II

The Ghost of King Hamlet tells the heir apparent many things in their first interview, but the political status of the youth goes conspicuously unmentioned; both royal Hamlets seem concerned about things other than the legalities of the succession. The Ghost never protests young Hamlet's loss of position, only his own. Nor does Hamlet himself, for most of the play, lament his preemption from rule. In spite of his disenfranchisement, however, other characters defer to him as being at or near the top of the political hierarchy. Yet he represses or deflects this position, and the obeisance due to it, as in this parting exchange with the guards on watch:

In valuing love over duty, reciprocity over rank, Hamlet here denies his social place and tries to establish a priority of affective authenticity over external form and service, a priority which will ultimately enable the antihierarchical act of regicide.^[21] As much as he denies his stature, however, it remains obvious to other characters. Laertes, for one, seems quite convinced early in the play that Hamlet is the future king, and he employs that notion, alongside its allied bromide of the body politic, to discourage Ophelia from a romance with the prince:

Laertes speaks as if the prince is already burdened with royal choices, as if a new King Hamlet has been proclaimed and is considering a wife.^[22] Ophelia takes up a similar refrain when she calls Hamlet "Th'expectation and Rose of the faire state" (G3). It could be that Polonius's children keenly feel their own political marginality and so exaggerate Hamlet's proximity to the throne. But these lines seem prologue to some promise that the play makes about Hamlet's aptness and destiny for kingship, a promise that Fortinbras eventually apologizes for in Hamlet's absent presence: "he was likely, had he beene put on, / To haue prooued most royall" (O2).

The extreme indirection with which the play broaches the hero's privation from rule lets us know that something weird has happened to the procedure, not just the outcome, of the succession.^[23] Hamlet's political station is one of the play's legion mysteries. Although the king proclaims him "the most imediate to our throne" and then invites him to "be as our selfe in Denmarke" (C1), there ought to be some question—especially in the first scenes of the play—why the able-bodied, scholarly youth is not already king. Yet no one utters a peep of protest against Claudius. Because generations of critics have reminded us of Denmark's elective monarchy, Hamlet's exclusion from the throne has been normalized over time. But then it should seem just as odd that the only son has failed to win election as it does that he has failed to inherit.^[24] As a "fact" of Danish culture, the elective monarchical process goes unmentioned, unexplicated, and wholly unquestioned until the last scene of the play. Is the issue of succession in Denmark really clear, or simply unprotested? Has Claudius been unanimously elected, and by whom? By "the people," or by a complicitous body of counselors and elders? By mystifying the procedure through which Claudius came to power, the drama gives multiple impressions about mechanisms of state: they malfunction while no one notices or cares; they are inherently corruptible; they are mysterious, and not to be questioned or trusted. The drama plays a game of royal bait and switch with the expected male inheritor and the audience, throwing a cloak over the succession process. In late Elizabethan England, the image of a clearly legitimate heir who is stealthily denied his place would be particularly appalling.

We need to know what the play resolutely refuses or is unable to tell:

the influence, if any, of the royal marriage upon the nation's choice; the political influence, that is, of the queen. But because we cannot determine whether Claudius's marriage to Gertrude preceded or followed his election, the succession mystery remains intact. The king himself seems to suggest that the marriage, shady at best in the light of his brother's funeral, followed his ascension to the throne: "Though . . . it vs befitted . . . our whole Kingdome, To be contracted in one browe of woe . . . Yet . . . we . . . thinke on him Together with remembrance of our selues. . . . Therefore . . . our Queene Th'imperial ioyntresse to this warlike state Haue we . . . Taken to wife" (B3v). Despite Claudius's sovereign and proprietary manner, his epithet "th'imperial ioyntress" for Gertrude implies an equivalence in their control of the kingdom and suggests at least the possibility that the king's rights go hand in hand with the queen's graces, her political indulgence. He is probably not just being courtly to his new bride; more probably, the phrase represents a prenuptial agreement, a legal consensus. But even if "Therefore . . . Haue we . . . taken to wife" implies a temporal sequence and thus the king's unlimited prerogatives, a deliberately elusive account of power emerges here; even Claudius's official version of cause and effect implies that Gertrude has been "taken" as an act of homage and remembrance (of "ourselves," no less), and for no other reason. The royal rhetoric constantly evades (but nervously alludes to) the king's contingent relationship to his own kingship: his dependence on high-level complicity ("Your better wisdomes, which haue freely gone / With this affaire along" [B3V); his extrapolitical—that is, sexual—motivations; and his consolidation of power through legitimizing marriage. Claudius's indeterminately figured access to rule might then have derived primarily from the fraternal relationship of inheritance or from the marital one of coercive force.

