Preface

This book is about offstage action in Hamlet, about words that describe action that isn’t performed physically in the play, things we don’t actually see: King Hamlet’s murder in his orchard, Ophelia’s death in the stream, Hamlet’s visit to Ophelia’s “closet,” Hamlet’s voyage to England, and so on. I focus on Hamlet because it is the most celebrated and enigmatic of all Shakespeare’s plays and because it among all of Shakespeare’s plays is the one that most fully explores the dramatic possibilities, limits, and implications of offstage action. In looking at speeches that refer to such “invisible” action—the Ghost’s speech about how Claudius poured the “juice of cursed hebona . . . in the porches of [his] ears”2 (1.5.62), Gertrude’s speech about how Ophelia “Fell in the weeping brook” (4.7.173), Ophelia’s speech about how Hamlet appeared in her “closet . . . with his doublet all unbraced, / No hat upon his head” (2.1.77–78), Hamlet’s speech about how he jumped “Up from my cabin, my sea gown scarfed about me, in the dark” (5.2.12–13)—I want to think about how the “Words, words, words” (2.2.192) in these speeches work to make physically absent things imaginatively “present”; how they “show” us what we don’t actually see, the unseen being essential both to this play and to our lives in this world—beyond which lies the ultimate unknown, that “undiscovered country / From whose bourn no traveler returns” (3.1.79–80).

To say Hamlet is about its “Words, words, words” is not to say it is not also a play about performed physical things. The representation or mimesis of physical action that we do not see performed in the play, only hear about in its words, is not separate from its physical action: words and action are completely intertwined. Both literal and physical are essential to the play, the ear and eye essential to how we get it perceptually, and know it. Words are also physical things; sound also; so too is the act of speaking. The materialities both of language and of physical action performed on a stage are alike, though also obviously very different. Because the relation between onstage and offstage things is also in effect seamless, the question becomes: What, conceptually, is the play doing with language? What is the reader, or member of an audience, doing? And how are these doings related? The plot of Hamlet raises such questions, and guides and constrains my reading of the play, as does my sense of how language works (whether Shakespeare himself thought of such things, one can only guess). Another question comes to mind: does the seamlessness of what is performed in word and deed onstage include deeds (physical, visible) whose meanings are multiple or unclear (even as linguistic events are)? What are the epistemological differences between these ambiguous events and linguistically ambiguous events? (Hamlet sees Claudius praying for example, but what he sees is deceptive.)

In thinking about offstage action in Hamlet, I will focus on what happens in and on the level of the play’s language. The words I will talk about are the words spoken by actors when the play is performed onstage, the ones we hear when we watch and listen to the play being performed. But the things I will talk about are not the things that audiences watching and listening to the play will notice, not because they are not there but because the performance of the play happens too quickly, takes place in the more or less “two hours’ traffic of our stage” that it takes to perform the play, whereas the things I talk about in Hamlet can only be noticed in reading words on the page—what Harry Berger, Jr. has called “armchair interpretation.”

My own “armchair” reading of Hamlet pays close attention to the “action” of its words—that is, to the semantic, phonetic, grammatical and ideational interrelationships between “words, words, words” in the play, many of which are unlikely to be noticed by an audience watching and listening to Hamlet being performed in the theater. It is a reading that begins, as Patricia Parker puts it, “with the conviction that careful or close reading is not the preserve of the ahistorical or apolitical”—nor I think the atheatrical, since my concerns in reading the words of Hamlet on the page are always to see them, or rather hear and understand them, as words performed by actors on a stage—words that refer to things that are not performed on that stage except in those words. It also recognizes that reading words on a page and hearing actors speaking words aloud from a stage are two different kinds of experiences—one of seeing words with the eyes, the other listening with the ears; one private, the other public; one that can slow down and also interrupt the play’s forward motion, the other that is swept along by it; one that allows us to think at leisure about the intricacies of the performed text, the other that dazzles us with what Berger calls its “spell.”

As such, my “armchair” reading explores what David Scott Kastan has called “the necessity of reading”—reading Hamlet’s words that is, and in so doing, thinking about things that will not ordinarily be noticed (by audiences watching and listening to Hamlet in the theater at least). Slowing down our experience of the play, I pay attention to how its words (a continuously unfolding series of verbal actions) make meanings in interaction with each other as elements of a work whose surfaces extend in all dimensions, spatial as well as temporal, and whose complex multiplicity of parts function in multiple systems of order simultaneously. The play I am reading is therefore not the play an audience is watching in the theater but an idea of that play, or, as I would like to think of it, that ideal play—the one that Shakespeare wrote.

