Hamlet in the Modern Mind

The following assembles raw material for a lecture on the uses and influence of Hamlet in Western thought over the last two centuries. I was greatly assisted by an essay by Margreta de Grazia, referenced several times in the following and available at eserver.org/emc/1-2/gdegrazia.html.

INTRODUCTION
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is indisputably one of the most important dramatic works in the history of Western literature. It has been staged countless times, filmed often, and commented upon too much to list. But Hamlet, unlike many other dramatic works, has not been the province of critics alone, but has been an important source for reflection and analysis among psychologists and philosophers as well. (Influence and influenced are difficult to disentangle here. As Margreta de Grazia points out, Coleridge coined the term “psycho-analytic” in the context of analyzing dramatic characters. Did Freud then interpret Hamlet psychoanalytically, or did Hamlet force psychoanalysis on Freud?) Since 1800, the play, and perhaps even more the hero of the play, has, when interpreted in a particular fashion, become emblematic of the modern condition, whether that is interpreted in Romantic, Freudian, Nietzschean, Hegelian, or other fashion. The focal question in many of these analyses has been the question of Hamlet’s delay.

HAMLET BEFORE 1800
Hamlet has not always been so highly regarded as it is today. Abraham Wright, writing in the 1630s, called it “an indifferent play, the lines but mean.” And Hamlet has not always been interpreted as it has been since the Romantic turn – Schlegel and Goethe in Germany, Coleridge in England.

Prior to 1800, it appears that Hamlet as a character was not considered problematic. Samuel Johnson’s objections to the play have little to do with Hamlet’s melancholy or his intellectualism. Rather, the objections have to do with plotting and probabilities and poetic justice. “The action,” Johnson wrote, “is indeed for the most part in continual progression, but there are some scenes which neither forward nor retard it. Of the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause, for he does nothing which he might not have done with the reputation of sanity. He plays the madman most, when he treats Ophelia with so much rudeness, which seems to be useless and wanton cruelty.” He saw problems with the hero, but they were not due to some character flaw in Hamlet: “Hamlet is, through the whole play, rather an instrument than an agent. After he has, by the stratagem of the play, convicted the King, he makes no attempt to punish him, and his death is at last effected by an incident which Hamlet has no part in producing.”

Johnson did not like the end for several reasons. First, “The catastrophe is not very happily produced; the exchange of weapons is rather an expedient of necessity, than a stroke of art. A scheme might easily have been formed, to kill Hamlet with the dagger, and Laertes with the bowl.” Perhaps more importantly, “The poet is accused of having shewn little regard to poetical justice, and may be charged with equal neglect of poetical probability. The apparition left the regions of the dead to little purpose; the revenge which he demands is not obtained but by the death of him that was required to take it; and the gratification which would arise from the destruction of an usurper and a murderer, is abated by the untimely death of Ophelia, the young, the beautiful, the harmless, and the pious.”

In focusing on problems of plot, Johnson was following a traditional line of criticism that goes back to what appears to be the first criticism of Hamlet, George Stubbes’ Hamlet, Som Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark (1736). As summarized in an article by Margreta de Grazia, Stubbes recognized the delay of revenge as a problem, but saw it as a problem of plot not of character: “Shakespeare turned to an ‘old wretched Chronicler’ (Saxo Grammaticus) rather than one of ‘the noble Originals of Antiquity’ and ‘followed the plan so closely as to produce an Absurdity in the Plot.’ In Saxo’s Danish History and Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques, Hamlet’s counterpart must wait for years — until he has grown up — before he can exact revenge, and he bides his time for this long span by feigning idiocy. Having chosen to follow his source, Shakespeare was left with the problem that, ‘Had [Hamlet] gone naturally to work . . . there would have been an End of our Play.’ He, therefore, ‘was obliged to delay his Hero’s Revenge’; and he did so through the same expedient of the ‘antic disposition.’ Acknowledging the problem, Stubbes criticizes Shakespeare’s solution: he should ‘have found some good reason’ of his own to explain the lag, for as we shall see, his adoption of Saxo’s solution compromised the very dignity of the tragedy. Thus on the rare occasion when delay IS noted before the end of the eighteenth century, the problem is attributed to plot not character and it was resolved, albeit unsuccessfully, by introducing the device of the ‘antic disposition.’”

