IV

Success for Hamlet balances on the wobbly hope that language can service epistemology—specifically, that he can, counterintuitively, learn by speaking. But by the time he is ready to administer the theatrical test of Claudius's guilt through the doctored Gonzago performance, the investigative instrument of his language has become grossly miscalibrated by earlier accidents and trials. A hermeneutic uncertainty principle

emerges: the observation or explanation of an object changes that object. Its position alters as it is being explained; or the light cast varies the outlines, the shape, the apparent substance of the thing. Thus the presumed evidence and the knowledge that claims authority from that evidence get dislodged. Interpretation always changes the understood parameters and contents, the perceptual reality of a text; certainly a soiled or misaligned measuring device will more radically alter notions about that which is under study and may even alter the object itself.^[59] In Hamlet , the object under study does change. Hamlet cannot read (observe, engage, attack, interpret: infect) Claudius and Polonius, Ophelia and Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, without wreaking ontological havoc on them—without transmitting destructive contagion.^[60]

Hamlet tries to deploy language as a periscope, a surveillance instrument that keeps him hidden, but the investigative act itself, and particularly the disturbances he has inherited from the Ghost's own discourse, confound his best attempts, both revealing and betraying him. His language typically proves perversely ineffectual, an exploratory scalpel that operates against his self-interest; it alienates the prince from the court he has disordered, incurring quarantine, expulsion, and attempted execution. His words always have a profound density and oracular charge; they gesture cleverly, like the witches' ambiguities in Macbeth , to recondite knowledge and inside information. But his language also betrays a relentless incompetence, a failure to achieve its own ends or secure its desired meanings.

Hamlet's words routinely trouble understanding. Always about to mean something , they usually trail off into insoluble ambiguity; like the apparently random malice of epidemics, Hamlet's speech aims at multiple targets, diverges noticeably from its apparent intention, and characteristically demolishes category distinctions as it undermines its own illusion of purpose at every turn. Subtly and all unknowingly, Hamlet in language becomes a disease even as he tries to become its cure. For instance, after the player delivers the Hecuba speech, Hamlet decides that theater itself can be used as a diagnostic measure:

For murther, though it have no tongue will speake
With most miraculous organ: Ile have these Players
Play something like the murther of my father
Before mine Uncle, Ile observe his lookes,
Ile tent him to the quicke, if a doe blench
I know my course.
                                                                                   (G1)

The apparent meaning of the prince's plan is undermined by a kind of septicemia of ambiguity. By saying he will tent his uncle to the quick, Hamlet means he will both attend to or watch him carefully, and that he will become or employ a "tent," a medical instrument that probed and cleaned a wound. But a tent was also used to "keep open or distend a wound, sore, or natural orifice" (OED sb3, def. 2): metaphorically, that is, to prolong or exacerbate it. In an age ignorant of antiseptics, such a device would actually foster infection. Interestingly, the OED gives the following alternate spellings for "tent" in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: "teynte, taint, taynt." Thomas Nashe exploited the implicit connection:

Debt and deadly sinne, who is not subiect to? with any notorious crime I neuer knew him tainted; (& yet tainting is no infamous surgerie for him that hath been in so many hote skirmishes).^[61]

"Tent" for "taint" was an operative Renaissance pun. Hamlet's first act as a doctor or diagnostician, then, strongly suggests an act of contamination: the probe of Claudius, the potentially prophylactic examination, will simultaneously taint him to the quick. So when the prince says (in lines absent from Q1), "If a doe blench / I know my course," he seems already imaginatively to have killed the king: if Claudius responds properly he'll be as good as dead, a "corse" Hamlet knows, a corpse his tainting has infected. For Hamlet, the desire to know and the wish to kill are not sharply differentiated. The eerie pun also suggests that the intended victim will be Hamlet, too—"I know my course"—and thus his self-knowledge doubles here as the knowledge of his mortality. (In fact, all of Hamlet's knowledge henceforth seems to depend on the outcome of the Gonzago playlet.) A final ambiguity of the speech undoes any possibility that the prince can remain detached from the disease he studies. Having decided that the play is his best empirical tool, the thing "wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King," Hamlet unknowingly becomes as good as his word: to catch the king's conscience means not only to ensnare it but to contract it.

