2—
Giving up the Ghost:
Hamlet , Revenge, and Denial

Behind what we think of as the Russian menace lies what we do not wish to face, and what white Americans do not face when they regard a Negro reality—the fact that life is tragic. . . . Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time^[1]

Countless processions of black letters have reminded us that we must each give up the ghost sooner or later. What dresses me in more than the customary suits of solemn black—perhaps even in the black hat of the villain—is my polemical suggestion that we ought to give up the ghost in a more literal sense, and that Hamlet deeply condemns the illusions of afterlife it superficially encourages. The vexed status of King Hamlet's ghost, in the play and its critical history alike, reflects uncertainties about personal immortality. Should that apparition be read as a true spirit or a destructive illusion, a cultural convention or

a pathological projection? Obviously its widely witnessed appearance seems to promote a Catholic view rather than a mortalist one. But instead of spurring Hamlet to some pious resolution to ease or avoid his father's suffering, the ghost makes Hamlet resolve to remember and avenge. The visitation renews the young man's hope, not of otherworldly salvation, but of lasting worldly identity, inspiring him to defend his father's memory against the ravages of time, and to attack the proximate cause of his father's death.

The two complaints of this dead ancestor—about his purgatorial agonies and about his unrequited murder—can be condensed into a single, historically based manifestation of survivor anxiety. If I am correct that revenge-tragedy serves partly as a displacement of prayers for the dead forbidden by the Reformation, then Hamlet's guilt-ridden compulsion to help his tormented father may draw on Shakespeare's own guilt toward his recently deceased and reputedly Catholic father. "The motif of the child whose prayers, good works, and penances secure release for the soul of the unshriven parent was a potent one in late medieval thinking," demanding "an elaborate sequence of Masses, fasts, and other mortuary observances."^[2] Perhaps Shakespeare peaked like John o' Geneva, and could pray nothing—at least until (like his Wittenberg-trained protagonist) he found an indirect theatrical way to assail the conscience of the King who had taken his father's life (2.2.562–64, 600–601).

Ghosts are the standard-equipment starters of Senecan revengetragedies; my point is that this convention reflects a deep motive for stories of blood-revenge, which sustain two precious beliefs: first, that our rights and even our desires exert some force beyond our deaths; and second, that revenge can symbolically restore us to life by defeating the agency of our death, conveniently localized in a villain.^[3] We continue to need our versions of these ghostly visitations for much the same reasons Renaissance playwrights needed theirs: to shape life into meaningful plots that motivate action and allow the performance of something complete and significant in the short time allotted. We demand that the culture haunt the theaters of our minds and our worlds—our distracted globes (1.5.97)—with compelling illusions that divert us from the recognition of meaninglessness. A society lacking consensus on the ulterior purpose of human life—lacking a univocal ghost—faces a crisis of morale even more stubborn and painful than Hamlet's. Without the introjected specter of the father—the superego Freud identifies with the socialized individual conscience, the nom du père Lacan identifies with

the entire patriarchal and logocentric structure of Western culture—chaos seems inevitable.^[4] So there are powerful protective forces, sociological as well as philological and theological, arrayed to resist my exorcism. And perhaps I am like Gertrude, the sole observer to whom the ghost, holy or otherwise, chooses to be transparent. But, in my skeptical reading, Hamlet teaches us to see through this possessive apparition.

Hamlet and Hamlet and Hamlet —the father, the son, and the ghostly play—creep from death to dusty death, for all their sound and fury. How we die finally matters less than that we die. In the first act, Horatio warns Hamlet not to follow the ghost; in the fifth act, he warns Hamlet instead not to focus "too curiously" on the inglorious indifference of corpses.^[5] The spectral "illusion" (1.1.13) represents a threat, but so does disillusionment. What if the lost father proves to be not a ghost, but instead a skull; not the victim of extraordinary villainy, but of ordinary decay? When Hamlet encounters the remains of Yorick, the man who—kissing and carrying the boy "a thousand times"—was evidently no less a loving paternal figure than the biological father, the only tribute young Hamlet can pay him is a rising gorge (5.1.180–89). Yorick is death demystified; he does not appear in the Dramatis Personae, but he wears the mask of everyone we have ever loved who has died. Revenge may be "a remedy for grief,"^[6] but it is also a remedy for terror; it presents a bloody horror, but it blocks another, paler kind of horror, one less susceptible to consolation. Pursuing the specter of a murdered father—or, in The Spanish Tragedy , the specter of a murdered son—allows one to flee the specters of inevitable decay and unaccommodated death. An obsession with murder on earth and consequent punishment forestalls an obsession with meaningless life and subsequent annihilation.

My suggestion is not that we should dismiss the ghost as a mere hallucination of Hamlet's,^[7] but rather that we exorcise it from our own globe lest it poison or "blast" us (1.1.130)—that we follow the play in turning away from haunted battlements and accepting in their place a common graveyard. If the vengeful ghost cannot be exorcised entirely (and this chapter's subtitle suggests an effort to go Eleanor Prosser^[8] one better), it can at least be isolated as a fiction within a fiction within a fiction, an "illusion" within a drama within a cultural mythology of denial. The ghost is a design our psyches read into the threateningly blank Rorschach page called death. If it appears to be "a composite of what Catholics, Protestants, and skeptics thought about spirits,"^[9] rather

than a consistent entity, that may be because Shakespeare intended it to stand for all projective beliefs about afterlife. What this chapter offers is less a strictly critical analysis than a series of meditations on that point.

The social purpose of these meditations is to extricate from the play something like a psychoanalysis of the culture as a whole, intended to help cure the pathological compulsion to avenge threats against our fantasies of immortality by stabbing blindly through a curtain with no real hope of killing our real enemy. Such a cure would require a shift in our attitudes toward death—and hence in our analyses of revenge-tragedy—resembling a recent shift in approaches to mental illness, which now emphasize less the parents' culpability than "the tragedy of the patients' lives—tragedy which is so much of a piece with the tragedy of life for all of us that the presentation is often a profoundly grief-laden experience for both the presenter and the listeners . . . a picture which is much more deeply shaking than was the blame-colored picture previously often seen."^[10] In this sense, Hamlet's fixation on punishing the bad father Claudius in defense of the lost good father not only resembles the classic psychological splitting of a parental figure in response to unmanageable ambivalence. It also exemplifies the neurotic tendency to isolate all threats into a phobic object, where they can be kept under surveillance; and the mechanism of transference, whereby all goodness can be located in a single figure—a therapist, a god, a lover, a parent, a child—and there worshipped and guarded in a strategic displacement of narcissism.

Defending a ghost and eliciting its suppressed voice is a projective defense of the mortal self:

For medieval people, as for us, to die meant to enter a great silence, and the fear of being forgotten in that silence was as real to them as to any of the generations that followed. But for them that silence was not absolute and could be breached. To find ways and means of doing so was one of their central religious preoccupations. For what late medieval English men and women at the point of death seem most to have wanted was that their names should be kept constantly in the memory and thus in the prayers of the living.^[11]

This is what Hamlet asks of Ophelia—"Nymph, in thy orisons, / Be all my sins remembered" (3.1.89–90)—but many of the fame-hungry Elizabethans surely wanted prayers in order to be remembered, rather than remembrance in order to receive prayers. In announcing, "This is I, Hamlet the Dane" (5.1.250–51), then promptly leaping into a grave,

Hamlet obeys the familiar Renaissance burial inscriptions that urge us to sympathize with the dead because they were once as we are, and we will someday be as they are. And what Hamlet announces in the graveyard, identifying with his dead father, centuries of audiences have imagined in the theater, identifying elaborately with this protagonist: "It is we who are Hamlet," declares Hazlitt.^[12] The danger is that sympathetic identification with a past life—fictional or otherwise—can become a demonic possession of the present, violating a boundary between death and life that should be respected, for all our impulses to cross it.

