Paul A. Kottman
Do not circulate or reproduce without author’s permission
Chapter Seven: Speaking As One Witness to Another: Hamlet and the “Cunning of
the Scene”
“And after we will both our judgment join
In censure of his seeming”
Hamlet, 3.2.86-7
Horatio is asked to be the other witness; and he ends up being the last survivor.
Just as Horatio is called upon to “approve the eyes” of Barnardo and Marcellus by
speaking to the Ghost on the ramparts at the opening of Hamlet, so too he is again asked
by Hamlet to observe Claudius during the Mousetrap in anticipation of a subsequent
“judgment” to be shared with his friend. On both scenes the testimonial address of the
other witness, Horatio, is desired and anticipated from the start by those with whom he
shares the scene. Indeed, the unfolding of Shakespeare’s Hamlet itself is commensurate
with the timeframe during which Horatio can potentially perform such an address. From
his early appearance on the ramparts until the ultimate deaths of those with whom he has
shared the stage – that is, until the moment at which he can no longer speak as one
witness to another but must instead address himself to an “unknowing world” – the
speech of one witness to another, which Horatio embodies, is a threshold that shapes the
drama’s horizon.1
1
William Shakespeare, Hamlet 5.2.384. All future citations of Hamlet are taken from The Norton
Shakespeare, edited by Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).
It could be said that every human scene of interaction presupposes, at least
implicitly, the anticipation of a ‘joined’ judgment after the fact between those who were
on the scene. Even when it does not come to pass, every scene leaves behind the
eventual possibility of an exchanged testimonial address between one witness and
another. In fact, I want to offer this as an axiomatic definition of a scene: a scene
emerges only insofar as it immediately leaves behind the potentiality for a future,
testimonial address between those who were on the scene. This anticipatory temporality - whereby a scene begins presently only insofar as the relation that it inaugurates hereand-now is, from the start, oriented (beyond all intentions or desires) toward a future
testimony among witnesses from the ‘original’ scene – is essential to a ‘politics of the
scene.’
Paradoxical as it may seem, therefore, the anticipation of this ex post facto
‘testimonial’ address is a crucial prerequisite for a scene’s very emergence. For, the
sense of a given scene lies in the relationships that it inaugurates, alters or affirms – and
therefore in the futurity, however limited, of these relationships. And, by the same token,
this very futurity is bound up with the anticipation of an address between actors and
witnesses, one that will look back on a prior scene or prior scenes. It as if the memory of
a shared scene were not only a matter of recalling to mind a past event, but rather,
anachronistically, of anticipating a ‘future’ scene -- an anticipation that is the ongoing
condition of possibility for any living relationship or meaningful polity.
Obviously, as everyday experience teaches us, not all interactions lead to ulterior
exchanges of “judgment.” Indeed, most probably do not: it is highly unlikely that each
request for information from a stranger on the street, that every silent nod of greeting or
exchange of pleasantries on a train will find itself revisited by the actors and witnesses
concerned. Were this not the case, daily life would be truly intolerable. However, this
does not change the fact that the potential for a future exchange of ‘judgment,’ a future
commemorating address between those on the scene, is born at the very moment of the
initial interaction. Every scene, every single action, structurally anticipates the eventual
possibility of a subsequent judgment or judgments, actively exchanged by at least two of
those who were on the scene.
Ongoing dialogue in general depends upon this
anticipation, insofar as the interlocution will eventually have occasion to refer back, at
least implicitly, to its own history. This anticipation is a guiding pre-supposition of our
legal system and our courtrooms, as well as of our theaters, schools, places of worship
and every other public institution.2 It is as if human scenes of interaction anticipate their
own futurity by presuming not only the ontological survival of more than one witness,
but moreover by enabling those witnesses – at the very moment at which they become
“those witnesses” -- to actively address one another in memory of the scene.
Where there is only one survivor, can there have been a scene? What a murderer
leaves behind – the so-called ‘scene of the crime,’ or of a catastrophe – is in the final
analysis the mere trace of a scene, one whose features must henceforth be read,
deciphered or given over to the detective work of legibility and speculation. Hereafter
the meaning of ‘what happened’ comes to be shaped by those who arrived after the fact,
rather than by the speech of the participants themselves. There follows deliberation,
narratives, judgments, and rational reflection. Indeed, the work of reading begins in
2
The opposite of such public institutions would not be ‘private’ clubs or societies, but rather something
like the mysteries of Eleusis, for whom the sacred may have been essentially unspeakable [arrheton] and
whose rituals did not, perhaps, anticipate future testimony among witnesses. See Walter Burkett, Greek
Religion, translated by John Raffan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 276; also 285-90.
earnest above all when there are no longer at least two witnesses, in whose address the
living sense of the interaction might find its affirmation. Where there are not, or where
there are no longer, at least two witnesses who can address one another with regard to the
interactions on a particular scene, it is as if that scene has vanished from the earth and lost
its living sense. From then on there can be no ‘joined’ judgment. Whatever happened is
either forgotten or becomes another fact, event or collection of traces to be archived,
debated or disputed by all those who were not on the scene.
This ‘joined’ judgment is therefore of an entirely different order from the
understanding provided by the scholar, archivist or archaeologist who was not on the
scene, and is even of a different order from the narrative testimony provided by an eyewitness for the benefit of those who were not there, e.g. for the benefit of future
generations – “th’yet unknowing world” as Horatio calls his audience at the close of
Hamlet. As Primo Levi makes clear in his own writings – which are exemplary in this
regard – there is a fundamental distinction between the desire to “bear witness” for others
in general, and the desire to address oneself to those Germans who were on the scene:
“those,” as Levi tersely calls them.3
Thus, in order to understand the speech of one witness to another – the anticipated
speech that is the very pre-condition of a human scene – we need to first distinguish this
speech from classical narration; that is, from the act of bearing witness to a sequence of
actions for an audience that was not on the scene.
Beyond Narration
3
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 168. See my remarks on Levi in the Introduction.
“Do you hear, let them be well used, for
they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.
After your death you were better have a bad epitaph
than their ill report while you live”
Hamlet 2.2.519-522
A spoken tale, or oral narration, is perhaps the most common way in which a
series of actions is brought to speech. In Homeric epic, the narration is understood to
originate with the Muse – the daughter of Mnemosyne, who, from her divine perspective,
witnesses the actions of the Trojan war and conserves them in their totality in her perfect
memory. Her eyewitness memory and testimony are, precisely, that which is denied to
future auditors of the Homeric tale:
Sing to me now, you Muses who hold the halls of Olympus!
You are goddesses, you are everywhere, you know all things –
All we hear is the distant ring of glory, we know nothing –
Who were the captains of Achaea? Who were the kings?4
The perfect memory of the Muse – which sees and knows “all things” – cannot be fully
rendered in human speech; this is why the Homeric bard must pull from the totality of all
the actions the unified thread of a story, a mythos that then becomes ‘history.’ “As eyewitness and source” of the narration, the Muse is not the “author but simply the one who
tells the story because she was present at its happening” – she is capable of testifying to a
series of actions precisely where no living human being is capable of telling the story. 5
The very source of the epic, therefore, is the transmission of a single, privileged
eyewitness -- destined to others who are not themselves witnesses.
4
5
Homer, Iliad Book 2, vv. 484-486, translated by Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1990).
Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, 96-7.
According to Arendt’s suggestive interpretation of Homeric epic, classical narration
is the discursive revelation of ‘who’ someone is, or was. “Who somebody is or was,” she
writes, “we can know only by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero – his
biography.” Her analysis of narration – which, like many other aspects of The Human
Condition, reworks and revises Aristotle’s reflections on human actions and poetry -follows from the presentation of the hero in Homeric narration.6 That is, she starts from
the Greek hero’s desire that his exploits -- which come to form the mythos of the tale -be immortalized in narration after his death.7
The “paradigmatic significance” of
Achilles in this regard reveals “a desire (which is, in truth, rather virile) that combines the
challenge of death with a fame that survives it.”8 Indeed, the fame bestowed by narration
is, as Arendt puts it, “bought only at the price of life.”9 Thus, the meaning of the hero’s
actions is not revealed in a subsequent address between witnesses on the scene of those
actions, but rather post mortem; death appears as the horizon from which the meaning of
narrative speech springs. “Death is the sanction for everything that the storyteller can
tell,” as Walter Benjamin puts it, “he has borrowed his authority from death.”10
The point, for our purposes in any event, is that classical narration presumes that the
addressees of the narration exclude the protagonist of the story himself.11 Moreover, in
6
Arendt, The Human Condition, 186 and passim. Arendt’s privileging of the Homeric hero has led some
of her readers to accuse her of advocating a certain form of elitism. My colleague, the philosopher Agnes
Heller, nicely summarized this exasperation with Arendt by asking me one day why this “smart girl”
[Arendt] was so enamored of a “spoiled young brat” like Achilles. By contrast Shakespeare – she went on
to suggest -- knew just how to take measure of Achilles in his Troilus and Cressida.
