwanted feelings by inducing them in someone else. To some extent, this may be one reason that dramatists write plays—to pass their own intolerable feelings on to their audience. Hamlet constantly complicates our understanding of his words. He even challenges our assumptions about theater as an as-if encounter with the world of the imagination, implying that we too may be in reality “guilty creatures sitting at a play” (Shakespeare 1997, 2.2.589). Our patients’ first words in an analytic session are always worth taking seriously, since they may announce unconscious themes for what follows. Among Hamlet’s first words are those to his mother: “Seems, madam, Nay it is. I know not ‘seems’” (1.2.76). He adds that his mourning garments, his sighs, and his tears “indeed seem / For they are actions that a man might play, / But I have that within which passes show, / These but the trappings and suits of woe” (1.2.83–86). In some ways, then, we are invited to take Hamlet more seriously as an actual person, not just an actor. As Graham Bradshaw observed, “Hamlet can seem [to be] an actual person who somehow has been caught inside a play” (quoted by Bloom 1998, 401). And a person who is forced to censor his words, to avoid threatening King Claudius (who will later be “censure[d]” for “his seeming”) (Shakespeare 1997, 3.2.87). Instead, he turns to “ambiguous giving out” (1.5.178). Deprived of the cathartic benefit of speaking out means his suffering will keep intensifying—“But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue” (1.2.159). Hamlet even genders the very act of speaking freely—“I … must, like a whore unpack my heart with words” (2.2.583–5, my emphasis). A patient’s transference toward the analyst is complex, attributing aspects of his parents and siblings to the analyst, as well as unwanted aspects of his own impulses and superego-based defenses. Freud probably borrowed from Shakespeare his advice that psychoanalysts should be relatively anonymous, serving more as a “mirror” to help patients see themselves more objectively. Shakespeare understood that we often deal with unwelcome aspects of our own psychology by projecting them onto others, while trying to deny them in ourselves. Hence, his message that the Mousetrap play—and all Shakespeare’s plays—are holding a mirror up to us, the audience, so we can know ourselves more deeply, as we learn to be more tolerant of others.3 Shakespeare “mirrors” this mirror imagery when Hamlet tells Gertrude, “You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the [inmost] part of you” (Shakespeare 1997, 3.4.19–20). Seized with feelings of guilt, Gertrude’s audible terror about this prospect makes the hidden Polonius afraid Hamlet intends to kill her, leading to his own death. Likewise, Hamlet tells Horatio that he sees in Laertes a reflection of his own conflicts about taking revenge on his father’s killer: “But I am very sorry, good Horatio, / That to Laertes I forgot myself, / For by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his” (5.2.75–78).

226  Richard M. Waugaman Seeing oneself reflected in the mirror of an unappealing character potentially helps counteract our tendency to project our least tolerable traits onto another person or group. The mirror Shakespeare holds up to human nature also encourages us to be less judgmental. Shakespeare knew that being judgmental limits our capacity for empathy and understanding, a lesson every psychoanalyst must take to heart to do effective clinical work. The eminent Dutch-born psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk told me in his 50s that he had just begun reading Shakespeare, and he was dazzled by Shakespeare’s profound understanding of every character, without ever being judgmental. Yet another dimension of Hamlet’s complexity lies in its many religious allusions, both direct and intertextual. As Hannibal Hamlin (2013) observes, Shakespeare is full of intertextuality not only with the Bible, but also with works of theology. Atheist and agnostic Shakespeare scholars sometimes ignore the religious allusions in Shakespeare, since their “countertransference” projects onto Shakespeare their own lack of personal interest in religion. Psychoanalysts are trained to put aside our personal feelings as much as we can in listening to our patients’ feelings about religion or politics— or anything. There are misleading efforts to oversimplify Shakespeare as Protestant or Catholic—another false binary. However, Shakespeare may have intended to leave unsettled the crux of whether purgatory exists, so that the Ghost of King Hamlet might actually be his soul speaking to Prince Hamlet, rather than the devil; or it might instead be a symptom of madness. The final lines of Hamlet may even contain allusions to John Calvin’s conception of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. After Horatio promises to answer Fortinbras’s question about death’s “feast” that requires so many dead bodies, he adds, somewhat gratuitously, “all this can I / Truly deliver” (5.2.385–86, my emphasis). Five of the earliest six uses of “truly deliver” included in EEBO are in one book—a 1561 translation of Calvin’s The Institution of Christian Religion.4 Calvin wrote, for example, “in the mysterie of the Supper … Christ is truely delivered to us: namely that first we should growe together into one body with hym” (123). Similarly, Calvin wrote of the mystery of eating Christ’s flesh in the Lord’s Supper, “I nothing dout that bothe he [Christ] dothe truely deliver them” [ie., his body and blood] (134). There is an apparent allusion in Horatio’s words to the gist of the above passages from Calvin. Fortinbras himself seems to allude to the Holy Communion in his reference to the preparation of a “feast” with the several corpses lying before him. He thus reinforces the similar allusion in Horatio’s “truly delivered.” Hamlet’s famous final words are “the rest is silence” (Shakespeare 1997, 5.2.358), echoing his words in the second scene of the play, “But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue” (1.2.159). We might ponder the possible allusion to an early modern proverb (itself based on an ancient one): “The ornament of a woman is silence.”5 There is a faint hint that Hamlet’s struggle with suicidal impulses is influenced by his equating life with his masculine identity and death with his surrendering to his feminine self states. Recall

Shakespeare and Psychological Complexity  227 that earlier in this final scene, Hamlet repudiates his misgivings about having agreed to fence with Laertes by saying such doubts are merely those “as would perhaps trouble a woman” (5.2.216). Thus, he bolsters his resolve to fight Laertes by spurning fears he regards as shamefully feminine. What is the right age to introduce youth to Shakespeare? Traditionally, Jewish men had to wait until they were 40 to be allowed to study the mystical Kabbalah, for fear its complexity might otherwise be psychologically dangerous. Shakespeare, on the contrary, uses complexity in a way that meets profound needs, in people of all ages. Likewise, every adult has self states that were formed at different ages, and Shakespeare—possibly uniquely— seems to address all of them. The underlying narratives of Shakespeare’s late romances have been compared with fairy tales. But these are not the only plays that can appeal to children. As I was writing this chapter, I showed a 20-minute children’s version of Hamlet to my seven-year-old granddaughter (see Ludwig 2014). The play was new to her. From the beginning, she was deeply absorbed in the story and full of questions that got to the heart of the matter, sometimes in ways that were revelations to me. I began to suspect that the play was stirring up such intense feelings in her that she asked me to pause the film repeatedly, to slow the pace, in order to process her emotional reactions and talk about them with me. For example, she wondered if Gertrude knew Claudius had murdered King Hamlet. “I think she did, because she looked happy” in the opening scene, sitting with King Claudius. She asked about the Ghost of King Hamlet—“Is he real?” I explained the different possibilities that Hamlet himself considered. She asked how Ophelia died. After I told her Ophelia drowned, she said, “Maybe she wanted to go be with her father.” She compared the plot with that of her favorite film, The Lion King. She reminded me that Scar, one of Disney’s greatest villains, killed his brother Mufasa to take the throne. She added, “Scar did that because he had been bitten by a venomous snake.” She did not know, of course, that Scar was actually based on King Claudius in Hamlet. The end of the play seemed especially difficult for her to bear. Just as Gertrude was about to drink from the poisoned chalice, she asked me if Gertrude knew it was poisoned. She asked ahead of time which characters would die, and she seemed overwhelmed that nearly “everybody died.” Hamlet asks Horatio to “tell my story.” I explained to her that Shakespeare may have hoped this play would tell his own story, with enough disguise that it would escape censorship and come down to future centuries. I told her I loved reading biographies as a boy. Once I got interested in Shakespeare when I was 12, I was eager to learn more about him.6

Concluding Remarks So far, I have emphasized the maladaptive aspects of groupthink. But there are other relevant aspects of group psychology. A psychoanalytic