For reasons that will become clear, I prefer the latter explanation. Hamlet's birthright (which admittedly may be no more of a "right" than that of the child of a United States president to inherit the office) may then have been effectively blocked by his mother's "o'erhasty marriage," which has secured the position to which Claudius may or may not have won election. I do not wish to land too heavily on this shaky interpretive plank. But the play sustains the possibility that whereas Hamlet's nobility descends patrilineally, it is impeded matrilineally—that is, matrimonially. "I say we will haue no mo marriage, those that are married alreadie, all but one shall liue" (G3), Hamlet bellows in a fit of unfeigned distemper. His rage against marriage may articulate a specifically political frustration that contains both psychological and his-

torical ingredients. If he has been blocked or discouraged from kingship by his mother's wedlock, Hamlet's situation exactly reverses that of King James, whose mother, Mary Queen of Scots, provided him with the claim to Scotland's and eventually England's throne; additionally, Mary's bad marital choices actually hastened the Scottish prince's inheritance, as I discuss below. If Hamlet's exasperation at marriage is political, it remains the prince's only serious grievance that he does not expound upon at length—that the text does not wish to speak out loud. Hamlet's specifically marital, sexual hostility toward the mother who has not helped him secure a monarchy shields a more immediate historical antagonism: James's frustration with his political mother, Elizabeth, for her prolonged deferral of his English kingship.

The first quarto of Hamlet allows its protagonist to express political desire; when pondering the range of the Player's verbal potential, for example, Hamlet asks: "What would he do an if he hadde my losse? / His father murdred, and a Crowne bereft him?" (FI). The second quarto, however, postpones overt signs of Hamlet's aspirations just as carefully as it evades the political implications and intricacies of Claudius's election. Evidence of Hamlet's interest in kingship per se is spotty, and scarcely appears at all until the middle of the drama. In a rare moment of unguarded self-revelation susceptible of political interpretation, he does mention to Ophelia that he is "very proude, reuengefull, ambitious, with more offences at my beck, then I haue thoughts to put them in," and then he affirms and retreats from the confession: "wee are arrant knaues, beleeue none of vs" (G3). But after The Murder of Gonzago , Hamlet responds to Rosencrantz's question about the cause of his "distemper" by saying: "Sir, I lacke aduauncement" (H4). Perhaps he thinks he is being calculating—the response should look to the audience (and to Hamlet himself) like a lie—but let us assume for a moment that he has let something slip, that his heart's desire and mind's detachments can be traced to this missing commodity "advancement." After Hamlet expresses his "lacke," Rosencrantz helpfully replies that the prince should not worry about his hierarchical position, "when you haue the voyce of the King himselfe for your succession in Denmarke" (H4). This reply dovetails with Laertes' certainty about Hamlet's royal future, but it also enhances the impression of thematic contagion: Hamlet has the king's voice as a promise, as a possession. Voice is the text's symbolic vial of plague. A sinister and lovely polysemy, this double sense of voice resurfaces at the end of the play when Hamlet ambivalently endorses a more successful avenger than he has been: "I doe prophecie

