VI

This jigsaw of history and theater might usefully be reassembled in the frame of plague. Epidemic illness corrupts and compromises not only the political but also the aesthetic process. Because contagion by definition erases boundaries, it produces multiple likenesses; in the context of the sickness, every threat to stability becomes alarmingly similar, a disease of the state. Fortinbras and Hamlet fall into a historical pool of

resemblance. They enter a similarity with the physical and psychological operations and effects of pestilence, miming its depredations upon culture.

But while it seems reasonable enough to suppose that one or two fictional personages represent or evoke, in part or in whole, an historical figure, it must ring false to argue that a character or even a cast of characters can function as simulacra for epidemic disease—a transhistorical force. Interpretive ethics should harness the impulse to map such an intensely complicated, formidable presence as the plague onto dramatic characters, no matter how complex they are. For while Hamlet's language partakes of the marvelous, infused with the amperage of a transcendental, murderous energy, he remains a figure of a man, finally subject in his world to the fragility of the flesh. Despite the strong hint that he linguistically surpasses his own physical limitations—three times he states his death as a fact ("I am dead Horatio . . . Horatio I am dead . . . I die Horatio " [OI–OIV]), yet each time he survives his own sentence and continues to speak—he does expire at last. His mortality casts doubt on his ability to represent an essentially transcendent, historically unbound disaster. Likewise, his mighty opposite Claudius, while certainly capable of wickedness, never passes much beyond the human motivations "for which I did the murther; / My Crowne, mine owne ambition, and my Queene" (JI). Finally, Fortinbras, king of the dead, lacks either Hamlet's pestilent inhumanity or the disease's harsh motivelessness; he is middle management, not an obvious bearer of supernatural destruction.

There is of course a credible, inhuman inscription of the disease in the play: the Ghost. The image of King Hamlet can be regarded as the founding infestation; it hexes the language and health of the state. The Ghost certainly emblematizes plague's key attributes: a disembodied, corruptive energy, the pivotal effect of which is to set death in motion and to overthrow a king. Hamlet himself tells us that when the Ghost first appears—in "the very witching time of night"—is also when "hell it selfe breakes out / Contagion to this world" (H4v). But the surest analogy between the Ghost and the plague lies in the fact that both are recurrent phenomena. The idea of "haunting" now used mostly in reference to poltergeists and other spooks is based etymologically not so much on occupation as on repetition, on habitual action or location.^[58] And "to haunt" in one Renaissance usage referred to "unseen or immaterial visitants" including disease, such hauntings being especially "causes of distraction or trouble" (OED , "haunt," s.v. 5.a). This sense

of haunting links Hamlet's diseased distractions to plague's unique character in the Renaissance as a common supernatural event. When James's entourage was being followed by (and, seemingly, endlessly producing) the disease, Thomas Edmonds wrote that "the Court hath been so continually haunted with the sickness . . . as we are forced to remove from place to place."^[59] For all the catastrophic alteration signified by plagues, they more frighteningly meant recursion : the same death was replayed on a national scale, the same books of cures were translated and reprinted, the same laws against vagrancy and vagabondage were resurrected, and terribly familiar demographics prevailed. The plague was an episodic crisis of the past now present: a crisis of history's return.