228  Richard M. Waugaman perspective can illuminate the regressive experience of the group of spectators as, together, we watch a Shakespeare play. We may loosen our ego boundaries and become more suggestible as we identify with the group in their attitude toward a “leader”—in this case, the playwright and his imaginary creation. Shakespeare understood as well as any playwright ever has that theater offers the audience such an adaptively regressive experience, with the dark theater inducing a sleep-like state of mind, making us more receptive to our unconscious self states, and to both conscious and unconscious channels of communication from the playwright, through the actors. Likewise, Shakespeare understood enough about group psychology to grasp that the effective use of rhetoric can profoundly stir a crowd’s emotions, whether in the theater itself or in the dramatized ancient Roman audience listening to Mark Antony’s speech. We may wish to compartmentalize our theatrical encounter within the world of the imagination and not let it spill over too much into the real world of our everyday lives.7 Freud cited Gustave le Bon’s contention that group dynamics may generate a hypnotic state in its members, so that the group “is led almost exclusively by the unconscious” (Freud 1921, 77). Shakespeare’s very complexity can also contribute to such a hypnoticlike state, just as some hypnotic induction techniques do deliberately. One thinks of Hamlet alluding to “thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls” (Shakespeare 1997, 1.4.56); pondering those words may lure us beyond the reaches of our normal consciousness. In summary, I have used the perspective of a clinical psychoanalyst to explore several facets of the “infinite variety” of Shakespeare’s full complexity. Psychoanalytically informed biographical readings of Shakespeare need not be abandoned if we follow Keats’s advice about tolerating uncertainties and reconsider who the real author was. I hope this chapter will help restore the ongoing relevance of psychoanalytic approaches to Shakespeare, and I hope that it will lead to a fresh look at the Oxfordian authorship theory.8

Notes 1 I am grateful to Elisabeth P. Waugaman, Ph.D. for teaching me the importance of paradox in Shakespeare, since it challenges us not to oversimplify, but to tolerate complexity. The full texts of my 100 publications on Shakespeare are available at https://gufaculty360​.georgetown​.edu​/s​/contact​/00336000014RkZiAAK​/richard​ -waugaman 2 Space constraints do not allow me to summarize my publications on Shakespeare and the Oxfordian authorship theory. 3 William Hazlitt, in 1817, made a related point when he wrote, “Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings are but the idle coinage of the poet’s brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader. It is we who are Hamlet” (quoted in Martin 2022). 4 Although Stuart Gillespie’s comprehensive collection of Shakespeare’s literary allusions omits Calvin, Oxford’s uncle Arthur Golding dedicated his translation of Calvin’s Psalm commentaries to Oxford.

Shakespeare and Psychological Complexity  229 5 Attributed to Sophocles in the 1559 Chronicles of Thomas Lanquet. Also included in Henry Smith’s 1591 book, A Preparative to Marriage: Whereunto is Annexed a Treatise of the Lord’s Supper. EEBO has few other similar early instances of the phrase “is silence” (other than in the phrase “there is silence”). 6 So I was crushed when I read that “One of the great mysteries of English drama is the fact that so very little is known about the life of William Shakespeare” (Clark and Wright 1900, back dust cover). 7 In turn, that may unconsciously promote our wish to separate our iconic image of the Stratford “author” from the world of reality and evidence. 8 The opinions expressed in this chapter are mine alone, and they do not represent the views of the editors or of the publisher.

References Bloom, Harold. 1998. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books. Booth, Stephen. 1977. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bromberg, Philip. 2011. The Shadow of the Tsunami. New York: Routledge. Brown, Carolyn. 2015. Shakespeare and Psychoanalytic Theory. London: Bloomsbury. Calvin, John. 1561. The Institution of Christian Religion. London: Reinolde Wolfe and Richarde Harison. Cavell, Stanley. 1987. Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, W.G., and W.A. Wright, eds. 1900. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. New York: Nelson Doubleday. Einstein, Albert. 2003. Selected Writing. New Delhi: LeftWord. Freud, Sigmund. 1921. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology, and Other Works. Vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–74. ———. 1962. “Charcot.” In Early Psycho-Analytic Publications, 9–23. Vol. 3 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–74. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1986. “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance culture.” In Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, edited by Patricia Parker, and David Quint, 210–24. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hamlin, Hannibal. 2013. The Bible and Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jensen, Michael P. 2016. “Talking Books with Russ McDonald.” Shakespeare Newsletter 65, no. 2 (Spring): 75–81. Keats, John. 2001. Complete Poems and Selected Letters. New York: Random House. Ludwig, Ken. 2014. How to Teach your Children Shakespeare. New York: Broadway Books. Martin, Matthew R. 2022. Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory: An Introduction. New York: Routledge.

230  Richard M. Waugaman Ogburn, Charlton. 1984. The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality. McLean: EPM Publications. Podrug, Dinko. 2005. “Hamlet as Process: A Novel Approach to Using Literature in Teaching Psychiatry.” Psychiatry 66: 202–13. Rangell, Leo. 1988. “The Future of Psychoanalysis: The Scientific Crossroads.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 57: 313–40. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., edited by G.B. Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Suetonius, G. 1957. The Twelve Caesars. London: Penguin Classics. Waldo, T.R. 1974. Musical Terms as Rhetoric: The Complexity of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Style. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur. Waugaman, Richard. 1973. “The Intellectual Relationship between Nietzsche and Freud.” Psychiatry 36: 458–67. ———. 2017. “Review of Shakespeare and Psychoanalytic Theory, by Carolyn Brown.” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 86: 743–52.

14 An Afterword on Apocalypse and Afterwardness Vera J. Camden

Nachträglichkeit is a psychoanalytic concept first introduced in 1895 by Freud referring to a memory that is repressed but comes to be understood as trauma only later, in a deferred recognition. Translated into English as “Afterwardness,” this concept ascribes to a present traumatic moment the imprint of an earlier memory that is understood only retrospectively to have been traumatic. Jacques Lacan, after Freud, elaborates on the significance of this notion as “après coup.”1 Jean Laplanche will further identify the seductions of childhood as enigmatic, only understood retrospectively, whereby future knowledge reveals—afterwards—past trauma.2 Trauma both past and present is always, already rooted in early psychosexual development for psychoanalysis. Even later shock and injury of a physical or psychological nature derives its traumatic impact from the foundations, as it were, of childhood trauma. Indeed, Lacan’s most fundamental statement about trauma is that it has always, already occurred, anticipating, as it were, actual or empirical traumatic events. As Catherine Malabou (2015) explains, “a specific trauma may happen only because the originary trauma has already happened. Such is its apocalyptic unveiling structure. As we know, apocalyptô in Greek, literally means revealing” (113). Malabou objects, however, and contends that this principle must expand, considering the reality of apocalypse in our own day. In view of the blows and shocks of the contemporary world, such theories become predestinarian. Her question is a demand: “Is this Freudian conception still accurate to characterize current global psychic violence, or don’t we have to consider the fact that blows, shocks, strike any of us … erasing our personal history, destroying the very notion of psychic destiny, childhood, past?” (122). To illustrate her reservations, Malabou takes up the famous story of the dream of the burning child from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, in which a father who has watched over his young son’s sick bed for days and nights now falls asleep after the boy’s death in a room adjoining the bedroom and dreams. Freud writes, “After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing by his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’” (Freud 1953– 74, 5:509). When the father wakes, he sees that in fact one of the arms of DOI: 10.4324/9781003306894-20