th'ellection lights / On Fortinbrasse , he has my dying voyce, / So tell him" (OIV). In Hamlet's last moments, the transfer of vocality and power goes beyond a vote of confidence: it is a curse, a guarantee of life caught in the vise of office and the fatal pressure of royal responsibility. At the point of death, Hamlet, finally fully invested with a king's voice, has for just a moment completely taken over the king's identity and position, in precisely the same sense of his earlier self-recrimination, "how stand I then / That haue a father kild, a mother staind"; the dying voice he gives to Fortinbras figures an ironic bequest, a gift of death. In a potentate's proclaimed or juridical will lies coiled fact: "I sentence" or "I decree" signifies a performative linguistic act. During the play's last moments, plot becomes plaguy Jacobean history: transitional monarchy waits upon but also seemingly bequeaths mortality. Hamlet's political apotheosis comes when his language attains, through the prerogative of choosing a successor, monarchical tones; but his royal prerogative is only and entirely coextensive with death—the end of the Hamlet family line, if not the whole culture.

Since monarchical identity and demolition are interdependent in the play, it makes good sense that Hamlet first openly confesses his political interests when telling Horatio about his ruination of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet has managed to trope (to turn verbally) Claudius's scheme by killing the messengers, effectively erasing and rewriting the king's intentions. His expropriation of Claudius's plot crucially involves an imprinting of kingly identity: "I had my fathers signet in my purse / Which was the modill of that Danish seale, / Folded the writ vp in the forme of th'other, / Subcribe [sic ] it, gau't th'impression, plac'd it safely, / The changling neuer knowne" (NIV-N2).^[25] Hamlet's expert forgery and complex, murderous enfoldings (reversing the play's opening command, "Stand and vnfolde your selfe") do him regal, not yeoman service: he moves from resembling Claudius to overtaking him; he assumes the king's monarch-function, a murderer's business. If identity is the vanishing point of resemblance, Hamlet begins to vanish into identity with kingship once he fully surrogates both Claudius and King Hamlet. The forged and folded letter resurrects the homicidal force of the father, who is remembered in the signet; but that force is deployed by fraud—that is, as Claudius would wield it. Hamlet's royal acts reunite the deadly, sundered brothers of Denmark.

What gulls us into denial about Hamlet's darker deeds, his murders and plots, is that they so entirely are the acts of a king, and we have been hoodwinked into believing the prince's denials about his ambition. But

his practices are precisely those of a ruthless monarch, of one who will lustily devour enemies to nourish himself with power, and spit out the bones with no remorse. This realization takes Horatio aback:

Indeed—but which king? Horatio's customary taciturnity applies equally to Claudius, engineer of the first letter plot, and to Hamlet, its second engineer: "Why what a King you are!"

Hamlet's identity with royalty, his plaguy sameness with villainy, exposes his implication in specifically political desire. But he soon grasps one complication impeding this desire: tactical political success in Denmark follows on the heels of erotic success, and erotics are every bit as problematic for Hamlet as politics; the two are always interlaced. For instance, he perceives Claudius's achievement as a coherent mosaic of sex and statecraft, as he suggests to Horatio:

These lines contain the play's (and Hamlet's) first specific complaints about a succession process which suddenly seems wholly suspect. Claudius's triumph now looks less electoral than erectional, as Hamlet assigns his own monarchical exclusion to his uncle's phallic deftness. In juxtaposition with "whor'd my mother," Hamlet describes the entrance of Claudius into monarchy as a specifically sexual breach, a popping in, reminiscent of Paris's costly intervention in Menelaus's love life: "For thus popped Paris in his hardiment / And parted thus you and your argument" (Troilus and Cressida , 4.5.27–28). Claudius's popping in, like Paris's, figures cuckoldry, but Hamlet (not his father) is the cuckold here; in the lines "whor'd my mother, / Pop't in betweene th'election

and my hopes," Hamlet blames the king for sequentially impeding access to two oedipal prizes: the mother's sexuality and the father's authority.