A ghost always represents and ushers in historical crises. This Ghost's many (indirect) victims signify that a submission to the imperatives of the past can demolish entire cultures as well as individuals. However, King Hamlet's haunting is particular, not general: the spirit pours its worst poison directly into the son. The myriad relationships of sickness to history are conducted through Hamlet, not the Ghost. By adopting the father's infective mode and transmitting the ancestor's disease, Hamlet seizes what the present time has denied him: he seizes power, if only the terminal power to undo the present. Ironically, when he attempts to put his power into use at last, he calls forth as the successor to the throne a past name, the name of the father's vanquished enemy. Burdens of history convect in Hamlet's character, and he always makes of these pressures something contagious and destructive. The effect of the Ghost on Hamlet is, in a like but tortuous way, replayed through the sphere of inscription, in the effect of history on the text of the second quarto. Temporal borders rupture; the imaginative plague that is the past overtakes the theatrical present, absorbs and disperses Jacobean history. The defeated elder Bothwell is recalled in redemptive piracy; Darnley dies again and returns newly disfigured, seeking vengeance; Mary reappears as the target of Hamlet's most misogynistic imaginary accusations. And with this reemergence of Stuart history, present identifications grow strange. Claudius is unaccountably like James, insofar as both are victims of subversive diseases; Fortinbras, opportunistic infection that he is, also figures the new king; and Hamlet throughout forms homologies and displacements among several Tudor and Stuart personages and forces, including Essex (in his advocacy of and danger to the succession), Elizabeth (through his dying voice), and the much-troubled James.

One more example will suffice to sketch the uprooted, fragmentary

historiography of the play and suggest the plaguy destruction of categories in which Hamlet 's histories engage. As a kind of coda to the Bothwell legacy, another, identically named nemesis pestered King James in his maturity. Mary's second husband was James Hepburn, fourth earl of Bothwell; his nephew was Francis Stewart-Hepburn, fifth earl of Bothwell, who became one of James's most dangerous enemies. Just as Fortinbras junior returns at the end of Hamlet to visit (or perhaps redeem) the sins of the fathers upon the nation of the son, so the second Bothwell returned, with the name of the past, to haunt King James. The complex source of the younger Bothwell's hostility was a mixture of personal ambition, religious outrage at James's conciliatory stance toward rebel Catholic lords, and fiscal fury at the king's appropriation, throughout the early 1590s, of many of the nobility's lands and powers. The short version of the story is that Bothwell fought back, inflicting several outrages upon the dignity and person of James with minimal royal retribution; finally, in 1593, he apprehended and detained James under a brief house arrest. The king managed to escape, eventually arresting the younger Bothwell in turn and finally working the exile of his enemy—but not before young Stewart-Hepburn had driven a wedge between James and Elizabeth.^[60] The queen objected to her cousin's continued leniency to, and inaction concerning, the rebel lord; James for his part was furious that Elizabeth repeatedly refused to apprehend his energetic young enemy.

Looking to this complicated history, Lillian Winstanley has excavated another wing in the subterranean archive of Hamlet 's representational processes:

An excellent drama can . . . be made by combining in one the parts played by the two Bothwells. There is nothing difficult in such a conception: the two belonged to the same family, they were uncle and nephew, they held the same title. . . . [E]ven modern Scottish historians have remarked that the younger Bothwell seemed like a reincarnation of the elder.

The device of putting the two in one is quite simple and obvious . . .: the crimes committed by Claudius are the crimes of the elder Bothwell which are far more striking and dramatic than the crimes of the younger Bothwell; but the relation of Hamlet to Claudius is the relation of James to the younger Bothwell. Why not?^[61]

Here is why not: because to be so admirably tidy about the conduct of history in this drama is assuredly to be wrong—although Winstanley is not, I think, on the wrong track. Her favorite combination-inscription formula opens up further interpretive possibilities for, but also disjunc-

tions between, the text and the Jacobean story. Added bits of information seriously compromise her historical identifications—such as, for example, James's conviction that the younger Bothwell was dabbling in witchcraft. The king's paranoia about the occult was keen after he returned from his wedding trip to Denmark in 1590, where, as Christina Larner notes, "Witch-hunting was endemic. . . . [James] is likely to have been impressed by the fact that the learned and important in that country took the terrors and menace of witchcraft seriously."^[62] The intense interest he took in the subject was, as Larner makes clear, an interest in treason; the two topics were necessarily enmeshed in his mind. He determined to implicate the younger Bothwell in conspiratorial witchery as a way to demonize, exorcise, and apprehend (seize, understand) him. Winstanley does not discuss the possible ramifications of the younger Bothwell's suspected sorcery; once the question of the paranormal is brought into the discussion of Hamlet , historical identifications once again become confoundingly sloppy. True, Claudius is referred to as "that incestuous, that adulterate beast, / With witchcraft of his wits" (D3). So far, so good: the younger Bothwell might thus be said to help constitute the figure of Claudius. But it is Hamlet who speaks with the Ghost and who announces, after Gonzago , that "Tis now the very witching time of night." If there is converse with the supernatural, if there is magical treason staged by the play, Hamlet performs it.

