“Oh, Horrible, Most Horrible!” Hamlet’s Telephone

Subsequent references will be to William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2006).Google Scholar

Subsequent references will be to Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 2.Google Scholar

On biblion meaning “niche” and indexing the book to the library, see Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 4–6.Google Scholar

Actors themselves, of course, may be described as “speaking properties.” They serve as relays for the vocal and gesture effects we name “character.” See Frances Teague, Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

On the function of writing in the play, see especially, Jonathan Goldberg, “Hamlet’s Hand” in Shakespeare’s Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 105–31;Google Scholar

Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe, “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004): 379–419;CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Margaret Ferguson, “Hamlet: Letters and Spirits,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985): 292–309;Google Scholar

Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).Google Scholar

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (London: The Grove Press, 1994).Google Scholar

In the “Epistle Dedicatory” to the book, Dover Wilson recounts, uncannily, his telephonic recruitment to the task of solving Hamlet’s cruxes. He reads W. W. Greg’s “Hamlet’s hallucination,” which posits the ghost as hallucination and the dumb show as a moment that reveals Hamlet’s true madness, murderous intentions, and mistaking of the manner of his father’s murder. Dover Wilson’s career unfolds in repsonse to what he perceives as Greg’s attack on the linearity of the play, and he describes the way he parcels out the labor of canceling out Greg’s reading first into the monumental editing of the text and then the strategic splicing of the text with its performance so as to disambiguate the action. See John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 1–23, andGoogle Scholar

W. W. Greg, “Hamlet’s Hallucination,” Modern Language Review 12, no. 4 (October 1917): 393–426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Stephen Ratcliffe, Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet (Denver, CO: Counterpath Press, 2009).Google Scholar

See Linda Charnes, Hamlet’s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of the New Millennium (New York: Routledge, 2006).Google Scholar

Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).Google Scholar

Terrence Hawkes, That Shakespearean Rag: Essays on Critical Process (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 107–9. Hawkes’s essay sponsors a specular redescription of Hamlet spliced to a symptomatic reading of Dover Wilson’s “Pauline” recruitment. Refusing to positivize his reversal of the play as the “real” Hamlet, Hawkes offers readers instead the play’s doubleness or self-reversal as an insufficient product. It should be noted, however, that this self-reversing jouissance is funded by the absolute legibility of Dover Wilson’s ideological position to Hawkes. In effect, the textual density to Hamlet is rendered tolerable by the immediate readability of Dover Wilson.Google Scholar

Marjorie Garber reads Dover Wilson’s tussle with W. W. Greg as a form of “dull revenge,” discerning in the compulsive repetition and circulation of roles— “we have fought backwards and forwards over almost every line of [the play scene] as violently as ever Hamlet and Laertes passed at foils”— a basis of reading “literary scholarship and textual editing …themselves [as] species of revenge.” Marjorie Garber, “A Tale of Three Hamlets or Repetition and Revenge,” Shakespeare Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2010): 44, and Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

See Scott A. Trudell’s well-executed “The Mediation of Poesie: Ophelia’s Orphic Song,” Shakespeare Quarterly 63, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 46–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

On ash as a figure of forgetfulness, of the archive as also an anarchiving loss, see Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 100–101.Google Scholar

Jacques Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (within Such Limits),” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, eds. Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 333–34. While readers might expect us to cite Derrida’s Specters of Marx here, given its treatment of the Hamlet, we route the play through Derrida’s extended work on the figure of the archive. We go so far as to venture that Specters of Marx serves as a reduced treatment of the governing matrix of the play, one, perhaps, keyed to preserving the figure of a messianic futurity that in later Derridean texts receives a very different treatment by way of the figure of the archive and the afterlife. Key texts for us, among others, are Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); the essays and lectures gathered together as Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); and The Beast and the Sovereign, vols. 1 and 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009 and 2010). We take Derrida’s engagement with spectralization and temporality in Specters of Marx to constitute a case study of a larger argument in the making about cultural graphology. See Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2006).Google Scholar