As a description of Claudius's misdeeds, the phrase "pop't in" muddies the referent of Hamlet's desire, equating the maternal with the political space: each is erotically charged, sexually receptive, attainable. Again, the question of the succession remains unclear, the actual order of events still unresolved, but it is at last apparent at least to Hamlet that Claudius's adult heterosexuality has secured the election—the succession—at Hamlet's (unconsummated) expense. It is possible that he understood this mechanism earlier in the play. Significantly, in the politically potent sphere of his mother's bedroom, Hamlet records his first protest about the succession process when he calls Claudius "a cut-purse of the Empire and the rule, / That from a shelfe the precious Diadem stole / And put it in his pocket" (J3V). Having already been blocked by the Polonius family on the sexual path, the prince looks for a different erotics of advancement.

The Claudius model suggests that heterosexuality consummates political triumph, but it still takes an act of homoerotic violence to clear the way for that victory; and thus the bodies of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern become crucial props in Hamlet's rehearsal for the autocrat's part. Like Claudius, who destroyed his brother by pouring a dangerous juice into his unguarded orifice, Hamlet emulates the craft of kingship with a sexually coded assault of his two former friends:

His condition of being "vp" (erect), his groping to find them, the fulfillment of his desire, his fingering of their packet (letters, but also slang for genitalia), and his satisfied withdrawal all suggest homoerotic dalliance, intercourse, or in this case rape, stealthily mounted.^[26] Syntactically, he has his desire before he fingers their packets, after he's groped them—the lines hint that the exchange of letters is not the prince's primary desire. Hamlet justifies his homoerotic destruction of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by asserting that "their defeat / Dooes by their owne insinnuation growe" (N2); to unpack this comment, we may look to Thomas

Wilson's early description of rhetorical "insinuation": "a priuie twining, or close creeping in, to win fauor with much circumstance."^[27] The court spies are typically allied in Hamlet's mind with privy twining, a purely genital sexuality, as we see when he first greets them:

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's basely sexual nature metaphorizes their basely political nature, and teases out Hamlet's thinly disguised fury with them. Just after Gonzago , when the two companions have been sent to discover the cause of his "distemper," Hamlet accuses them of trying to manipulate him, to play on him like a pipe. He expresses a paranoia that appropriately mixes erotics and politics, a fear of being blown on, into, or away; he doesn't want to be fingered or handled as a mere instrument. He is so agitated that his metaphors begin to go off key: "you would plucke out the hart of my mistery. . . and there is much musique excellent voyce in this little organ." Then, collecting himself: "call mee what instrument you wil, though you fret me not, you cannot play vpon me" (H4).^[28] Plucking out the heart of his mystery and fretting him are more apposite figures for stringed instruments, which Shakespeare could have furnished theatrically, were he so inclined. But instead he chooses the phallic pipe, another kind of little organ, as the stage vehicle: "wil you play vpon this pipe?" "My lord I cannot." The pipe, like the men and their surveillance mission, configures a sexual threat. Not wishing to be penetrated or plucked at, Hamlet will instead prove intrusive, protruding, and he takes his own digital, sexually charged revenge on them.

In a line the second quarto lacks, Hamlet restates to Horatio his justification for killing the king's instruments: "Why man, they did make love to this employment." The folio line helps clarify the prince's rage: he detests their servicing of the state at least as much as their disloyalty to him; he is repelled by their metonymic character as entirely sexual/ political beings. But his revulsion, I believe, is contaminated by fear of discovery, an anger at their relentless exposure of his political needs, unknown as he would like those to remain. The folio again is more explicit than the second quarto can be on this point, and fully illustrates Hamlet's resentment of the court spies. In another passage absent from Q2, Hamlet and the men engage in dark banter about Denmark: "To me

it is a prison," Hamlet says in the folio. "Why," Rosencrantz replies, "then your ambition makes it one." Hamlet haughtily deflects the accusation ("O God I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space"), but the topic of Hamlet's cramped kingship and unfulfilled, shadowy ambition (as Guildenstern warns, "The very substance of the ambitious is but the shadow of a dream") infiltrates and pollutes the prince's lofty discursive space. Although he regards the subject as beneath him, as indeed he regards most desires as emanating from beneath, Hamlet in the folio lets slip a fixation on kingship in the act of denying it. Q2 manages to camouflage the fixation somewhat, but not completely. On learning from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that the players are about to arrive, Hamlet's first words are: "He that playes the King shal be welcome" (F2).

