Who said that--Hamlet or Hamlet?
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Abstract
IKE every play, Hamlet is a complex rhetorical structure, a series of verbal and visual cues which guide its audiences' responses. The function of these cues is to create a coherent dramatic experience in the minds of its audiences, for that is j finally where all plays are enacted. At the same time, however, the speeches, gestures, and settings, all those things which serve as rhetorical cues, come together as dramatic phenomena in creating an apparently self-contained world on stage. Thus, about a single speech we may say either, "Here Hamlet reveals such and such about himself," or, "Here we learn to take this perspective rather than that one upon the action." The fact that we may say either or both points to an essential characteristic of dramatic art: the fact that in plays phenomena are used rhetorically. Because they are, we may demand of any play that it both be and mean. But difficulties arise when we assume that all speeches ought to be referable both to character and situation and to the play's address to its audience; or, failing that, when we assume that all speeches ought at least to be referable to character and situation. Here audiences of Hamlet have a distinct advantage over dramatic critics, because audiences may be content to observe the world on stage and respond to its rhetoric without worrying overmuch about the relationship between the two while critics must perforce attempt to understand both, with particular attention to their relationship. That is by no means an easy task at any level, even the simplest, for it is not always clear whether a particular speech serves both rhetorical and mimetic intentions. Or to put it another way, it is not always clear who the speaker of certain lines may be persumed' to be. Most exchanges in Hamlet offer no particular difficulty: the motives for speeches and the sources of speeches in the emotions and thoughts of the characters are roughly self-evident. Hamlet tells us 'that he thinks of himself as a "rogue and peasant slave," and then proceeds to tell us why. There are some sequences, however, in which the emotional and intellectual sources of speeches are not self-evident, and to understand these we are forced to hypothesize a continuous inner life for the characters of which we see only the phenomenal outgrowths. In sequences of this sort, we assume that the characters themselves are speaking out of some part of their beings that we do not see, and we take what they say as cues which guide us toward the configurations of their inner lives. In such speeches which are literally non sequiturs or somehow literally inappropriate in tone or quality, we get a sense of the reality of characters, and from these speeches we are led toward characterological analyses. Speeches of both sorts, the self-evident or the characterizing, may be treated indifferently under rhetorical or mimetic analyses, and what is said may be referred either to the address the play makes