7
Arendt, The Human Condition, 186; see also Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood.
8
Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, 29. For more on the “paradigmatic
significance” of Achilles, see Arendt, The Human Condition, 194.
9
Arendt, The Human Condition, 194.
10
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” from Selected Writings Volume 3 (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 151.
11
The most significant exception – an exception that, in a sense, confirms the rule – is the eighth book of
Homer’s Odyssey, wherein Odysseus, incognito, encounters the tale of his own life as recounted by the
principle, the audience of the tale is not made up of contemporaries, co-actors,
acquaintances or peers of the hero -- but rather composed of future generations to whom
the hero’s fame extends as a kind of challenge to the power that death holds over his own
life. As the figuration of the bard in Homer illustrates, classical narration is a testimony
destined for those who, precisely, are themselves incapable of speaking as witnesses to
the events in question. In a sense, Aristotle’s own remarks on mythos, too, underscore
the structural generality of the audience – for, he writes, “the plot-structure ought to be so
composed that… anyone who hears the events which occur experiences terror and pity as
a consequence of the events themselves.”12
If classical narration unfolds upon a scene where it does not matter, in principle,
who is listening – since the tale of the hero, told posthumously, ought to be capable of
touching everyone – it is striking that Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as I will show shortly,
offers virtually nothing but scenes of speaking whereupon it matter deeply who is
listening, in life. Indeed, much of the play’s action seems to involve the performance of
speech for certain ears as opposed to others.
By focusing in this chapter on Shakespeare’s presentation of the speech of ‘one
witness to another,’ I want not simply to outline a generic contrast between classical
narration and Hamlet – although I do think that a certain formal break with classical
bard Demodokus at the court of the Phaekians. This scene is cited by Aristotle as an instance of
recognition through memory, Poetics 1455a3-4. Arendt refers to this scene from the Odyssey as the poetic
origins of history as a human mode of consciousness; see, Between Past and Future, 45. For a more
elaborate reading of the scene, see Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, 17-33.
12
Aristotle, Poetics 1453b5. My emphasis.
narration is a key to the play’s singular theatrical force. 13 More particularly, I also hope
to show how Shakespeare’s play might allow us to articulate a salutary shift from the
heroic struggle to overcome mortality through epic narrative towards a living desire that
sustains and prolongs the living sense of a given scene amongst participants who can still
address one another in life. Indeed, I hope to show how Hamlet might help us to perceive
this shift as underwriting a ‘politics of the scene,’ whose horizon of meaning is not deathdefying tales but rather life-affirming speech.
If the Homeric epic “was intended to perpetuate the immortality of the hero” by
redeeming death in narration, then the speech of one witness to another alludes instead to
the absolute mortality of the witnesses and their scenes of interaction – and this mortality
is, in Shakespeare’s play, utterly without redemption.14
Not their deaths, but rather their living interactions and interlocutions, form the
horizon of meaning of the lives that are lived in Hamlet. Hamlet’s dead father figures in
the drama not as a deceased hero who survives thanks to the remembrance provided by
the classical tale. Old Hamlet does not ‘conquer death’ in the manner of Achilles, nor is
his story simply ‘told’ in the narrative style of Andrea’s Ghost in Thomas Kyd’s Spanish
Tragedy (1587), who speaks autobiographically to the general public.
Rather, Old
Hamlet’s ghost actively returns, silently at first, in a “questionable shape” in order,
eventually, to command urgently through the spoken word that his son -- and, so far as
we know, no one else -- “remember” him. Like the paradigmatic Greek hero, the Ghost
seems terrified of oblivion, of being forgotten – however, unlike Achilles, Old Hamlet’s
13
I tried to demonstrate this in my essay “Sharing Visions, Interrupting Speech: Hamlet’s Spectacular
Community,” Shakespeare Studies, vol. 36 (1998). And I will incorporate part of this demonstration, reelaborating it along the way, into the reading of Hamlet that follows in this chapter.
14
Citation taken from Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul
Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 102.
Ghost does not express a desire to be remembered by future generations. 15 Old Hamlet
seems wholly unconcerned with his place in posterity; instead, he addresses himself with
great urgency to Hamlet alone.16 Moreover, rather than demand that his son tell the “as
yet unknowing world” the murdered king’s story, the Ghost asks his son – and his son
alone -- to lend him “serious hearing” and to “remember” him. The desire for “eternal
fame,” the heroic victory over death, is here replaced by a Ghost, condemned to a
purgatorial “prison-house,” who desires remembrance exclusively in the “distracted
globe” of the one to whom he now speaks, namely, his son: “List, list, O list!/ If thou
didst ever thy dear father love – “... “Remember me.” (1.5.22-3, 91). Indeed, the burden
Hamlet must henceforth bear is defined not by ‘what’ he has to remember, by some
message that he must relay to others -- but rather by the fact that he, and he alone, lives
on under this paternal command to remember his father.
In the world of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, speech does not immortalize the dead for
posterity, nor does speaking bestow “eternal fame.” Rather, the act of speaking seems to
constantly encounter the death of the other as the limit of the very meaning of speaking.
For, the meaning of speech in Hamlet arises not – as it does in classical narration – from
its capacity to transmit the meaning of a dead hero’s life to future generations; rather,
15
Stephen Greenblatt relates the particular anxiety expressed by Old Hamlet – that is, an anxiety regarding
the remembrance of the dead by the living that survive them – to “the issue of remembrance that… lay at
the heart of the crucial early sixteenth-century debate about Purgatory.” Greenblatt’s deeply suggestive
analysis lends some crucial historical support to my reading here, insofar as it seems clear that the Ghost’s
anxiety about remembrance concerns not “eternity” but rather “some term.” Purgatory as a theological
doctrine might be understood – from the perspective I am proposing here -- as a specific expression of an
anxiety about the extent to which one ‘lives on’ not in perpetuity but above all in the memory of those with
whom one shared the world-stage, those with whom one could speak as one witness to another. See
Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Chapter Five.
16
Of course, one could argue that Shakespeare’s play Hamlet itself (along with earlier versions of the story)
is the way in which Old Hamlet comes to attain immortal fame, just as Achilles finds fame through
Homer’s narration. However, and this is my point, Achilles is represented within Homer’s tale as
expressing a desire for, and anticipation of, posthumous fame; whereas Old Hamlet is represented by
Shakespeare as desiring to speak to his son alone.
what matters is being able to address, here-and-now, those with whom one shares or has
shared the world-stage. It is as if speaking were not worth the trouble unless the auditors
are precisely those and not others – “the ears are senseless that should give us hearing,”
says the English ambassador, upon seeing the dead bodies strewn about Elsinore, “where
should we have our thanks?” (5.2.374-7).
Indeed, it seems as if death itself in Hamlet marks not only the inevitable return of
the human body to worms and earth – one of Hamlet’s favorite topics -- but moreover the
truncation of interlocution, the impossibility of ever again hearing the voice emit from
someone with whom one had shared the world-stage. “That skull had a tongue in it, and
could sing once,” quips Hamlet to the Gravedigger, as he plays with an anonymous skull
before uncovering the remains of someone that he had as a child played with, Yorick. “I
knew him, Horatio,” remarks Hamlet before addressing the decaying remains of his dead
acquaintance directly, “Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs…?” (5.1.74,
178, 183-4). What gives this exchange its peculiar combination of uneasy humor and
unexpected poignancy is not simply the empirical fact of the rotting skull, which Hamlet
had not been able to identify as belonging to the dead Yorick without the Gravedigger’s
help -- but rather Hamlet’s direct address to the ossified prop where once “hung those
lips” capable of speech. There is apparently a crucial difference to Hamlet between, on
the one hand, the endless corpses that litter the earth – whether the anonymous skull that
Hamlet watches the gravedigger toss in the air before stumbling upon “poor Yorick,” or
the bodies of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar “dead and turn’d to clay” – and, on
the other hand, the still (though barely) identifiable remains of someone Hamlet himself
knew.