The sentries in the opening scene stand on guard against some undefined threat to their world, an enemy that (for all its disguises) proves to be mortality itself, the foe against whom our weapons are futile: "For it is as the air, invulnerable, / And our vain blows malicious mockery" (1.1.150–51). This ghost is less "the devil of the knowledge of death"^[13] than the tempter toward the denial of death. The motives projected onto the ghost in the opening scene reflect all the conventional fantasies of overcoming mortality. The dead return to this world, often in righteous anger, to oversee their familial, financial, and political legacies (1.1.63–138). At the center of Horatio's speculation stands the vengeful quest of young Fortinbras, which suggests not only (as young Hamlet observes) that life and death alike can be justified by honor, but also that the living child can repair the losses of the dead parent. If Fortinbras can undo one consequence of his father's defeat, the loss of territory, why not another, the loss of life? The procreative remedy for death transmutes into a more obviously symbolic one.

Hopes of resurrection—whether by sons, symbols, or saviors—are timeless functions of human culture; but they are terrifying when they threaten to malfunction. Both the timelessness and the terror are evident when Horatio turns to contemplating a previous eruption of politically ominous ghosts: "A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, / The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets . . . and the moist star . . . Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse" (1.1.117–23). The doomsday comparison is more than casual, because Horatio's diction generates a vision of the Last Judgment gone bad. The dead awaken to a nightmare. Though Rome was then a pagan world, the mightiest Julius fell just a little ere the meekest Jesus fell, and the passage evokes Matthew 27:50–53 (in which Jesus dies amid earthquakes, and the saints rise from their graves to wander the city) only to distort horribly its image of resurrection.

Only a dozen short lines beyond this Caesarean mock-Doomsday, Horatio attributes to the ghost a conventional motive that comes too close for comfort to the problems of bodily resurrection:

         if thou hast uphoarded in thy life
Extorted treasure in the womb of earth,
For which they say your spirits oft walk in death . . .
(1.1.139–41)

Perhaps the lost treasure for which the ghost mourns, which he wishes his audience would extort in a Caesarean rebirth from the tomb of earth, is nothing other than his own remains; mortal bodies were commonly described as matter temporarily appropriated from the earth. But at this moment the cock crows, cutting off the speech. This "trumpet to the morn," as Horatio calls it, resumes the parodic echoes of the Day of Judgment. The Last Trumpet that resounds here is merely an animal voice that sends the dead back to their graves instead of up into salvation.

Marcellus's rhapsodic response makes the Christian associations explicit, but again this Savior, instead of liberating the dead, remands them to their graves:

It faded on the crowing of the cock.
Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
This bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad. . . .
(1.1.162–66)

So the cheer of the morning that now rises in its "russet mantle" is an equivocal cheer. For all Hamlet's eager hyperbole, his father is no Hyperion who resurrects with each sunrise (1.2.140, 3.4.56). The stage action reflects a psychological truth: that rising to the business of a new dawn means leaving behind the awareness of death and the memories of the dead. The mourning of the dead and the morning of the day are incompatible. That may partly explain why Hamlet complains of being "too much in the sun" and clings stubbornly to his midnight-black mantle of protracted sorrow.

This stubbornness is the problem Claudius confronts at the start of the second scene. He tries to bury the fact of death rhetorically in a subordinate clause—a syntactical analogue to the death-denying strategies of the culture as a whole—and tries to bury the same fact practically in the role-based systems of marriage and royalty that subordinate the mortal body-natural to a successively immortal body-politic. It enrages

Hamlet when Claudius identifies himself as Hamlet's father and Denmark's king. Hamlet is determined to resist this ordinary obliteration of the dead and of the facts of death, even before he learns that this particular death demands a particular commemoration. So he attacks the neglect of mourning with black clothing, attacks the impersonal rhetoric of kingship with ironic wit, attacks the usurped roles on the throne and in the royal bed with outright diatribes.

Hamlet attempts to sustain his father's existence by identifying with him, even if that means joining him in death. He wishes not to be himself, not to be alive, even (in the famous soliloquy at 3.1.56) "not to be" at all. In his gloom, passivity, and silence, in the black of his mourning wear, in his closed or staring eyes, and his wish to move out of the sun and into his grave, young Hamlet tries to be a sort of medium at a seance, conjuring the dead man into presence, with all his absentness intact. His mother Gertrude is trapped in a community of denial: she is no more willing to see the dead than to see the mad Ophelia (4.5.1) or the "black and grained spots" of her own mortal frailty (3.4.90). She accuses her son of blindness—as she will later accuse him of madness—for seeing things in death that she cannot bear to confront:

Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust.
Thou know'st 'tis common: all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.
(1.2.68–73)

Hamlet's edged reply—"Ay, madam, it is common"—suggests that it is precisely the commonness of death that horrifies him, the way it erases distinctions.

Claudius then undertakes the same line of argument, insisting that heaven, the dead, nature, and reason all make up one voice that

                                                still hath cried
From the first corse till he that died today,
'This must be so'. We pray you throw to earth
This unprevailing woe, and think of us
As of a father; for let the world take note
You are the most immediate to our throne. . . .
(1.2.104–9)

To escape perpetual futile mourning, one must accept the figurations and distractions the culture offers: stepfathers in place of fathers, the

deferred promise of glory and material reward. No wonder Claudius is the villain of the piece, when he so perfectly embodies the standard cultural explanation of why we should accept death, expressed (for example) by Drummond: "since it is a necessity, from the which never an age by-past hath been exempted . . .(no consequent of life being more common and familiar), why shouldst thou, with unprofitable and nothing availing stubbornness, oppose to so unevitable and necessary a condition" (p. 24).

But Claudius's rhetorical reference to "the first corse" is a Freudian slip that reveals his special share in the universal guilt that bequeathed mortality. He seems to have forgotten, at least on the conscious level, that (according to his Bible) the first corpse was Abel, killed by his brother: Cain, "that did the first murder" (5.1.76). This unwitting but revealing allusion not only provides a first squeak of the guilt that will eventually be caught in "The Mousetrap"; it also compromises the larger cover story of natural decay by which Claudius's depredations—and perhaps those of all Creation—seek to disguise themselves as something orderly and acceptable, something controllable by a finite commemoration ("for some term / To do obsequious sorrow," as Claudius puts it at 1.2.91–92). As in The Spanish Tragedy , the first cause of death—the "author of this woe"—can hide from prosecution behind the efficient causes. "Cain was not therefore the first murtherer, but Adam , who brought in death" (Browne, p. 141).