To claim that in my reading of Hamlet I am reading the play “that Shakespeare wrote” is likely to raise questions from critics who point out, as Kastan writes, that Shakespeare’s “literary career strikingly resists the very notions of artistic authority and autonomy that his name has come triumphantly to represent.” Shakespeare’s plays were indeed collaborative and social ventures, and in reading the words of Hamlet I do not mean to ignore what Kastan calls “the historically specific conditions of its writing and circulation” but rather to understand it in the light of its offstage action, which is also not present except in words. That is to say, like the “conditions” that Kastan would discover about “the historicity of the play . . . its production and reception . . . marks of this worldliness . . . materializations . . . [which] are its meanings,” Hamlet’s offstage action is also missing—its “absence” made present in the play-text performed by actors, witnessed by audiences, read by the play’s readers, all of whom participate in and thus help to perpetuate and realize the play’s “worldliness” as well as its “meanings.”

Thus thinking about the differences between text vs. performance, reading vs. playgoing, the autonomy of an “author” vs. the uncertainty of collective production, my “armchair” reading is related to what may be called the fictions of reading. We can imagine ourselves reading as if listening to a speech, conversation, or story; we can imagine ourselves reading as if looking at a picture, play, film, or sequence of events; we can imagine ourselves reading as if perusing—that is, producing and constructing—a text. Reading is always reading-as-if, which is only to repeat the outworn and politically correct (but still correct) view that reading is always a socially constructed practice, that is, a convention, like the writing that reproduces and represents it. Different kinds of texts—arrangements of words—can nudge us toward one or another or some combination of these fictions of reading. The question is how some passages not only refer to offstage phenomena but represent them in a way that invites us to visualize them or makes it hard for us to visualize them, and thus function as both metaphoric interpretations of the speech acts they appear in and words themselves—which are never the same thing as the physical action they describe. The payoff in approaching the speeches I will look at is that we are able to see the relation between what is being described (offstage action) and the language that describes it—a relation between language (words read on the page, or heard when spoken into the air) and the physical event that language means to “show,” that is, represent.

Thinking further about reading as a form of looking at pictures, it may also be useful to think about the play’s offstage action in relation to visual arts, specifically to painting and film. I look at Jan van Eyck’s painting Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride in Chapter Five, for example, as an image suggesting not only the absent presence of Shakespeare the author and the setting of offstage action in Hamlet, but also Ophelia herself, who might (like the woman in van Eyck’s painting) be pregnant. (I say “might” not because I believe Ophelia is pregnant—Shakespeare gives us no real evidence to suggest that she is—but because I want to point to how much of Hamlet happens offstage without any evidence of exactly what does take place or who is responsible for what, thus complicating the question of “evidence” itself—e.g., of epistemology and knowing, showing and the difficulty of seeing beyond “show,” the unknowableness of what isn’t seen, etc.) In Chapter Four I look at how the words of Gertrude’s speech “show” Ophelia’s death—an offstage, unseen death that is also shown in John Everett Millais’s great painting “Ophelia,” whose slow-motion, static feeling of calm suggests something of the distance, the displacement and diffusion, that physical actions “painted” in words appear to have in Hamlet. Hamlet’s spoken and written words to Horatio “show” us what happened offstage on his voyage to England, which I talk about in Chapter Two: how he “fingered” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s “packet”; how “a pirate of very warlike appointment gave us chase,” later how “in the grapple” he “boarded them” and thus was able to make his way back to Elsinore (all of this unseen in Shakespeare’s play but filmed in Olivier’s Hamlet). So too with Shakespeare’s own written words, which are all we have to “show” us who Shakespeare the man really was, that person who has disappeared into his words despite an engraved image on the first folio’s title page, which I talk about in relation to the missing (offstage) author and his missing offstage action in my Afterword. Such disappearance of physical action (or Shakespeare) into words, representing what we do not see onstage (although Olivier films it) might be seen as a kind of verbal camouflage, Hamlet’s language removing its physical action into the “background” of its textual surface so to speak, where we can no longer see it, can only hear verbal references to it. The poet John Ashbery suggests a similar disappearing trick in Cubism, which like camouflage “obliterates by pressing a thing as far as possible back into the waves of otherness that surround it”10—”otherness” in this case not paint but language itself, Hamlet’s words at certain points “indistinguishable” from its physical action. But in this disappearance into the play’s language, physical things we might otherwise see (were they performed onstage) take upon themselves a kind of visual resonance, echo, or presence established, and also conveyed to us, in words that deliver (even though the things those words refer to are not-seen, not-seeable) something more informative than any performed action, what T. J. Clark, also writing about Picasso’s Cubism, imagines when he says “The moment of maximum visual information in a picture is that at which the object goes out of sight”11: the “object” here again not paint but character, who disappears from the play’s stage into its words (Hamlet’s father’s account of his death in the orchard, his mother’s account of Ophelia’s death in the stream).

