George Washington University

Hamlet without Us
Author(s): Kathryn Schwarz
Source: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 2, SURVIVING HAMLET (Summer 2011), pp.
174-179
Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington
University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23025626
Accessed: 08-03-2018 12:13 UTC

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 Hamlet without Us

Kathryn Schwarz

We do it wrong, being so majestical,

To offer it the show of violence,
For it is as the air, invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.
Hamlet, 1.1.143-461

If the"I" in these poems is so difficult to locate, then how wary you and
you, I, and they—should be in presuming to say "we"2

At "Could
the end of
any his essay,
pedagogy Lee Edelman
renounce poses ainherent
the sublimation challenge t
in ac
ing, taking seriously the status of teaching as an impossible professio
ing ourselves in relation to our students as agents of a radical queerne
assault on meaning, understanding, and value would take from them
than it could ever give?" (169). If, as Edelman argues, Hamlet repr
prototype of the modern subject as Child, the subject who attemp
an infinite future, to make present a ghostly past" (167), our vocation
that attempt, and our practices—of teaching literature, of teaching S
of teaching Hamlet—instantiate, again and again, the present moment
the past lays its hand on the future.
When Edelman writes of Hamlet, "He establishes thereby the c
a reproductive futurism bringing archive and anamnesis together
ogy whose complicity with aesthetic education and therefore with th
of aesthetic education not only shapes the text of Hamlet but also
to its privileged position as the paradigmatic literary work of modern
culture" (155-56), he returns us to the questions of ideology and
that preoccupied, or more aptly haunted, the professional self-int
of the 1980s. His scrutiny of influence and inheritance recalls Ala

G. Blakemore Evans, gen. ed., The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Boston: H
flin, 1997).
Bruce R. Smith, "I, You, He, She, and We: On the Sexual Politics of Shakespeare's Son
nets," in Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York: Garland Publishing,
1999), 411-29, esp. 427.

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 HAMLET WITHOUT US 175

critique of the English educational system

final instance of the validity of Literature.
and universal experience, Literature must
upon it becomes an instrument within the
schools adjust young people to an unjust s
order evokes Jacqueline Rose's analysis of th
literary criticism: "Writing which proclaim
which demands such integrity (objectivity/
that moment of repression when language a
place, putting down the unconscious process
the Oedipal drama and of narrative form
King Hamlet's ghost and "a compulsory retu
father" (160) reprises Marjorie Garber's an
'"Remember me!' cries the Ghost, and Sh
literature, that which calls us back to ourse
self-chosen attribution of paternity.'Rem
against self-slaughter."5 Driven by the ne
synecdoche and as subject, as text and as
our Bentham) for the edification of the nex
reanimates a primal scene in the history of
foundations of our continuity and recogniz
that to forget was to repeat. The problem
will-to-be-taught, the desire for a lesson—
the zero" (169)—cannot be solved in the s
tives exist, when to be in Hamlet's shadow i
"No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was m
Prufrock absents himself from the line of
itance bestowed by Hamlet as universal subj
of Edelman's inclusive proposition: "For
the concept of the human whose normative

Alan Sinfield, "Give an account of Shakespeare an

are effective and what you have appreciated about t
references," in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in
and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), 134—
Jacqueline Rose, "Sexuality in the Reading of Sh
sure" in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drak
102.

5 Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York:
Methuen, 1987), 176.
6 T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in 7be Complete Poems
1950 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 7.

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176 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

all" (164). Or, of course, he doesn't, as long as we are a

"bestow on its specter, and so on its always ungraspab
able value of a domesticated and domesticating good, o
literature to make us better, more fully human" (169)
project, so contentedly in thrall to a naive yet mercena
nation as a kind of bait, if Thomas C. Foster's How to
fessor is any indication. Foster takes up Prufrock's lin
Doubt, It's from Shakespeare ...," where he shares the
isomorphism: "Eliot's poem does more, though, than m
It also opens up a conversation with its famous pred
of tragic grandeur, Prufrock suggests, but an age of ha
recall that Hamlet is himself a hapless ditherer, and it
saves him from his own haplessness and confers on
tragic."' Prufrock was meant to be Hamlet after all, b
and by us if not by Eliot. And if Prufrock must be ha
exogenetic—if, for that matter, Eliot must succumb
would disavow—we at least are secure, because we h
to which we are heir.