From another perspective, the Cain allusions point to the deeper things that this revenge story shares with the Genesis story. Both narratives play to the profound need to perceive death as a contingency, and a correctable one at that. That is the fallacy at the pathetic heart of blood-revenge, the fallacy that inspired the "prophetic soul" of Hamlet himself to suspect his uncle of murdering as well as replacing his father (1.5.41). Just as the play vindicates the disgusted cynicism of adolescence by giving it objective correlatives, so too it vindicates—like many (other) detective stories—the perversely satisfying suspicion that every ordinary death can be exposed as a murder. Every death is both banal and outrageous; nature becomes murder's alibi in Claudius's speech, in a way that reminds us how murder becomes nature's alibi in several popular genres of fiction.^[14]

A few lines before he learns that his father's ghost has appeared, Hamlet is already groping for a mythology that will allow him to imagine death as reversible, capping his complaint about his mother's hasty remarriage with the assertion that Claudius is "no more like my father / Than I to Hercules" (1.2.152–53). Given the themes of the soliloquy,

this allusion recalls Hercules' expedition into the underworld to return the conjugally loyal Alcestis to her noble husband: if Hamlet were indeed like Hercules, then he could have his real father again in place of his step-father.

Like Milton in "Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint," however, Hamlet must eventually awaken from the Alcestis fantasy to the dark, stubborn facts of natural death. The wish this dream fulfills is the wish to evade the ordinary consumption of the body:

O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter.
(1.2.129–32)

This is not merely (as he is commonly characterized) a man so disgusted and weary-spirited that he wishes to surrender to death. On the contrary, he is trying to find an alternative to death, or if he must die, to do so as a willed act, a conquest rather than a surrender. (Intriguingly, the other great voice of morbid intellect in this period, John Donne, was similarly inclined to turn death into a pure melting, as in the "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," or into a decisively violent suicide, as in Biathanatos .)

The alternative to such lovely or sudden endings was much less attractive, as the vivid heritage of macabre medieval art would have reminded Hamlet, Donne, and their audiences. As so often in Renaissance literature (and 5.1.29–31 makes it explicit), gardens become a subconscious euphemistic metaphor for graveyards:

                                                'tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead.
(1.2.135–38)

At two months dead, the problem is not only faded memories above ground, but also decaying flesh below ground that nature grossly repossesses. Hamlet will talk explicitly about the "convocation of politic worms" that feast on Polonius's corpse (4.3.19–31), but the macabre transi image seems already to be on Hamlet's mind in this first soliloquy. When he recalls bitterly that Gertrude used to hang on King Hamlet "As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on"

(1.2.144–45), it sounds as if she were a coffin-worm, and their marriage had been the beginning of King Hamlet's vermiculation. Indeed, early in the bedroom confrontation, Hamlet construes Gertrude's marriages as a mindless feeding on her husbands (3.4.66–67), and he warns Polonius to sequester Ophelia from kissing and conception, lest "the sun breed maggots in a dead dog" (2.2.181–86). Until he fully understands the murder as such, Hamlet finds a scapegoat through the familiar misogynist suspicion that women (in the decadent sexuality they evoke, or in the fallible bodies they issue) are the source of men's mortality. "Frailty, thy name is woman" (1.2.146).

The suggestion of vermiculation recurs more disturbingly in Hamlet's complaint that

                                  The funeral bak'd meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven
Or ever I had seen that day, Horatio.
My father—methinks I see my father.
(1.2.180–84)

Seeing him is one thing; eating him is another. Hamlet's father, already regurgitated by his tomb (1.4.50–51), becomes all too model a Host at this mixed sacrament, serving as a locus for the communion of his kin. Nor is this so peculiar a transaction as we are provisionally encouraged to imagine: all the bodies in Denmark, Guildenstern tells Claudius, "feed upon your Majesty" (3.3.10). A king "may go a progress through the guts of a beggar," as Hamlet argues (4.3.30–31); he may also go a progress through the guts of his son. The wildest horrors of Titus Andronicus lie waiting to be recognized in every meal of our ordinary lives, as we repress the knowledge of the deaths our lives are built on.^[15]

Hamlet's reluctance to partake of this feast of renewal is understandable. He is much more willing to incorporate his father's returning spirit than his father's bodily remains; he prefers communication to communion. Yet, at least in body-language, the ghost communicates nothing but death. Horatio shifts the topic from the funeral meats to the apparition, which he describes as "very pale," its eyes "fix'd" (1.2.233).^[16] It came "In the dead waste and middle of the night" and left the sentries "distill'd / Almost to jelly with the act of fear," so that they "Stand dumb and speak not to him" (1.2.198, 204–6). The blank staring, the collapse into silence, even the distillment into jelly (cf. Donne's Sermons ,

III, 105), suggest that this ghost infects those he encounters with a version of his own unredeemed deadness. Marcellus turns for consolation to the idea of Christ as a bearer of Eternal Life (1.1.163–69), but this ghost offers a parodic inversion of precisely that notion.^[17] Its insistent "Remember me" translates into "memento mori ," not an extension of life, but an invitation into death.

Why, then, is Hamlet so jolly by the end of a visitation that hints at purgatorial torments, reveals earthly horrors, and assigns him a brutal and predictably fatal task? Perhaps he exults because the idea of death as ultimate closure and permanent stillness has been so strikingly refuted. For a creature of faith such as Sir Thomas Browne (p. 115), the pain at the end of life is much more frightening than the prospect of what may follow. But, as C. S. Lewis suggests, this play is haunted, not by "a physical fear of dying, but a fear of being dead."^[18] What Hamlet emphasizes repeatedly in greeting the ghost is its bodily escape from the tomb, as if that physical resurrection were more valuable, or at least more plausible, than spiritual salvation:

                                                                       tell
Why thy canoniz'd bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements, why the sepulchre
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn'd
Hath op'd his ponderous and marble jaws
To cast thee up again. What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon. . . .
(1.4.47–53)

The ghost provides simultaneously an explanation and a disproof of simple mortality. The gross decay of this old man's flesh resulted from an evil aberration, and the rest of his spirit is not yet silent.

Better a murdered king on earth than a dead one at peace, if Hamlet's response is any guide. If his father still has a purpose in death, then Hamlet's life, rendered aimless by a confrontation with mortality, can recover purpose also: "Say why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?" (1.4.57). Again the ghost and the project of revenge he advocates serve the same purpose as neurotic symptoms. Like both Hieronimo and Hamlet, any person forced to confront the human situation must become a bit insane in order to continue functioning normally:

the despair and anguish of which the patient complains is not the result of such symptoms but rather are the reasons for their existence. It is in fact these

very symptoms that shield him from the torment of the profound contradictions that lie at the heart of human existence . . . neurotic symptoms serve to reduce and narrow—to magically transform the world so that he may be distracted from his concerns of death, guilt, and meaninglessness. The neurotic preoccupied with his symptom is led to believe that his central task is one of confrontation with his particular obsession or phobia. In a sense his neurosis allows him to take control of his destiny.^[19]

"My fate cries out," Hamlet insists over Horatio's warnings, "Still am I call'd" (1.4.81, 84). "Fate" and "calling" are the words by which countless Renaissance self-fashioners deemed valid the readings of their lives that gave them shape and therefore value. An inauthentic madness helps hold off a true madness, and that internally generated function may be helpfully masked as compulsion from a meaningful beyond.