Despite (or because of) the intrusions of the two functionaries, Hamlet defers, for as long as he can, his own involvement in the nexus of political and sexual desire. He defends against a world in which sexuality operates extensively within, on behalf of, as a substitute for, political strength. One important sign of Hamlet's deferral comes in his early, almost defiant use of the word "election" specifically to help articulate his distance from intrigue and influence: the word enunciates a pure love, untainted by politics. We know that the royal election, whatever form it took, did not go Hamlet's way. So it may be in part a form of psychological compensation that causes the prince, in tones of carefully emasculated passion, to speak love to Horatio, and to tell him that the most important election is affective.

By describing his soul's faculty of rational choice in feminine terms, Hamlet dissolves a masculinist Renaissance distinction between anima (fem., principle of life) and animus (masc., principle of intellection and rationality). As we saw in Troilus and Cressida , self-feminization has many functions for the male Shakespearean speaker; but here, self-

denigration is not among them. Instead, Hamlet presents his mistresssoul as female but not as weak or vulnerable, a pledge to Horatio in an act of homosocial free will.^[29] This expression of love complicates gender identity for two purposes: it allows Hamlet to deny sexuality, and it notarizes his repudiation of ambition. A feminine identity—adorned with rational, free will but unpolluted by sexual "will"—relieves Hamlet from the burdens of a male, court-constructed subjectivity in which intense sexual and social ambition are normative. He contrasts his love for Horatio with the beloved's inability to provide "advancement," but that inability is the very source of Hamlet's love: political engagement is precisely what Hamlet is avoiding by plighting troth to his friend. The word "election" here, even in the context of a discussion of Hamlet's soul, carries the harmonics of state more than religious doctrine. He contrasts the soul's elevated marriage seal with the crude sexual synecdoche of the candied tongue licking pomp, the pregnant knee of the flatterer—the slaveringly ambitious and bodily opportunistic. At this point in the play, prior to the Gonzago scene, Hamlet can still freely rush into Horatio's chaste and depoliticized affections: "giue me that man / That is not passions slaue, and I will weare him / In my harts core, / I in my hart of hart / As I do thee." Horatio is explicitly not "a pype for Fortunes finger / To sound what stop she please." To be phallically sexual is to be vulnerable; Hamlet professes a grateful, feminized chastity to his friend, for Horatio offers release from the power-soaked world, the world where "election" once and always represents a succession manipulated in bed. But Hamlet's attitudes change in the context of Gonzago , with his increased proximity to monarchy. Presently, the brutality of his interview with Ophelia ("Doe you thinke I meant country matters? . . . That's a fayre thought to lye betweene maydes legs" [HI]) and the putrid invective he afterward hurls at his mother ("Nay but to liue in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed . . .") underline his sullied descent from matters of the soul to those of the groin—where he and the play locate vortices of political force.

Terror of the erotic accompanies and also encodes a fear of the political and, as such, conjures succession anxiety—Hamlet's and the play's. Queen Elizabeth's chastity cult, despite its ideological dissonances at the end of her reign, provided one kind of comfort, the little boy's safety of not having to imagine his mother (or grandmother) as a sexual being. But the fact of chastity also proved disturbing in that it meant the lack of an heir, which no ideological or iconographical manipulation could make good. Hamlet never enjoys psychic ease about either his queen