Accordingly, we remain fascinated by and admiring of the work of sociologist of science Bruno Latour and his modeling of what amounts to a translational poetics that would depathologize concepts of mediation and mimesis but we are cautious with regard to the interpretive certainty or even “archive fever” his model produces when itself translated to media and literary studies. A strategic difference between the likes of Latour and those of us housed in the humanities resides in the way we find ourselves oriented to our objects of study. Tuned to things past— to the fragments of chains of making long severed, partially interrupted— and so to “actor networks,” to use Latour’s terms, that have dropped actants as they have added new ones, we are obliged to deal with the objects that result from these dropped connections. It is these texts or traces that we take as our points of departure. Our object remains always the archive of a practice, the remnants of some thing, which, by our joining, we re/activate. We must be alive then continuously to the ways the archive, itself an “actor-network” enables certain modes of joining and disables others, makes certain worlds or prospects un/thinkable. In our modeling of “Shakespeare” in this book, and of Hamlet in this chapter, we draw on Latour’s rich work but seek to do so in a nonsalvific, noncelebratory mode that remains tuned to the stakes of deconstructive reading (and not reading). Convenient points of arrival for firsttime readers of Latour might include Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto,” New Literary History 41, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 472–91; On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For an attempt to render Latour’s relation to Derridean deconstruction by way of the correlation between recipes and play texts as archival objects,Google Scholar

see Julian Yates, “Shakespeare’s Kitchen Archives,” in Speculative Medievalisms: A Discography, ed. The Petro-Punk Collective (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2013), 179–200.Google Scholar

On the spectral qualities of Horatio and for the turn to Horatio as privileged locus of critical interest for critics today, see Christopher Warley, “Specters of Horatio,” English Literary History 75, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 1023–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Our modeling Hamlet in relation to an infrastructure of survivance allies itself with many of the insights we find in Lee Edelman’s reading of the play in two overlapping essays: “Hamlet’s Wounded Name,” in ShakesQueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 97–105, which excerpts and augments from “Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That’s Out of Joint,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 148–69. Like Edelman, we read Hamlet as a structure that anarchives as it archives, that registers the structure of forgetting that obtains to any act of remembering, drawing on the same sense of the “anarchivic” and “anarchiviolithic” that he locates in Derrida’s Archive Fever (See Derrida, Archive Fever, 11; Edelman, “Against Survival,” 155). The question Edelman raises in the last line to his shortened essay and that we take up in this chapter replays Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy as asking “how [we may] resist survival’s archive, its consignation, by becoming what lets the future be and by being what lets [hinders] the future” (Edelman, “Hamlet’s Wounded Name,” 105). We read the play as already resisting this infrastructure, narrating its effects, and rending itself into a fragmented multimedia archive and its ash. While we admire Edelman’s unfailing critique of what he calls “the secularized messianicity of reproductive futurism” (Edelman, “Hamlet’s Wounded Name,” 105) and are sympathetic to his unfailing pursuit of a negativity that would decouple the future from its scripting by a past, we think it worth pointing out that his subordination of Derridean deconstruction to a Lacanian account of the Symbolic order tends to present as a desire for “cancellation” in all-out apocalyptic mode (see especially the reading of Archive Fever presented in Edelman, “Against Survival”). In presenting the play as multimedia archive, we seek to resist the attempt to derive from what remains, as we think Edelman wishes to do, a stable moral philosophical script, canceling out the play in order to posit a “pedagogy [that could] renounce the sublimation inherent in acts of reading, taking seriously the status of teaching as an impossible profession and assault on meaning, understanding, and value” (Edelman, “Against Survival,” 169). Sympathetic as we are to Edelman’s project, we think it is crucial to point out that here it produces a weak sovereignty over the play, leaving Hamlet behind, as it “lets” in the future constituted as a blank that Edelman begins to fill in. Such sovereignty is underwritten further by a reading that chooses Folio over Quarto in deciding on the text of the play, treating the text therefore as essentially stable. The key lines, in both essays, which capture the tenor of the paternal “screwing” to which Hamlet is subject, read as follows: “O God, Horatio, what a wounded name, / Things thus unknown, shall I live behind” (5.2.328–29). “Live behind” captures the temporality of a present hostage to a future that is already canceled out by the repetition of its past. But in Q1 the second line reads “shall I leave behind,” which parses Hamlet’s predicament slightly differently. We are not out to derail the political import of Edelman’s position with textual quibbles (as if we could), but we do think that the textual wobble he avoids here suggests that stitching Derridean deconstruction to Lacanian psychoanalysis may prove counter-(which is to say, all too) productive, sedating the text in order to assert an ownership of “place” that deconstruction will not allow. As Derrida speculates in Archive Fever, returning to the position he ventures in Of Grammatology, psychoanalysis would be very different had Freud had email rather than print as his metaphoric substrate. Under such circumstances, we wonder whether the future as such may be thought of outside of its metaphoric media, which leads us to provincialize psychoanalysis as a media-specific model tuned to the writing machines of one order of survivance. The challenge remains, we think, to read and write beyond and without and within still other terms. See Derrida, Archive Fever, 16–18; and also Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 84–85, where psychoanalysis is offered as a study of the ways in which we are cathected to certain writing instruments. On “reproductive futurism,” see also Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