Why have I taken this turn? Not to accept domestic

cation; but to think, for a moment, about the relations
What would it mean for "us," with brazen infidelity to
to say'no" to Hamlet: to refuse not just an inheritance b
tance, to see neither a web nor a line nor a mirror, bu
retains a certain dated charm? There is little purchase i
for we have been conscientiously trained to spot it as
am"; in this, at least, Foster does indeed show his read
fessor. A mixture of belatedness and overexposure mig
as in the story of a woman who, after finally seeing Ha
just a bunch of cliches. Apocryphal or not, this echoes
caustic comment: "English Seneca read by candle lig
tences, as Bloud is a begger, and so foorth: and if you in
morning, he will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should
speaches."8 But Nashes preface to Robert Greene's M
so he cannot refer to our Hamlet, which is to say Shak
specifically Shakespeare's good Hamlet, and a long h
ment to the elusive Ur-Hamlet embroils us in lineages

Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A

to Reading between the Lines (New York: HarperCollins, 2003),
Thomas Nashe, "To the Gentlemen Students of Both Univ
Greene, Menaphon Camillas alarum to slumbering Euphues (Lon

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 HAMLET WITHOUT US 177

Margreta de Grazia says "no," cogently a

Hamlet, arguing that our obsession with
undercuts the skills by which we live: "It
Hamlet's complex interiority into focus. R
Hamlet to appear modern, the premise o
Twenty years earlier, Garber made a comp
series of questions about revenge, forgettin
Hamlet—as I have suggested above—the pla
construction of the modern subject?" She
questions can be answered, tentatively, in
at least in part for the befuddlement and
demonstrate when they are asked to come
close to us. What look like critiques, an
make some other point (philosophical,
bring us back to the play itself, not as
the unknowability of origins, what Freud
Garber, an anachronistic, peripatetic Ham
of the text; for de Grazia that figure in
ship has been content to treat the plot as
who can readily leave it behind to wander
attached."11 Yet both analyses, like Edelm
acy that mortgages the living to the dead
by ventriloquism and apostrophe: "Uncan
transference of death to the living and vo
voice say? What kind of commandment do
down?" De Grazia delineates a transaction
"The father's 'will' makes itself known
requires the son's sacrifice) rather than
Hamlet is left not with the patrimony pr
a suicidal paternal command to redress t
relationship both to the Name-of-the-Fath
ship of slippage, overlap, and breach, bequ
Trapped by the mandate to live and di
ally—in another's name, Hamlet has no
order of or' that keeps what is from bein

9 Margreta de Grazia, "Hamlet" without Hamle

Garber, 157—58.
De Grazia, 3.
12 Garber, 147; de Grazia, 98.

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178 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

life from death is a false opposition, the sign of an ord

manufactured to cover the spectacle of its own collaps
this through readings of Lacan, Derrida, Zizek, and fin
that violates natures bounds to condemn violations
advance the order of or' he returns from the grave to d
distinction pronounced in'To be, or not to be'" (166
must know the speciousness of "or," if not from philo
ogy, or some precocious modernity, then from genre.
from the moment he gives credence to his father's m
in his beginning. For all its gnomic insistence in our c
not to be" is not a question. In revenge tragedy, being
that sustains its automatism through the will—always
other lives with it. Here we are both belated and re
tors in a conversation that has dispensed with our int
posits neither counterfactuals nor even teleologies,
which, prefabricated by the machinery of plot, is n
press toward iconoclasm? If so, let me press a little ha
1603 text—disreputable "bad quarto" that it is—gets it
be, I there's the point," Hamlet begins.13 There's the p
This generic reduction, which suggests that Hamle
than exceptionally ventriloquized and undead, does
man's own point about the consequences Hamlet h
zombie movie, made more respectable but also more
respectability. In "The Uncanny," Freud writes, "M
feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and
of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts."14 Freud finds
tent across time, and adds a comment that might be a
"Most likely our fear still implies the old belief that t
enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off to share
He does, however, wonder briefly about repression, in
but not obvious in so overt a fear. "But repression is t
educated people have ceased to believe officially tha
ible as spirits, and have made any such appearances
and remote conditions; their emotional attitude towar

13 William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Princ

sig. D4v.
14 Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" (1919), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychologi
cal Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press,
1974), 17:217-56, esp. 240.
15 Freud, 241.

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 HAMLET WITHOUT US 179

once a highly ambiguous and ambivalent on

strata of the mind into an unambiguous fe
hold us in these coils; neither mourning no
our entanglement with Hamlet mimics lov
A hint of that piety inflects even Edelman
totype of the modern subject as Child" (1
full-fledged from No Future, a book in wh
to talk about birds.17 If we—that subsum
the ghost, could we perhaps give it a bit le
a powerful point about history and accoun
being willing to be haunted."18 Edelman's e
we might, in the case of Hamlet, be alto
the spectral mandate of legacy, a reflexive
the impulse to question our methods and
Hamlet in the 1974 edition of the Riversid
"Coleridge's 'I have a smack of Hamlet' may
remaking of Everyman in Hamlet's imag
a time of obligatory and schematic intr
feel."19 Are we, by now, entitled to refuse?

16 Freud, 241-42.
17 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and
132-33,135.
18 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New
York: New York UP, 2005), 60.
19 Frank Kermode, introduction to Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, in The Riverside Shakespeare,
1183.

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