1. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dell, 1962), p. 105. Norbert Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p. 5, similarly ponders the injuries human beings "have done to each other in the name of a belief that death was not an end."

2. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 353.

3. Alexander Welsh, "The Task of Hamlet," Yale Review , 69 (1979-80), keenly recognizes that "revenge is a function of mourning" but his sensible reminder that "two deaths do not make a life" may not seem as true to the subconscious as it does to the conscious mind (pp. 488, 496-97).

4. Sigmund Freud, "The Ego and the Id," Complete Psychological Works , Standard ed., trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press), XIX, passim; Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self , trans. Anthony Wilden (New York: Dell, 1975). Whether the male orientation of this symbolism is necessary—for Shakespeare, Freud, or Lacan—is certainly debatable, but for the purposes of this chapter I will adopt it. A feminist revaluation of such "chaos" as a generafive multiplicity slandered by a defensive patriarchy would only reinforce the gendering of this idea of logical authority; it might also reinforce my general argument that this linear conception of the human legacy provokes violence against Others in defense of that legacy. Compare the way the Duke abandons his patriarchal authority in Measure for Measure , then reclaims it in order to supervise a less puritanical, more comic response to the works of the id.

5. Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 106, discusses this juxtaposition.

6. Welsh, p. 488.

7. W. W. Greg, "Hamlet's Hallucination." Modern Language Review , 12 (1917), pp. 393-421, is the classic instance of this argument. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers (London: Methuen, 1989), discusses the way absent presences help to construct and deconstruct the meaning of works such as Hamlet .

8. Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), argues that the ghost would have been clearly recognizable to an Elizabethan audience as a demonic tempter.

9. Avi Erlich, Hamlet's Absent Father (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 38-39.

10. Harold F. Searles, "Schizophrenia and the Inevitability of Death, Psychiatric Quarterly , 1961 (35), pp. 633-34; quoted by Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), p. 63. Becker, pp. 29-30, places the curing of denial among the highest moral projects: "If we had to offer the briefest explanation of all the evil that men have wreaked upon themselves and upon their world since the beginnings of time right up until tomorrow, it would be not in terms of man's animal heredity, his instincts and his evolution: it would be simply in the toll that his pretense of sanity takes , as he tries to deny his true condition." By calling these the " costs of pretending not to be mad ," Becker inadvertently suggests the strong relevance of this problem to Hamlet, where the confrontation with death leads to a half-pretended madness that only completed vengeance (or death, or both) can cure.

11. Duffy, p. 328.

12. William Hazlitt, Collected Works (London, 1902), I, 232. The tendency of all sorts of people to identify deeply with Hamlet is notorious. There is obviously a critical pitfall in identifying too deeply with dramatic characters, and when I assert that a character thinks or wants something, I am using a familiar shorthand for the idea that the character is depicted in such a way that readers may infer those ideas or desires. Meta-critics who reflexively attack psychological readings for treating these verbal artifacts as if they were real people should, however, ask themselves whether their own readings could withstand a rigorous application of their principle, whether any meaningful response to drama is possible without somehow imagining that the words represent or constitute human beings.

13. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire , 5th ed. (Cleveland: World Press, 1964), pp. 38-39.

14. Cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques , trans. John Russell (New York: Atheneum, 1972), p. 219: "To say . . . that death is either natural or unnatural is meaningless [in Bororos culture]. When a native dies, the village organizes a collective hunt . . . to make Nature pay her debt."

15. Once again Browne provides useful evidence that this reading is not an anachronistic imposition: "we are what we all abhorre, Antropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not onely of men, but of our selves; and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth" (p. 107). Montaigne's essay "Of Cannibals" discusses a captive's warning that, in eating him, the captors "will be eating at the same time their own fathers and grandfathers, who have served to feed and nourish his body"; Complete Essays , trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 158. Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 158, 162-63, shows that some Renaissance Englishmen found the idea of eating at funerals, or even at memorial services some weeks later, disturbing.