232  Vera J. Camden the bedclothes wrapping the beloved child’s body had caught fire from a fallen candle. The smell of the burning bedclothes is itself wrapped into the father’s dream world, and it eventually awakes him from his dream encounter with his lost son. Freud interprets the dream as a wish-fulfillment, in that by bringing the child to life, however reproachfully, he keeps him alive for a few more precious minutes (5:509–10). Following Freud’s remarkable interpretation, later psychoanalysts, such as Lacan and, after him, Slavoj Žižek, have deepened the meaning of the dream by pointing out that the child’s reproach is more devastating than death itself. For it fills the father with an unendurable regret for having neglected the child’s fever for too long and not preventing his death. The guilt for the child’s death in this way is more penetrating than the loss itself. Malabou (2015) follows the chain of interpretations that thus follows Freud’s dream work, however, with a rhetoric of her own: for she is determined to awaken the sleeping giants of psychoanalysis from their dreams that prevent them separating the “always already” categorization of trauma, pervasive in clinical as well as literary critical uses of psychoanalytic theory of the formation of the human subject, from trauma that surpasses in its devastation all notions of predestiny (125). For as she insists, “the plasticity of contingency has the power to bestow its own form on the subjects that it shocks. A subject that is really burning” (122). I rely upon Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit—afterwardness—to provide an Afterword to New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains. This volume of essays, as its introduction announces, originated “in a series of symposia and seminars held in 2020 and 2021, seeking new directions in psychoanalytic readings of Shakespeare.” The first symposium in this series, at which I spoke, was entitled “New Directions for Shakespeare and Psychoanalytic Studies” and held at Case Western Reserve University, February 28–29, 2020. The mission of that early symposium to “renew a dialogue between Shakespeareans and psychoanalysis” is now fulfilled in the current volume, which will enliven even further directions for study. Indeed, the first symposium in this series, which began in Cleveland, included, perhaps uniquely for Shakespeare conferences, a clinical psychoanalytic perspective that I, among others, was invited to address: what are the points of contact between the psychoanalytic study of Shakespeare and clinical practice? And how might literary readings inform clinical practice, a topic I have taken up—clinical cases “taught” by literature?3 The bold vitality of this singular invitation informs the vitality of the entire volume, derived as it is from many such invitations from scholars of diverse disposition, all seeking new directions from literary texts that promise, to quote Vladimir Nabokov (1997), “the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art” (309). In short, the only immortality we may enjoy. “It is time to listen again to seething brains” the editors of this volume proclaim. They have drawn this image from Theseus’s speech in the last act

An Afterword on Apocalypse and Afterwardness  233 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, even as they note that Theseus and Freud share the metaphor of transmutation of one substance into another: the sublimation that Freud borrowed from chemistry is anticipated by Theseus for whom seething was also a physical process that could be enlisted to explain the powers of the imagination to apprehend what mere reason, cool reason can neither perceive nor express. But as Nabokov well knew, the seething brains of madmen and lovers, of course, boil over. And with such a title as “Cool Reason and Seething Brains,” the essays here collected must variously, inevitably reflect the tempest of the times in which they were conceived, during the pandemic years of 2020–21. It was seething. The Cleveland conference at which I spoke was held mere days before the nearly universal worldwide lockdown began its grim directive in earnest on March 3, 2020, when Governor DeWine canceled the popular “Arnold Expo” in Columbus, Ohio, and then issued a stay-at-home order on March 10, 2020. We could not then have anticipated the sheer scale of the destruction to come from the spreading virus and the draconian measures we were about to take— both individually and collectively—to fend off its spread. With such origins, this volume invites us to think otherwise, and to think of “afterwardness.” Our conference, and the peculiar tensions it expressed and enacted around the topics and the tone of the discussions we had, now, afterwards, takes on a weight that was felt but could not have been understood at the time. This Afterword to New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains, written afterwards, will attempt to articulate and even interpret how this initial conference—and perforce this volume— was already traced with the trauma of the pandemic looming at the door, impacting our professional and private lives in ways we could not predict nor fully comprehend at the time. My intention is to mark it as a milestone and the drama of its unfolding discussions and debates, predicating in many ways the brilliance of the essays gathered throughout the pandemic years and marking key preoccupations that reflect, indeed, new directions in psychoanalysis and Shakespeare but do so under the peculiar and powerful pressures of an unprecedented pandemic. I want to be clear that I am not for a moment suggesting that the essays consciously take up the times in which they were being written, for they do not. Unless I am mistaken, not one of the authors or editors of this volume mention COVID-19, the circumstances of meeting over Zoom, writing in lockdown or, most importantly, of bearing the pervasive paranoid-feeling burden of social distancing, masks, and the like. Rather, I will suggest how the conversations of the symposium itself predict the impressions, themes, and patterns of the shared preoccupations of the volume, even as they formed the foundations for the series of seminars and symposia that this early gathering in Cleveland had inaugurated. It is in this way, as James Shapiro (2021) has shown in his recent work on Shakespeare in a Divided America, the works, and the reception of the great Renaissance bard, both in productions of his plays as well as in critical and popular reading of his works, provide a picture of the times in which they

234  Vera J. Camden are produced. So too this fresh volume of New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare will, at the same time, reveal between the lines its traumatic origins, its Nachträglichkeit, in an Afterword.

The Burning Question at the Cleveland Symposium It is necessary to set the scene of the first Cleveland symposium on “New Directions for Shakespeare and Psychoanalytic Studies.” Upon entering the elegant foyer of the Victorian house now repurposed for university events on the Case Western Reserve University campus, participants were welcomed and found their seats; but for many there was just beginning the underlying anxiety of where to sit, whether to shake hands, or offer a collegial peck on the cheek seeped out in jokes and asides about a contagion that we barely acknowledged. It still was not clear if we should be taking protective measures, and, if so, what would that mean? We were already worried about what we were hearing on the news, the strange, unprecedented proximity of sickness and death, the dangers to human society because of contagion, and what were its origins: how had all of this started? And, as if such impending threat of an invisible but potentially deadly disease was not enough, in this same week, ever visible in the media were the appalling, record-setting California wildfires, the images and accounts of which blazed in the background of our minds and sometimes cropped up, unbidden in figures of speech or even direct expressions of despair. The mood of the weekend became increasingly unsettled as we reckoned with questions about the privilege of our profession and the luxury of talking about Shakespeare in our own day; these are questions that now dominate virtually all humanities forums as the pandemic grimly looms among us, but on that weekend, at that symposium, they seemed to suddenly emerge to each of us quite personally, like interrogations from an invisible interlocutor. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the final roundtable at the symposium would erupt in what became for me an unforgettable, perhaps traumatic memory that only now makes sense. For in this final session, a passionate debate concluded the conference with an infuriated speaker, the late Christian A. Smith, conference co-organizer, reaching a fever pitch of frustration at the insouciance of a fellow panelist toward human suffering. He could not contain his rage at a scholarship that seemed to obviate the reality of history, the shocks and blows of an impingement on human lives in, precisely as Malabou asserts, a seeming indifference to the intrusions of empirical events that defy reference to memory, exceed the power of testimony to ameliorate.4 And in his rage, he thundered a reproach at his debate opponent (but also by implication to the rest of the audience): “Don’t you see that the world is burning?” With this frightening, staggering reproach the conference came to an end. Participants dispersed severally to their cars and went home. The post-conference dinner was canceled, as were all the niceties of after conference exchanges of friendly plans and the

An Afterword on Apocalypse and Afterwardness  235 lingering after dinner at the pub. No such savoring of collegiality was to be ours; in effect, the lockdown that was to come was upon us. The readiness was all. Christian Smith’s reproach—knowingly or not—invokes Freud’s dream of the burning child. Like Catherine Malabou, he insisted that his fellow symposium members recognize that the world is really burning. We have moved beyond metaphor, and, like the father in the dream, we have been awakened to a real fire. The searing question upon which the February 2020 symposium prematurely concluded, with tensions taut and pandemic protocol newly concerning, the organizers regrettably felt the conference dinner should be canceled and we all should go home. And as I look back on the symposium now, I realize its apocalyptic significance! How fecund its painful exchanges were, yet how anxious what we now call an “inperson” gathering must have been as the news reports of disaster fueled the seething brains of the presenters and the participants. It seems to me now inexorable that we should have ended up socially distanced at that banquet evening. It was an oddly fitting conclusion to our papers, discussions, and debates about Shakespeare and psychoanalysis, the uses of the humanities more generally, and, indeed, the future of the world. It augured rather like the canary in the coal mine so much of the disruption that was coming to our society across all institutions. And the scholar whose passions brought the house down, so to speak, played Cassandra to our symposium drama, alerting us, precisely, to the fundamental premise of psychoanalytic interpretation of trauma, that is, that trauma has always already occurred no longer is sufficient to account for the intrusions of the Real, and maybe never was.5 “Don’t you see that the world is burning?” precisely demands that the listeners attend to the fragility of the earth amidst floods, fires, and pandemics, the feeling of an impending apocalypse that impinges our daily lives—and the end of our world as we know it, as Giorgio Agamben (2021) warns in his recent book on the rise of authoritarianism in response to the pandemic (97).