mother's sexuality or succession politics in Denmark; Gertrude's erotic life not only fails to produce an unequivocal succession but actively mucks things up. The play is in this way a worst-case historical scenario, a tragic psychosis of the political unconscious in which anxieties about sex and politics constantly chafe one another. What if there were a rightful successor and he could not, so to speak, get in? Hamlet comes to embrace this imaginative despair. Just after his declaration of love to Horatio, the king and his train enter, and Claudius asks the prince how he fares. Apparently punning on the meaning of "fares" as "eats," Hamlet answers: "Excellent yfaith, / Of the Camelions dish, I eate the ayre, / Promiscram'd, you cannot feede Capons so" (H4). The more important pun, however, turns on statecraft, not gastronomy. The paranomasia of the politically discouraged resounds here: "I eat the heir" means that Hamlet is forced to consume his own ambitions and survive on only an airy promise of being the most immediate to the throne. It also means that we will have no more Hamlets, insofar as his dictum against wedlock ("I say we will haue no mo marriage") is self-consuming, and the succession will not pass lineally through him. At this point, he sees himself shut out of, and complicitous in, the predigested succession.

Yet the prince's revenge task would, if effective, presumably make the monarchy available to him—but Hamlet and the second quarto are exceedingly reluctant to consider this as a supporting motive. Hamlet as revenger apparent would compromise the purity (if any exists) of the desire for vengeance, because it would openly admit political craving. In pointed contrast, Laertes returns from France to avenge his father's death and directly challenges Claudius by leading a popular uprising. As if to underscore the process from which Hamlet has been excluded, Laertes' royal encroachment is framed as an election, albeit an unruly one:

This extraordinary report glosses Hamlet's disappointments and political failures. It shows that Denmark's political forms are stable in all situations, if even the rabble and their rousers insist on their own election of a favored candidate ("choose we, Laertes ").^[30] It is significant that Hamlet, though "loued of the distracted multitude," never marshals a revolt of this sort—yet presumably he could, especially as his

cause is even more reasonable, just, with more extensive ramifications than Laertes'. Why doesn't the prince stage an overt insurrection to convert revenge from the private to the public arena? The play as a whole suggests, as perhaps a vestigial recollection of Essex, that direct challenges to power will fail, which Claudius demonstrates by defusing Laertes' popular revolt without breaking a sweat. In any case, open challenge is for Hamlet inconceivable, for it would place him before the mirror of his repressed desires. These desires are not necessarily something he consciously wants and cannot, because of external restrictions, obtain; they are what, because of these restrictions, he cannot stand to believe he may want. He has long shied from political life, reluctantly remaining at Elsinore after his father's funeral, never fully pressing or protesting for his royal rights. He engages the court only in oblique, passive-aggressive disruptions, not in outright revolt; and he noticeably fails for most of the play even to mention his considerable political disappointments, which could serve quite nicely as "excytements of my reason and my blood" (K3v)—that is, as further motivations to revenge, if he wanted them.

But Hamlet's death-infected commitment to retributive murder becomes increasingly difficult to square with any civic impulse or will to office. The unacknowledged plot to secure political place—the succession plot—proves inimical to the urgent desire to do "bitter business" and obliterate monarchy, consequences and souls be damned—the revenge plot. Paradoxically, of course, Hamlet's revenge is prerequisite to his own succession. But the wild impulse and capacity for revenge and the orderly wish and capability to rule confute one another. Like negative and positive integers, they define mutually exclusive grounds. Further complicating this practical and ideological conflict is the paradramatic level of discourse—that is, the historical context of the work. The play as a whole and Hamlet in particular skittishly engage a complicated desire that they can neither fully confront nor comfortably resolve: the desire, perhaps again translated from the Essex revolt, to contest and control monarchy, to master the space where authority resides—but not to occupy that space. Instead, contestation and control lead Hamlet to mimic the historical effects of that antimonarch, the bubonic plague: he will prevent the new king's peace and pleasure. He is like Lear's Fool in this sense: a reverse clown. His urge to interrupt authority's revels is a defective oedipal impulse. He seeks mainly to stymie the reigning force, not to seize it.