16. Hamlet mimics these symptoms when he visits Ophelia disguised as a sort of memento amori , "Pale as his shirt . . . As if he had been loosed out of hell / To speak of horrors," letting out an expiration that seems to "end his being," and finds his way out "without his eyes" (2.1.81-83, 96-98). If Hamlet is indeed playing dead here, perhaps it is to test whether his dead self will be as pathetically rejected by his beloved as his father's dead self has been.

17. Erlich, p. 203, points out that this ghost makes "night hideous" instead of "wholesome," bringing news of a corruption through sexuality (the medium of Original Sin and hence mortality) that inverts the glad tidings enabled by Christ's virgin birth. Erlich puts this observation in service of a psychoanalytic diagnosis of Hamlet's "highly complex search, partially unconscious, for a strong father" (260); I prefer to associate this search with the more general symbolic need for some mission in life that death does not simply cancel.

18. C. S. Lewis, "Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem." Proceedings of the British Academy , 28 (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), pp. 147-52.

19. Roy D. Waldman, Humanistic Psychiatry (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971), pp. 123-24; quoted by Becker, p. 181. Hamlet would probably find a more graceful phrasing, but he could certainly say of the ghost what (according to Becker, p. 212) the analysand characteristically says of the analyst at the peak of transference: "'I am immortal by continuing to please this object who now may not be alive but continues to cast a shadow . . . and may even be working its powers from the invisible spirit world.'"

20. Clifford Geertz, "Religion as a Cultural System," in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion , ed. M. Banton (New York: Praeger, 1966), p. 4.

21. Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (New York: Doubleday, 1955), passim. Ronald Levao, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 348, points out that Hamlet identifies extensively with "he that plays the king" in the play within Hamlet .

22. Thomas Adams, Workes (London, 1629), p. 555. For more specific verbal echoes of the play, see, for example, p. 928, where Adams asks, "who can say, which was the Client, which the Lawyer: which the borrower, which the lender: which the captive, which the Conqueror; when they all lie together in the blended dust ?" The sentiment may have been conventional, but this array of instances was not. Two paragraphs later, Adams describes human beings as an impressive "piece of work," and on the following page describes God as sending "his Sergeant Death to arrest us," echoing the dying Hamlet's description of "this fell sergeant, Death" as ''strict in his arrest" (5.2.341-42). What makes such echoes particularly surprising is Adams's affiliation with the virulently antitheatrical Puritans.

23. For a recent and typical example, the parents of murdered actress Rebecca Shaeffer have dedicated their lives to gun control: "We face death every morning," her father told a reporter; "You never cease missing the person. The gun issue lets us focus our anger" ( Los Angeles Times , August 13, 1991, p. E1).

24. Directory for the Public Worship of God (1644); quoted by Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 185. Cf. Freud, "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices," IX, p. 118, on the way the neurotic cannot renounce formalities that may "seem quite meaningless to us . . . for any deviation from the ceremonial is visited by intolerable anxiety, which obliges him at once to make his omission good."

25. On the implication of a Black Mass in this poisoned chalice, see Roy W. Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), p. 250. The suggestion that Ophelia is damned by immersion in water, perverting the promise of baptism, reinforces this pattern of inversion. The idea of cannibalism often raised anxieties in Renaissance minds about the feasibility of the general resurrection, since bodies would have to compete for their constitutive material.

26. Daniel E. Van Tassel, "Clarence, Claudio, and Hamlet." Renaissance and Reformation , New Series, 7 (1983), pp. 48-62.

27. Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance "Hamlet" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 82-102.

28. See for example Death Repeal'd By a Thankfull Memoriall (Oxford, 1638), which emphasizes in several places the immortalizing power of the monuments Lord Bayning of Sudbury has charitably helped to build.