The Death Drive Freud, following Shakespeare, warned us about the death drive, that consummation devoutly to be wished. As Evans says in her piece for this volume on Hamlet, This striving toward a fantasized original crime, this version of revenge as a regression ever-backward into the past, mimics … the impulse of every organism to seek to return to a prior, inert, restful state … Hamlet’s desire to “set it right,” to solve the conundrum of the time “out of joint,” like the death drive, carries him into the future of consummated revenge only by driving him simultaneously toward the remote reaches of the past.

236  Vera J. Camden It must be said that this is not a Platonic view of origins—the sleep and forgetting that constitutes our birth and a death to a precious preexistence that beckons to death as an avenue to eternity. Rather, the rot and abjection that pervades Hamlet’s dread of both birth and death suggests a far more powerful whiff, closer to Lear’s repulsion at the smell of the womb that he now despises, insofar as his daughters did not, precisely, take him in and envelope his divestiture of self, his crawling toward death. The essays gathered in this volume taken together display an uncanny preoccupation with death, particularly in its physicality; in one form or another, the material body emerges fragile and deteriorating, a pervasive aspect of these new essays on Shakespeare and psychoanalysis. In some ways this is inevitable insofar as psychoanalysis takes as its fundamental premise the psychosexual development of human beings and that we are first and foremost bodily beings. Our brains are biological organs that center our conscious and unconscious experiences of our minds and our sense of being, individually, unique selves. The seething brain may signal sublimation, as our editors instruct us, but it is also a materially vulnerable thing; it is an organ subject to disease and physical trauma, and to old age. To provide a summary of the thematic and imagistic preoccupations of the volume’s contributors—as I do in what follows—is, for me, to offer a rather unrelenting “abstract and brief chronicle” of our time, to use Hamlet’s expression. Uncanny though it may seem, yet how inevitable, each of the essays in this volume pulses when taken together as a whole body with desire, disease, and death. Evans exposes how a rotten Denmark visited upon Hamlet the stench of his father’s murder and his “common” mother’s rank desire; Stone shows how the blood-letting renders Julius Caesar weak as a girl in order for the homosocial order of the masculine horde to retain its corrupt cohesion; the decentering of reliability in language, an epistemological breakdown concomitantly contaminates royal blood lines, leading to bloody battles, thoughts, and actions in Kimbro’s analysis of how a miscarried pregnancy can never be wiped from memory and predetermines Macbeth’s mayhem; Hamlet’s dance macabre in the grave digger’s scene acts out his resistance to the rank decay of flesh and bone in Bellinson’s recognition that, long before Freud, Shakespeare showed how “the stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch / Which hurts, and is desired.” For Newlin, even the synthetic skin that covers the mechanized body of Ava, the android who represents Miranda in the sci-fi film adaptation of The Tempest by implication repudiates the abject reality of human flesh, which, according to Julia Kristeva, repels the skin-like film of boiled milk; the triumphant theatrics of Petruccio’s open invitation to his audience to behold his anus in the final scene exposes the grave of the fundament for Rampone, even as it bests Kate the shrew in its grotesque logic. In further grotesquerie, Rieger’s depiction of corporeal mutilation and the chopping off of body parts in early modern England reveals that mutilation is religiously and politically fetishized to preserve the power of the state; Rzepka’s chapter on Romeo and

An Afterword on Apocalypse and Afterwardness  237 Juliet explicitly identifies the uncanny afterwardness of the doomed couples’ deaths, depicted endless loops of desire and death and, in a singular clinical contribution, the unspooling visions of desire and death in Shakespeare’s plays, Waugaman links to clinical self-states, and the extreme dissociative identity disorder to Hamlet’s “north-north west” madness, which shifts with the winds. This clinical piece stands as a monument to the importance of listening to patients as closely as one would read Hamlet, hearing the breakdown of body and mind with the healer’s bent (McLaughlin 2013). Zackariah Long offers a reading of the problematic play Pericles, apparently co-authored with Shakespeare by George Wilkins in a tour de force recognition, once again, of how and why this volume to which he is contributing is so timely. Long outlines the anguished legacy of patriarchy in the lives of those who are circumscribed by a culture that venerates the violation of the young. Literature’s revelatory power can affectively expose the impact of ritual violation that in this culture rises to acceptance through the groupthink also exposed by Waugaman even in the history of psychoanalytic consensus on sexual matters. Yet Pericles, as one reviewer of a rare recent production acclaimed, “is a portal. It’s a play about how, when all is lost, one can reestablish a connection with a benevolent universe.” The Latin quote on Pericles’s shield, “In hope I live,” offers the prospect of healing after trauma and indeed, “The gods are on every page” (Zarin 2016). There is hope and not a tragic finality. The resources of culture and perhaps nature itself offer a prospect of a new beginning: hope is a fundamentally transcendent link to the future and life. As nearly every contributor to this volume agrees, in one way or the other “Shakespeare will go on explaining” (Bloom 1998, xviii). Shakespeare reads us better than we read him. Most strikingly for my point in this Afterword is that Shakespeare knew before Freud that civilization was discontent and only would be preserved from its own desire for death and destruction by truth and beauty, the capacity to sublimate the psychic resources—crude oil wells to use Freud’s own image—before they explode and burn before the apocalypse. When in 1909 he entered New York harbor and saw the Statue of Liberty, Freud remarked: “They don't realize we're bringing them the plague” (quoted in Lacan 2006, 336).6  The plague is an over-determined image to us now, afterwards. Freud predicted that the plague psychoanalysis brings is the bite of the apple: the knowledge that sexuality lies at the core of human life, an erotic drive to death itself. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice depicts a city in the throes of a cholera epidemic, following Freud to show how the death drive feeds upon the passions of the eros, extinguishing civility and moral obligation. This returns us to Malabou’s twist of Lacan’s haunting insight that the real trauma in the dream from which the father must ironically escape back into waking reality is the child’s reproach that his father was not able to save him from death nor protect him from suffering. Malabou wants psychoanalysis to allow, in the face of the End Times, that the world is really burning, and the glaciers are really melting. The

238  Vera J. Camden searing jolt of Christian Smith’s burning question at the Cleveland symposium now haunts me in its Afterwardness as I welcome this timely, marvelous collection of new essays on Shakespeare and psychoanalysis. For me this volume demonstrates some measure of the resilience demonstrated by Freud and H.D., who sustained their psychoanalytic dialogue, knowing that the contagion of fascism was at their door. H.D. began her analysis with Freud on the brink of the disaster that soon would overtake Vienna and then the world; their exchanges exhibit the raw, even violent intensity of those who know their time is short.7 Yet, they use psychoanalysis not to escape this “gathering storm” but, rather, to explore the roots of the violence and desire that drives the human psyche as much as it defines human history (Friedman 2002, 538).8 All this they ponder through their probing of, precisely, the particulars of H.D.’s psychoanalytic odyssey. Indeed, Freud says to her, “You discovered for yourself what I discovered for the race” (H.D. 1974, 18). Freud’s proclamation that he had struck “oil” in his discovery of the human unconscious disturbed H.D. because it was, precisely, “crude.” She much preferred the more pleasing if familiar image of a well-spring of water, the fountains of life, long quenching to the poets. Yet Freud kept to his notion that within the unconscious lay the crude, rich oil that fueled the fires of human violence and desire, the drives that threaten to consume all of creation—if they are not sublimated. And, therefore, he strived to sustain the centrality of the arts, sciences, and humanities—the full panoply of human culture—to his psychoanalytic project.9 Norman Holland, impressed by Freud’s cultivation of H.D.’s writing, notes that, as he aged, the analyst became more particular in whom he would take into treatment, openly admitting that he only wanted to see patients who could “help” the project of psychoanalysis with their own gifts.10 Philips also says H.D. hid from Freud the worst of civilizations’ teetering on the brink. But of course, he knew it all along. He among all theorists directly faced the human capacity—even drive—toward death and destruction. Lauren Berlant (2011) will opine that the denial of death and destruction in the post-Holocaust world allows the hope of material prosperity to cover over the crimes against humanity, to normalize horror instead of fighting it. This cruel optimism takes the place of what Freud himself warned against in his apologia for lay analysis, precisely directed against the medicalization, the instrumentalization of psychoanalysis he foretold would be enlisted in the interests of American medical marketing. Freud never relinquished his clinical practice and even in his highly informal interactions with H.D., he recognized that his analytical method depended upon hope for her future as a writer, and, in many ways, her analysis reflected his assiduous determination to anoint—perhaps beyond the loyal band to whom he conferred institutional fraternity—the artist as his true heir. Freud’s final days sought from the artists and writers who could offer him something in return for his analysis that would enhance his vision and sustain it at the same time. Freud’s anxiety for the future of his clinical work and the notion that these