Hamlet catches and prolongs an ailment remarkably like the disease he seeks to purge; he both bestows and contracts ghastly cognitive illness. His discourse amplifies his noetic crisis. It propagates contagious similitudes that bind self and other, that undermine category distinctions between suspicion and proof. His language thus seeds collective neuroses and discord, but it cannot make reliable differentiations or draw reasonable conclusions.

The prince thinks that the best way to root out an infection is to spread it linguistically. A moment at the Gonzago scene will help show just how complicated this assumption is, how deeply language is implicated in the structure of plague, and most important, how contagion structures the body of Hamlet's discourse.

When Claudius has begun to grow uncomfortable with the playwithin-the-play and challenges the prince about the plot, Hamlet seizes his chance to tent his uncle. He does so by yoking the themes of poison and audition:

Hamlet's response seems peculiar on several counts: there has been no discernible jest from the players, and likewise no literal poisoning has yet occurred or been mentioned in the playlet. We should read Hamlet's answer instead as another trim pun that comments reflexively on the action of toxic language in Denmark. Hamlet twice implies in his answer to the king that there is no threat or offense on stage: first, because the players are only joking; and second, because to "poyson in iest" is, here, to "poison ingest." In one respect, the players are the ones who absorb the prop of the stage poison, confining the offense to their stage and leaving "no offence i'th world." But there are no unserious jokes in Denmark: the ingestion pun implies that expressing and consuming are the same act. Logically, the wordplay has no point. The players should not ingest what they speak; only the audience should—especially Claudius, concerned as he is with what there is to hear, with how toxin operates aurally. Yet the pun has a subliminal logic: speakers are constantly corrupted with their own language. They are susceptible to the venom of their own oratory; at some point, no poisoner remains safe from his corruption, an axiom Hamlet takes as a story guide. Because a word spoken must first be harbored and nourished in the womb of the imagination, heard first internally by the speaker, a constant bidirectional danger accompanies the speech act, even, presumably, the soliloquy. Hamlet's fondest dream is that he can remain untouched by the depravity he has heard and spoken about his uncle; but as soon as he articulates a position, diagnoses an ailment, it becomes his own, his tainted mental property.

Because word-poison constitutes the play's theme and structure, it

compels a metadramatic consideration of what is heard or ingested in a performance, as opposed to what is merely seen. While the stage murderer pours his venom into the ear of the sleeping king, he metalinguistically addresses his brew, which is akin to describing one's own words as one speaks them:

An exquisite ambiguity attends "inuected," a word automatically changed by all modern editors to Q1's (and F's) "infected"—a change which severs the semantic ligature between a hostile linguistic act (the thrice-blasted invective of Hecat's "ban") and the corruption or infection inherent in that act (already implied by the word "blasted"; recall Laertes' warning, "contagious blastments are most imminent"). Also operative at the phonetic margins is "inflected": cursed (invected) alterations of meaning, unwholesome (infected) usurpations of life, take linguistic form in poison, inflected in several toxic curses.

As if to underscore the critical function of the spoken thing, when the stage murderer Lucianus pours venom into the ear of the sleeping Player King, Claudius fails to respond immediately, even as he had notoriously failed to respond during the preceding dumbshow which reenacts the historical crime. It might be more accurate, however, to say that Claudius is not permitted to respond to Lucianus's perfidy—not, at least, until Hamlet peppers him with a comment on the scene:

The scene could be staged many ways, of course, but the text seems to indicate that it takes Hamlet's pushy gloss to get a rise out of Claudius. The king, that is, responds to Hamlet's narrative rather than his dramaturgy; he is affected not by what he sees—a usurper pouring poison into the ear of a sleeping king—but by what he hears: a commentary about

that action. Thus, Claudius's earlier nonresponse to the dumbshow makes perfect sense. Yes, the king saw the prefatory mime, but he could not respond to what he could not hear.^[62] His subsequent vigorous reaction to Hamlet's eager narrative secures a simple point: for knowledge to have power, for information to take hold, it must enter through the ear . In a theatrical world where language holds hegemonic force, the dumbshow can by definition have no effect.