29. Frye, p. 258, insists that Hamlet's remark is perfectly compatible with an expectation of Christian afterlife; but the contrast with the compelled speech of Hamlet's revenant father, and the correction ("flights of angels sing thee to thy rest") urgently offered by Horatio, suggest otherwise. Instead, the last words look ahead to Flamineo's farewell in Webster's The White Devil : "I have caught / An everlasting cold; I have lost my voice / Most irrecoverably . . . rest breeds rest . . ." (5.6.266-68).

30. René Girard, A Theater of Envy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 271-89, perceives many of the same concerns in Hamlet that I do, and explores them brilliantly, but finally deduces that Shakespeare is advocating Christianity as humanity's last best hope against the cycle of retributive violence. The evidence of plot runs against this recuperation of a devoutly Christian Shakespeare. Hamlet's supposed conversion only escalates the violence, violence that is clearly homologous with Christian stories about punishing a primal sin and sacrificing an innocent son.

31. Compare Becker, p. 90, summarizing Kierkegaard: "One goes through it all to arrive at faith, the faith that one's creatureliness has some meaning to a Creator; that despite one's true insignificance, weakness, death, one's existence has meaning in some ultimate sense because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things brought about and maintained to some kind of design by some creative force." Levao, p. 354, perceives Hamlet "longing for the coherent force of fictions."

32. Richard Levin, New Readings vs. Old Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

33. Philippe de Mornay, Discourse of Life and Death , trans. Mary Herbert Pembroke (1592); ed. Diane Bornstein, Medieval and Renaissance Monograph Series, III (1983), 46.

34. Cf. Girard, pp. 286-89, on the moral admonition Hamlet offers a world of nuclear technology. This fear of fratricide further equates Hamlet's revenge with Claudius's primal crime.

35. Cf. Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," XIV, 292: "the bewilderment and the paralysis of capacity from which we suffer, are essentially determined among other things by the circumstance that we are unable to maintain our former attitude towards death, and have not yet found a new one."

36. Maurice J. Quinlan, "Shakespeare and the Catholic Burial Services," Shakespeare Quarterly , 5 (1954), pp. 303-6.

37. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things , trans. William E. Leonard (New York: Dutton, 1957), I: 99-100. Bacon, "Of Unity in Religion," II, 236, quotes this passage. Shakespeare seems to have recognized this pattern from the first scene of what may have been his first play, where Exeter asks,

We mourn in black, why mourn we not in blood?
Henry is dead, and never shall revive.
Upon a wooden coffin we attend,
And death's dishonorable victory
We with our stately presence glorify,
Like captives bound to a triumphant car.

Exeter is evidently proposing to correct this situation by a war against "the subtile-witted French" who may "By magic verses have contrived his end" ( Henry VI, Part I , 1.1.17-27). Kirby Farrell, Play, Death, and Heroism in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 57, notes that this speech "reduces death to a military humiliation that the survivors can undo by destroying the French and, through them, death itself."

38. First Letter, iv.1; see (Sister) Miriam Joseph, "Discerning the Ghost in Hamlet ," PMLA , 76 (1961), pp. 493-94. See also Isaiah 8:19, "Should they consult the dead on behalf of the living?"

39. In addition to Greg, see Arthur Kirsch, "Hamlet's Grief," ELH , 48 (1981), pp. 17-36.

40. Job 14:10, quoted by John Dunton (?), "House of Weeping," in A Mourning-Ring (London, 1692), p. 44. Hamlet's father performs a role like that of the virtuous pagan Cyrus, who "forbids his sonnes to thinke . . . that he shall be Nothing any more after his death" (Tuke, p. 2), rather than the role suggested by Augustinian theology, in which dead fathers "are where they doe not see, nor hear what things are done or chaunceth in this life"; William Leigh, The Soules Solace Against Sorrow (London, 1602), p. 30, citing Augustine's De Spiritu , 2.9.

41. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus 1604-1616: Parallel Texts , ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950).