Abstract
The opening act of Hamlet directs our attention to the nature of the Ghost and the disorienting story it has to tell, while more subtly setting the stage with a different kind of disorientation, that of place. The first scene opens with the question “Who’s there?” (1.1.1) and much critical discussion has focused on the various personal identifications the “who” might call into question in the play. Maynard Mack noted that “Hamlet’s world is pre-eminently in the interrogative mood,” calling attention to how the play “reverberates with questions, anguished, meditative, alarmed.”1 Rather than the “who” of the opening line of the play, I shall take up the question of “there” with its spatial indeterminacy, particularly as it exists for playgoers as a locational marker and also as an important part of the interrogative mood of the play. In many instances, characters’ spatial interactions establish the position of the playgoers; this spatial specificity develops the narrative momentum of a play, a momentum toward the final stasis of the ending.
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Notes
Maynard Mack, “The World of Hamlet,” Yale Review 41.4 (1951–1952): 502–523, 504.
Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in The Oxford Authors: Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 243.
Harley Granville-Barker, Preface to Hamlet, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 9.
Paul Woodruff, The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 109.
Bruce R. Smith, “Taking the Measure of Global Space,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43.1 (2013), 26–48, 36.
D.A. Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare (New York: Anchor, Doubleday, 1969), xxi. I quote from the revised and expanded third edition of the book, which was originally published in one volume (New York: Sands and Company, 1938).
Albert Cook has noted (in relation to this passage) that the boundary “between life and death” is “freely crossed by the ghost who confronts those on stage by evading an ordinary stabilization in space”; Albert Cook, “Space and Culture,” New Literary History 29.3 (1998), 551–572, 565.
David Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 82. Hillman argues that the “paradigmatic sceptic’s question of what lies behind or within […] occupies a number of the play’s characters” and suggests that these “within and without” boundaries of bodies in Hamlet connects with what he terms “visceral knowledge” (82).
Emrys Jones, in Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), traces connections between this mother-son scene and Shakespeare’s earlier mother-son scene between the Bastard and Lady Faulconbridge in King John (100),
Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Hamlet (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 657.
Granville-Barker, Preface to Hamlet, 111. John Russell Brown remarks that “he may catch hold of his mother roughly and this makes her cry out for help […]. But his very look and tone of voice may be sufficiently frightening to motivate this reaction.” John Russell Brown, The Shakespeare Handbooks: Hamlet (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 90–91. In their third series Arden edition (London: Arden/Thomson, 2006), Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor note that while the lines indicate that Hamlet forces her to sit, “theatrical tradition has not needed the authority of this text to inject violence, often erotically charged, into this scene.” This note appears at 3.4.17 in their edition.
Brown notes on 3.4.89–103 that “By some point – varying with each change of cast and probably, with each performance – Gertrude has listened and her mind has changed” (Brown, Handbook: Hamlet, 92). In Simon Russell Beale’s discussion of playing Hamlet in John Caird’s production (2000–2001), he describes how “We found that, by the end of a scene in which an important relationship could have been destroyed, precisely the opposite has happened.” Simon Russell Beale, “Hamlet” in Players of Shakespeare 5, ed. Robert Smallwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 145–177, 173.
Michael Pennington, Hamlet: A User’s Guide (New York/London: Limelight Editions/Nick Hern Books, 1996), 102.
This connection between banishment and imprisonment demonstrates a different conflation than the one made by Mowbray in Richard II. Importantly, it is in Mowbray’s response to his own banishment that he calls it an imprisonment; see Chapter 2. Patricia Parker’s illuminating work on “delation” and “dilation” shows another way that spatial confusions (between enclosures and revelations) function in the play. Parker’s larger argument ties these resonances and confusions to concerns in the period with views of bodies, espionage, and expansion of geographical knowledge. Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Andrew Hiscock, The Uses of this World: Thinking Space in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cary and Jonson (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), 24.
John Russell Brown, “The Setting for Hamlet,” in Stratford Upon Avon Studies 5: Hamlet, eds. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), 163–184, 171.
Ewbank’s larger argument focuses on questions of “translation” and how much in the play is determined through language and the attempts to translate, which often can be read as a failure of language itself. Inga-Stina Ewbank, “Hamlet and the Power of Words,” Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977): 56–78, 60.
Robert E. Wood has noted that Hamlet’s assertion that “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams” (2.2. 254–6) uses “metaphoric language drawn from the lively Renaissance debate concerning the boundedness of space.” Robert E. Wood, “Space and Scrutiny in Hamlet,” South Atlantic Review 52.1 (1987), 25–42, 36.
Mariko Ichikawa’s Shakespearean Entrances carefully explores the configuration of stage movement and the passage of time on stage particularly as it relates to entrances and exits. The movement I am interested in here also considers the passage of time as offstage characters perform certain actions. Mariko Ichikawa, Shakespearean Entrances, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Stephen Booth, “On the Value of Hamlet,” in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, ed. Norman Rabkin (New York: Colombia University Press, 1969), 74–93. The essay is reprinted in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ed. David Scott Kastan (London: Prentice Hall, 1995), 19–42. I quote from Kastan’s reprint where these quotations appear on page 22.
C. Walter Hodges, Enter the Whole Army: A Pictorial Study of Shakespearean Staging: 1576–1616 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 119–121.
Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967) takes advantage of this absence of location and opens with “two Elizabethans passing the time in a place with no visible character.” Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967), 11.
The quick succession of short scenes after Antony’s preparation for battle in 4.4 includes multiple locations and very short bursts of activity. John Wilders’ Arden edition marks a total of fifteen scenes in the fourth act; the Oxford text edited by Wells and Taylor includes sixteen through a different act break. John Wilders, ed., Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare (London: Arden/Routledge, 1995).
Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works by William Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
E.T. Schell, “Who Said That—Hamlet or Hamlet?,” Shakespeare Quarterly 24.2 (1973), 135–146, 145.
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© 2014 Darlene Farabee
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Farabee, D. (2014). Narrative and Spatial Movement in Hamlet . In: Shakespeare’s Staged Spaces and Playgoers’ Perceptions. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137427151_4
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