It is not my intent to fault Winstanley's critical approach, because I am obviously much in its debt; I only question its simplifications. The problem with reading historical inscription in Hamlet is that end points to identification are elusive; as soon as the reader finds a secure historical purchase, just one more fact or a differently perceived resemblance causes a landslide of semantic slippage. What seems extraordinarily suggestive but unresolvable in the colloquy between the drama and its Jacobean-Bothwellian connections is the perplexing chiasm between the uncle-nephew relationship in history—the Team Bothwell as Jacobean nemesis—and the same relation, also converging on a unity, between Hamlet and Claudius in the text. What spirograph is traced here? We must abandon the notion of single or dual historical correspondence in favor of a multidimensional constellation of references: the two Bothwells variously confounded James, who has been victimized like Hamlet, who seditiously hounds the king, who in turn is like the two Bothwells in both his villainy and frustrating power to evade punishment. Uncle and nephew of the past, the criminal, witchy, treasonous (but not unquestionably wicked) Bothwells, and uncle/nephew of the textual pre-

sent, Claudius and Hamlet, diverge structurally, but at key points they are disturbingly similar in the threat they pose to political order.

If the writing-in of the past in Hamlet has a gnomic point, it is that theater can reconstitute history without reducing or caricaturing it. But can the text represent its contexts coherently? Can it construct, out of the widely signifying past, a moment of meaning and resolve? The play displays, reanimates, but does not cleanly anatomize or limit historical energies that tend toward the entropic; the writing-in yields a hermeneutic opening out. Contentious participants in culture, over time, resemble one another; disordering influences are analogized with infection; notions of cause, justification, ideological difference slip away. In Hamlet , layers of similitude among characters break down categorical boundaries between them, foisting interpretive uncertainty not only upon an audience, but also upon the history glancingly represented. Shakespeare's alarming convergences of Hamlet and Claudius, Hamlet and Fortinbras, Hamlet and any other producers of discord call forth an unwelcome contagion between categories that most audiences (and certainly the characters themselves) wish to keep separate: uncle/father, winner/loser, ruler/subject, hero/villain, present/past, structure/chaos. Neat layers of significance blend into one another, as when the Bothwell earls receive theatrical life as an antagonistic but convergent division (Hamlet/Claudius), not a unity, as Winstanley would have it. Determination of historical codes or references in the play must be provisional: Hamlet only haltingly, intermittently represents the put-upon and succession-starved King James; and it seems that every twist in the plot introduces another possibility for the aesthetic return of some aspect of the new king's past. For instance, I have placed the intrusion of young Bothwell into James's life in the same referential frame as the intrusion of young Fortinbras into Denmark. The return of Fortinbras figures an historical rerun of precisely the sort that Francis Stewart-Hepburn must have seemed: the frights of memory. Yet this inscription juggles with us. For Fortinbras as a type of Young Bothwell coexists with Fortinbras as James, the northern ruler and potential invader feared by some Englishmen. If we take the possible reverberations of history seriously here, then the self becomes its demonic other as James and young Bothwell funnel into the figure of Fortinbras. A fractured mirage of Jacobean images begins to assemble. Just like a dream in which the dreamer plays every role and suffers each character's triumphs and handicaps, Hamlet sutures intimate scraps of James's history into a patchwork body of personal figurations that are also topical, cultural figurations—because

when the dreamer is the king, his portents are national. If the figure of James lends some conceptual unity to the baffling historiographical imbrications and discontinuities in Hamlet , the play, as a displaced dream of someone else's anxieties, still cannot deploy those inscriptions in an entirely rational, unified manner. History becomes random Jacobean anthology in the text. Unlike the operative mimetic coherence of contemporary contexts in Troilus and Cressida , Denmark's referential fragments are dysfunctional as representations: their sheer multiplicity, their dubious genealogy, makes them poorly matched pieces, yoked by theatrical violence in a plot whose dream logic never quite gels.