Hamlet's gadfly pestering of the king during the players' speeches thus helps cement a point that could not have been neatly, definitively made without the prefatory mime. However, once Claudius does react to the narrativized murder, we cannot be sure which aural facts have registered most potently; we cannot at this moment know what, exactly, bothers him.^[63]The Murder of Gonzago could have had ratiocinative value, but Hamlet dashes that possibility by making open threats against Claudius throughout—by speaking. For in identifying Gonzago's murderer as "one Lucianus , Nephew to the King" (Hzv), rather than, as Denmark's history would have it, brother to the king, the play-within-the-play becomes a murder threat, broadcast clearly from nephew to uncle. And in being so aggressively confrontational about the primal event, Hamlet entices a reaction not to the mise-en-scène but rather to his own narrative about it. He speaks daggers to Claudius while the players play, the poison pours. In a mirrored repetition and reversal of plot history, Hamlet aurally poisons Claudius—infects him—in these central scenes. As Nigel Alexander notes, one vital aspect of The Murder of Gonzago is that its presentation "convinces Claudius that he is diseased. He diagnoses this disease as Hamlet and attempts to cure himself by sending the Prince to execution in England."^[64] The thing to catch the king's conscience becomes instead a telegraphed homicide warning (as well as an oedipal promise of replacement: "you shall see anon how the murtherer gets the loue of Gonzagoes wife"). The Murder of Gonzago is a surefire bet to terrify Hamlet's adversary, but not necessarily to reveal him. Yet neither Hamlet nor the drama openly acknowledges this problem.

Lucianus propounds an ambiguity which escapes the prince's rhetorical control; the figure self-deactivates as an instrument of discovery. I do not think it has been generally noticed that the name "Lucianus" has an exemplary rhetorical ancestry. In Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie , the Greek rhetorician and satirist Lucian is invoked in connection with the figure of radical verbal doubt: amphibology , or what

Puttenham calls (with apt resonance for Hamlet ) the "vicious speach":

When we speake or write doubtfully and that the sence may be taken two wayes, such ambiguous terms they call Amphibologia , we call it the ambiguous or figure of sence incertaine. . . . [T]hese doubtfull speaches were used much in the old times by . . . false Prophets . . . to abuse the superstitious people, and to encomber their busie braynes with vaine hope or vaine feare.

Lucianus the merry Greeke reciteth a great number of them, deuised by a coosening companion one Alexander, to get himselfe the name and reputation of the God AEsculapius , and in effect all our old Brittish and Saxon prophesies be of the same sort, that turne them on which side ye will, the matter of them may be verified.^[65]

Puttenham's syntax prevents us from knowing whether Lucianus merely recounted someone else's deceptive ambiguities or actually profited from fraudulent self-representations constructed on his behalf; and thus the example perfectly embodies its subject. The ambiguous word "reciteth" and the unclear referent "himselfe" both create an amphibology that anticipates Hamlet's intense binary deployment of "Lucianus"—a figure who may represent either Hamlet or Claudius, "turne them on which side ye will." Shakespeare may not have known Puttenham's brief excursus on rhetorical duplicity, but its intricate anticipation of Hamlet 's thematic obsessions is suggestive. Puttenham's Lucianus (or Alexander) used the devious, outrageous fabrications to deceive people into thinking he was a god. But not just any god: Aesculapius is the Roman god of medicine and healing. Just as verbal ambidexterity was exploited amphibologically to achieve a false identity as a healer—and Puttenham is suggestively silent on how this exploitation was managed—so Hamlet uses Lucianus, a figure of theatrical duality and "sence incertaine," "to encomber" Claudius "with vaine hope or vaine feare": specifically, to tent him to the quick.

