Like Elsinore's power structures, Hamlet's metadramatic devices are entirely suffused with the figure of the informer, the plotter and the tale-bearer. Claudius, Polonius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Horatio and Hamlet himself are examples. Even old Hamlet carries the mark of these diseased structures of authority; as Derrida has said, the ghost is ‘third party and witness’ to his own murder. He is the disembodied informer to his own theatrical homicide. The duplicitous atmosphere which this informing generates is so integral to the movement of the play's narrative that it becomes if not quite invisible then transparent: a facilitation. It is also so much the very air that Denmark breathes that it generates a way of seeing whose vicious nature is obscured by its own corruption, and whose ‘espials’ are both assertively ‘lawful’ and ubiquitous (F: 3.1.32). Here, informing functions as a tragic social hamartia which the play projects from the personal experience of its protagonist onto the world of the whole court, and beyond this onto the authority-structures of Elizabethan England. The ‘something rotten’ in the state of Denmark is not merely the King, its most visible manifestation, but more so it is the corruption of the moral authority of the Danish state itself, perpetrated by murderous ambition and manifested in its reliance on structures of informing. It is not Claudius’ delegitimising crime that finally brings down the Danish court, but the very mechanisms of his maintenance of power, excessively exercised via poison, poisonous words and poisoned swords. Conversely, however, Hamlet's own supposed hamartia, traditionally his vacillation and consequent procrastination, arises in fact from a reluctance to submit to the role offered in the system of murderous surveillance that surrounds him.