Nor was Hamlet seen as primarily an intellectual weighed down with a burden of action that he cannot bear. Rather, Hamlet seems to have been known more for the comic excess of his madness than for his brooding melancholy. Stubbes criticized the antic disposition both on grounds of implausibility and because it mangled the generic distinction of comedy and tragedy. Again in de Grazia’s summary: “Stubbes points out that while the ‘antic disposition’ takes care of the gap in the plot, it introduces an absurd implausibility: the madness Hamlet feigns to ward off suspicion ends up only attracting it. More important, as Stubbes notes throughout his Remarks, the ‘antic disposition’ repeatedly degrades the tragedy by introducing levity proper only to comedy. In terms of the generic considerations at the heart of his criticism, the device is a terrible ‘injudicious’ mistake: ‘The whole Conduct of Hamlet’s Madness, is, in my Opinion, too ludicrous.’ Throughout his evaluation of the play’s ‘Beauties and Faults,’ he censures the prince’s ‘Levity of Behaviour,’ beginning with ‘his light and even ludicrous Expressions’ to his companions after his solemn encounter with the ghost, expressions which he finds poorly ‘correspondent to the Dignity and Majesty of the preceding scene.’ He attributes Hamlet’s ‘satirical Reflections on Women’ to the same cause and complains ‘that it wants Dignity,’ just as Hamlet’s exchanges with Ophelia ‘want Decency.’ Hamlet’s jokey puns are particularly censured for their indecorum: his pun on ‘pipe’ (the badge, along with the tabor, of the clown) ‘is a great Fault, for it is too low and mean for a Tragedy’; so, too, his pun on Brutus’s ‘brute part’ is ‘intolerable,’ conjoining noble Roman republican with wild beast. Hamlet’s ‘pleasantry’ upon establishing the guilt of his uncle ‘is not a-propos,’ nor is his reflection on his killing of Polonius, nor ‘his tugging him away into another Room.’ Finally, while admitting its popularity on stage, he finds the jocularity of the grave-digger’s scene ‘unbecoming’ to tragedy. By censuring all manifestations of Hamlet’s antics, Stubbes ‘refines’ his character from the ‘barbarisms’ of the prior age, purging away the coarse, low, base, and mean. Having stigmatized all eruptions of Hamlet’s ‘idleness,’ Stubbes leaves the reader with a Hamlet worthy of a tragedy — princely, dignified, heroic and virtuous.”

Shakespeare, in Stubbes view, is left with two Hamlets – the clownish Hamlet of the antic disposition and the dignified prince: It is “as if we were to dress a Monarch in all his Robes, and then put a Fool’s Cap upon him.” Hamlet is a problem character and a problem play; but it is because of the dramatic and plotting issues not because Shakespeare was attempting to depict a new kind of sensibility.

ROMANTIC HAMLET
After 1800, Hamlet became an emblem of human existence in all sorts of guises, employed as a symbolic turning point in Western cultural history, whatever the character of that turning point might be. Is the main conflict of modern Europe a religious choice between Catholicism and Protestantism? Hamlet, the student of Wittenberg, symbolizes the paralyzing choice. Is the main mark of modernity a radical disjunction between subject and object? Decades before Descartes, Hamlet already represented the modern egocentric predicament. Is modern life characterized by nausea, tedium, and accedia? Why, so was Hamlet? Is modern existence caught haunted by specters of the past? The prince of Denmark preceded us all. Victor Hugo said it all in 1835: “Admirable power of genius! He make’s things higher than us which live like us. Hamlet, for instance, is as true as any of us and greater. Hamlet is colossal and yet real. For Hamlet is not you or I. He is every one of us. Hamlet is not a man; he is man.”

Coleridge (who, famously, declares that he had a bit of Hamlet in him) indicates this sea-change in interpretation in his 1818 lecture on Hamlet. According to Coleridge, “the character of Hamlet may be traced to Shakspere’s deep and accurate science in mental philosophy.” Specifically, “Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect; – for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action. Now one of Shakspere’s modes of creating characters is, to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself, Shakspere, thus mutilated or diseased, under given circumstances. In Hamlet he seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses, and our meditation on the workings of our minds, – an equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds. In Hamlet this balance is disturbed : his thoughts, and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities. This character Shakspere places in circumstances, under which it is obliged to act on the spur of the moment: Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve.”

