Full-text
source: PerAbs_FT
Author: Smith, David M Source:
Explicator 59, no. 4 (Summer 2001): p. 174-176 ISSN: 0014-4940 Number:
82659869 Copyright: Copyright HELDREF PUBLICATIONS Summer 2001
Hamlet's cruelty to Ophelia is one of the most powerful and
moving dramatic gestures anywhere in Shakespeare. That cruelty, however,
discomforting as it is, evades easy interpretation. In act 3.1 of Hamlet, for
example, Ophelia attempts to return love tokens that she maintains were given
to her by the prince. Hamlet rebukes her with the response, "No, not I, /
I never gave you aught" (94), a gesture convincing enough as domestic
abuse that a powerful subtext is often overlooked. I believe that Shakespeare
had a specific intent in Hamlet's willful denial of what is generally staged as
a verifiable reality: the letters and trinkets Ophelia holds in her hands.
Hamlet's gesture speaks to a much larger project of resisting a definition
imposed on him by what he sees as a coercive and illegitimate speech culture
headed by the king.
As James Andreas has shown, Hamlet derives its considerable
energy from a dialogical engagement of opposing "verbal styles."
Whether one adopts Andreas's terms out of Levi-Straus of "the vulgar and
the polite" or prefers the more standard Bakhtinian terms of the official
and the Carnival, the social/cultural alignments are clear.' Claudius, by both
rank and temperament, speaks monologically, with a unidirectional flow of
language associated with the official. As king he circumscribes meaning and is
the embodiment of an objectivistic truth, the unequivocal semantic authority in
the
Act 1.2 is crucial to understanding Hamlet's refusal to
acknowledge the gifts he has tendered to Ophelia, for it makes explicit the
king's effort, within a monologic and coercive speech culture, to define Hamlet
as the good son and courtier necessary to a consolidation of political power
and semantic authority. After establishing the official spin on the royal marriage
and disposing of the threat posed by Fortinbras, Cladius turns his attention to
the prince. He first refers to Hamlet as "my cousin" and then as
"my son," a subtle continuation of a rhetorical effort to disarm
opposition and consolidate power by co-opting a major rival. Hamlet has, in
effect, been offered the vice-presidency in an effort to draw him into the
regime and neutralize the threat he poses.
Hamlet resists the role of chief courtier and heir that
Cladius and Gertrude try to force him to accept in act 1.2, and his cruelty to
Ophelia is an important symptom of his resistance. Following an avowal to feign
madness and "put an antic disposition on" (1.5.172), Hamlet appears
before Ophelia in her chambers:
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac'd No hat upon his
head, his stockings fouled, Ungart'red, and down-gyved to his ankle, Pale as
his shirt, his knees knocking each other, And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors-he comes before me. (2.1.75-81) Hamlet's
appearance, as described by Ophelia, is that of a Harlequin, and the incident
is a carnivalistic effort to subvert the official speech culture that Ophelia
is associated with. Moreover, throughout the play the exchanges between Hamlet
and Ophelia are characterized by the vulgar/polite dichotomy, as the prince
continually harasses the maid with sexual innuendo. In Bakhtin's terms,
Hamlet's attack on Ophelia is an effort at self-devalorization, an attempt to
destroy the heroic image he has occupied in her mind, an image reinforcing the
official role as chief courtier and heir. By subverting that courtly image and
assigned role, Hamlet is attacking the official speech culture that bars
intersubjectivity, hence Hamlet's ability to have the truth about his father's
death be known. The following passage, uttered by a dumbfounded Ophelia, makes
explicit the comprehensiveness of Hamlet's devalorization:
O, what a noble mind here o'erthrown!
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword Th'
expectation and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
Th' observ'd of all observers, quite, quite down.
(3.1.150-54)
Nevertheless, taking the clown's part, shedding all the
accouterments of court, and descending into madness are insufficient to
Hamlet's project: he takes the further step of denying the relationship-hence
reality-itself. Hamlet, at odds with a speech culture that seeks to totalize
him, craves an even more radical devalorization, a complete debasement of the identity
that his dialogue with Ophelia assumes. Hamlet's problem remains that even
though the Hamlet that used to exist has vanished and been replaced by the
harlequin Ophelia describes, Hamlet the courtier lives as a memory, a point of
departure, which is sufficient in itself to contain Hamlet in official speech
culture. Polonius concludes that Hamlet's behavior owes to his being
love-struck, a conclusion that leaves the prince definable within official
speech culture. A prince mad for love is much less threatening to the crown's
ability to control discourse than a sane but radicalized prince who wants to
undermine the court at its foundation. Hamlet's project is to achieve a genuine
outsideness, an independent identity that would create the conditions for a
dialogical relationship with the court.
Hamlet's denial of his previous relationship with Ophelia,
his denial, in fact, of any connection to the gifts she attempts to return, is
necessary to genuine outsideness because of the danger of being co-opted by
love, a danger that surfaces in the dialogue that follows the exchange over the
gifts. In a line best played as a slip of the tongue, Hamlet tells Ophelia,
"I did love you once," and she responds, "Indeed, my Lord, you
made me believe so." Hamlet immediately recants: "You should not have
believed me, for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish
of it, I loved you not" (3.1.114-18). The passage is nearly impenetrable
unless Hamlet's effort to destroy his own image is considered. Hamlet first
tells her he has loved her, but when she returns her own expression of love, he
immediately recants. He takes back his declaration because he objects to
something in the reciprocity of the exchange: her image of him necessary to her
love. Hamlet's love, rather than being self-defining and issued from a position
of outsideness, is largely a function of Ophelia's impression of him, to which
he objects because of her association with court and official semantic
authority. His reasoning follows that she should not have believed his
expression of love, because virtue is not sufficient to guard against the love
of having one love you for your virtue, which is another form of valorization.
Ophelia's impression of Hamlet's love invalidates that love in just the same
way the heroic image she holds of him invalidates him more generally. Only by
denying the reality of their past relationship itself can Hamlet establish his
own outsideness and begin to create an authentic dialogue beyond the
constraints of a circumscribed speech culture.
NOTE
1. For a comprehensive introduction to Bakhtin's theories
see Morson and Emerson.
WORKS CITED
Andreas, James R. "The Vulgar and the Polite: Dialogue
in Hamlet." Hamlet Studies 15.1-2 (1993): 8-22.
Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin:
Creation of a Prosaics. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1991
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed.
G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton, 1974.
-DAVID M. SMITH, Columbia College