If death has a sense for the living in this strange scene, beyond serving as a grim
reminder of our own unavoidable rendezvous with the soil and its vermin, then this sense
appears to arise from the severance of the interlocution between those who had once
shared the world-stage. To the slight extent to which death is represented by Hamlet as
more than sheer bodily decomposition – a persistent figuration in the play that allows
Hamlet, shortly hereafter, to speculate on the “noble dust” of Alexander “stopping a
bung-hole” – it can be faintly glimpsed in his address to Yorick. For Hamlet speaks not
only of Yorick, but also speaks to his remains – so, while the encounter with Yorick’s
corpse invokes the relentless return of dust to dust, this encounter goes beyond the
morbid talk of decomposing flesh. Instead, the uncovering of Yorick’s skull compels
Hamlet to reflect, albeit momentarily, upon what it means to lose this one, someone with
whom he had shared, however briefly or casually, the world-stage. The jokes that
Hamlet tells to Yorick’s skull -- “Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chopfallen?”, presumably the sort of jest that Yorick himself used to perform – are of course
destined to receive no witty reply from the addressee. But they are nevertheless jests
that, we might surmise Hamlet knows, the jester would have heard and appreciated in a
way that no other would. Speaking to the skull, Hamlet addresses “dust,” the “earth;” but
he addresses this dust, this earth, with the speech of one witness to another, without hope
of a reply. Human death – if it is more than the sheer dissolution of flesh into dust –
marks the termination of speech among witnesses, the loss of interaction with those with
whom one shared the world-stage.
Thus, death in Hamlet does not sanction the meaning of spoken narration, as in
classical storytelling, but in fact appears as the horizon at which, emptily, only classical
narration remains. The play itself, Shakespeare’s longest, comes to a close precisely
when nothing remains to be spoken, save the classical narration from the mouth of
Horatio. Hamlet’s own dying words might in fact be understood as expressing the full
weight of regret that – at the moment of one’s death -- such meaningful speech among
peers must eventually give way the standard narrative report. “Had I but time… O I
could tell you/ -- But let it be. Horatio, I am dead, / Thou livest. Report me and my
cause aright to the unsatisfied” (5.2.341-4).
Precisely because it does not anticipate, or even desire, the narrated immortality
of a hero or ‘life after death’ for its protagonist -- the speech of one witness to another is
more completely rooted in the overlapping lifespan of the interlocutors themselves; it is
the living, breathing expression of their ongoing vitality to one another, an affirmation of
a shared past as well as a mortal futurity for their relation. As Hamlet’s dying utterance
reveals, death is nothing other than the severing or foreclosure of this futurity. Hamlet
does not simply perish alone, after all, but dies to Horatio who, it is decided, must survive
him. Indeed, Hamlet is able to grasp his death only in terms of his living, dying relation
to Horatio: “Horatio, I am dead, / Thou livest” (5.2.343-4), “O, I die, Horatio” (5.3.357).
In many tales – whether poetic or quotidian -- one encounters scenes in which
friends or peers who witnessed the same scene exchange tales regarding what they
perceived. They might compare notes, dispute the particulars or collectively ‘get their
story straight.’ They may even -- as a group -- recount the tale through their many voices
for other listeners, as happens when Horatio, Barnardo and Marcellus first tell Hamlet of
the Ghost’s appearance. However, what gets heard in the speech of one witness to
another – what the witnesses themselves listen for – is not the content of the story, whose
narrative thread they know by heart anyway. Curiosity, or the desire for new facts, for
justice, or for an entertaining yarn may entice an external audience – but the attention
paid by the witnesses themselves to one another’s words is not reducible to the refined art
of the storyteller. Rather, for “those” who were on the scene, what matters is the
relationship among witnesses that is confirmed in the narrative address – an affirmation
that, while it may occur through the act of a spoken narration, is not reducible to the
particular words uttered by the storyteller.
Were you on the scene? Did you see what I saw? Did you hear what I heard?
Responding to these questions in the affirmative is, finally, the urgency that motivates the
speech of one witness to another. This response might unfold through the telling of a
story, but the affirmation is not located within the force of the mythos – which appeals
instead, as Aristotle teaches, to ‘every’ listener, not just to those who were on the scene.
In fact, ‘what’ is said – the semantic content, discursive style, even the particular
language or idiom in which such speech unfolds – is not essential.
Even more mysteriously, what the witness perceives in the performed address of
the other witness as witness is not, in the end, reducible to the phenomenonality of this
performance. The testimonial affirmation of a relationship between witnesses cannot be
made audible or visible; and yet at the same time this affirmation must be performed
perceptibly by some form of address. For what gets affirmed presently in the address
between witnesses is, precisely, the intangible bond that was born on the same scene
whereupon they first came into relation with another.
Addressing ourselves to others in ways that confirm a shared relation – one that
emerged on a prior scene or scenes -- is no doubt something that we perform daily, at
many levels of speech and in all manners of bearing towards one another.
It is
impossible to catalogue or classify such addresses. Rather, what the infinite variety of
such addresses allows us to reflect upon is the fact that they matter not solely because of
the content of what is expressed, nor because of the style or form of the address, but
rather because of who addresses whom. The address of one witness to another, therefore,
allows us to shift the emphasis from the style or content of communicative utterances or
gestures to the relationship between those on the scene. ‘What’ the address of one
witness to another seeks to express or communicate is finally less crucial than the
irreplaceable singularity of its participants – the self-communication of the one who
speaks to the one who listens.
Speech and Politics on the Scene
In the final analysis -- precisely because it can be extremely painful or intensely
poignant -- addressing ourselves to others with whom we shared a particular scene need
not even involve a coherent act of speech or a well-executed gesture. It could be the
spontaneous shedding of tears, as we saw in the case of the Herodotus anecdote. It might
be some active expression that emerges through signs of rage, affection or lust. It may be
an act of retribution, revenge or punishment whose violence is, perhaps, distinguished by
an absence of outwardly recognizable signs or traces.
forgiveness.
Or, it could be an act of
While no typology of such addresses is possible, it is nevertheless the case that
among them the act of speaking occupies a privileged position. It may not always be the
most poignant, or even the most humane, sort of action; but speaking is perhaps the most
fully human. Any deed “can be perceived in its brute physical appearance without verbal
accompaniment,” observes Arendt, but the deed “becomes relevant only through the
spoken word.”17 By ‘relevant’ she means to say not simply that a deed becomes germane
through speech, as if mute actions were irrelevant in some larger sense; she means rather
that deeds reveal themselves to be human, they attach themselves to singular human
agents, when the agent speaks up and discloses herself. What makes speech a privileged
form of action, in Arendt’s interpretation, is in fact its revelatory character – the fact that
in the act of speaking the speaker reveals who she is.18
Arendt’s reflections on speech can be read as a deep critique of a long
philosophical tradition that binds logos to politics – extending back at least to Aristotle’s
formula whereby man’s nature as a political animal [zoon politikon] is bound up with
man’s characterization as that animal that has speech [zoon logon echon].19 The stakes of
her critique of Aristotle can perhaps be most easily grasped by attending to Arendt’s
observation that the common translation of zoon logon echon as animal rationale
represents a fundamental “misunderstanding.”20
In an illuminating account of this,
Adriana Cavarero has shown that -- because this misunderstanding involves a privileged
substitution of mute thought for acoustic speech -- the metaphysical tradition of political
17
Arendt, Human Condition, 179.
Ibid., 178.
19
Aristotle, Politics 1253a9-19
20
Arendt, The Human Condition, 27.
18
philosophy could be called the “de-vocalization of logos.”21
Just as speech is
subordinated to reason, mute thought and abstract signifieds, so too politics is removed
from the phenomenal horizon of human interaction, and given over to philosophical
fictions like “Man,” “citizen,” the “state” and so forth. As Cavarero points out, however
-- given that elsewhere Aristotle is careful to define logos as “signifying voice” [phone
semantike] -- it is clear that Aristotle is not referring in the Politics to the mute sphere of
thought but rather to the act of signifying with a living voice. 22 For Aristotle, logos still
implies the acoustic performance of speech.
That said, for Aristotle the accent falls not on phone but on the semantike.23 For
Aristotle speaking politically means ‘signifying’ not just “pain or pleasure,” which can be
expressed by the cry of an animal, but moreover signifying things that concern the polis –
“what is good and evil, just and unjust etc.”24 Aristotle’s point is not that by discussing
or debating what is ‘good or just’ the members of a polity arrive at a consensus on what is
‘just’ or ‘good,’ as for example in modern forms of democratic debate. For Aristotle, that
which concerns the polis – the ‘just,’ for example – is not a set of principles upon which
citizens come to agree; rather they are principles that constitute the very organization of
the political life as such. [“Justice is the very organization of political life [politikes
koinonias taxis],” he writes.25] Thus, when he says that through speech humans signify
by means of a voice whatever concerns the polis, he intends the following: that human
beings are able to ‘signify’ to one another those organizing principles of which the human
21
My discussion of Aristotle here is indebted to Cavarero’s original interpretation of the Politics; see For
More Than One Voice, 183-185.