An Afterword on Apocalypse and Afterwardness  239 artists and scientists would be poised to help the field and further his own insights as he conversed with them sustains particularly the latter years, infusing his intimate exchanges recorded by H.D. in her Tribute. There is, then, no “cruel optimism” in H.D.’s tribute to Freud, who, in the end, advocated for her poet’s mission, ensuring through her analysis that this great poet who came to consult with him because of a “writer’s block” would keep on writing.

Telling Time: Shakespeare at the End of the World As James Shapiro, in Shakespeare in a Divided America points out, the interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays, and the critical, political, and theatrical controversies that surround productions and interpretations of his works, hold “up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life” (Johnson 1765)—and the tumult of the times. “His writing continues to function as a canary in a coal mine, alerting us to, among other things, the toxic prejudices poisoning our cultural climate” (Shapiro 2021, xiv). Shapiro’s metaphor of toxins in the cultural climate surely resonates with the fears of contamination, climate crisis, and toxic waste that seep into his rhetoric as he looks around the world today that is read, as it were, by Shakespeare. His historical project, of course, offers the history of the staging of the plays in America, and the controversies that end up being expressed through the various interpretations of his work, in criticism as well as dramaturgy, to alert us to the trends of our own time. Our editors explain that the work on Shakespeare and psychoanalysis the last two decades reflects the dominance of a rather anti-psychoanalytic bent among Shakespeare scholars under the influence of New Historicism, despite the popularity of psychoanalytic approaches, of one school or other, in previous decades since Freud’s own writings on Hamlet. Considering Shapiro’s sweeping observation that Shakespeare will always read us, one may herald the appearance of this fresh volume, Cool Reason and Seething Brains, because it has broken this silence and started the conversation back up between these two former companions as they reflect on our troubled times. In other words, psychoanalysis has come back into conversation with Shakespeare in the 2020s because we require them, and readiness is all. It has become common over the last decade for writers of whatever stripe—critics, journalists, philosophers, certainly prophets—to frame their work in relation to the apocalypse. Christoper Bollas (2018) used Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia to capture what he calls, without qualification, the apocalypse of our times, some three years before the pandemic on or about March 2020 when the world changed. And as to the future generations, he notes, again with a metaphor that suggests toxins and contamination: “Even though youth will always try to find the bright side of life, our melancholia seeps into their veins” (128). The pandemic certainly confirmed his metaphoric diagnosis of an infectious melancholia,

240  Vera J. Camden now fearfully realized in an invisible virus. These same youth now refer to the time before the pandemic as, precisely, the “beforetimes,” even as they reckon with the fears of extinction and stage protests. Slavoj Žižek’s Living in the End Times (2011) notoriously, and not without irony, invokes apocalyptic threats brandished by religious fundamentalists to pronounce the “terminal crisis” of capitalism; Richard Miller’s Writing at the End of the World (2005) demands that literary critics engage with personal and contemporary trauma if they have any hope of actually being read, given that we live in a contemporary apocalypse. Written in the early 2000s, Miller’s title ironically drew in his readers, to whom he proffered, in the end, a remarkably hopeful vision of redemptive writing, writing that allowed for narrative healing. Now, no longer mere metaphor, the apocalyptic headlines: “End-Times Tourism in the Land of Glaciers” is used by a New York Times travel journalist to usher tourists to northern climes as ecological last rites (Kizzia 2022). He enjoys no irony as he finds consolation in the inevitability of human extinction. For his part, Giorgio Agamben (2021) frames the pandemic as “politics” by identifying the creeping authoritarianism of government lockdown measures: “What is happening today on a global scale is certainly the end of a world” (96). He offers the rather limp hope of a return, “among the ruins around us, [to] a humbler, simpler form of life” (97). And in the meantime, even the super wealthy who do not fancy a humbler or simpler life, are also preparing for the apocalypse, by preparing luxurious bolt holes underground, as reported in The New Yorker.11 We have never needed Shakespeare—and psychoanalysis—more. For those readers—lovers and madmen—who seek to fulfill the hopeful prognostications of the editors of this volume, Jonathan Bate’s (2022) new book, Mad about Shakespeare, offers a Shakespeare as a way to read the apocalypse as nothing less than “Shakespeare as a lifelong and enriching alternative for religious faith” (Larrington 2022). Thomas Mann (1956), in his essay “Freud and the Future,” offers a similar hope for the power of art and literature to sustain Freud’s vision of the science of the unconscious that exceeds the therapeutic method even as it offers, again, nothing less than a “poet’s utopia”: Freud is of the opinion that the significance of psycho-analysis as a science of the unconscious will in the future far outrank its value as a therapeutic method. But even as a science of the unconscious it is a therapeutic method, in the grand style, a method overarching the individual case. Call this, if you choose a poet's utopia; but the thought is after all not unthinkable that the resolution of our great fear and our great hate, their conversion into a different relation to the unconscious which shall be more the artist's, more ironic and yet not necessarily irreverent, may one day be due to the healing effect of this very science. (115)

An Afterword on Apocalypse and Afterwardness  241 Freud’s appeal in “Lay Analysis” to a cultural and social vision that exceeded the “therapeutic method” that was limited to the individual: this frankly utopian vision depends upon the poet, the forces of art, the pioneering scientist, the work, that is, of culture and a new humanism that acknowledges the interdependence of human beings with the environment and even with worlds yet to be discovered.

Notes 1 See Faimberg (2005). 2 James Strachey was criticized for his translation as “deferred action.” See Wilson (2015, 1049). 3 As I have stated in another essay on the subject, “For while we may not share Freud’s erudition any more than we share his genius, we are heirs to his psychology of the mind and to his technique of treatment: that psychology and that technique were shaped by an intellectual legacy imbued with a humanistic as well as a scientific view of human experience” (Camden 2008, 100). Our editors inform us that the scholar to whom this volume is dedicated, Christian A. Smith, was working, before he died, on a book about Freud’s lifelong reading of Shakespeare. 4 On witnessing, see Caruth (1996). 5 Freud’s seduction theory, taken to its extremes, ends up marginalizing historical reality. On the history, development, and debate of the theory, see Garcia (1987). See also Erikson (1962). 6 See also Camden (2020). 7 H.D. began her analysis with Freud in the Spring of 1933 and then, after a hiatus, she returned in the Fall of 1934 while, as she puts it, “the war closed on us” in Vienna (H.D. 1974, 57). On H.D.’s tribute to Freud, see Camden (2022, 1–17). 8 Freud frequently extolled the ways that the poet apprehended what he strove to comprehend. As his physician, Max Schur, wrote to H.D. on November 17, 1957, in praise of Tribute to Freud said, “He always admired—and even envied—poets, who knew what he had to learn ‘with blood, sweat and tears’” (quoted in Friedman 2002, 539). 9 In his essay on lay analysis, Freud (1953–74) imagines a psychoanalytic academy wherein, “Analytic instruction would include branches of knowledge which are remote from medicine [such as] … the history of civilization, the psychology of religion, and the science of literature—unless he is well at home in these subjects, an analyst cannot make anything of a large amount of his [clinical] material” (20:246). 10 Holland (2002) extrapolates from H.D.’s reported dialogue that “Freud undertook the analysis of H.D. and the others like her in order to give a group of intellectually special people a ‘feel’ for psychoanalytic ideas and method. … Indeed H.D. had written to Havelock Ellis … ‘Dr. F. … says openly, he cannot take on people who have nothing to offer in return, anymore … or words to that effect’ (1/17/3). [She later writes] to Conrad Aiken that ‘Freud considered me … as rather special—not crazy [but rather as someone] who would ‘help’ (8/26/34).” Holland concludes that Freud saw H.D. as an “Intellectual equal” when he tells her, “you discovered for yourself what I discovered for the race,” and when he conducts the analysis informally. H.D. (1974) writes, “‘Of course, you understand’ is the offhand way in which he offers me, from time to time, some rare discovery, some priceless finding, or ‘Perhaps you may feel differently’ as if my feelings, my discoveries, were on a par with his own” (86). 11 See Osnos (2017).