Elsewhere, Coleridge put the point this way: “The poet places [Hamlet] in the most stimulating circumstances that a human being can be placed in. He is the heir-apparent of a throne: his father dies suspiciously; his mother excluded her son from his throne by marrying his uncle. This is not enough; but the Ghost of the murdered father is introduced to assure the son that he was put to death by his own brother. What is the effect upon the son? — instant action and pursuit of revenge? No: endless reasoning and hesitating.”

It is a small step from Coleridge to William Hazlitt’s claim that “it is we who are Hamlet.” Hazlitt went on to point out that in Hamlet Shakespeare has dramatized a common human experience, so that we cannot criticize the play “any more than we should know how to describe our own faces.” In short, “This play has a prophetic truth, which is above that of history. Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow of reflection, and thought himself ‘too much i’ th’ sun;’ whoever has seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious mists rising in his own breast, and could find in the world before him only a dull blank with nothing left remarkable in it; whoever has known ‘the pangs of despised love, the insolence of office, or the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes;’ he who has felt his mind sink within him, and sadness cling to his heart like a malady, who has had his hopes blighted and his youth staggered by the apparitions of strange things; who cannot well be at ease, while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose powers of action have been eaten up by thought, he to whom the universe seems infinite, and himself nothing; whose bitterness of soul makes him careless of consequences, and who goes to a play as his best resource is to shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock representation of them – this is the true Hamlet.”

“Like Hamlet without the Prince,” the saying goes. But around 1800 Hamlet was detached from his play, his sadness separated from the particular circumstances that produced it, and his intellectual paralysis elevated to an emblem of a particular kind of man, if not man in general. It is this detached Hamlet that has become the primary focal point for novelists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers. Theories of Hamlet’s delay, de Grazia suggests, became theories of human consciousness in general.

A HAMLET SAMPLER
Literary uses.
Many other writers allude directly and indirectly to Hamlet the play and Hamlet the prince. Melville’s Pierre tears up his copy of Hamlet while vowing to act on the new revelations concerning his dead father. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister aspires to produce Hamlet, Eliot alludes to Hamlet in his Prufrock and his Waste Land, and Kafka and Mallarme make use of the Hamlet character in their writing. This is not to mention those works overtly inspired by Hamlet, including Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Updike’s more recent Gertrude and Claudius.

Perhaps the most famous literary use of the play is in Joyce’s Ulysses. Not only is Stephen Daedalus (an intellectual searching for a father, burdened with the vocation to put right what is wrong with Irish letters) a Hamlet figure and not only is the novel pockmarked with quotations from Shakespeare’s play, but Daedalus offers an explicit theory about the origins of Hamlet. In the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter set at the National Library of Dublin, Stephen argues for an autobiographical interpretation of the play:

The autobiographical interpretation does not posit a breach between Shakespeare and his father: “A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father’s death. If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with thirtyfive years of life, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, with fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No. The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio’s Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?”

Rather, it is rivalry between Shakespeare and his brothers. Pointing to the recurring theme of three brothers in Shakespeare’s plays, Stephen argues as follows:

“—You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others? Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed Ann (what’s in a name?), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow. Richard the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered. The other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare’s reverence, the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of King Lear in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney’s Arcadia and spatchcocked on to a Celtic legend older than history?
— That was Will’s way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now combine a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith. Que voulez-vous? Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and makes Ulysses quote Aristotle.
— Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare, what the poor is not, always with him. The note of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Two Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe. It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of my lords bishops of Maynooth: an original sin and, like original sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in the world he has created, in Much Ado about Nothing, twice in As you like It, in The Tempest, in Hamlet, in Measure for Measure, and in all the other plays which I have not read.”

Psychological uses.
As for psychoanalysts, Freud himself devoted attention to Hamlet and inspired a disciple, Ernest Jones, to produce a paper, later published as a small book, on Hamlet and Oedipus. (Jacques Lacan, a latter-day doyen of psychoanalysis, also produced a lengthy analysis of the play.) Freud believed that he had found the solution to what Jones called the “sphinx” of literary-critical problems, the problem of Hamlet’s delay. Freud suggested that “The play is built up on Hamlet’s hesitations over fulfilling the task of revenge that is assigned to him; but its text offers no reasons or motives for these hesitations and an immense variety of attempts at interpreting them have failed to produce a result. According to the view which was originated by Goethe and is still the prevailing one today, Hamlet represents the type of man whose power of direct action is paralyzed by and excessive development of his intellect.”