Shakespeare thus exposes the inner workings of narrative forms that rose rapidly to prominence during his lifetime: the call of a conversion experience, the spiritual autobiography, the revenge story. Without such provocative mythologies, we might not know what, why, even how to desire, beyond the sleeping and feeding Hamlet dismisses as merely bestial (4.4.35). Without such "revelations" to dispel the banality of death, without them to shape for us a meaningful task of defending good against evil, we could easily sink into the poisonous accidie that grips Hamlet in the opening scenes. He has to find murder for the same reason most people have to find God, and the ghost functions as religion does in general, providing "a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations" and "clothing these conceptions with . . . an aura of factuality."^[20]

Hamlet's responses to the visiting ghost, and even to the visiting players, provoke us to evaluate our own appetites for stories of murder and retribution, whether in the Book of Genesis, the story of Pyrrhus, or the play of Hamlet . Revenge drama is, I believe, overdetermined in its appeal to Renaissance audiences. The revenge-instinct is not unique to that cultural moment, nor even to the human species; but instances like The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet offer the supplemental pleasure of characterizing death as "most foul, strange and unnatural" (Hamlet , 1.5.28). If the Biblical question, "Death, where is thy sting?" is no longer merely rhetorical, at least it now has an answer: "The serpent that did sting thy father's life / Now wears his crown" (1.5.39–40). In making death the work of an evil serpent in the garden (or at least the orchard), to be avenged by a devout son, Shakespeare at once taps and anatomizes the appeal of Christian mythology. Our desire for Hamlet to

kill Claudius, for the heir to defeat death on the father's behalf, is really another version of a standard dream of immortality regained.

Shakespeare refuses to stabilize this traditional system of denial: even this consolingly specific criminal accusation comports a more general and troubling oedipal riddle about the normal succession to the crown of life, generations guilty of feeding on the bodies of their ancestors. Ernest Jones's classic Freudian interpretation, which argues that Hamlet is paralyzed by the fact that Claudius has merely enacted Hamlet's own oedipal desires, may be expanded into something less purely psychosexual.^[21] Perhaps young Hamlet's tendency to think of suicide as an alternative to revenge reflects a recognition that he is precisely what he must attack Claudius for being: the replacement of his father, the symbolic embodiment and direct beneficiary of the process that necessitated the father's death.

Claudius assigns Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to elicit from Hamlet "What it should be, / More than his father's death, that thus hath put him / So much from th'understanding of himself" (2.2.7–9). But (even without oedipal guilt) might not that clearest early warning of death most people encounter—the demise of the same-sex parent, a loss Shakespeare suffered at about the time he was writing Hamlet —make it unbearable for us to recognize ourselves sanely, to understand ourselves as the heirs of graves no less than thrones? Thomas Adams—whose Jacobean sermons show a surprising imprint of Shakespeare's works, including Hamlet —preached that "common Funerals tell us all men are mortal, but that of a Father speaketh not only plainly, but particularly, thou art so. Where the Father's dead, there can be no pretence or thought of immortality."^[22] How should one sanely, self-knowingly, reconcile (as Hamlet attempts to do later in the scene, at 2.2.303–8) the magnificence of humanity with its destiny in dust? Gertrude diagnoses for Claudius the cause of Hamlet's madness as "His father's death and our o'er-hasty marriage" (2.2.57). From Hamlet's perspective, those two events are two stages of the same crime, the commonplace and outrageous obliteration of King Hamlet by time and mortal frailty. The Player Queen makes the idea explicit: "A second time I kill my husband dead, / When second husband kisses me in bed" (3.2.179–80).

On one level, the revelation of Claudius as a murderer is merely the literal fulfillment of a fact that is already true psychologically, symbolically. By replacing the perfect father with a mortal man, by showing that love and memory are ephemeral, and that roles such as husband and king are fungible, the transition from old Hamlet's reign to that of Claudius

entails the invention of mortality in young Hamlet's psychic world. No wonder Hamlet calls him "this canker of our nature" (5.2.69); no wonder the comparison of Claudius to that first corpse-maker, Cain, keeps recurring; and no wonder his standard speeches of consolation become indices of his extraordinary guilt, as the spectators are invited to project onto this villain all their own resentment at the unsatisfactory explanations and consolations they have received for the deaths of the people they love. Again—to adapt Voltaire's aphorism about God—if there had been no murder, Hamlet would have been compelled to invent one. And in a work of fictional art, in the work of mythmaking, there can hardly be any absolute distinction between empirical reality and psychological invention. The need to make a hero of the father and a villain of the stepfather not only suggests a familiar psychological syndrome in Hamlet the man. It also reminds us that our pleasure in watching Hamlet the play, other stories of blood-revenge, and perhaps even the Christian story, arises from a similar syndrome: a need to cast the world in polarities that give it meaning, to isolate a master truth that can finally be vindicated against the interim victories of mortality.

Claudius proves susceptible to the same convenient allegorization of his own mortality, pleading for England to eradicate Hamlet, "For like the hectic in my blood he rages, / And thou must cure me" (4.3.69–70). Hamlet is indirectly flesh of his flesh, more than kin and less than kind, the outward agency of Claudius's inherent susceptibility to death—as the plot proves him to be. He brings Claudius's poison into Claudius's bloodstream, gives him a taste of his own mortality. The assurance God will not give him in the prayer scene, Claudius begs from the English executioners, by asserting his royal prerogative over life and death. His plots to assassinate Hamlet thus derive from the same projective mythology that shapes Hamlet's plots against him.

Campaigns against death are ostensibly waged in service to the dead (as in the common practice of raising funds for gun control or medical research in the name of victims of crime or disease),^[23] but they are primarily functions of denial on the part of the living. Laertes' determination to aid and comfort his dead father and sister—indeed, his illusion that that is his motive—provides a vivid example of the culture's standard mechanisms of denial. Since Polonius has been interred "but greenly / In hugger-mugger" (4.5.83–84), and since Ophelia receives only "maimed rites" (5.1.212), Laertes feels compelled to supplement them with the ritual of revenge. Again the play taps emergent tensions in the surrounding culture, where Puritans would insist—unsuccess-

fully—that corpses "be immediately interred, without any Ceremony," because "praying, reading, and singing" in funerals "have been grossly abused, are no way beneficial to the dead, and have proved many wayes hurtfull to the living."^[24] For Laertes as for Hamlet, the road to bloodrevenge is paved by the Reformation.

Even at his most violently rebellious, Laertes is thus as conventional a thinker as his father; he embodies precisely the destructive and delusional determination to wound the living for the sake of the dead that the play as a whole condemns. The point is not that Laertes overreacts—Shakespeare could surely have given him slimmer grounds for outrage, as other Renaissance playwrights gave their honor-mad killers—but that his solution proves so badly misguided. He seems unselfconsciously delighted to rehearse the juicy role of avenger, first on his father's behalf and then on his sister's. Playing this role requires a villain from whom to retake their lives, and Claudius is shrewd enough to cast Hamlet convincingly in that role. Claudius promises Laertes that Ophelia's "grave shall have a living monument" (5.1.292) in the killing of Hamlet, who supposedly caused her death. So the act of revenge is to serve the same purpose as funeral statuary, to give the deceased some representative immortality.