22
Ibid., 183; Aristotle, Poetics 1457a5-30
23
Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, 188.
24
Aristotle, Politics 1253a16
25
Ibid., 1253a37
being already has perception [aesthesis echein], such as ‘the good’ or ‘the just.’26
Consequently, what makes speech [logos] a fundamental characteristic of human political
existence for Aristotle is the fact that by means of a voice, they are able to signify what
they already perceive as concerning the polity.
In her own analysis, conversely, Arendt draws upon the extent to which
Aristotle’s formula presupposes a more general link in Greek culture between action and
speech [praxis and lexis], in order to offer a quite different account of speech in political
life.27
Since, for Arendt, action is the above all the way in which human beings
“distinguish themselves instead of merely being distinct,” it is not surprising that her
revision of Aristotle’s account of speech concludes with her claim that “in acting and
speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and
thus make their appearance in the world.”28 Put another way, for Arendt, in contrast to
Aristotle, the political significance of speech is not that it signifies or communicates
matters of political import -- but rather that it is above all through the act of speaking that
one actively reveals who one is.29
Since this “revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore where people
are with others… in sheer human togetherness,” both speech and action are inherently
26
Ibid., 1235a17-18
Arendt’s peculiar appropriation of Aristotle in this regard has been the object of a number of studies.
Jurgen Habermas, for example, has claimed that Arendt’s reading of Aristotle supports his own view of
language in politics. And Jacques Taminiaux has shown how Arendt’s reading of speech and action in
Aristotle represents a “point by point response” to Heidegger’s reappropriation of Aristotle’s
Nichomachean Ethics in the articulation of his fundamental ontology. See, respectively, Jurgen Habermas
“Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” Social Research 44 (1977); and, Jacques
Taminiaux, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1991), 111-144
28
Arendt, The Human Condition, 176, 179
29
Indeed, Arendt explicitly refutes the notion that what is important politically in speech has anything to do
with communication or signification. See The Human Condition, 179
27
relational; indeed, their importance for political life derives from this relationality. 30 For
Arendt, speech is the relational act par excellence – in that it is the best “actualization of
the human condition of plurality.”31 In her view, the very act of speaking is the way to
open a new political sphere in which what matters most is the revelation of who one
uniquely is.
I have chosen Aristotle and Arendt as my primary points of reference once again
since their views represent, broadly and summarily, two radically different poles within a
certain tradition of thinking about the bond between speech and politics, in relation to
which I will shortly situate another, different set of suggestions taken from my reading of
Hamlet.32
At one end of the spectrum, we find in Aristotle the notion that human political
existence consists in speaking about – that is, in vocally signifying – political concerns.
On the other end of the spectrum, we find Arendt’s claim that what makes speech
political is not that it “signifies” -- but rather that, through the act of speaking, the
uniqueness of the one “who” speaks is revealed, leaving behind new or altered relations.
Symptomatically, the signifying function of speech – its ability to communicate some
content or message -- gets distinguished by Arendt from what is, for her, its more
properly political function, which is to reveal to others the singularity of the one who is
speaking.
Refining the radically phenomenological perspective that Arendt puts forth in her
work, Cavarero suggestively re-locates the political sense of speech in the singularity of
30
Ibid., 180
Ibid., 178
32
For more on Aristotle and Arendt’s reflections on logos and politics in this regard, I refer the reader again
to Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, 183-93.
31
the speaker’s voice, the acoustic emission from mouth to ear. For Cavarero this politics
emerges from “the reciprocal communication of voices,” wherein what comes to the fore
is above all the embodied singularity of the speakers in relation to others, no matter what
they say. By insisting on the bodily dimension of speech as it is expressed in the
singularity of each human voice, she is able to argue for a bond between politics and
speech that is fully rooted in an ontological horizon of embodied, material relationality
among unique speakers – what she calls the “reciprocal communication of voices.”33
I invoke these recent, powerful recalibrations of the ancient bond between logos
and politics because, in my view, they have the genuine merit of shifting theoretical
accounts of the political valence of speaking away from the dominance of the semantic
and toward a contextual horizon of human plurality -- of singular, embodied speakers
who, as Cavarero puts it, “convoke” one another when they open their mouths.
What Arendt’s and Cavarero’s reflections help us to grasp, finally, is the
remarkable extent to which the bond between political life and the act of speaking has
long been articulated in ways that obscure, or even deny, the possibility of grasping
politics as an interactive space brought into being among singular, embodied actors hereand-now.
For what Aristotle and contemporary political philosophers like Jürgen
Habermas, for example, have in common, despite their many differences, is that the
political sphere is defined such that it has nothing to do with the singularity of a given
scene of speaking.
On the contrary, what these ‘traditional’ political philosophies
presuppose is a generalizable interlocutory sphere – a domain governed by certain
33
Ibid. For a fuller discussion of these matters the reader could also consult my Introduction to Cavarero’s
text.
semantic rules which, even where these rules are understood to be unstable or revisable,
assure that what matters is the interlocutors’ capacity to signify. 34 Indeed, the singularity
of the scene of interlocution, or the unrepeatable relationship among speakers, is
precisely what the metaphysical tradition of political philosophy cannot admit.
According to this tradition, the political sphere is not determined by ‘who’ is speaking,
but rather by a impersonal semantic order which guarantees that it does not matter who is
speaking. Arendt’s and Cavarero’s work, therefore, clears the path for a re-thinking of
the bond between logos and politics as something belonging not to the communicative
capacity of discourse, nor to the innate rationality of human beings, nor to the semantic
content of our statements – but rather as the expression of the embodied relationality of
human existence, from which political life arises and to which it responds by forming
new, singular webs of relations.
It is worth repeating that, for Arendt as for Cavarero, the political import of
speaking lies in making oneself heard – it means speaking up, audibly, here and now –
over and beyond to the semantic content of ‘what’ is said. 35 The meaning of political
action and speech, according to Arendt, most fully “lies in the performance itself,” not in
whatever reified content might outlast that performance.36
Consequently, the bond
between logos and politics requires that logos be understood as the acoustic performance
of speaking, rather than its semantic content. Shoshana Felman, similarly, insists on the
34
See See Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere,” in Princeton Readings in Political Thought (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996; and Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, translated by Thomas
McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). For more on Habermas and Aristotle, see Cavarero, For More
Than One Voice, 188-9.
35
Arendt makes this clear when she says that the opposite of speaking is “complete silence.” See, The
Human Condition, 179.
36
Arendt, Between Past and Future, 153.
bodily dimension of speech, as a kind of excess within signification, in her analysis of
performative speech-acts.37 However -- whereas Cavarero insists upon the resonance of
singular voices as a deeply embodied phenomenon, expressed in the acoustic singularity
of each human voice -- Arendt avoids locating the political import of speech primarily in
the body or in the voice. Our “physical identities,” Arendt writes, “appear without any
activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice.”38 Acting
and speaking, she claims, are of a different order than this sheer display of bodily or
vocal uniqueness – for “in acting and speaking” we show who we are and “reveal actively
[our] unique personal identities.”39 In other words, speaking is a bodily performance for
Arendt – but the political meaning of speech, insofar as it is an action, is not reducible to
its bodily dimension.
In Arendt’s view, what is essential to speech-as-action is not solely the fact that it
is rooted in the body of the singular actor, or the fact that a certain utterance reveals the
embodied singularity of the speaker; rather, she adds, what is essential to action is
moreover the capacity of this embodied, singular actor to “initiate” or “begin something
new.” To be precise, for Arendt the embodied singularity of each actor -- the fact that
each is born unique -- is the ontological pre-condition for “the startling unexpectedness
[that] is inherent in all beginnings and origins.” In other words, the “newness” of each
action “is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something
uniquely new comes into the world.”40 There can be new ‘scenes’ on the world-stage, as
it were, only because there are newcomers in the world.
37
See Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 179.
39
Ibid. My emphasis.
40
Arendt, The Human Condition, 178.
38
Being born with 'a voice like no other' does not, of course, guarantee or fully
determine the actions or locutions performed with that voice. I take it to follow from this
that the bodily dimension of speech – the unique sound of the voice, the singular physical
bearing and appearance of the speaker – reveals the uniqueness of speaker to others
‘passively,’ as it were; not necessarily because locutions are not acts, but rather because
this bodily singularity is already ‘given’ to the speaker, in the unique timbre of her voice,
and thus does not need to be ‘actively’ disclosed to others by her. However, in speaking
up, one also reveals – and this is the ‘active’ dimension of the act – one’s uniqueness, not
merely as a bodily given, but as a politicized being capable of initiating a relationship,
capable of responding to others. Thus, while Arendt’s categories leave us no way to
extricate acting or speaking from a bodily performance, she does require us to consider
the extent to which speech is a category that stands at the threshold at which an embodied
singular being, born pre-politically with a voice and face like no other, politicizes herself
by speaking up.