On the rebranding / business model as a way of metaphorizing issues of sovereignty in the play, see Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000).Google Scholar

On the arbitrary quality of “sovereign violence” or law-making violence, see Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” [1921] in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 236–52. See also key readings by Giorgio Agamben, placing Benjamin’s essay in conversation withGoogle Scholar

Nazi Jurist Carl Schmitt in The State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), and Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). See also Jacques Derrida’s reading ofGoogle Scholar

Benjamin in “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–67. We take the play already to imagine what it means in Agam-ben’s terms to live a “bare life,” a becoming “wetware,” mediator, or relay to an elaborated infrastructure / media platform that may continue to deploy your voice or body after your death. On the need to imagine such a relation and Agamben’s inability to do so, see Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 305–34.Google Scholar

On erasable wax tablets, writing tables, or “table books,” see Stallybrass, Chartier, Mowery, and Wolfe, “Hamlet’s Tables,” 379–419. See also, Roger Chartier, Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 22–24.Google Scholar

See Harold Jenkins’s illuminating appendix to the swearing in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1982).Google Scholar

On Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba, see the special issue of Telos dedicated to the text edited by Julia Reinhard Lupton, Telos 153 (Winter 2010), and also Julia Reinhard Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).Google Scholar

On time effects (past, present, future) as products of a media platform or “actor network,” see Bruno Latour, Aramis: Or the Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 88–89.Google Scholar

Derrida, Archive Fever, 62–63. See also Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), where Derrida writes, “A witness and a testimony must always be exemplary. They must first be singular, whence the necessity of the instant: I am the only one to have seen this unique thing, the only one to have heard or to have been put in the presence of this or that, at a determinate, indivisible instant” (40). The logical requirement of exemplarity installs the necessity of substitutability within the very irreplaceability of testimony. “The exemplarity of the ‘instant,’” explains Derrida, “that which makes it an ‘instance,’ if you like, is that it is singular and universalizable …This is the testimonial condition” (41). It is easy, as Derrida notes, to assume that this techne refers to the uncertain agencies of “cameras, videos, typewriters, and computers,” but “as soon as the sentence is repeatable, that is, from its origin, the instant it is pronounced and becomes intelligible, thus idealizable, it is already instrumentizable, and thus affected by technology. And virtuality” (42).Google Scholar

Wilson and Greg both note the strangeness of the dumb show in their readings. See also Dieter Mehl, The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention (London: Methuen, 1965).Google Scholar

In A Politics of the Scene, Paul Kottman appears to solve the problem of the relation between the dumb show and the Murder of Gonzago by privileging the “essential” aspect of “affirmative speech or action …for the experience of the theater.” Crucially, for his reading, Claudius reacts to the play but not the dumb show because it repeats something that was mimed “with speech.” It is that fact of speech that gets Claudius’s attention— making the play, not the dumb show, effective. In grander, philosophical terms, following Hannah Arendt, for Kottman, what matters is the fact of speech, here and now, as we’re on the scene, making the scene, inducting one another as witnesses to what is being said— even if we are never able to agree on what it was exactly that we heard. For him, such a colloquy defines the “politics of the scene” and remains a site of potentially productive political action, for he asserts the constitutive fact of speaking, of presence, of being “on the scene” as crucial to the “convoking” of a community. It’s worth pointing out that, in this model, the argument holds only to the extent that we understand the attribute of speech to be a preverbal or phatic guarantee of the human. Such a position, we feel, appealing as it may be, stores up as many problems for itself as it solves, erasing the problem of “noise” or static, of phone merely and logos, as necessary exclusions to a scene of communication. See Paul Kottman, A Politics of the Scene (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 1–26, 139–65. On the dumb show, see especially 163–65.Google Scholar