Hamlet establishes the endless complexity of persons in history, and this establishment depends on the play's refusal, or rather inability, to schematize persons and history, to isolate a group of histories and distinguish among them. In this incompetence lies a vast disorganizing potential. Stuffed with orts out of joint from the Jacobean past, the second quarto of Hamlet absorbs immense cultural and historical incoherence without completely digesting it.

There are two ways to take the drama's internalization and decomposition of its contexts. The first is to assign full aesthetic intentionality to the author and the text: to say that Shakespeare has a conscious mimetic program which produces the cracked histories I have traced. If this program is intentional, however, it is also a theatrical failure: it results in huge disruptions in plot and psychology that have long bothered critics of Hamlet . These critics have labored for centuries under the despotism of an assumption that the play makes sense. One would have to conclude from the contextual reading that the text is disturbed by its own mimetic process, its inscriptional procedure, a procedure it cannot manage given the range and variety of materials enfolded in the stories of James, the succession, and the bubonic plague.

But another way to read the presence of history in the text would take the plague as a model, not merely an example, of historical intervention. King Hamlet's demise inevitably evokes memories of the Darnley murder, and creates an aperture for history to enter the text; from that point, "history" cannot be kept out, and its effects as well as its boundaries spread. It becomes an infectious pressure on and a pollutant in the interpretive and mimetic function. Here is the problem: once we see the foundation of the plot as materially derived from historical fact—the Darnley murder, say, or James's ongoing problems with the Bothwells—the drama cannot easily be read except through the filter of that controlling story; that story becomes the text's touchstone, its stable meaning. This

hermeneutic trap is the accidental but necessary consequence of the work's having admitted any clear and pivotal topicality into the theater. A piece of history that contributes, for instance, a crucial plot twist, a primary image cluster, or the likeness of a major character also dangles a lure for readers—a promise of accessibility. More often than not, Shakespeare makes good on this promise; only rarely do his histories lead nowhere. His plays are typically choosy repositories of reference. But when the social and cultural fields that surround the text infiltrate it apparently at random, the structures on which literary form traditionally depends can break down. Any art must deploy its cultural referentiality with care if it hopes to arrange the scatterings of the past and present; if, that is, it hopes to derive sense from temporality. A text which draws promiscuously on or helplessly absorbs the contradictions and multiplicities of history will suffer hermeneutic disruptions, nonproductive polysemy, dysfunctional theatrics. In Hamlet , history becomes an unwholesome influence that the text can neither resist nor contain.

Plague, as a model of the aesthetic process of historical intervention in Hamlet , replaces sociological or psychological sense with contagion patterns that gesture toward but frustrate design. The disease's multiple manifestations and interventions rationalize (if anything can) the second quarto's radically discontinuous acts of referentiality, in which several characters variously configure a single historical fact, or one character absorbs osmotically but fractionally several historical features, identities, or relations. But even a flexible theoretical understanding of the text's interplay with disease has limited usefulness. Plague, after all, is not historically an effete structure or an aesthetic object; it is a thuggish fact, an agonizing assault on the body. Its torque and sudden danger exceed stability; it cannot be fully controlled or transformed into something the imagination can stand and use. When Shakespeare's artistic tools are sharp, the sickness in Denmark appears to metaphorize a dynamic, contagious process of epistemological, moral, and social dissolution. But the play cannot sustain a single coherent image of the disease. A culture contains but is also described by its illnesses; just so, the play is tainted by the pathological environment it describes.