I would like to radicalize this Arendtian conception of the political nature of
speech by insisting that the political salience of speech – its active revelation of the
speaker and her concomitant capacity for newness -- be grounded absolutely in the scene
of speaking itself. That is, I propose that we understand the inauguration of a ‘scene’ as
the true threshold at which speech moves from sheer bodily vocalization to action, from
ontology to politics, from the general human condition of plurality to particular webs of
relationships.
From this perspective, the physical activity of vocalization becomes the action of
speaking whenever it brings into a being a new scene – that is to say, whenever it leaves
behind a new or altered relationship that can find its ulterior affirmation in the subsequent
address of one witness to another. For, if Arendt is right that what is finally at issue is the
initiative taken in the act of speaking, the impulse to make oneself heard, then making
oneself heard also means anticipating, or exposing oneself to, the eventuality of another’s
response.
To avoid confusion, let me quickly assert that the interior well-springs of the
impulse to speak, however one wishes to understand this impulse – whether as the
unconscious, as pulsions, drives, pleasures, desires, intentions – are less important here
than the fact that, as it makes itself heard, every act of speech is an unprecedented
intervention that can bring about a set of unforeseen consequences, and irrevocably alter
the web of relations into which it intervenes. Therefore, rather than speculate on the
‘origins’ of speech, or its originary and constitutive ties to the philosophical emergence of
the ‘human,’ I wish to emphasize instead the already human consequences of speaking on
the world-stage – the scenes that we make, and the futurity of our relationships that is
anticipated whenever we open our mouths. For whether or not we do so consciously,
each time we speak we anticipate -- without necessarily making any promises -- an
ulterior address between ourselves and our current interlocutor. This anticipation may, in
fact, run contrary to our ‘inner’ desires never to speak to, or even see, the other again.
And yet -- so long as each has breath to speak -- the potential for future, testimonial
interlocution remains in the world as the specific consequence of the actualization of each
uttered word. It is as if each speech-act presupposes not only the ontological survival of
the addressee, at least for the duration of the utterance itself – but moreover orients itself,
beyond all intentions or foreknowledge, according to the anticipation of a future
interlocutory scene with this other.
Infancy -- which invariably arises in theoretical accounts of the advent of speech
– has been described by contemporary feminists philosophers as a phase of primary
vocality. “According to this broad, speculative horizon,” writes Cavarero, “the voice can
be traced back to a primary orality… where the semantic order has not yet made its
entrance.”41 The human voice is, according to this view, destined to speech because it is
destined to – although not yet fully absorbed by -- the semantic. Indeed, following the
analysis provided by Julia Kristeva in Revolutions in Poetic Language, the semantic
destiny of human speech never fully extricates itself from the vocalic pleasures and
bodily drives of infancy – so that this primarily vocality can be ‘read’ within the
semantic. The point, anyway, is that the threshold that defines the passage between
infantile vocalization and human speech remains – for many contemporary philosophers,
just as for Aristotle -- the unavoidable problem of the semantic.
Perhaps our emphasis on the ‘scene’ as the horizon of meaning for human speech
might provide another perspective from which to re-consider the age-old mystery of
infancy. If the sheer activity of vocalization – the infant activity par excellence – is not
yet speech, but rather the expression of a certain destination to speech, then perhaps this
destiny has not solely to do with the infant’s eventual arrival at signification, a phone that
arrives at semantike. Perhaps, we might speculate instead, the human destiny to speech is
bound up with the increasing initiative with which the child intervenes uniquely among
others, coming in this way to speech. After all, the newcomer not only acquires language
41
I refer the reader again to Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, section 2.4; 132 and passim.
as a ‘system’ of signifieds and signifiers; rather she begins through speech to intervene
unsystematically, with increasing distinctness, among others – she begins to inaugurate
singular ‘scenes,’ in the full sense we are giving to that word here. That is, in coming to
speech, she begins to intervene through words among others in ways that actively
distinguish her as the speaker and forge new or altered relationships -- and that come to
leave behind the eventual possibility of an exchanged testimonial address between herself
and the one to whom she speaks.
The act of speaking is therefore something that distinguishes itself from sheer
vocalization not – as tradition would have it – because speech is a “signifying voice”
[phone semantike]. The centrality of the semantic as the categorical threshold that
defines human speech can, from our perspective, be displaced by the inauguration of
scenes of speaking on the world-stage. Put simply, speech begins to distinguish itself
from bodily vocalization not simply by signifying – but rather through the speaker’s
initiative, her capacity to ‘make a scene.’
In this way, I want to argue, the scene might displace the semantic as the
operative category for reflections on the stakes of human, political speech. Wherever
there is human speech, a scene is left behind – a scene whose very emergence on the
world-stage presupposes, at least implicitly, the anticipation of some future address
among those who were on the scene. I propose that this anticipation -- which is born with
every scene of speaking -- be understood as the ‘political’ sense of human speech.
Put differently, I want to suggest that what makes human speech fundamentally
political is the anticipation of a future testimonial interlocution that arises with each scene
of speaking. This is an anticipation that all acts of speaking bear – one which orients the
speakers, in a way that has nothing to do with the communicable content or intentions of
the utterance, toward a shared futurity of interaction and interlocution with those among
whom one speaks. The speech of one witness to another is thus, from this perspective,
perhaps the fullest affirmation of the political stakes of speaking.
All of this simply means understanding speech to be that most ‘human’ action
which inaugurates or alters a relationship among “those” interlocutors and witnesses who
are on the scene – a relationship whose ongoing sense implies, from its very emergence,
the anticipation of an ulterior scene of speech among those same witnesses. To speak is
to ‘make a scene’ – and, as I have been trying to suggest, to make a scene implies,
without regard to human desires or logical probability, the futurity of the active
relationships between those who were on the scene.
Taking the risk, therefore, of adding my own contribution to this exciting rethinking of the ancient bond between logos and politics undertaken by Arendt, Cavarero,
and others, I want to propose that – at bottom – what binds speech to political existence is
that the act of speaking ‘makes a scene.’
And since perhaps no one else has better understood what it means to ‘make a
scene’ out of words, it is to the work of William Shakespeare that we must turn to better
articulate, in properly dramatic terms, the possibilities of these theoretical speculations.
Hamlet – or, Making a Scene
“Who’s there?
Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself” (1.1.1-2).
So runs the terse exchange at the opening of Hamlet. Each sentinel speaks up out
of the darkness, not yet fully visible, asking the other to reveal himself. Before anything
else, therefore, the tragedy’s incipit demands the active revelation of those on the scene.
“Action and speech are so closely related,” writes Arendt, “because the primordial
and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question
asked of every newcomer: ‘Who are you?’”42 The answer to the question “who is there?”
thus requires the active disclosure, in word and deed, of those on the scene.
This will not be the last time that we encounter Shakespeare’s and Arendt’s
shared focus on the question of “who” is on the scene. But, for the moment, the point is
that “who” is there must be made manifest through the revelatory force of words and
deeds. A passive appearance of the protagonist is not enough – for, as the opening lines
of Hamlet make clear, the protagonist enters the scene only insofar as he “unfold”
himself in gesture and speech.
That Hamlet is a play which continuously draws attention to its own theatricality,
by staging drama as a ‘problem’ within the very plot of the play, is a critical truism that
nevertheless sheds light on how the scenes of Hamlet force us to reflect upon what a
‘scene’ is – to confront what Hamlet later calls “the cunning of the scene.” In one sense,
this means that Hamlet poses the question of the ‘scene’ in ways that exceed the
playhouse or stage. For, if Arendt’s speculations on the revelatory force of words and
deeds carry any weight, then it follows that one “stands and unfolds” oneself on every
scene, ‘theatrical’ or not – just as it follows, too, that every scene responds to the
question, “who is there.”
42
Ibid.