242  Vera J. Camden

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2021. Where Are We Now?: The Epidemic as Politics. Translated by Valeria Dani. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Bate, Jonathan. 2022. Mad About Shakespeare. New York: Harper Collins. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Bloom, Harold. 1998. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books. Bollas, Christopher. 2018. Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment. New York: Routledge. Camden, Vera J. 2008. “‘The Past is a Foreign Country’: Some Uses of Literature in the Psychoanalytic Process.” In Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine, edited by Peter L. Rudnytsky, and Rita Charon, 99–117. Albany: SUNY Press. Camden, Vera J. 2020. “Psychoanalysis and the Pandemic.” Fifteen Eighty Four, May 21, 2020. https://www​.cambridgeblog​.org​/2020​/05​/psychoanalysis​-and​-the​ -pandemic/. Camden, Vera J. 2022. “Introduction—Reading to Recover: Literature and Psychoanalysis.” In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis, edited by Vera J. Camden, 1–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, History and Narrative. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Erikson, Erik H. 1962. “Reality and Actuality: An Address.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 10 (3): 451–74. Faimberg, Haydee. 2005. “Aprés-coup.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 86: 1–13. Freud, Sigmund. 1953–74. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated and edited by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. 24 vols. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Friedman, Susan Stanford, ed. 2002. Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and their Circle. New York: New Directions. Garcia, Emanuel E. 1987. “Freud’s Seduction Theory.” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 42 (1): 443–68. H.D. 1974. Tribute to Freud. Boston: Norman Holmes Pearson. Holland, Norman N. 2002. “H.D.’s Analysis with Freud.” PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, April 26, 2002. https:// psyartjournal​.com​/article​/show​/n​_holland​-hds​_analysis​_with​_freud. Johnson, Samuel. 1765. “Preface.” In Vol. 1 of The Plays of William Shakespeare in Eight Volumes, With the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators; To Which Are Added Notes by Sam. Johnson  (London: Printed for J. and R. Tonson et al., 1765). Kizzia, Tom. 2022. “End-Times Tourism in the Land of Glaciers.” The New York Times, November 22, 2022. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2022​/11​/22​/opinion​/ glaciers​-alaska​-climate​-change​.html. Lacan, Jacques. 2006. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Larrington, Carolyne. 2022. “Saved By Books: ‘Eng Lit’ Memoirs by Three Illustrious Critics.” TLS, November 11, 2022.

An Afterword on Apocalypse and Afterwardness  243 Malabou, Catherine. 2015. “‘Father, Don’t You See I’m Burning?’: Žižek, Psychoanalysis and the Apocalypse.” In Repeating Žižek, edited by Agon Hamza, 113–26. Durham: Duke University Press. Mann, Thomas. 1956. “Freud and the Future.” International Journal of PsychoAnalysis 37: 106–15. McLaughlin, James. 2013. The Healer’s Bent: Solitude and Dialogue in the Clinical Encounter. New York: Routledge. Miller, Richard E. 2005. Writing at the End of the World. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Nabokov, Vladmir. 1997. Lolita. New York: Random House. Osnos, Evan. 2017. “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.” The New Yorker, January 22, 2017. https://www​.newyorker​.com​/magazine​/2017​/01​/30​/doomsday​ -prep​-for​-the​-super​-rich. Shapiro, James. 2021. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. New York: Penguin. Wilson, Emmett. 2015. “Revue Francaise de Psychanalyse.” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 84 (4): 1049–79. Zarin, Cynthia. 2016. “The Continual Riddle of Shakespeare’s ‘Pericles’.” The New Yorker, March 8, 2016. https://www​.newyorker​.com​/culture​/culture​-desk​/the​ -continual​-riddle​-of​-shakespeares​-pericles. Žižek, Slavoj. 2011. Living in the End Times. New York: Verso Books.

Index

Abraham, Nicholas 20, 22–24, 26, 30–31 Ackroyd, Julie 185 Adam and Eve 38, 48n2, 140–141 Adams, Parveen 150, 152 Adelman, Janet 48n3, 49n9, 122 afterwardness see Nachträglichkeit Agamben, Giorgio 235, 240 aggression 72, 82, 164 anagnorisis 60, 95 analysand: Hamlet as 9, 198–212; Octavius (Julius Caesar) as 170 analysts 4, 8, 170; in Hamlet 199, 201–212; see also Freud, Sigmund Anderson, Thomas P. 105–106, 109 Antigone: crypts in 25–29; death in 25–28, 30; desire in 26–27; drive in 29; intimacy in 26 antitypes 132, 138–139, 142–144 Antony and Cleopatra 9, 164–171; masculinity in 171–172; masochism in 174–175; queer readings of 171; race in 172–173; urine in 169–170 archetypes, in Pericles 139–143 Aristotle 72–73 athletics: in Hamlet 7–8, 71–81; and spectator participation 75–76 audiences: appeal to 73; appreciation of 79; gendered identities and 184; morality and 185; nudity and 149, 157–161; participation in 72; performance pressure and 76; spectator participation and 72, 75–76; at sporting events 73 Ball, William 151; see also The Taming of the Shrew Barrie, Robert 184 Bate, Jonathan 240

Bausell, R. Barker 6 Berengario da Carpi, Jacopo 156 Berlant, Lauren 238 Bernheimer, Charles 158 biblical references 144; Adam and Eve 140–141; Cain and Abel 36, 38–40; Christian afterlife 58; Genesis 38–39, 141, 143–144; God the Father’s motivations 141; New Testament 138, 143; Old Testament 44, 138, 143; Pericles and 140–143; Ten Commandments 44 blood 87–88; as guilt 98n7; in Hamlet 37–38, 40–44, 72, 79; in Julius Caesar 91–98; in Macbeth 104–112; as sacrifice 42, 88; as vendetta 96 bloodletting: in Julius Caesar 87–88; in Macbeth 107, 110 Bloom, Harold 212, 215 Bollas, Christopher 239 Booth, Stephen 217, 221 Bornstein, Robert 5 boys 185; as actresses 179; as theatrical performers 184–185 Bradshaw, Graham 225 Branagh, Kenneth 49n6, 65n4, 78 Bromberg, Philip 220, 221 Brown, Carolyn 216, 219 Browning, Kirk 151; see also Taming of the Shrew Cahill, Patricia 132 Camden, William 116–117 castration 91, 94–95, 149–150, 187, 190; in Pericles 134–136 catharsis: in Hamlet 71–78, 84; in Julius Caesar 94 Catholics 103–104 Cavell, Stanley 56, 66n8, 215

