Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A note on the texts
- Introduction
- 1 Titus Andronicus: This was thy daughter
- 2 Romeo and Juliet: What's in a name?
- 3 Hamlet: A figure like your father
- 4 Troilus and Cressida: This is and is not Cressid
- 5 Othello: I took you for that cunning whore of Venice
- 6 King Lear: We have no such daughter
- 7 Macbeth: A deed without a name
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
3 - Hamlet: A figure like your father
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A note on the texts
- Introduction
- 1 Titus Andronicus: This was thy daughter
- 2 Romeo and Juliet: What's in a name?
- 3 Hamlet: A figure like your father
- 4 Troilus and Cressida: This is and is not Cressid
- 5 Othello: I took you for that cunning whore of Venice
- 6 King Lear: We have no such daughter
- 7 Macbeth: A deed without a name
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
Summary
WHO'S THERE?
Hamlet's father returns from the grave, as Lavinia returns from the woods, in a “questionable shape” (I.iv.43). In both cases something strange and silent, familiar and unfamiliar, comes on to the stage, posing a problem of interpretation like that of the ghost in The Spanish Tragedy: “My name was Don Andrea.” The Hamlet Ghost, in full armor, looks imposing and powerful, a male figure to command respect as well as fear – in that sense the opposite of the mutilated Lavinia. But it too has a dislocated identity, and when in I.v it describes its own death, we learn that beneath the armor is another violated body.
Lavinia is bombarded with questions; so is the Ghost, and again the questions break against silence. Like Marcus' “This was thy daughter,” the wording of Horatio's question shows how problematic the Ghost's identity is:
What art thou that usurp'st this time of night,
Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march?
(I.i.49-52)He asks not “Who art thou?” but “What art thou?” – seeing the Ghost not as the late King Hamlet but as a nameless thing that has usurped (the word is unsettling applied to something that looks like a king) the form of the late King Hamlet. The first reference to the Ghost is to “this thing” (I.i.24), and throughout the dialogue it is not “he” but “it.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare's TragediesViolation and Identity, pp. 55 - 83Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005