Although the stage poisoner perfectly represents the division and convergence of Hamlet and Claudius, thus serving a symbolic function, the figure also undoes its dramaturgic function by crippling the evidentiary value of the Gonzago playlet. For all his clever plotting, writing, directing, Hamlet has stupidly tipped his hand: Claudius now knows the harm his nephew means him (that much has been communicated unequivocally), and immediately after storming out of the performance, the king seals a letter ordering Hamlet's death: "I like him not, nor stands it safe with vs / To let his madnes range, therefore prepare you / I your com-

mission will forth-with dispatch, / And he to England shall along with you" (H4v).

Without fully grasping the ambiguities that contaminate his results, Hamlet has nonetheless become intensely aware of his own infectious potential. Directly after the playlet, Guildenstern informs Hamlet that the king is "meruilous distempred . . . with choller" (H3v), and Hamlet now disavows the physician's role that he said he would assume when tenting Claudius to the quick: "Your wisedome should shewe it selfe more richer to signifie this to the Doctor, for, for mee to put him to his purgation, would perhaps plunge him into more choller." The pun on "collar" is less important than the comminatory surface sense. Abrogating the doctor's role with this threat, Hamlet seems finally to have discarded the equivocation that summoned Lucianus. But even if the prince has successfully tented (opened, probed, and worsened) the wound of Claudius's febrile conscience, infective doubt should remain: audience doubt.

We confront a contaminating menace to rationality here. A moment of profound unintelligibility is treated by the play as if it made sense ; a passage that ought to plant doubt in the minds of everyone (speaker, interlocutor, audience) slides into an apparent resolution that actually contains the germs of further dissolution.^[66] Despite Claudius's guilt, it is theatrically illogical at this point to credit Hamlet's apparent triumph at having found him out; Hamlet ought not to be triumphing at all, only laying ground for further inquiry. For the king's response to the playlet is far from a lucid confession, especially given Hamlet's threatening contribution to that response. To the redactor/director of Gonzago , the play has had its desired effect; not so to Horatio, however, whose less sanguine interpretation of the event remains shrouded in his usual laconic, noncommittal idiom:

Again, talk of the poisoning, rather than its spectacle, most concerns Hamlet. But it is the prince's toxic talk of the poisoning, not Lucianus's, that has made the issue of confirmation—the informational value of "the Ghosts word"—moot. And Horatio's response clarifies the prob-

lem: what Hamlet takes to be concentrated truth has been diluted in the matrix of the experiment. The friend's minimalist intercourse here hardly constitutes a ringing endorsement. Asked if this performance piece would not earn Hamlet a fellowship in "a cry of players," Horatio responds with chin-stroking caution: "Half a share." Half shares and partial evidence are all the play allows. An illuminating contrast to Horatio's rejoinder occurs in the first quarto, where the friend plays the eager informant and volunteers this intelligence after the show: "The king is mooued my Lord" (Q1, F4v). The certitude of the first quarto evaporates time and again into the airy, poisonous ambiguity of the second. Rules of evidence and conclusion dissolve in Q2, with a consequent peril to rationality.

Gonzago is supposed to be a crucial test of Claudius's guilt, a test to be graded by Horatio's response. But then the play abandons the response as insignificant: Hamlet hears what he wishes to hear, and ignores his friend's halfhearted replies. The text constantly arranges such situations: dramatic avenues that hold out the promise of proof, knowledge, or orientation, but prove to be merely dead-end corridors lacking legible markings. The clog in verbal logic that corrupts the Gonzago performance and its aftermath characterizes Hamlet 's meanings, which pivot on irrational conclusions, confused assertions, and faulty word choices. The tainted mixedness of what Hamlet accepts (on the surface, at least) as unequivocal data corrupts what he accepts (on the surface) to be his knowledge. The reason for his ready acceptance of poor information is clear enough. In response to Guildenstern's aggrieved requests for greater conversational clarity after the Gonzago playlet, Hamlet confesses what we may already have gathered:

He is not only a diseased wit himself but the cause of diseases in others. The aftermath of the Gonzago performance shows Hamlet at his nervous worst: linguistically disturbed, spoiling for a fight, marginally incoherent. In a giddy spin the prince recklessly uses others for rhetorical target practice, sometimes purposefully, more often gratuitously; he disregards the obvious danger to himself and becomes an exceptionally mobile and potent vector of disruption, broadcasting his strain of sickness around the court.