Lest anyone imagine that the kinds of things I will think about in Hamlet happen only in Hamlet, let me make it clear that Shakespeare’s plays are full of things we do not see, things performed in words only. Othello’s tale of how he won Desdemona’s love, Enobarbus’s account of how Antony met Cleopatra on the barge, Prospero’s history of how he and Miranda first arrived on the island: this prehistory is essential to our understanding of the play’s present action—as is the Ghost’s speech to Hamlet about how he was murdered, which I will talk about further in Chapter Three. Still other action previous to the play’s present actions is referred to in more casual but still memorable ways: a bleeding Captain’s “report” of Macbeth carving Macdonwald “from the nave to th’chaps” (1.2.1–22), Orlando complaining of mistreatment by an older brother in As You Like It, Orsino’s confession of love sickness for Olivia in Twelfth Night, Gloucester’s recollection of his “sport” (1.1.22) in “making” his bastard son in King Lear: these and hundreds of other instances elsewhere of how, in their opening lines, Shakespeare’s plays “show” us bits and pieces of things we do not see performed physically onstage—things we probably do not notice we have heard listening to the play—as do the opening lines of Hamlet, which I will look at in Chapter One. Happening offstage during the time of the play, still other events are described by someone who has witnessed (or heard about) them: Edgar’s story of how Gloucester’s heart “?‘Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief / Burst smilingly” (5.3.190–91) in King Lear (which would certainly be difficult for any actor to perform physically onstage), Egypt’s Queen recalling how Antony’s “legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm / Crested the world” (5.2.83–84) in Antony and Cleopatra (more than difficult to perform), the Gentleman describing Leontes meeting his daughter at the end of The Winter’s Tale (which “undoes description to do it” [5.2.57] and could not be performed onstage, at least not realistically, not that realism is ever on Shakespeare’s list of dramatic requirements)—all these instances of action we do not see performed physically onstage (perhaps because they cannot be performed) but instead “shown” in words the play uses to describe those actions.

Finally, recent attention to the problem of knowing the authentic Shakespearean text might be taken to suggest that one’s attempt to read the words of a play by Shakespeare, particularly one like Hamlet, which exists in three separate versions (the First Quarto, the Second Quarto, and the Folio) as well as any number of modern edited editions, no two of which are exactly alike, is likely to run aground on the sharp rocks of indeterminacy. Choosing to read the words of Hamlet in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, taking them as one of several possible versions of a work whose “authentic” version cannot be known, I mean both to acknowledge the essential indeterminacy of the play’s material text and to propose that offstage action may be understood in terms of it: that is, the constructed text whose absent or “missing” original does not exist (cannot be performed or even seen, can only be speculated about) may be taken to stand for or represent—literally to enact—the physical absence of the play’s “missing’” offstage action, action that can only be speculated about (whether heard by the play’s audience or read by its readers), action performed in the “Words, words, words” that I (like Hamlet himself) will be reading. And in suggesting such a parallel between reading in the play (Hamlet’s) and reading of the play (my “armchair” reading), I want also to suggest that the physically “missing” offstage action about which we as readers and audience can only speculate may be understood in relation to the ghostly presence of the “missing” author, “Shakespeare” himself, who is indeed also “offstage,” about whom we know so little other than his words—”inauthentic” as they may be, some of which (the ones that dramatize its offstage action) refer to “missing” things, things we must speculate about from the words Shakespeare uses to describe or, as I would say, “perform” them.