Hamlet

It was Wolfgang Clemen who personad the phrase symbol cluster to designate Shakespe atomic number 18s use of repeated patterns of moviery functioning within individual plays as a sort of key signature. Recent articles in The Explicator go for focused on such images as the wheel (Andrews) and the tusk (Ault); other critics have focused on the imagery of the mirror (Henry) and the rat (Berstein). Although the problem of Hamlets sexuality has been in the forefront since such Freudian classics as the one by Jones, oddly piffling has been said about a nonher complex of images, which recur doneout the course of the play, concerning caprice, gestation, and birth.

The first such instance comes in Hamlets famous warning to Polonius to keep Ophelia out of the sun: If the sun breeds maggots in a dead dog, Hamlet warns, Ophelia had best not walk of life in the sun. Conception is a blessing, entirely as your girl may conceive, friend, look tot (2.2.181-85). Conception as spawn and as fantasy are linked in this disgusting analogy. identical linkages occur when Horatio notes that the mad Ophelias speech may strew I Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds (4.5.15) and when Claudius remarks, after spying on Hamlet and Ophelia, T here(predicate)s something in his reason / Oer which his sorrow flummoxs on brood, / And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose / impart be some danger (3.1.164-67). The analogy here yokes Hamlets melancholy musing to a hen contemplative upon eggs which, when hatched, lead disclose some danger to the state: gestation = brooding = thinking; eggs = thoughts; hachure = deeds born of thought.

Gertrude returns to the image of a bird brooding in its nest, and to the linkage of hatching and disclosing, when she predicts that silent calm will follow Hamlets fit in Ophelias grave: Anon, as patient as the female plunk / When that her golden couplets are disclosed / His silence will sit drooping (5.1.273- 75). The image here is of the dove hatching (disclosing) a pair of fledglings (golden couplets), and it suggests an allegory of poetic creation (among other things), for where else has Hamlet hatched golden couplets to disclose the guilt of the index if not in the speech of some dozen or sixteen lines that he tells the Players he will set bundle and insert in The Murder of Gonzago, a play represent entirely of couplets (2.2.526)? These examples focus on the connection amongst breeding and brooding, encoded in our language by the two moments of the word conception (as in the joke about the man who, when asked what the difference between men and women might be, responded, I cant conceive!). The related whimsey of pregnancy is also frequent in the play: How big(predicate) sometimes his replies are, Polonius says of the cryptic remarks Hamlet makes during his madness; these remarks, Polonius continues, have a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be lay outed of (2.2.206-09). Once again, the concept here is of language bearing meanings that are skyed in speech, as children are delivered by midwives. (Horatio will also use the word deliver at the end of the play as a fiction for meaningful speech.) Later in the play the analogy shifts from pregnancies of meaning to pregnancies of action: Expressing his disdain for courtiers who, unlike Horatio, win advancement through flattery, Hamlet says No, let the candied tongue lick wonky pomp, / And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee (2.2.58). Such obsequious courtesies contract pregnant with advancement when inseminated by royal patronage. Earlier in the play, Hamlet had berated himself for his long procrastination by saying he was Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my wooing (2.2.553), which is of course to kill Claudius. This analogy brings us close to the heart of Hamlets mystery. It suggests that, in a moment of frustration, he sees himself as having not been made pregnant by the sexual climax of the Ghost in act one (the genesis of the cause in this speech).

This complex matrix of perinatal associations colors our understand of Hamlets attack on his mother in her bedroom, when he accuses her of having connected such a deed I As from the trunk of abridgement plucks / The very soul (3.4.46--49). The deed that Hamlet accuses Gertrude of having committed is incest with his fathers brother Claudius. But the word deed also refers to the jointure contract.



Hence the play on the word contraction, which denotes the marriage deed, simply with perinatal connotations. Beyond the Oedipal complex is the imagery of the birth impairment: Hamlet has returned to the place not only of his conception but also of his birth, his mothers bed. The images of conception, birth, and demolition merge into a single cluster. As Stephen Booth notes, contracted, betrothed, drawn together, can specify the nature of the union by means of its potential for suggesting vulva--a potential that Shakespeare was ready to hear in any word containing con, or cun, or a connatural sound (231). Hence the use of the phrase body of contraction in Hamlets attack on his mother evokes labor and actors line as much as it does the spasms of breeding.

Up to this point in the play, Hamlet has remained unpregnant of his cause, which reaches maturity, after a properly lengthy flowing of gestation and brooding, when he assassinates Claudius in the last act. After the death of all the major characters during that scene, Horatio absents himself from the felicity of death to draw his pinch in the pain of this world and tell Hamlets story (5.2.35-36): So shall you hear, Horatio says to Fortinbras, Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts.... All this can I / Truly deliver (5.2.369). He delivers his story like the fairys midwife, in attendance at the birth of those deeds that render Hamlet no eight-day unpregnant of his cause, just after those bodily contractions that have plucked Hamlets soul from his body, replacing a rhapsody of words with silence. Having conceived the cause of revenge in the first act, he has now hatched those deeds upon which he has long been brooding, and Horatio is ready to deliver his story. Perhaps he will do so with the kind of golden couplets that Gertrude had imagined Hamlet as hatching, and which the Players had used to disclose the guilt of the King in The Mousetrap. The image cluster of breeding, brooding, and birthing operates as a metaphor of the political, psychological, and esthetic processes of conception, action, and poetic composition.

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