And yet, if Shakespeare does not invent the revelatory power of speech and action
as such, in Hamlet he nevertheless crafts a keen mimetic expression of this power. The
“implicit manifestation of the agent and speaker,” writes Arendt in a passage that perhaps
applies to no body of work more than to that of Shakespeare, “is so indissolubly tied to
the living flux of action and speaking that it can be represented and ‘reified’ only through
a kind of repetition [that] is appropriate only to drama.”43 The other ‘arts’ – painting or
literature – can reveal who someone was, the way that David’s painting represents
Socrates at the moment of his death, or Rembrandt is revealed in his own self-portrait;
however, they cannot re-stage the scene upon which the thinker or the painter actively
revealed himself to others in life. By contrast, dramatic representation defines itself, as it
were, by giving back to the protagonists a time and place, an unrepeatable here-and-now,
whereupon to re-inaugurate a ‘new’ scene by speaking up and distinguish themselves
actively. The revelatory power of staged drama draws its authority and force from the
revelatory power of words and deeds in general; and at the same time, the stage is that
artistic endeavor which returns to actions and speech the full force of their capacity to
reveal who the protagonist is or was. The stage steals its power from the dynamic flux
that adheres in all human scenes – but does so in a way that restores a specific form or
unity to that potentiality.
This form or “unity,” I would argue, is not that of the poetic mythos of which
Aristotle speaks in the Poetics. Drama breaks with other modes of imitative poetics,
crucially, in that it does not just transmit the mythic sequence of events through the
mouth of the storyteller or the brush of the painter. Instead, the protagonists of the story
themselves are compelled to expose themselves anew – to stand and unfold themselves,
43
Arendt, Human Condition, 187.
to speak up here and now, before others on a ‘new’ scene of action. And in the drama of
Shakespeare’s day, unlike Greek tragedy, this implies that someone – with a face and
voice like no other – actively expose themselves on stage, without a mask.
This break with storytelling and narration is a definitive feature of the
Shakespearean scene, as it unfolds in Hamlet. There are, to be sure, numerous scenes in
Hamlet in which the act of bearing witnesses or testifying in a conventional narrative or
juridical sense constitutes the most main action. One could think of the Ghost’s narration
to Hamlet, or Polonius’ relating Hamlet’s behavior to Claudius, or of Horatio’s closing
promise to tell Fortinbras and his entourage what he saw and heard. As we have seen, the
basic presupposition in such circumstances is that those who come to hear these
testimonial speeches were not themselves ‘on the scene’ in question: “let me speak to
th’yet unknowing world,” declares Horatio – virtually the sole survivor at the Danish
court -- at the play’s close, prefacing a testimonial narration that was authorized by the
Hamlet’s dying voice.
In fact, the play itself begins with just such an act of testimony. Barnardo and
Marcellus do not simply await the Ghost’s return at the outset of Hamlet in silence.
Instead, Barnardo offers to tell Horatio a Ghost-story; he translates into speech, as he
says, what he saw with his own eyes:
Sit down awhile
And let us once again assail your ears
That are so fortified against our story
With what we two nights have seen (1.1.33-36)
Indeed, as far as the audience is concerned, the Ghost is introduced verbally before being
presented visually.
For Hamlet does not– as, again, does Thomas Kyd’s Spanish
Tragedy, to pick an apt model for comparison – open with the Ghost already visible on
stage, narrating its own story. That is, rather than with an active appearance of the
“thing” itself, Hamlet begins by staging a conventional act of narrative testimony about
that prior appearance. Barnardo testifies to what he and one other witness, Marcellus –
who is also there listening – saw the previous night. Indeed, this appearance is a secret
shared (for the moment) only by the three men; as Horatio later says to Hamlet, “this to
me/ In dreadful secrecy impart they did” (1.2.207). In this sense, the act of Barnardo’s
and Marcellus’ testimony is what brings the three men into this particular relationship,
which has resulted in Horatio’s attendance on the ramparts in the dead of night. There,
on the scene that opens the play Hamlet, this “secret” relationship is again affirmed
through the spoken narration of Barnardo’s tale.
Although it is also performed within earshot the other original witness, Marcellus,
this tale takes the form of what I have been calling ‘classical narration’ -- insofar as
Barnardo speaks as a kind of Homeric narrator. He testifies to what he saw and what he
recalls for a listener -- namely, Horatio -- who did not see it. Again, this model of
narration or storytelling, which extends back to the Greek bard’s relation to the Muse –
daughters of Memory [Mnenosyne] -- presupposes a narrator who speaks of what was
seen ‘from memory’ for an audience that did not see it, but rather simply listens to the
tale.44
44
For more on the figures of the Muses in this regard, see Eric Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 19-24.
In the generation prior to Shakespeare, English dramatists in fact relied quite
heavily on precisely this narrative technique – inherited primarily from the Romans, in
particular through the influence of Seneca on early English drama.45 In the case of
Barnardo, this ancient connection is made even more explicit by the fact that – given the
‘ghostly’ object of narration – Barnardo’s tale is, according to the classical model of the
bard, blind. Extrapolating from this blindness, it could be said that all classical narration
is a sort of ghost-story -- since all such tales recount something which cannot be made to
re-appear presently before the eyes, other than by conjuration through speech. 46 His tale
“assails the ears” alone; for Horatio is an auditor here, not yet a witness. Like all
conventional acts of narration, which by definition presuppose this split between seeing
and listening, Barnardo’s tale makes explicit the fact that they are sharing the time of the
narration, not the time of the object of the narration. And just as many stories indicate
this distance through the opening “once upon a time,” so too Barnardo’s tale begins:
“Last night of all… the bell then beating one…” (1.1.38,42).
I want to bracket these rather evident features of Barnardo’s narrative testimony
since, as often happens in Shakespeare, they appear to represent a type of narration from
45
There seems to be a general consensus in the relevant scholarship over the past thirty years regarding the
influence of Senecan, narrative drama on the early English stage. See, as a start, Francis Yates' chapter
"The English Public Theatre as an adaptation of the Ancient Theatre" in Theatre of the World (London:
Routledge Press, 1969), 112-135; Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English
Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 1-33; and more recently, Andrew Gurr, "The
Social Evolution of Shakespeare's Globe" in Theatrical Spaces and Dramatic Places, from Theatre
Symposium, 4, 1996, 15-27; and A.J. Boyle, Tragic Seneca: An Essay in the Theatrical Tradition (New
York: Routledge, 1997), 145-213; and, finally, the first section of my dissertation “Spectral Communities
and Ghosts of Sovereignty: Interpreting Apparitions in Hamlet and Macbeth” (University of California,
Berkeley, 2000)
46
For more on ghost-stories as a topos in Hamlet, see Stephen Greenblatt, “What is the History of
Literature?” Critical Inquiry 23.3 (1997): 460-481
which the play will almost immediately depart.47 No sooner does Barnardo begin the act
of narration then Marcellus cuts him off at the sight of the Ghost’s appearance:
Peace break thee off, look where it comes again (1.1.43)
Soon after, in the same manner, Horatio interrupts his own narration about “young
Fortinbras” upon the Ghost’s subsequent appearance.
But soft, behold! Lo, where it comes again (1.1.129)
At this moment, at least within the logic of the play, Hamlet transgresses the limits of
conventional, spoken narration; the Ghost’s active appearance interrupts or supersedes
the narrative account of its prior appearance.48 Indeed, insofar as the Ghost’s appearance
fully interrupts Barnardo’s tale – by rendering it superfluous, one might say – it becomes
clear that the sort of classical, narrative speech whose features I outlined earlier now
appears insufficient. Or, better, something other than narrative speech addressed to
“th’yet unknowing world” is now required. For Horatio is now himself an eye-witness;
47
Interpreters of Shakespeare often describe the way in which his plays appear to ‘cite’ or ‘parody’ an older
model of theatrical presentation just before explicitly breaking with those earlier conventions. Alvin
Kernan writes, for example, that wherever Shakespeare writes in an “old style,” he does so to “distance
himself as a playwright from the older tradition in order to ask a variety of questions about its
effectiveness.” Hamlet is a favorite example of critics in this regard since, as Anne Barton and Howard
Felperin point out, scenes like the ones involving the Player King clearly allude to “the forms and figures of
an older drama.” See, Alvin Kernan, The Playwright as Magician: Shakespeare’s Image of the Poet in the
English Public Theater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 118-119; and, Howard Felperin,
Shakespearean Representation: Mimesis and Modernity in Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1977), 52
48
For more, see my “Sharing Visions, Interrupting Speech: Hamlet’s Spectacular Community,”
Shakespeare Studies, vol. 36.
and it would make no sense for Barnardo to continue speaking to him, in the old narrative
mode, as if he were not.
Put another way, the fact that Horatio is now a witness as well, by virtue of being
on the scene with the two guards, fundamentally alters the nature of the relationship
among the three. Indeed, this is the very reason for which Horatio was invited by
Marcellus to join them, here and now, on the ramparts in the dark of mid-night. He was
called upon to speak as a witness, confirming the eyes of others.
Marcellus: Therefore I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night,
That if again this apparition come,
He may approve our eyes and speak to it (1.1.29-32)
Significantly, Horatio is not simply called upon to “watch the minutes” silently along
with the two guards – who, after all, were themselves struck dumb by the Ghost’s prior
appearance.