246 Index children 190; as performers in theater 185 Christological readings: of Hamlet 226; of Julius Caesar 91–92; of Macbeth 106–107; see also biblical texts clothing: in Antony and Cleopatra 173; in Ex Machina (Garland) 187, 190–191; in Interpretation of Dreams (Freud) 231–232; in The Taming of the Shrew 158–161 Clough, Arthur Hugh 167 Colston, Ken 107, 110 combat, in Hamlet 78–81 complemental series 216–217 conflict 120, 140, 171, 197, 215–216; dissociative identity disorder (DID) and 223–224; in Hamlet 197–199, 212–213, 223–224; in Romeo and Juliet 24, 26 cosmetics, in Hamlet 47 countertransference 218, 223, 226; see also transference courtly love 184 COVID-19 pandemic 233, 240 Crane, Mary Thomas 6 crypts 31; in Antigone 20, 28–29; cryptonomy 19–31; encryption 20–21, 25–26, 31; psychic crypt 24; in Romeo and Juliet 7, 20–30 Dalal, Farhad 7 Danto, Elizabeth 11 Davis, Natalie Zemon 3, 4 dead, encounter with in Hamlet 35–36; see also ghosts death: in Antigone 25–28, 30, 31; in Hamlet 38–41, 48, 53–54, 58–59, 84, 123; in Julius Caesar 90–97; in Romeo and Juliet 19–20, 27–28, 30; see also assassination death drive 29, 38, 118–119, 235– 236; in Hamlet 40–41, 121, 124, 127–128 D’Emilio, Dylan 75 Derrida, Jacques 31, 37, 40, 44, 52, 61, 97n1 98n8 desire 24–26, 154; in Antigone 26, 29; in Antony and Cleopatra 165, 169– 170; Catholic desire 103; death and 26; in Ex Machina 181; in Hamlet 123; in Macbeth 106–110; male

desire 169; oedipal desire 38, 134; in Pericles 136–142; sexual desire 62, 153; sexual repression of 4; in The Taming of the Shrew 149, 153–161; in The Tempest 179, 182–183, 186–190; in Twelfth Night 62–63 DID see dissociative identity disorder dismemberment: in Hamlet 42; in Macbeth 111; see also Stubbes, John dissociative identity disorder (DID) 222–224; see also self-states dissolution 118; in Hamlet 120–129 divided subjectivity 108–109 dreams 5, 135, 168–169, 202, 217, 231–232, 235, 237; in Ex Machina (Garland) 181, 187; in Julius Caesar 90–91 drive 174, 187 in Antigone 29–31; see also death drive Dunning-Kruger effect 75, 84n5 Eagleton, Terry 1–2 ego dissolution, in Hamlet 120–122 ego fracturing 116–120 Einstein, Albert 216 Eliot, T. S. 212 Ellis, Havelock 171, 241n10 embodiment 187, 217; in Antigone 29; by boy actresses 179–182; in Hamlet 35, 45–48; in Macbeth 104; of masculinity 160, 166 entombment see crypts equivocation, in Macbeth 103–113 erotic desire, in The Taming of the Shrew 160–161; see also desire erotic self-forgetting, in Romeo and Juliet 22 erotogenic masochism 118–119, 124–125 Ex Machina (Garland) 9, 180–186, 189–191 family romance, in Antony and Cleopatra 171–172; see also Oedipus complex fantasy 7, 9, 20, 29–31, 186–191; in Antony and Cleopatra 164–174; of the crypt see crypts; in Hamlet 35, 48; of phallus 149; of primal scene in Pericles 135 Felman, Shoshana 36, 97n2, 98n6 feminine sexuality 179, 188

Index  247 femininity, in Julius Caesar 87, 89–90 festivity 71, 73, 76, 79; in Julius Caesar 88–89 Foakes, R. A. 71–72, 77 Freccero, Carla 35, 47; spectrality 35 free association 218 Freud, Sigmund 1–4, 11, 54, 237– 238, 240–241; on antithetical meaning 87; on conflict 215; on the conscious 217; on discharge excitations 55; on dreams 5, 38, 90, 135, 168, 202, 231–232; on the ego 164; on the family 165; on group phenomena 165; on Hamlet’s psychic conflict 197; incompetent therapy 201; on introjective identification 24; on language 3; on masochism 119–120; on melancholy 22–23; on memory 109, 168–169, 231; on opposition 78; on personal identity 3; on the phallus 150; on the primal scene 133, 138; on protection against stimuli 74; on the psyche 3; on psychoanalytic treatment 210–211; on suffering 174; on theory 216; on transference 206; on trauma 217, 231; on urine 168–169 Frow, Toby 157–159, 161 Gajowski, Evelyn 216 gang-killing, in Julius Caesar 90, 94–95; see also assassination Garland, Alex 180, 190 Garnet, Henry 103, 113n1 Genesis 38–41, 48n2, 141, 143–144 ghosts: in Hamlet 35, 38, 41–44, 52, 54–57, 59–61, 65n2, 66n6, 198–199, 204, 207; in Julius Caesar 95–96; in Macbeth 111–112 Gowing, Laura 155, 157 Greenblatt, Stephen 2, 12n7, 30, 64, 111, 117, 119–120, 127, 129n6, 219–220 group phenomena 165 groupthink 218–219, 221 guilt: 232, in Hamlet 35–36, 207, 212, 225; in Julius Caesar 93; in Macbeth 104, 107–112; in Pericles 136–137, 143 Gunpowder Plot 103–105, 112, 113n1 Guy-Bray, Stephen 171

Hall, Kim 172 Hamlet 52–53, 71; antic disposition in 203–204; catharsis in 71–78; combat in 78–81; cosmetics in 47; and death drive 40–41, 235; death in 53–54, 58–59, 84, 123; dismemberment in 42; dissolution in 122–129; dreams in 202; ego dissolution in 120–122; encountering the dead in 35–36; “fall of a sparrow” speech 57–58, 78; form of soliloquy in 198–199, 204–210; ghosts in 41–44, 55–61; intertextuality and 226; listening in 201–202; madness and 199–200, 202–204, 224–225; masochism in 122–125; memory in 43; mourning in 199; Oedipus complex and 197; Other 55, 61; performance of 78–81; psychotheology and 53–61; readiness in 58, 60, 77–78; repetition compulsion and 36, 38, 57; revenge in 36, 40–41, 56; secrecy in 210–211; self-fashioning/ self-fracturing in 126–129; sexual disease and 43; social facilitation and 71–78; suicide and 54, 122; temporality and 36–41; transference and 211–212; vengeance and 56–57; violent play in 71–78; and Wittenberg 81–84; Yorick in 45–48 Hamlin, Hannibal 226 H.D. 238–239, 241n7, 241n8, 241n10 Heilman, Robert 155 Henderson, Diana 153–154 Heng, Geraldine 164 Hirschfeld, Heather 132, 139 Hirsh, James 204 Hobbes, Thomas 3–4 Holland, Norman 238, 241n10 Homer, Sean 150, 154 homosocial groups 90, 94, 96 homo-eroticism 160 Hydraulic Model of Aggression 72 identity 3–4, 8–10, 24, 60–61, 119–120, 160, 166, 184, 191n1, 220–221; in Hamlet 120–124, 129 imprisonment, in The Tempest 183–184 incorporation 23–24 intertextuality, in Hamlet 226

248 Index intimacy: in Antigone 26; in Hamlet 209, 211–212; in Romeo and Juliet 25 introjection 23–24, 31, 212 Jesuits 107 Jones, Dan 84 Jones, Ernest 38, 49n4, 197, 212 jouissance 175, 179, 186–189 Julius Caesar 87, 97; assassination in 93–95; blood in 91–96; catharsis in 94; death in 92–96; dreams in 90–91; femininity in 89–90; festivity in 88; gang-killing in 94–95; oedipal drama in 95; violence in 91–92 Kaethler, Mark 6 Keats, John 215, 228 Kent, Sarah 160 Kimble, Charles E. 76 Lacan, Jacques 4, 26–27, 31, 161, 163, 232, 237; on the death drive 29; on desire 161, 179, 181, 184–189; on “hommosexuality” 188; on Nachträglichkeit 231; on need 154; on the phallus 150, 152, 158–159, 187; on sexual difference 179; on sexuality 170; on the Woman 179, 188–189; see also jouissance Lanfranco of Milan 41 language 3–4, 31, 106, 187 loss: 232; in Hamlet 76, 122–123, 127–129; in Macbeth 113n6; in Pericles 134, 143; in Romeo and Juliet 23–25; in The Tempest 181; in Twelfth Night 64 love, courtly love 184; see also intimacy Lupercalia 87–88, 91, 97 Luther, Martin 41, 81 Lutheranism 81–82 Macbeth 103–104; blood in 104–112; Christological readings of 106–107; dismemberment in 111; ghosts in 111–112; guilt in 107, 110–111; melancholy and 106; post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 110–111; sin in 110; trauma in 109