For a fine account of how the scene is supposed to go based on a reading of Hamlet as embarked on humanist-fueled understanding of theater as quasi-pedagogical reenact-ment, see William N. West, Theaters and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 122–28.Google Scholar

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 85.Google Scholar

Here the play reworks what Alan Stewart calls “the oldest letter story in the book”— the story of Bellerophon dispatched with letters naming his death from the Iliad. For Stewart’s insightful reading of the scene see Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 262, and 261–94 generally.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Margreta De Grazia’s Hamlet without Hamlet stands for us as the superlative critical enactment of the drive Hamlet 2 stages, exorcizing the “materiality” of the text from all spectrality, if not all spectral editing. On the “x without x” formulation de Grazia uses in her title, see Blanchot and Derrida, Demeure, 88–89. Other notable unHamletings that supplement and so supplant would include John Updike’s prequel Gertrude and Claudius (New York: Random House, 2001) and the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead, directed by Julian Marsh (2009).Google Scholar

The best reading of the film thus far, which attends very carefully to its gender and racial politics and topicality, is Courtney Lehmann’s “‘Brothers’ before Others: The Once and Future Patriarchy in Hamlet 2,” Journal of Narrative Theory 41, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 421–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

The Works of Thomas Nashe, reprint, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), vol. 2, 211. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Nashe’s argument seems to transfer St. Augustine’s reformulation of prostitution as sex or desire work in De Ordine II.iv to public theater. Understandably, Nashe’s defense has received much critical attention. For reasons of space it is not possible to provide a list of all the relevant critical commentaries here. Especially notable however, in our view, is William N. West’s discussion of Nashe’s faith in humanist conceptions of theater as providing exempla in Theaters and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe, 117–19, and Paul Yachnin’s pointed reading of Nashe contra Philip Stubbes so as to expose their shared sense of the power of theater to affect its audience. Yachnin will, of course, argue that this efficacy was judged to have been misplaced in the 1590s and beyond, hence his modeling of the later theater as “powerless” in Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 1–2.Google Scholar

John Michael Archer, Citizen Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

On Shakespeare’s “presentation fantasies” and the sonnets as an experiement in creating a “quasi-human” technology of preservation, see Aaron Kunin, “Shakespeare’s Preservation Fantasies,” PMLA 124, no. 1 (2009): 92–106, and for an allied treatment,CrossRefGoogle Scholar

see Julian Yates, “Shakespeare’s Sonnet Machines,” in ShakesQueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 333–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Working through the secularization of theological forms of predication as they migrate into secular forms of governance, Jacques Lezra argues that the impossible, self-predicating “logic of sovereignty requires [an order of statements,] …what we may now call a past contingent: the capacity to make statements of fact or descriptions …into propositions susceptible to revision: because it could have happened otherwise, an act or a decision that I now take, or that the group I am part of now takes, can make it have happened otherwise,” can revise and revive, in other words, different pasts in and by our present. “The tense form,” he observes, “is impossible; the concept, unthinkable.” And to embark on the “decoupling of sovereignty from the onto-theology its performance requires, is to invite madness, conflicting stories, the over-and underdetermination of cultural narratives, mere literature.” Nashe’s defense, we think, unfolds on this ground, albeit in winking mode, offering up theater as one point of enunciation from which what Lezra calls the “modern experience of terror” might issue. See Jacques Lezra, Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Richard Doyle, Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 86–87.Google Scholar

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. René Weis (Arden Edition Third Series, 2012), 2.2.33–34. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.Google Scholar