[As Horatio later recounts to Hamlet: “…thrice he walk’d/ By their
oppress’d and fear-surprised eyes/ Within his truncheon’s length, whilst they, distill’d/
Almost to jelly with the act of fear,/ Stand dumb and speak not to him” (1.2.202-6)]. On
the contrary, he is explicitly called upon to “approve” the eyes of his companions by
speaking. What sort of speech is required here? And how does it differ from the
conventional, narrative speech of Barnardo’s tale?
I am aware that -- given the cultural significance attached to ghostly apparitions in
the period -- Horatio’s speech could be valued because he is a “scholar.” And as such,
he may be regarded as capable of eliciting some response from the Ghost, or of
determining whether it was a demon or a tortured soul.49 It is interesting and significant,
for example, that some popular beliefs maintained that Ghosts never speak unless spoken
to; but such beliefs only beg the question at hand – namely, how are we to understand the
compulsory nature of an immediate, non-narrative speech in the face some active
apparition? That is to say, why must Horatio speak here and now, in the presence not
only of the apparition but moreover on the scene with the two guards, who actively await
his verbal “approval”?
It is true that Horatio is ostensibly called upon to speak to the Ghost [“Thou are a
scholar, speak to it, Horatio… Question it, Horatio (1.1.44,47)]; however, the urgency
with which he is compelled to do so carries with it the sense that he is asked to speak to
the Ghost within earshot of his companions. Unlike Hamlet, he does not engage in
private conversation with the apparition. Nor do Barnardo and Marcellus retreat to some
safe place – rather they listen attentively for Horatio’s response. Indeed, the fact that the
Ghost does not – at this point in the play – respond in any audible way to Horatio’s
entreaty [“Stay, speak, speak. I charge thee speak” (1.1.54)] makes clear that what is at
stake, in this particular moment, is not so much a dialogue between Horatio and the
Ghost or the information that Horatio is able to glean. The Ghost in fact says nothing
here. Rather, what is decisive is the urgency that Horatio speak, there and then, on that
scene, among those witnesses.
This urgency arises, I wish to suggest, from Marcellus’ desire that Horatio
“approve” the eyes of the guards by speaking; that is, in the desire that Horatio speak as
one witness to another, in order to affirm that he, as well, sees what they see. Indeed it is
imperative for Horatio to leave no doubt that he, too, shares in the scene of the Ghost’s
49
See Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 208-210.
appearance. It is not enough for him to simply be there “when this apparition comes.” In
order to fully participate in the scene, he himself must act affirmatively by speaking of
what he sees.
This is, moreover, why he is not called upon to speak ex post facto, but rather to
speak to the Ghost as it actively appears. Indeed, he must speak now – not because this
‘now’ is midnight on a particular date; but because his speech must correspond to the
actuality of the relation that it confirms. For the point lies not so much in what he says –
again, his speech to the Ghost communicates nothing, provides no information. Rather,
by speaking Horatio affirms a particular, singular relation among witnesses that will turn
out to be decisive for the structure of the play as a whole.
Let me therefore interrupt my reading for a moment to suggest that a nonsemantic, non-communicative sense of speech seems to lie at the heart of what brings
Horatio, Barnardo and Marcellus together. If the relation between these three might be
fairly taken as something like an emergent polity – a nascent company that will soon
include Hamlet and that will come to be bound by an oath “never to make known what
[they] have seen” (1.5.149) – then the particularity of this company is affirmed not by
semantic content of their discourse, but rather by the reciprocal confirmation of each
others’ eyes through the act of speaking.
A little later Horatio is once again called upon, this time by Hamlet, to approve
the Prince’s eyes through their observation of Claudius during the Mousetrap. Here, of
course, the performance of the Mousetrap is intended – at least by Hamlet – as a more or
less explicit re-enactment of the scene of his father’s murder. Here again, dramatic re-
enactment gives back a time and place to a sequence of actions, in order to restore to
these actions their revelatory force.
Indeed, the trajectory of Shakespeare’s plot at this point takes us through the very
terrain we also explored through Phyrnichus’ play in the previous chapter – namely, what
sort of relation emerges through the mimetic re-enactment of a series of actions that is
within living memory? What happens when a performance not only brings into being a
new polity or a new relationship -- as in Act I, scene 1 of Hamlet -- but moreover actively
affirms a shared relation that had first emerged through a prior scene or scenes?
The structure of the reenactment in Hamlet is, of course, rather more complex
than the anecdote provided by Herodotus. For Hamlet was not himself a witness to the
original poisoning; Claudius is, presumably, the only survivor of that murder scene.
Nevertheless, Hamlet aims to affirm Claudius’ role as murderer of his father through a
mimetic reenactment -- by staging, “before” Claudius “something like the murder of my
father” (2.2.591-2).
What is remarkable in the complexity of this whole design is that Hamlet appears
to desire more than sheer knowledge or proof of Claudius’ guilt. To be sure, the staging
of the Mousetrap is a means through which to uncover the King’s “occulted guilt.”
However, Hamlet’s energies and desires are oriented at least as much towards the staging
of the scene itself as they are towards the stated goal of uncovering the King’s guilt. The
scene is not only a means to an end, but “is also an end in itself.”50 Hamlet wants not
only proof; he wants a scene – in the fullest sense of the word. For, he not only organizes
a general audience for the re-enactment -- but more tellingly, from our perspective,
50
See Agnes Heller, The Time is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History (Oxford: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2002), 63.
instructs Horatio to watch the scene with an eye toward Claudius. In asking Horatio to be
the other witness, Hamlet makes clear that he desires from the scene not that the
“unknowing world” come to know of Claudius’ crime – rather, he requests the
subsequent affirmation of the ‘other’ witness, Horatio.
Thus, Hamlet informs Horatio that one scene in the play “comes near the
circumstance” of poisoning, as told to Hamlet by the Ghost:
I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot,
Even with the very comment of thy soul
Observe mine uncle… Give him heedful note;
For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,
And after we’ll both our judgment join
In censure of his seeming (3.2.78-87)
The structure of the mise-en-scène here is famously complex; Horatio and Hamlet
observe Claudius, who in turn regards the play along with the others gathered. However,
the multiple layers of gazing, the distribution of singular, subjective positions within the
space of the theater, the breakdown of the distinction between spectator and spectacle –
all of these formal features of the scene that Hamlet devises are necessarily organized
around a mimetic relation between the performed reenactment and the original murder
scene.
Again, ostensibly Hamlet aims to prove the veracity of the Ghost’s word by
arranging for a dramatic reenactment of the murder scene as the Ghost related it.
However, given the elaborate theatrical construct at work here, it is difficult to reduce the
entire operation to a sort of fact-check. Indeed, the difficulty the scene presents to an
observer is due in large measure to a rather glaring disjunction between Hamlet’s stated
goal [catching the King’s conscience] and the surplus desires regarding the performance
itself that Hamlet expresses before, during and after the staging of the Mousetrap.
Without pretending to resolve this difficulty – which has proven to be one of the
most enduring exegetical puzzles in the English language -- it seems safe to conclude the
following. What is at stake in Hamlet’s arranged reenactment of the murder is not
reducible to an objective proof of the truth or any demonstration of fact regarding the
prior action -- in this case the poisoning of Old Hamlet. Nor, by the same token, is the
staging of the Mousetrap simply an elaborate hall of mirrors, in which the inevitable
subjectivity of the individual gaze -- the fact that everyone watches from a different
vantage -- is multiplied and dispersed.51 At stake, rather, is the particular relation brought
into being among those on the scene – and, most especially, between Hamlet and Horatio
vis-à-vis Claudius -- through the mimetic reenactment of the murder.
To be sure, the ‘relations’ of those on the scene are deeply complicated; I am
unable to summarize it here, for it seems to break down at various levels. Hamlet and
Horatio watch Claudius; but Hamlet also discourses with Ophelia and Gertrude. Polonius
observes Hamlet and Ophelia, and at the same time speaks to the King. And what of the
players? In the end, the scene of the Mousetrap’s performance seems to produce or alter
numerous relationships, as well as provoke a cacophony of responses and competing
interests. In a sense, my reference to the ‘polity’ of Hamlet – the celebrated “rotten” state
of Denmark – as a set of “relations” in the context of this scene could be mistaken for
51
These two themes form the lenses through which the scene has often been interpreted. Psychoanalytic
readings of Hamlet, in particular, have tended to rely upon the “mirror” structure of this scene. A good
summary and discussion of such readings, particularly that provided by Jacques Lacan, can be found in
Philip Armstrong, “Watching Hamlet Watching,” in Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 2 (New York:
Routledge Press, 1996), 216-237. Also, Jacques Lacan, “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in
Hamlet,” translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies 48: 38-72.
irony at best, and pure comedy at worst. Certainly the neat unity of the audience’s
response that, according to Herodotus, followed the performance of Phyrnichus’ play is
missing from Hamlet! Rather than a collective weeping, mimetic reenactment in Hamlet
instead leaves behind an audience that is rife with difference and incongruity.