I cannot say with certainty that the second quarto of 1604 represents a postaccession and postplague revision or therefore that the play definitively acknowledges the recent national horror. Its precise dates of composition, redaction, and performance will remain elusive. No matter. What is clear is that Hamlet draws on the interregnum imagination, one

which included the presence of sickness. The play stages a threat to monarchy from an antithetical energy; it pictures a cavern where force falls and tosses about. Like the second tetralogy, Hamlet considers the transitional, contingent nature of monarchy and the corkscrew trajectories of an ambition that has been blocked from its plotted ascent. The text's primary subliminal energy—the frustrated desire for political success, for succession—charges a place that has been blasted from within by a mysterious corruption.

The presence of James's past in the text ought to dictate certain plots and organize certain theatrical experiences, but it actually undoes and disorganizes plot and experience: partly because it was a past that was never satisfactorily resolved (the murderer of the father escaped, the murderer's nephew returned like a ghost to pester James); partly because the history itself was contradictory (the stepfather in many ways was at least morally comparable to the reprobate father); and partly because James was haunted by tragedy in his succession. The second quarto, rattled by its indiscriminate absorption of the king's troubling and suspended past, has made itself vulnerably subject to too many histories. The play compounds history's unreadability by linking James and Hamlet, the dramatis personae and the contexts of the drama, in a unity of intellectual misgiving; Hamlet imitates the plague's style of category disturbance by implicitly engaging dramatic subjectivity in acts of contagion so that everything means everything. Its sometimes deliberate, often slurred construal of the past results in overdeterminations that take their toll on the interpretive potential, the knowability, of the play.^[63] No chart of historical figures, currents, or quadrants can stabilize this work.

The text further blocks interpretive maneuvers by depicting not only national histories but also minutely personal connections to the past, and not all of these are James's connections. As everyone knows, the very name "Hamlet" echoes that of Shakespeare's son Hamnet, who was buried in 1596. The boy was, suggestively enough, a twin—his sister, Judith, survived. In Shakespeare's theatrical transformation of tragic familial fact, the twinning phenomenon becomes nightmarish, memorializing a past that cannot be buried: the son calls the father-Ghost by his own name ("Ile call thee Hamlet " [DIV]) and so levels the differences between them, between then and now, death and life. The scene of the son calling out to the dead father mirrors the biographical scene that the play actually performs: the living father Shakespeare calling out to his dead son who bore the name the father bestows again on

a play, a tragical history of father and son. In this context the play becomes a personal mourning ritual, encoding the author's own difficulty in processing the terrible knowledge of the past, the death of his child. Of course, Hamlet's severe imperfections complicate this touching elegiac tableau. And as with the drama's more political histories, the complications proliferate, for the name has further ramifications evoked but unresolved by the text. A young woman named Katherine Hamlett, one of Shakespeare's childhood neighbors, drowned in the Avon in 1579. Not only did she meet Ophelia's fate, but, like Ophelia, she was the subject of a coroner's inquest.^[64] Shakespeare writes a play around a name besmirched by doom: "Hamlet" is attached in history to two morbid destinies that converge, temporally and semantically out of sync, in the author's life. The fate of Ophelia, because it remembers Katherine Hamlett's demise, obliquely recalls the name of the son; and although the fictional Hamlet is conspicuously absent from the scene of Ophelia's death, her funeral brings him, poorly led, into the grave.