Freud offered psychoanalytic explanations for Hamlet’s delay, claiming to demonstrate that Hamlet’s reasons are obscure not only to readers and viewers but to Hamlet himself, so thoroughly has he repressed certain desires. As he wrote to his colleague Wilhelm Fleiss in 1897, Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia showed all the symptoms of hysteria brought on by his repressed Oedipal feelings, and Hamlet, like hysterical patients in general, brought destruction down on himself: “Fleetingly the thought passed through my head that the same thing might be at the bottom of Hamlet as well. I am not thinking of Shakespeare’s conscious intention, but believe, rather, that a real event stimulated the poet to his representation, in that his unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero. How does Hamlet the hysteric justify his words, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all’? How does he explain his irresolution in avenging his father by the murder of his uncle—the same man who sends his courtiers to their death without a scruple and who is positively precipitate in murdering Laertes? How better than through the torment he suffers from the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same deed against his father out of passion for his mother, and—‘use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping?’ His conscience is his unconscious sense of guilt. And is not his sexual alienation in his conversation with Ophelia typically hysterical? And his rejection of the instinct that seeks to beget children? And, finally, his transferral of the deed from his own father to Ophelia’s? And does he not in the end, in the same marvelous way as my hysterical patients, bring down punishment on himself by suffering the same fate as his father of being poisoned by the same rival?”

Freud developed this further in Interpretation of Dreams, under the heading of “dreams of the deaths of beloved persons”:

“Another of the great poetic tragedies, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is rooted in the same soil as Oedipus Rex. But the whole difference in the psychic life of the two widely separated periods of civilization, and the progress, during the course of time, of repression in the emotional life of humanity, is manifested in the differing treatment of the same material. In Oedipus Rex the basic wish-phantasy of the child is brought to light and realized as it is in dreams; in Hamlet it remains repressed, and we learn of its existence- as we discover the relevant facts in a neurosis- only through the inhibitory effects which proceed from it. In the more modern drama, the curious fact that it is possible to remain in complete uncertainty as to the character of the hero has proved to be quite consistent with the over-powering effect of the tragedy. The play is based upon Hamlet’s hesitation in accomplishing the task of revenge assigned to him; the text does not give the cause or the motive of this hesitation, nor have the manifold attempts at interpretation succeeded in doing so. According to the still prevailing conception, a conception for which Goethe was first responsible. Hamlet represents the type of man whose active energy is paralyzed by excessive intellectual activity: ‘Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’ According to another conception. the poet has endeavoured to portray a morbid, irresolute character, on the verge of neurasthenia. The plot of the drama, however, shows us that Hamlet is by no means intended to appear as a character wholly incapable of action. On two separate occasions we see him assert himself: once in a sudden outburst of rage, when he stabs the eavesdropper behind the arras, and on the other occasion when he deliberately, and even craftily, with the complete unscrupulousness of a prince of the Renaissance, sends the two courtiers to the death which was intended for himself. What is it, then, that inhibits him in accomplishing the task which his father’s ghost has laid upon him? Here the explanation offers itself that it is the peculiar nature of this task. Hamlet is able to do anything but take vengeance upon the man who did away with his father and has taken his father’s place with his mother- the man who shows him in realization the repressed desires of his own childhood. The loathing which should have driven him to revenge is thus replaced by self-reproach, by conscientious scruples, which tell him that he himself is no better than the murderer whom he is required to punish. I have here translated into consciousness what had to remain unconscious in the mind of the hero; if anyone wishes to call Hamlet an hysterical subject I cannot but admit that this is the deduction to be drawn from my interpretation. The sexual aversion which Hamlet expresses in conversation with Ophelia is perfectly consistent with this deduction- the same sexual aversion which during the next few years was increasingly to take possession of the poet’s soul, until it found its supreme utterance in Timon of Athens. It can, of course, be only the poet’s own psychology with which we are confronted in Hamlet; and in a work on Shakespeare by Georg Brandes (1896) I find the statement that the drama was composed immediately after the death of Shakespeare’s father (1601)- that is to say, when he was still mourning his loss, and during a revival, as we may fairly assume, of his own childish feelings in respect of his father [this, NB, is the theory that Stephen Daedalus challenges in Joyce’s Ulysses – PJL]. It is known, too, that Shakespeare’s son, who died in childhood, bore the name of Hamnet (identical with Hamlet). Just as Hamlet treats of the relation of the son to his parents, so Macbeth, which was written about the same period, is based upon the theme of childlessness. Just as all neurotic symptoms, like dreams themselves, are capable of hyper-interpretation, and even require such hyper-interpretation before they become perfectly intelligible, so every genuine poetical creation must have proceeded from more than one motive, more than one impulse in the mind of the poet, and must admit of more than one interpretation. I have here attempted to interpret only the deepest stratum of impulses in the mind of the creative poet.”