To speak of “those” on the scene of the Mousetrap is, therefore, to name a “those”
in which the distinction between each participant is absolute and incommensurable. It
could even be said that Hamlet is a demonstration of this incommensurability.
In this
sense, my reference to “those” on the scene of the Mousetrap [not unlike Levi’s angry
invocation of “those” Germans] does little more than mark a plurality-in-relation whose
precise communal ties are not resolved.
Nevertheless, I would assert that it is possible to name “those” who were on the
scene in a way that distinguishes them – as a plurality or collectivity or polity – from
those who were not. There may never be final agreement over that designation; names
can be changed or denied. But this does not prevent us from taking for granted that the
performance of the Mousetrap in Hamlet is a single, particular scene – on which “those,”
and not others, interacted in response to the mimetic reenactment of the poisoning.
Indeed, being able to take precisely that for granted seems to be one of the most
fervent and explicit desires of Hamlet himself. After all, the “cunning of the scene” to
which he refers revolves in large part around the fact that the scene releases Hamlet from
having to rely upon his own, solitary perception of Claudius’ behavior or the Ghost’s
“word;” he can now enlist Horatio’s “judgment” as well. What matters to Hamlet, at
bottom, is who is on the scene. Claudius, of course, must be there. And, perhaps most
importantly, Horatio must bear witness. What Hamlet seems to desire here above all else
is not, finally, knowledge of his uncle’s guilt – whose divulgence he will hear shortly
anyway – but rather a spoken affirmation of what he witnesses. It is as if what he fears
most is not a “damned Ghost” who would deceive him, but rather that there is no one
living with whom he can speak affirmatively, as one witness to another.
For, what the entire mise-en-scène of the play-within-the-play seems to affirm,
more than any proof of Claudius’ guilt, is the essentiality of such affirmative speech or
action for the experience of the theater. After all, Claudius’ reaction to the Mousetrap
itself at 3.2.260 – regardless of how one interprets its significance [perhaps he is guilty,
perhaps he simply needs to relieve himself] – comes only when the dumb-show is
repeated with speech. The first enactment of the scene of poisoning has no discernable
effect upon Claudius, a fact that has prompted some critics of the play to propose that the
King simply did not see the dumb show, or that he did not commit the crime, or that
Hamlet was hallucinating when he saw the Ghost.52
The point, in any case, is not to decide why Claudius does not react to the dumbshow, but rather to understand why Shakespeare decided to perform the reenactment
again, supplemented by testimonial speech the second time around. For it cannot be
coincidence that Claudius expresses his unease only after the player’s speech [“Have you
heard the argument? Is there no offence/ In’t?” (3.2.228-9)]. In fact, it might be argued
that -- as long as no one present affirmed through some subsequent speech that the dumbshow enacted “something like” the circumstances of Claudius’ ascent to the throne -- it
would have been possible for Claudius to remain seated. Put differently, the content of
52
An entertaining discussion of such views can be found in Dover Wilson’s intricate analysis in What
Happens in Hamlet? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959); see also Stanley Cavell’s perceptive
intervention in “Hamlet’s Burden of Proof,” Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 179-192
the mimetic reenactment [in this case the mimed poisoning] only acquires its full political
or public significance when those who witness the reenactment affirm, ex post facto,
what they saw or heard – thereby confirming its meaning.
The fact that the “King rises,” not when the scene of poisoning is enacted silently,
but only when Hamlet provides a contemporaneous narration the second time [“A
poisons him in his garden for his estate” (3.2.255)] seems indeed to indicate the
importance of a subsequent, spoken affirmation of what one sees. It has been argued that
“the idea that a play could force guilty spectators to confess their crimes was… a favorite
Elizabethan testimony to the influence of illusion upon reality.”53 However, it is not the
visual illusion alone that provokes the King’s reaction, but rather the subsequent
affirmation provided by Hamlet’s speech. As Hamlet later says to Horatio – “Didst
perceive/ Upon the talk of poisoning?” (3.2.282-3).
In other words, what is at stake is not the “influence of illusion upon reality,” but
rather the relationship that finds its affirmation in Hamlet’s contemporaneous narration of
the action on stage. As with Horatio’s compulsory speech in response to the Ghost’s
appearance in Act 1, scene 1, Hamlet’s verbal account of the mimetic poisoning does not
communicate any new semantic content to those present – insofar as everyone can plainly
see what is being performed on stage. Rather, his speech is an affirmation of what the
others – and especially Claudius – see before them. Hamlet speaks as one witness to
another, giving voice to the shared interaction of the scene.
53
This idea “forms part of Heywood’s Apology for Actors, and is emphasized in the anonymous Warning
for Fair Women (1599).” See Anne Barton, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (Baltimore: Penguin,
1962), 145
Where there is no spoken affirmation among witnesses, the action itself fades and
the scene dies. It is as if the sense of action lay in a shared memory that depends upon
such active affirmation among others.
Hamlet in fact finds himself repeatedly confronted with the problem of affirming
what he has seen, and what he must recall. “Remember me,” his father’s Ghost had
commanded. But how to fulfill this command? How can one, alone, remember an
action?
Of course, one could inscribe an action in ritual; or repeat through chants and
ceremony what one must not forget; or one might entrust action to the endurance of
scripture.54 Hamlet, however, devises further unrepeatable scenes of action -- at the heart
of which resides the desire to have what he has seen affirmed by others while he is
himself alive. The play-within-the-play, as I have tried to suggest, represents such an
effort.
When his father’s Ghost appears for the last time in his mother’s closet, Hamlet
hopes again to have his eyes approved through another’s speech. “Do you see nothing
there?” demands Hamlet, in the desire that his mother speak of what he sees. “Nothing at
all, yet all that is I see” (3.4.122-123). It is true, of course, that it is a Ghost that “steals
away” – “Look where he goes now out at the portal” (3.4.125-127). But perhaps the
point is that, where no speech confirms it, there is only a ghost – an appearance that does
not take on the shared sense of action.55
54
Hamlet does all three of these in the play.
Shakespeare’s Macbeth faces the same problem at the climax of the banquet scene, upon the appearance
of Banquo’s Ghost. Like Hamlet, he desperately desires spoken affirmation of what he sees:
55
Pr’ythee, see there!
Behold! look! Lo! How say you? (3.4.67-68)
If Hamlet seeks to affirm the memory of his father’s appearance, he must seek it
among others who also remember. Nothing guarantees him success; on the contrary, he
seems doomed to a certain failure. The culmination of the tragedy – of its mythos -- is
indeed a set of circumstances for which only Horatio can speak as a witness, for those
who are “but mutes or audience to this act” (5.2.340). “Had I but time,” Hamlet says, “O,
I could tell you.” This lament is not only directed towards a general “audience,” but
towards Horatio as well. What Hamlet’s death truncates, after all, is not the story “of
carnal, bloody and unnatural acts…” which will, presumably, take shape in Horatio’s tale
(5.2.386). What dies is the relation; Hamlet dies to Horatio [“Horatio, I am dead/ thou
livest” (5.2.343-4)]. One witness dies to another.
If Hamlet “stages” the essence of the theater, then perhaps this is because drama
is set-up or devised to make it possible to address one another as witnesses. Dramatic
performances invariably seemed designed to gather together, and then leave behind, a
plurality of spectators who are henceforth enabled, as it were, to address one another
regarding what they saw.
The work of the theater, a theatrical production, thus involves a certain
transformation: the dramatic performance presupposes a sheer gathering – a human
plurality whose commonality lies, at base, in the time and space that they collectively
inhabit, in their ontological exposure to one another within a given spatial and temporal
horizon. And, from the raw material of this ontological plurality, the scene fashions a
new plurality, a singular “those” who were on the scene, a unique “they” who are
distinguished from all others in the world inasmuch as they alone can address one another
as witnesses. The task of drama is thus to fashion – although this is not making as
No one can bear witness alone; to be what it is, action requires that another affirm its having been seen.
poiesis, but rather a ‘leaving behind’ – a plurality who can speak as one witness to
another. The political promise of the singular scene – which makes it something more
than ritual or repetition – is, finally, this unique relation among actors and witnesses that
it brings into being. The political fulfillment of this promise is, therefore, that one
addresses another in memory of this relation, in memory of the scene.