madness, in Hamlet 199–204, 224–225; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1 Malabou, Catherine 231–232, 234–235, 237 Mann, Thomas 237, 240 Marshall, Cynthia 98n8, 105, 117– 120, 191n11 masculinity 149; in Antony and Cleopatra 164, 166, 171–172; in Hamlet 78, 121; in Julius Caesar 89–90; in The Taming of the Shrew 149, 151–152, 157, 160 masochism 118–120; in Antony and Cleopatra 174–175; erotogenic masochism 124–125; in Hamlet 122–125 Mazzio, Carla 30, 155–156 McAleer, Kevin 83 McDonald, Russ 219 McLeod, Saul 73 McMillan, Bobby 84 Meier, Jeremy 80–81, 85n9 melancholy: Freud’s thoughts on 22–23; in Macbeth 106; in Pericles 134; in Romeo and Juliet 20–23 memory 109; in Hamlet 37–38, 43–47, 122; in Macbeth 107; in Pericles 135 mensur 81–83 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1, 232–233 milk: in Hamlet 42–43 misogyny 9, 157, 183, 187; in Hamlet 47 Morin, Roc 82 Morton, Thomas 104 mourning 20, 113n6; in Hamlet 199, 208, 225; in Twelfth Night 61–62; see also melancholy Nabokov, Vladimir 232–233 Nachträglichkeit 30, 97n2, 231–233, 237–238 narcissism 186 Nevo, Ruth 132–137, 142 New Historicism 2–3, 119–120, 143, 219, 239 New Testament 138, 143; see also biblical references nobility, in Antony and Cleopatra 167 nudity, in The Taming of the Shrew 149–151, 158, 160–161

Index  object of fantasy 188; see also fantasy O’Connor, John J. 151–153 O’Dair, Sharon 5 oedipal drama: in Antony and Cleopatra 168; in Hamlet 38, 203; in Julius Caesar 95; in Pericles 135–136, 142 Oedipus complex 134, 187; in Hamlet 197 Ogburn, Charlton 220 Old Testament 44, 138, 143; see also biblical references Original Sin 39; see also biblical references Other 4, 52–53, 164, 181, 186–190; in Hamlet 55, 61 penises 149–150; of horses 172; in The Taming of the Shrew 155–159; see also phallus Pericles: archetypes in 139–143; asymmetrical patterns in 143–145; castration phantasy in 134–135; melancholy in 134; oedipal drama in 136; primal scene in 132–138; sexual knowledge in 141; typology and 139–140 Peters, Erin 105, 132 phallus 149–150, 187–188; in The Taming of the Shrew 152–155, 158–159, 161 pharmakon 87, 97n1, 97n3 Plutarch 91–92, 95–97, 167–168, 174, 175n7 Podrug, Dinko 216 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 111; in Macbeth 110–111; see also trauma primal scene, in Pericles 132–139 Protestant Reformation 105, 113n3 psyche 3, 5, 40, 113n2, 120, 197; in Macbeth 108–109 psychic conflict 197; see also conflict psychic fracture 119 psychological complexity 215–227 psychotheology 7, 52–53; and Twelfth Night 61–65 PTSD see post-traumatic stress disorder

249

queer readings of Antony and Cleopatra 171 race 164–165; in Antony and Cleopatra 165–173 Ragland, Ellie 150 Rangell, Leo 218 rape 88, 97n2, 142 readiness, in Hamlet 48, 58, 60, 77–78 reductionism 216, 219 regicide 107, 110, 129 repetition compulsion: in Hamlet 36, 38, 57; in Romeo and Juliet 20 replication crisis 5–6 repression 4–5, 95, 133, 173, 197, 199; see also desire The Return of Martin Guerre (Davis) 3 revenge: in Hamlet 35–37, 40–42, 56, 82, 124, 197–198, 203–207, 235; in Julius Caesar 90, 94, 97 Reynoso, Joseph S. 72 Rezabek, Jeffery S. 76 Richards, Cynthia 105, 132 ritualized fan involvement see social facilitation Romeo and Juliet 19; crypt in 22–24, 28–30; death in 27–28, 30; erotic self-forgetting in 22; intimacy in 25; loss in 23–25; melancholy and 20–23; paradoxical simultaneity in 19; repetition compulsion and 20; self-encryption in 25 Rosenblatt, Josh 74, 77, 80, 84 Rosenzweig, Franz 54 Ross, Alexander 141 sadism 119, 124 sadomasochism, in Hamlet 116–128 Sandler, Joseph 218 Santner, Eric 52–57, 63–65 scatology 163–164; in Antony and Cleopatra 165–171; see also waste scientism 6–7 secrecy, in Hamlet 210–211 seething brains 1–2, 232–233, 235 self-: acceptance 221; encryption, in Romeo and Juliet 25; fashioning 117–120, 126–129; fracturing 117–120, 126–129; shattering 119, 122

250 Index self states 220, 223, 226–227; alters 222–223 sexual desire, repression of 4–5; see also desire sexual disease, in Hamlet 43 sexual knowledge, in Pericles 141 sexual perversions 170–171 sexuality 4, 170; feminine sexuality 188 sexualized violence, in Antigone 26; see also rape Shapiro, James 233, 239 Shapiro, Michael 184 shattering 105–106, 109, 111–112, 119–120, 126–127 signification 31, 186, 188 Silverman, Kaja 150 sin, in Macbeth 110 Skura, Meredith 5, 8 Smith, Christian 12n3, 234–235, 238, 241n3 social facilitation, in Hamlet 71–78 spectator participation 72 sports see athletics Starks-Estes, Lisa 106, 109–110, 132 Stubbes, John 116–120 subjectivity 109, 117–118; in Hamlet 121–129 sublimation, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1 suffering 234; in Antony and Cleopatra 165–167, 174; in Hamlet 35, 43–47, 125–126, 197, 225; in Pericles 134 suicide, in Hamlet 54, 122 Sullivan, Garrett 22 The Taming of the Shrew 8–9, 149; Ball and Browning production (1976) 151–157; Frow’s Globe Production (2013) 157–161; tongues in 149–150, 154–157 Targoff, Ramie 25 The Tempest 179–182, 189–190, 236; desire in 182–183; disobedience in 186; imprisonment in 183–184 temporality 109, 111; in Hamlet 36–41; in Romeo and Juliet 19 Ten Commandments 44 tombs see crypts

tongues, in The Taming of the Shrew 149–150, 154–157 Torok, Maria 20, 22–24, 26, 30–31 transcendence 54, 126, 158 transference 206, 211, 225; Hamlet 211–212; see also countertransference trauma 5, 7, 8, 40, 95–96, 109, 132–133, 221, 231; childhood 95; dissociative identity disorder (DID) and 222–223; in Hamlet 36–38, 40, 44, 74, 123, 125–126; letting blood as 87; in Macbeth 103–112; original trauma 94; in Pericles 132–139; see also equivocation; primal scene Twelfth Night 53; mourning in 61–62; psychotheology and 61–65; wonder in 64 typology 132–133, 138–139, 143; in Macbeth 107; in Pericles 139–140 urine 164, 166–171; see also waste vengeance: in Hamlet 40, 45, 48, 54, 56–57; in Julius Caesar 94 Vince, Máté 103 Waldo, T. R. 221 waste 163–164, 171; and sexual pleasure 170; see also urine Watson, Robert 53, 57, 60, 65n2 Weigert, Edith 212 Westfall, Alfred 81 Westley, James 73 Wilkins, George 132–133, 138–139, 141, 237 Willis, Deborah 105, 111, 132 Witmore, Michael 185, 190, 191n10 Wittenberg, in Hamlet 41, 81–84 Wofford, Susanne L. 111 The Wolf Man’s Magic Word (Torok and Abraham) 31 woman 179, 188–189; in Ex Machina 180–186; in The Tempest 181–183 wonder, in Twelfth Night 64 Young, Kevin 72 Žižek, Slavoj 29–30, 60, 189, 232, 240