These twinnings typify the opaque and garbled referentiality in which the play engages at every turn. Hamlet comprises, with indecipherable complexity, buried histories: cultural and monarchical remembrances fused with those even more elusive and painful memorial reconstructions of the author. The play's myriad cultural influences have a nonlogical, unstructured relationship to one another. And I have not even touched on the influx of "ideas of the time," prominent histories in their own right—accounts of what it was possible to think and thus to mean or not to mean.^[65] The figure of Hamlet and his intercourse with his burdens reify some central political and philosophical struggles of the high Renaissance: conflicts of spiritual piety versus worldly business; tension between improvisational rashness and cautious rationality; sympathy to a politically oppositional Catholicism versus loyalty to reformation structures and ideologies (a conflict contained in the purgatorial Ghost and in the predestinarian convictions of Claudius and Hamlet). The prince enacts all of these conflictual relations and also bears the immense representational burden of Jacobean history that I have labored to unpack. But finally, Hamlet's figuration as a repository of Renaissance culture cannot secure human status. He is a portrait of unification without unity, of collocation without coherence.

What can we make at last of the play's rewriting of James's life, of Hamlet's polyvalent intake and dispersal of contemporary and foundational Stuart contexts? The convolutions of the inscriptive process suggest that even particular histories are uncontrollable or chance elements,

impervious to literary management—that history is an intellectual banquet whereby "a little more than a little is by much too much." The theatrical text will always, as Quince says with inadvertent brilliance in A Midsummer Night's Dream , come "to disfigure, or to present" a reality external to itself; it inevitably presents a disfigured approximation, an amended shadow of impinging shapes of the real. However, theater's deformation and reformation of its historical material need not signify incapability or failure. It may instead betoken triumph over the intractable elements of workaday life. In theater, the alternatives of the past and the potentialities of the present can be laid beside one another, remembered and processed, forming new semantic relations. Theater construes the possibilities of history, the nearly lived and barely avoided. Certainly, Hamlet does not passively receive inchoate contexts. At its best, the play marvelously deploys cultural referentiality to intensify theatrical experience. What I wish finally to suggest, however, is that Hamlet cannot contain its histories as themes or influences. If the play is a virtual anthology of historical coordinates, it also necessarily becomes a repository of illogic, its contexts frustrating form and the instrumentality of the past.

I have been discussing the relationship of succession anxieties to the concerns of the second quarto, but it should be noted at last that the idea of succession is integral to all literary plot—if by "succession" one means a sequence of events that comes to semantic fruition. The happy succession saga is a model story, really, a narrative perfection: one event follows causally on another until tension resolves in the denouement of a new regime, logically consummating the old. A prior story is now superseded, and ideally, order prevails; whatever treason occurred in the tale functioned merely as the plot obstacle, so satisfying and necessary to overcome. In Hamlet , however, failed succession is narratively self-referential as well as historically situated: the story of frustrated inheritance and ironic takeover stages its own metafiction of narrative incoherence. The prince's experience of prolonged political disappointment, and the play's obstructed catharsis and revenge, are perfect examples of fictional anticlimax; plot fails to provide cumulative understanding. Plot in Denmark conspicuously and repeatedly trips, interrupts itself, dawdles, and postpones to the point of tragedy the achievement of royalty: as everyone knows, Hamlet makes belatedness and delay the very condition of its form. These features do resonate with the history of James's successions, the past and present historical contexts, but they structurally exaggerate the character of those contexts. The least pleasant fea-

tures of Jacobean succession history, including the disturbing adjacency of monarchy and disease, become the most prominent elements in Hamlet 's antisuccession plot. Historically, the epidemic only momentarily wrecked the plot of succession; plague was but temporarily inimical to the story of English rule that had been uninterrupted for forty-four years.^[66] But theatrically, disease takes dominion everywhere; the political structure and the form of the narrative are both shot through with illness. And treason in the plot is not merely a brief interruption before the denouement, but rather the constant activity of the rightful heir, whose aggressive self-consumption causes the story of succession to make less and less sense.

Hamlet 's illogicalities arise in part because the play and its wide, dark river of referents share a chaotic flow; in the turbulence, text is put profoundly into question as a meaning-bearing object. If the historically overburdened second quarto fails to synthesize itself, or even to allow the possibility of synthesis, at least it acknowledges the world that formed it, the contexts that stress its present meanings. Twelfth Night , by contrast, avoids such acknowledgments.