Even shrewder, perhaps, is Claudius's evocation of the Norman horseman's name—Lamord—as a provocation for Laertes to undertake the duel (4.7.91). Claudius's diction then emphasizes that any reticence in revenge constitutes a surrender to death: a submission to time, disease, and mutability (4.7.110–18). By raising for Laertes the same disturbing possibility that events have raised for Hamlet—that loving memory, the last hope of the dead father, decays like a body—Claudius compels Laertes to assert the contrary with bloodshed. By accepting the conventional formula of consolatory vengeance, Laertes will show himself indeed his complacent "father's son / More than in words." But his vow "To cut [Hamlet's] throat i'th' church" sets the immortalityfantasies based in memory, progeny, and vengeance directly against the central immortalizing promise of Christianity (4.7.124–25). We are left uncertain whether revenge should be construed as the correction of murder, as revenge-tragedies generally suggested, or merely as further murder, as Elizabethan orthodoxies insisted. By these contradictions Hamlet deconstructs its own genre, forcing us to recognize the arbitrary designations by which we locate absolute eternal values in a mutable world. In distancing himself from Laertes' stock vengefulness, Hamlet offers us a glimpse of a morality undistorted by the denial of death, a way

out of the bad faith prompted by existential dread: "In the prison of one's character one can pretend and feel that he is somebody , that the world is manageable, that there is a reason for one's life, a ready justification for one's action. To live automatically and uncritically is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the programmed cultural heroics" (Becker, p. 87). Hamlet fails to rescue Laertes from precisely this prison, and it means they will both die in the prison here called Denmark.

When Claudius is given what he earlier called "superfluous death" (4.5.96), the multiple sword-thrusts and poisonings replicate all the killings he has caused, revealing the absurdly systematic way revenge seeks to undo death. This sort of redundant murder also helps conceal the binary nature and fundamental causes of death. As a mortal man, Hamlet must die within a few decades by course of nature; but we hardly notice that tragic fact in its own guise while we are watching him parry more vivid and specific threats: suicidal impulses, marauding pirates, mandated executions, poisoned swords and cups. Laertes claims his poison is so powerful that

Where it draws blood, no cataplasm so rare,
Collected from all simples that have virtue
Under the moon, can save the thing from death
That is but scratch'd withal.
(4.7.142–145)

But what balm can save anyone from death, even in the absence of a poison-tipped rapier? They should have died hereafter, unless the poison were the eternally redemptive blood of Christ. From this perspective, the duel is a kind of Black Mass that, under Claudius's satanic guidance, undoes all the promises of immortality. Like the guests at Claudius's implicitly cannibalistic wedding-feast, these Danes are feeding on a deadly rather than a redemptive Host.^[25]

The black humor of the gravedigger performs the same kind of subversion as that Black Mass. Like the crowing of the cock and the recollection of Julius Caesar in the first act, the scene suggests a parody of the Last Judgment: skulls rise from their graves to endure Hamlet's sentences, and the gravedigger, Hamlet, and Laertes all climb from graves under their own power.^[26] This is a place of skulls—"another Golgotha," to borrow a crucifixion reference from Macbeth (1.2.40)—but the only resurrection it can offer is exhumation. The clowns analyze the causes and implications of Ophelia's death so badly that they expose

the underlying absurdity of allocating burial spots according to the state of mind that once inhabited the decaying corpse. No less absurd is their indignation that the rich and powerful have more right than the poor to hang and drown themselves (5.1.26–29). Much of the graveyard humor arises precisely from the way the decorous official metaphors collapse to a crudely physical level: "The crowner hath sat on her and finds it Christian burial" (5.1.4). But that collapse is as frightening as it is funny. Incoherent theology is not only a poor cover for implacable biology, it suggests that better theology is merely a better cover. Certainly, after seeing the attitude of the gravedigger toward the bodily remains—the way the props are treated by the stagehand after the funeral show is over—we can hardly overlook the empty pomposity of the priest's concern that a full Christian ceremony would "profane the service of the dead" (5.1.229). They are already being served profanely enough, and served in fact to worms.

Laertes tries to answer the priest's chilly arguments with natural facts and feelings, but cannot help inventing his own death-defying miracles (and hence his own supernatural cruelties) in the process:

                                     Lay her i'th' earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring. I tell thee, churlish priest,
A minist'ring angel shall my sister be
When thou liest howling.
(5.1.231–35)

Laertes' dramatic leap into the grave, Gertrude's strewing of flowers—how much of this can survive as convincing high sentiment after the gravedigger has sounded the low-comic keynotes? Hamlet accuses Laertes of "rant," then grandly demands to be buried with Ophelia too. He seems to be torn between a need to express his own passionate mourning, and his need to acknowledge sarcastically the hollowness of such gestures. If brother and lover intend to keep raising the verbal dosage until their patient revives, the hyperbole will inevitably, and revealingly, become ridiculous—as the violence does in other revengetragedies. Gertrude attributes Hamlet's reactions to "mere madness," but Ophelia's stark indifference to the debates and rivalries over her worldly love and her eternal soul exposes all these competitors and commentators as victims of a typically human madness, a delusive need to replace the indifference of death with the differentiations by which we define and preserve our sanity.

While it is valid for a Hamlet scholar to inquire, say, whether aristocratic Renaissance widows were expected to mourn two months or twelve,^[27] it is also valid to ask why it should matter. Hamlet exclaims sarcastically to Ophelia, "O heavens, die two months ago and not forgotten yet! Then there's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year. But by'r lady a must build churches then . . ." (3.2.128–31). Patent as it may seem, this tirade still strikes a devastatingly direct blow to a familiar tendency to answer mortal annihilation with the memories of those who loved us, with the legacies of our good deeds and grand monuments, and with the prayers such things elicit for us from those we leave behind.^[28] Hamlet's anger reflects a special exasperation with the human tendency—irrationally, but under the name of reasonableness—to measure responses to the infiniteness of death with finite numbers, to suppose that a month's mourning is the right amount for a permanent loss, even that a tanner's body will rot after nine years rather than eight. The popular aphorism about lies needs little revision to apply to attitudes toward death: there are denials, damned denials, and statistics.

The persistence of the facts of deadness against all human constructions comes through clearly in the gravedigger's riddle that makes his profession the best builders, since "The houses he makes lasts till doomsday" (5.1.59). It comes through more subversively in his argument that Adam was the first gravedigger, which not only re-awakens the Cain reference, but also suggests that all mankind has ever really done is tirelessly dig its own graves. This may sound like a prophecy of the nuclear arms race—a logical culmination of that process—but it was already evident to Shakespeare's contemporaries: "Assoon as God set us on work, our very occupation was an Embleme of death; It was to digge the earth; not to digge pitfals for other men, but graves for our selves" (Sermons , IV, 52).

The play focuses on this disturbing idea with increasing magnification. First we are told that the gravedigger began his job on "that day that our last king Hamlet overcame Fortinbras," suggesting that the earliest death mentioned in the play was in fact the start of the world's mortality. Moreover, the fact that young Fortinbras takes over young Hamlet's royal legacy at the end of the play demonstrates that time obliterates human achievements, that the things people fought and died for slip, by forfeit or random permutation, back to their opposites or starting-places. Which man won that archetypal single combat between old Hamlet and old Fortinbras finally makes no more difference than whether Ophelia went to the water or the water to Ophelia. The Old

Testament keynote for Hamlet may thus be less the vengeful splendors of Genesis and Exodus than the clear-eyed weariness of Ecclesiastes.