Hamlet's conflictual urges toward and away from kingship constitute

one of the play's many insoluble contradictions. The text sustains an impressively steady inconsistency in its attitude toward Hamlet's possible succession. This waffling may have to do with dramatic necessity as much as ideological or historical conflict: if Claudius's election were portrayed as overtly illegal, or Hamlet's desire for rule showed too strong, the prince would have markedly less reason not to commit expeditious revenge. Still, after Hamlet's return from his perilous sea voyage, after his ghastly fight in Ophelia's grave and exciting narrative to Horatio about the plots he has overcome, the play seems ready to endorse the hitherto impossible dual ideal of Hamlet's readiness to take revenge and to reign. But remarkably, the text trumps the succession question one final time. Hamlet's "readiness" becomes a synonym for the anticipation of death, not for the belated ability to achieve revenge and royalty all at once: "there is speciall prouidence in the fall of a Sparrowe. . . if it be not now, yet it well come, the readines is all" (N3V).

How did the revenge and succession questions get diverted? Let me quote again Hamlet's tally of Claudius's crimes:

Hamlet asks Horatio two questions that the text of the second quarto only half-completes. The rhetorical immediacy of the queries obscures the fact that they are both missing the crucial referent, and that both are therefore grammatically incoherent. Does Horatio not think what "stand[s] mee now vppon"? Is what not perfect conscience? The referent of both questions—"To quit him with this arm"—is missing in Q2, and must (again) be supplied by the folio. Hamlet asks Horatio: don't you think I am justified, indeed, is it not perfect conscience, to requite Claudius for the harms he has done—to kill him? The folio does what the quarto cannot: it directly confronts the possibility of Hamlet as a justified regicide, a political revenger. The quarto seems racked by anxiety about the prospect of Hamlet's ambition and succession. Let us recall in this context that Q2 also fails to include (whether because of revision, negligence, or censorship) the passage about the child actors and the Wars of the Theaters. In wishing to know how the "little eyases" thrive, Hamlet in the folio asks incredulously whether the children will

not, once they have grown into "common players," have already been made by their writers to "exclaim against their own succession." Hamlet's question betrays his identification with their plight. Theatrically occupying a contestatory space, the prince seems always to have to exclaim against the succession which is his due; he lives the irreconcilable contradiction of revenger and candidate, caroming between childish impulses and adult responsibilities. He is not unlike King James in this, an heir presumptive who had, as best he could, to remain silent about (if not to exclaim against) his own succession.

Questions of political inheritance or consequence cause the second quarto to suffer bouts of amnesia or incoherence. I want to insist on these dysfunctions as significant: they are textual arrows aimed at the historical blank of failed or perplexed—diseased—succession. Just at the moment in Q2 when Hamlet's revenge seems most imminent, most replete with reasons and emotions, it is edited out, unstated and imprecise—and at just that moment, as if to further disburden the play of its impulses and justifications for king killing, Osric enters with Laertes' swordfight challenge. An exceedingly odd plot contortion then occurs: after finally speaking his clear desire for kingship ("th'election and my hopes"), after hinting that his conscience would be not only untroubled but satisfied by taking arms against a sea of cultural imperatives, Hamlet suddenly forgets, or allows himself to be diverted from, his own intense emotions. He abdicates his newly focused desires at the prospect of the sword fight with Laertes. When Hamlet seems ready to prosecute his right to the throne by taking the long-pondered revenge, the play introduces one more distraction from the purpose—the final, mortal distraction.^[31]

The second quarto's conspicuous avoidance of the succession question shadows similar, contemporary historical indirections. For James's long incumbency also had to navigate cultural reticence—the silence of interested courtiers, the Elizabethan Parliament's suppression of debate on the question (1602). And as the play closes toward death and a new regime, its relationship to its cultural contexts becomes at once more intimate and more turbulent.