From this point in the play, Hamlet's role as the spreader of cognitive illness crystallizes. In a famous exchange, the prince manipulates Polonius infectiously:

Hamlet enforces obedience to his unstable, fictive vision in exchange for a concession to visit Gertrude. But something more sinister is happening as well. This apparently trivial power game enacts on a small scale Hamlet's characteristic havoc: to break down the resistance of other subjectivities until they absorb his scattered perceptions and preoccupations. It is a wonderful feature of this exercise in imposed likeness that it depends on the perception of similitude ("it is like . . . It is backt like . . . Very like . . ."). This is contagion, the infective leveling of another consciousness. If it seems unusual to describe this scene in terms of plague, we should consider that the obliteration of individuality is the first social consequence of any epidemic, in which a vast number of persons contract the identical ailment. It will not be long before Ophelia, too, begins to act and speak as Hamlet did: mad, but not in craft. We should also consider that the interview with Polonius, although present in both quartos, is followed in Q2 alone by a passage that highlights Hamlet's Ghost-like, pestilential affinities: "Tis now the very witching time of night, / When Churchyards yawne, and hell it selfe breakes out/Contagion to the world" (H4v). In the process of catching the king's conscience and the king's sickness, Hamlet becomes, in G. Wilson Knight's words, an "element of evil" whose poison causes the other characters to fall "like victims of an infectious disease."^[67]

In overwhelming and dissolving identities through verbally imposed contagion, Hamlet breaks a plague to the world that speaks doom for the state. The implications of this power are most meaningful politically in the relationship of the so-called mighty opposites, Hamlet and Claudius. Their growing similarity—the plague that encircles them—is

first fully visible after the Gonzago playlet. Following the performance, the king, as a result of Hamlet's words, has been in Guildenstern's phrase "meruilous distempred"; Rosencrantz then highlights the mutuality of infection by asking Hamlet: "Good my Lord, what is your cause of distemper . . .?" (H4). Rosencrantz fails to realize that Hamlet's sickness is not unique property, not the prince's own, particular self; it is rather an appropriated force, a motile, communicable set of perturbations and compulsions. These are overwhelmingly persuasive.

Even before the Gonzago sequence, Claudius has felt the pressure of Hamlet's infectiousness. We can observe in what has been thought to be a textual error some compelling evidence of the range of Hamlet's influence. After eavesdropping on the prince, who has been excoriating Ophelia, Claudius determines that Hamlet should go to England for Denmark's neglected tribute; Polonius ill-fatedly asks for one last chance to discover Hamlet's real problem. The second quarto text records a variant so perfect that it seems a shame to emend it, worse still to ignore it. The king responds to Polonius's request with a line not present in Q1:

It shall be so,
Madnes in great ones must not vnmatcht goe.
                                                                        (G3v)

Most people think that "unmatcht" should read "unwatcht"; but because one of Hamlet's keenest talents is coercion, forcing others to act and think the way he does, what the king says here seems proper. The typesetter of Q2 has (perhaps accidentally) registered Hamlet's influential ability; with letter-perfect aptness, the text suggests that Claudius will intentionally, as Hamlet himself claims to have done, take on madness. Interestingly enough, and whether we read "unwatcht" or "unmatcht," the king had just determined, moments before, that Hamlet is in fact not mad. In the odd multiple negations this play so often employs, Claudius asked, "Love? His affections do not that way tend, / Nor what he spake, though it lackt forme a little, / Was not like madnes" (G3v). Perhaps in the king's quick self-contradiction, his assertion that Hamlet's sanity is madness after all, we can see that Claudius has indeed begun to match Hamlet's lunacy, to internalize it. Anyone who observes the play in performance will certainly be struck by the intuitive intelligence of Q2's reading: Hamlet drives everyone crazy. The only possible response to his illness is contagiously to adopt it, to not let it go unmatched.