The next step is the indirect revelation that this gravedigger's first day on the job was also "that very day that young Hamlet was born" (5.1.143), as if this resting-place had been prepared for him from the beginning of his existence as a physical individual. What was he "born to set . . . right"? Again the specific mission of revenge serves as a metaphor, or perhaps merely as a disguise, for the mysterious assignment implicit in being born a human being. Have we been summoned to perform justice, to defend honor, to protect our families and our nations; or merely to chase illusions and to die? Words, laws, and beauty here lose their meaning; as the surface is scraped off the graveyard, the play exposes the shallowness of its society's fabric of denial (however richly brocaded) beneath which it hides its dark obvious secrets. Culture is a shroud. Hamlet expresses surprise that this worker "sings in grave-making," and Horatio replies that "Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness" (5.1.65–67). This exchange builds on the preceding suggestions of universality, reminding us that, from one perspective, all our works and days constitute singing at grave-making, enabled by habit and by cultural customs that insulate us from the overwhelming facts of death that are always around and ahead of us.

Events forbid Hamlet to keep these observations at the comfortable distance of contemptus mundi and memento mori commonplaces, a process which serves to remind us that we too may not have truly confronted mortality merely by speaking about it sententiously in the abstract. He begins to identify achingly with the abused disinterred bones, then learns that one skull belonged to his old playmate Yorick—a demystified ghost and a demythologized father. Finally Hamlet stumbles across the funeral of his beloved Ophelia. He asserts his identity almost hysterically as the anonymity of the grave closes in on him, yet in doing so he again allows his father's identity to absorb his own: "This is I, / Hamlet the Dane" (5.1.250–51). The accompanying impulse to descend into the grave—as if the only way to honor a life that has ended were to join it in the functions of death—marks Hamlet's subservience to the scenarios of blood-revenge. That impulse that must be resisted to allow a comic affirmation like that of The Winter's Tale , where Leontes finally overcomes his guilt-ridden desire to become as dead as Hermione, and instead ushers her back into the functions of life.

At the brink of death, with all his own sententiae about futility and anonymity still fresh in his ears, Hamlet undergoes a sort of deathbed

conversion, seeking a final serenity within the Christian formula. This change has often been interpreted as Hamlet's saving revelation, and as the central truth the play serves to inculcate. But Hamlet's attitude toward heaven consistently proves to be an index of how badly he needs faith at any moment; and the graveyard scene expands that pattern to the entire culture, positioning religion as one of the antic dispositions provoked by mortality. Though Hamlet is clearly ineligible for the benefits of the "happy fraud" Thomas Browne (p. 300) attributes to ancient cultures, which believed that ghosts were pained by too much grieving, it is not clear that the Christian happiness about death is any less fraudulent. Hamlet's final "the rest is silence" (5.2.363) seems potentially disturbing for his religious followers in much the way Jesus's "Why hast thou forsaken me" might have been for his.^[29]

Furthermore, it is hard to discern much divine care rewarding Hamlet's conversion, or much Christian benevolence in his own actions; the Denmark of act 5 is hardly a kinder, gentler nation.^[30] It is also hard to see Hamlet's new version of passivity as especially Christian. Stoicism is the last refuge of many a Renaissance hero, but Hamlet's acceptance of his role as a born avenger and a falling sparrow looks less like a happy declaration of faith than like an agnostic yielding to fate, as best one can read it. What Hamlet seems to posit is less a deity to save his soul than a co-author to advance his heroic scenario over the competing scripts that crowd the stages of Elsinore, and thereby to give his life the narrative shape that makes closure a triumph rather than a surrender.^[31] God the Father in act 5 proves to be merely an extension of the father's ghost in act 1—as Freud's theories of religion from the early Totem and Taboo to the late Future of an Illusion would predict. If my resistance to the Christian references places me in the critical pitfall Richard Levin calls "refuting the ending,"^[32] my defense is a kind of tu quoque : to accept the conventional consolations as sufficient is to refute the ending of human life, to misrepresent as comic (however cleverly and appealingly) a plot of rise and fall.

The "augury" Hamlet finally declines to defy (5.2.215) is the mysterious but reliable prophecy of death that sits so ill about our hearts, and lies latent in the uncannily inescapable prophecies of so many other tales of tragic irony, where the protagonist finally arrives at the fatal spot that has awaited him since birth. Hamlet justifies his passivity with a parsing that—in its very absurdity and circularity—may be finally all the human mind can "reasonably" conclude about death:

There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. (5.2.215–18)

All one can do is blankly declare that each individual life is significant. All one can choose about death is to be ready—to mythologize the things that happen into a satisfactory story, to prepare a plausible reading of mortality as wholeness rather than emptiness. Hamlet hopes for a benevolent paternal deity behind this inscrutable omnipotence, but we see the duel arising instead from the reigned paternal benevolence of Claudius, a virtual personification of death itself. Shakespeare uses Horatio to encourage our exasperation with Hamlet for submitting to the scheme—thereby compelling us to challenge our own fatal attractions to schemes called honor and religion and revenge, things we choose to die for so that dying can have a "for."

What is there to fight for, what even to live for, in the world of Denmark? That is the question posed so memorably by Hamlet's early soliloquies, and we should not dismiss it as merely the conventional symptomology of the melancholic, or forget its fundamental power when Hamlet conveniently receives an assignment that (in either sense) "distracts" him. Christian religion appears as empty words chewed in the mouth of Claudius and a prayer-book placed for show in the hands of Ophelia. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern expose common friendship as vulnerable to the brief passing of time and the least pressure of realpolitik. To a cynical male eye, romantic love would have been similarly compromised by Gertrude and Ophelia. Claudius poses as a Donne-like lover whose very existence depends on mutual attraction with Gertrude: "She is so conjunctive to my life and soul / That, as the star moves not but in his sphere, / I could not but by her." This, in turn, explains why he does not dispose of Hamlet promptly, since "The Queen his mother / Lives almost by his looks" (4.7.14–16, 11–12). The entire Danish society—and it may not be extraordinary in this—becomes a kind of house of cards, people making the needy lives around them the justification for their own, in an endlessly circular argument of life-motivation.

Hamlet's survey of Fortinbras's "twenty thousand men / That, for a fantasy and trick of fame, / Go to their graves like beds" (4.4.60–62) defines honor as a thin, destructive invention to which one must nonetheless subscribe if one is to posit and preserve any transcendence of our status as physical animals. To avoid perceiving death as an

ultimate defeat, one must declare something else more important, and validate that assertion by action. That is why the armies march, and even while acknowledging it as absurd and arbitrary, Hamlet seems to consider it as good a reason as any. Honor is further exposed as the hollow commodity of Polonius's advice, the cipher at the abysmal center of Ophelia's madness, and the heartless heart of Laertes' duelling. The declared stakes of that duel—horses, decorations, reputations (5.2.144–61)—plausibly represent all the fripperies of worldly wealth and ostentation which generally serve, as they do in this specific instance, to distract us from the real situation until we are safely in the clutches of death. As on the level of plot, so too on the level of moral symbolism, these designated objects of rivalrous desire are merely toys designed to keep our minds on the game. As a popular Elizabethan treatise on death warned about the rewards of courtiership, "all these liberalities which the Devill casteth us as out at a windowe, are but baites: all these pleasures but embushes: and that he doth but make his sport of us, who strive one with another for such things."^[33] Acquisitive materialism and the competition it breeds keep us from recognizing our common grievance—and perhaps somehow making common cause—against mortality.