In his 1910 essay, Jones, who claims to be closely following Freud, explains further: “As a child Hamlet had experienced the warmest affection for his mother, and this, as is always the case, had contained elements of a more or less dimly defined erotic quality. The presence of two traits in the Queen’s character go to corroborate this assumption, namely her markedly sensual nature, and her passionate fondness for her son.” Further, “Now comes the father’s death and the mother’s second marriage. The long “repressed” desire to take his father’s place in his mother’s affection is stimulated to unconscious activity by the sight of some one 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. Without his being at all aware of it these ancient desires are ringing in his mind, are once more struggling to find expression, and need such an expenditure of energy again to ‘repress’ them that he is reduced to the deplorable mental state he himself so vividly depicts.”

As a result of this configuration, Hamlet’s hatred for his uncle cannot be brought to consciousness without simultaneously bringing to consciousness his own incestuous longings. Thus, “Much as he hates [Claudius], he can never denounce him with the ardent indignation that boils straight from his blood when he reproaches his mother, for the more vigorously he denounces his uncle the more powerfully does he stimulate to activity his own unconscious and ‘repressed’ complexes. He is therefore in a dilemma between on the one hand allowing his natural detestation of his uncle to have free play, a consummation which would make him aware of his own horrible wishes, and on the other ignoring the imperative call for vengeance that his obvious duty demands. He must either realize his own evil in denouncing his uncle’s, or strive to ignore, to condone and if possible even to forget the latter in continuing to ‘repress’ the former; his moral fate is bound up with his uncle’s for good or ill.”

Philosophical uses.
Philosophers have also found the post-Romantic Hamlet to be an unavoidable character. Nietzsche saw Hamlet as an embodiment of the only proper response to the careless injustice of history, namely disgust. He compares the Dionysian man to Hamlet: “both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they fell it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no – true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.” Thus, “conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence; now he understands what is symbolic in Ophelia’s fate; now he understands the wisdom of the sylvan god, Silenus: he is nauseated.”

Derrida’s late Spectres of Marx even brings Marx into the discussion. Derrida picked up on the “specter” language at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto and his language of specters and ghosts in describing the commodity in The German Ideology and elsewhere. Derrida refuses to think that the spectral references are purely rhetorical, and speaks freely of Marx’s “spectrology”: “When Marx evokes spectres at the moment he analyses, for example, the mystical character or the becoming-fetish of the commodity, we should therefore not see in that only effects of rhetoric, turns of phrase that are contingent or merely apt to convince by striking the imagination. If that were the case, moreover, one would still have to explain their effectiveness in this respect. One would still have to reckon with the invincible force and the original power of the ‘ghost’ effect. One would have to say why it frightens or strikes the imagination, and what fear, imagination, their subject, the life of their subject, and so forth, are.”

Derrida ends this section of the book, a discussion of “ideology” with explicit references to Hamlet’s ghost: “If he loves justice at least, the ‘scholar’ of the future, the “Intellectual” of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let thus speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, spectres, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. They give us to rethink the “there” as soon as we open our mouths, even at a colloquium and especially when one speaks there in a foreign language:
Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.”
Walter Benjamin’s treatment of the development of German drama included meditations on Hamlet as the symbol of post-Reformation Europe, as de Grazia says, “mourning in the aftermath of the Reformation the loss of meaningful action to a Lutheran theology of solafiedeism, ‘the philosophy of Wittenberg.’ With the renunciation of good works, ‘Human actions were deprived of all value,’