That recognition seems to underlie Hamlet's impulses to reconcile himself with Laertes, first in his mourning, then in his dying. Shortly before the fencing match, Hamlet declares that he feels "very sorry, good Horatio, / That to Laertes I forgot myself; / For by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his" (5.2.75–78). The specific cause they share is the outrageous death of a father, but as Claudius pointed out in the play's second scene, the whole history of nature is "death of fathers," and it should not seem so particular with Hamlet and Laertes. We all share the simple doom that the revenge story buries and the gravedigger brutally unearths. To continue spilling each other's blood to cover up that fact—to perform vengeful human sacrifices in the service of an illusion—seems a terrible if widespread mistake. It makes us each into Claudius, a "limed soul, that struggling to be free / Art more engag'd" in the business of death (3.3.68–69). Hamlet is right to call it a possessive "madness," not an authentic self, that attacked Laertes' family, foolishly stabbing a foolish man in blind anger, and lashing out at a loving young woman for all the betrayals men have felt in their love of women. In the paranoid management of our missiles, we share the madness whereby Hamlet "shot my arrow o'er the house / And hurt my brother" (5.2.239–40), and risk sharing his fatal guilt.^[34]

When Hamlet says that his imagination can "trace the noble dust of Alexander till a find it stopping a bung-hole," Horatio warns him that " 'Twere to consider too curiously to consider so" (5.1.197–99). It is not merely "the dread of something after death" that robs "enterprises of great pitch and moment" of "the name of action" (3.1.78, 86, 88); the dread of nothingness threatens similar consequences.^[35] To be and then not to be puzzles the will. What haunts Hamlet most deeply is not exactly the ghost, and what he finally fears about the sleep of death is not exactly the nightmare of damnation. When Rosencrantz tries to attribute Hamlet's distraction to his worldly ambitions, Hamlet replies, "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams" (2.2.254–56). The prospect of a little grave juxtaposed with the prospect of a limitless universe would disable human ambitions and destroy the human psyche, if that recognition were not tamed by rituals, fictions, and selective perceptions. Better a king of a nutshell than a slave of the infinite. Hamlet's too curious dreams may have shown him that his worldly reign (like Alexander's) is nightmarishly lost in a vastness beyond measure.

If Hamlet has nothing to live for, at least he finds something to live by —something like dramatic art. By the time Hamlet completes his revenge, he seems no longer to be working at the behest of the ghost, but on behalf of a compulsion to achieve shape and purpose in his own foreshortened lifetime. He was demonstrably right to mistrust the histrionics of revenge involved in playing "Priam," and even in playing "Hamlet"; yet like the rest of us, he desperately needs a role. His metatheatrical consolation is that he dies as part of a meaningful and repeatable story. It is really the audience, onstage and off, that is in danger of resting in silence, pallor, and oblivion:

You that look pale and tremble at this chance,
That are but mutes or audience to this act,
Had I but time—as this fell sergeant, Death,
Is strict in his arrest—O, I could tell you—
But let it be. Horatio, I am dead,
Thou livest. Report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.
(5.2.339–45)

Anticipating his arrest to a new kind of prison, Hamlet again resurrects his father's spirit in the process of avenging it: like the ghost, he turns his audience fearfully pale, withholds his secrets, but asks that he be remembered and thereby justified. This time Horatio will have to

perform the moralizing and immortalizing work that Shakespeare himself performs, and in a similar way.

But all this telling will be lost to Hamlet, who concentrates on the completion of his earthly story, no longer on any prospect of a judgment beyond:

       Fortinbras . . . has my dying voice.
So tell him, with th'occurrents more and less
Which have solicited—the rest is silence.

HORATIO : Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
(5.2.361–65)

Under the immediate pressure of mourning, the stoic skeptic tries to supply the transcendent music that seems to have forsaken his friend at the moment of death, tries at least to reinterpret that silence as a musical "rest" preparatory to an immortal song.^[36] But the music that immediately answers Horatio's plea is a drum, a sound—whether it proclaims victory or death—of determined destruction. Like the heartbeats of Henry King's "Exequy" (1624) that propel him inexorably closer to their silencing and his death, they speak of a forced march through time to timelessness. But they also suggest a kind of heroic measure (to borrow a medical term) in the desperate struggle to replace that lost heartbeat, as war is often a heroic measure in the desperate struggle to efface mortality.

Fortinbras's commentary on this corpse-strewn stage must sound, to an exorcised audience, almost as ironically irrelevant as the English ambassadors' grand announcement of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's execution (5.2.373–77). That we now perceive Fortinbras's retributive campaign as a misguided response to the emotional needs of mourning is an index of Shakespeare's success as an ethical teacher. Fortinbras becomes a spokesman for a conventional view of heroic death that the play itself has rendered obsolete:

This quarry cries on havoc. O proud Death,
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,
That thou so many princes at a shot
So bloodily hast struck?
(5.2.369–72)

The anthropomorphizing of death—even where it is disguised as a grim surrender, as it is here—is actually a consoling fiction. Death (pace John

Donne) is not proud; nor is it ashamed. The terror lies in its indifference, which steals away the differences by which and for which we live. The princes who fall bloodily at once would all soon enough have descended in age and sickness to their tombs, no more or less dead than paupers. At death's Lasting Supper, "your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service," and Shakespeare has disabled the mechanism of denial required to perceive this "feast" as ritual and metaphor, systematically reducing the promises of the supper of the Lamb in heaven to the banquet of the worms underground (4.3.16–37). As in the gravedigger's riddles, the high drama of a gallows must yield place to the sheer duration of a grave (5.1.41–59). A story of royal murder has become a story of human decay, death has become less a ghost than a skull, and the efforts to conceal it by hasty burial (of King Hamlet, Polonius, Ophelia) now yield to the stark deliberate staging of all available corpses (5.2.382–401).

Shakespeare does not give his ghost the last word, as many revenge-tragedians do. The final music of the play is not even that ominous drum, but the numbing, death-bearing sound of the soldiers' memorial shooting. Fortinbras's closing suggestion that all this bloodshed would have been acceptable if it had occurred on the battlefield (5.2.406–7) reflects his psychological need to keep death safely contained within the ancient ritual known as war. It may also alert modern readers to our opposing need, in a century of holocaust and potential holocaust, to eliminate the justifying, distancing category of war and instead to focus on the many individual deaths war entails, which are each inherently tragic. Nor is this only a modern problem: religion, war, vengeance, and sacrifice have together been manufacturing violent suffering from the earliest recorded incidents of Western civilization, with Agamemnon "making his child a sacrificial beast / To give the ships auspicious winds for Troy / Such are the crimes to which religion leads."^[37]

All that these patriarchal ghosts give to life is a mission to destroy it, as Polonius and old Fortinbras and old Hamlet gave to their sons, as parents give to children in so many different codes and times and places. The world is still full of Cold Warriors and Holy Warriors, armies propelled at each other in bloody vengeance by ghosts of their fathers in armor. The ghost's words threaten Hamlet's ear with effects strikingly similar to those of Claudius's poison (compare 1.5.15–22 with 1.5.68–73); rumors "infect [Laertes'] ear / With pestilent speeches of his father's death" (4.5.90–91). Is there anything worse that could be poured in human ears than these legacies of blame and hatred? Hamlet

converts John's admonition in the New Testament—"Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God"^[38] —into a parable urgently applicable to a modern secular world. Whether or not Prosser is correct in diagnosing a recognizable Elizabethan demon, this kind of ghost seems dangerously unholy, bringing malediction. Again, revenge entails not just a violation but a parody of Christian orthodoxy. To identify the ghost as the incarnation of Hamlet's feelings^[39] is to get things backwards: Hamlet is martyred as an incarnation of his father's desires, desires not for mercy but for punishment.

Recognizing the arbitrariness of the ghost's dictates and of Hamlet's obedience, recognizing both as desperate responses to a situation that permits no reasonable response, may liberate us to obey neither God the Father nor the fathers' ghosts when they tell us to kill each other for the sake of our immortality. If the world is a prison, as Hamlet suggests, then we should at least understand our sentence and recognize our fellow prisoners. Denmark has gone from Eden to prison to killing-field to graveyard. If we follow ghosts to a deadly brink or commanders to pointless battles, if we blindly trust some paternal deity to shape our deadly ends, it will be all too easy to take our world along the same tragic path.

To interpret Hamlet in this polemical manner is to give up the ghost as a real justification or consolation, isolating it instead within the fictive form as a projection of the various mythologies by which conscious mortals sustain a sense of purpose. But exorcism is itself a risky process, and not a simple one. "Man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?"^[40] Claudius convinces Laertes that abjuring revenge for our lost kin would mean abjuring love for them as well. Hamlet fears the same equation, and fears more deeply that giving up such ghosts might mean giving up entirely. If Ophelia must refuse Hamlet's love because it is "A violet in the youth of primy nature, / Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting, / The perfume and suppliance of a minute, No more" (1.3.8–10), then any human love—even the love of life—is too risky to accept, since Hamlet's affections are here belittled with the same terms commonly used to describe mortal existence in the contemptus mundi and carpe diem traditions. As Hamlet is "subject to his birth" in this regard (1.3.18), so are we all subject to our death, and to the deaths of those around us. Ophelia complains that the "violets . . . withered all when my father died" (4.5.182). The image of my lapsed-preacher father, some twenty years deceased, returns to ask (paradoxically) whether I really want to join him in believing that the dead are simply dead. In some ways

the compelling ghost of a father is a nightmare devoutly to be wished, but it will not tell the secrets of its house, and at the crowing of the cock, it is gone again:

HAMLET : Do you see nothing there?

GERTRUDE : Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.

HAMLET : Nor did you nothing hear?

GERTRUDE : No, nothing but ourselves.
(3.4.132–35)

Since we assume that artists convey deep truth, and that our own beliefs are deeply true, we tend to deduce (by the fallacy of the undifferentiated middle term) that artists endorse our beliefs. This false deduction unites many ironizing feminist and Marxist critics with the old-fashioned moralizers they scoff at. My preacherly (if atheistical) speculations on Hamlet can hardly evade the same accusation merely by hovering between an old humanist correctness (advocating peace as a universal good) and a newer radical version (advocating a revolutionary skepticism). For better or worse, my moralizing differs primarily in being less programmatic: it challenges the institutions generated by one human reflex without positing that some contrary institution would renew the earthly paradise. In that sense, I try not to deny Hamlet its identity as a tragedy.

Yet I did propose a seemingly impracticable alternative to these denial-driven cycles of revenge: "somehow making common cause against mortality." Though advances in medical care may delay slightly the death of the body, and advances in artificial intelligence may allow some aspects of an individual mind to continue functioning beyond that death, those are hardly satisfactory answers. As Marlowe's Faustus complains in his opening soliloquy, even curing the Black Plague does little to cure the plague of his individual mortality:

Yet art thou still but Faustus , and a man.
Couldst thou make men to live eternally,
Or being dead, raise them to life againe,
Then this profession were to be esteem'd.
Physicke farewell.
(B-text, 1.1.50–54)^[41]

The first thirty-one lines of All's Well stress the same limitation. The most plausible and time-honored secular tactic in the human struggle against mortality is procreation. If tragedy insists we may not return to the Garden of Eden, comedy accepts its figuration in the Garden of Adonis, where (according to Spenser) creatures are "eterne in mutabilitie," and mortal transience is a necessary component of the machinery of life. In Shakespearean comedies such as All's Well, Twelfth Night, Lover's Labor's Lost , and even The Winter's Tale , the procreative answer to mortality must overcome the rituals of mourning—not only the threat of death—as time passes. This is the alternative Hamlet overlooks in giving his father's deadly demands priority over his mother's hopes for his eventual marriage to Ophelia.

The gendering of these responses fits some familiar patterns. Hamlet accepts a predominantly male legacy of warlike vengeance; the worship of the father entails obedience to what are now commonly known (and condemned) in the academy as patriarchal values, which seek a violent closure. Gertrude is characteristically willing to let new people replace the old ones, even in her bed, always seeking to join the community together; the obvious matriarchal investment in nurturing a generational chain to resist death corresponds to a model of deferral commonly associated with female sexuality. On the brink of retirement from the fame and competition of play-writing in London to the domesticity of Stratford, Shakespeare showed Prospero, every third thought on his grave, turning from a campaign of vengeance against his brother to a campaign for progeny through his daughter.

Yet Shakespeare's Measure for Measure demonstrates that this procreative answer to death is finally as questionable as the vengeful responses explored in Hamlet . As the hope of Christian afterlife became inadequate to assuage the terror of mortality in Shakespeare's increasingly narcissistic culture, the pressure was redistributed onto other supporting mythologies such as honor and lineage. Shakespeare evidently recognized that these secular solutions would not bear the new load, because—despite the culture's efforts to portray them as products of personal desire—principles of honor and processes of procreation ultimately serve the survival of group structure rather than of individual subjectivity. Renaissance Stoicism would have warned that obeying the instincts of the body destroys the only real freedom, the only durable defense against fortune, mortality, and the state. In Measure for Measure the body is in command, and the only law it respects is that of biological process. From one perspective, Shakespeare's Vienna is largely a society

of Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns, interchangeable parts only too pleased to live and die as functions of the national status quo.

Dying for the ancestral causes, for tribal honor, as Hamlet does, is arguably a sounder answer to mortality than blindly replicating those ancestors for tribal survival. Despite their obvious affinity for death, the symbolic and absolutist qualities of sacrifice are better suited to the psychic needs of a transient creature confronted by the infinite than are the messy compromises of procreation, so emphatically physical and so perpetually in need of renewal. Hamlet experiments with deferral, but feels more corruption than satisfaction as a result, calling himself "a very drab, / A scullion!" (2.2.582–83), until he can rejoin the fatal chain of honorable male violence. Measure for Measure expands this revulsion into a queasy comedy in which sexual reproduction takes priority over honor. If we refuse to follow the specter of Hamlet when it threatens to draw us over the edge into a suicidal madness (1.4.69–74), then we surrender meekly to our animal natures, to our mortality. Either way, death has a square meal, and the last laugh.