1. John Harington pithily anticipates this point: "Treason dothe never prosper;—what's the reason? / Why; if it prosper, none dare call it Treason." Norman Egbert McClure, ed., The Letters and Epigrams of John Harington (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), 255.

2. Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare 1603 , in The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker , ed. F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 21, 25.

3. William McElwee, The Wisest Fool in Christendom: The Reign of King James I and VI (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), 109; hereafter cited in text and notes as McElwee, Wisest Fool .

4. "The True Narration of the Entertainment of his Royal Majestie from the time of his Departure from Edenbrough till his Receiving at London," in John Nichols, ed., The Progresses and Public Processions of King James the First , 5 vols. (London, 1828; rpt. New York, Kraus Reprint, 1980), 1:113; hereafter cited as Nichols, Progresses .

5. Quoted in F. P. Wilson, The Plague in Shakespeare's London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 94-95; hereafter cited in text and notes as Wilson, Plague .

6. Quoted in Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1985), 304. But elsewhere (258-59) Slack notes that such rebellions as the mayor feared were remarkably rare.

7. Wilson, Plague, 95-96 . Wilson also quotes a proclamation from the Lord Mayor issued at the height of the plague on September 17, 1603:

The people infected and whose houses are infected (against all honesty, human Civility and good conscience seeking as it were rather the desolation of the City and of this kingdom by dispersing of the infection than otherwise) do daily intrude themselves into all Companies both private and public . . . and do flock and follow the dead to the grave in multitudes one still infecting another to the displeasure of Almighty God and great grief of his Majesty.

In this vision of plaguy society, the human impulse toward self-preservation becomes perverted, and the only community exists as death-centered, flocking (literally and figuratively, I take it) to the grave. Slack notes that most incidents of willful dissemination of plague were unconfirmed hearsay; but he rightly observes that "rumours and threats are sufficient in themselves to show the divisive impact of plague in social relationships at every level" ( Impact of Plague , 293).

8. In 1606 Lord Dunfermline, the lord chancellor of Scotland, wrote to Thomas Egerton, Lord Ellesmere, to tell him of the devastating tenacity of the disease:

The onlie truble we haiff is this contagious sicknes of peste, whilk [which] is spread marvelouslie in the best townes of this realme. In Edenburght it hes bene countinuall this four yeares, at the present not werie wehement, bot sik [such] as stayes the cowmoun course of administration off justice, whilk can not be weill exercised in naa other plaice. Air and Striveling ar almoste overthrowin with the seiknes, within thir twa monethes about twa thowsand personnes dead in ane of them. The maist of the peple fled, and the tounes almost left desolat.

The Egerton Papers , ed. J. Payne Collier (London: Camden Society Publications, 1840), 406-7. To the magistrate's aristocratic chagrin, even "the best townes of

this realme" cannot defend against the epidemic, as if class boundaries should be impenetrable to illness. Dunfermline goes on to describe the frequent council meetings in which "we tak the best ordour we may for mantenance of his Majesties peace and obedience." Although he mentions the deaths of the townspeople, the lord chancellor seems most concerned with upholding order. Not only does the disease prevent the administration of justice everywhere it goes, but it more threateningly figures active revolt: two towns "at almoste overthrowin with the seiknes." Such language discloses the symbolism of the pestilence as treason in the Renaissance.

9. The history of the disease in the English Renaissance is a history of monarchy on the run; every ruler from Henry VII to James I fled an outbreak of the disease at least once. See J. F. D. Shrewsbury, A History of the Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), 127-35. See also Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York: John Day, 1969), 157.

10. Howes's Chronicle testifies to the kingly attributes of the disease, in specific contrast to James and his progress into the city: "By reason of God's Visitation for our sins, the Plague and Pestilence there reigning in the City of London and Suburbs . . . the King rode not from the Tower through the City in Royal manner as had been accustomed." Here the "reigning" of the plague suggests a divine sanction against England, and pictures the disease as a proxy ruler; but the point of the passage is to compare the customary "Royal manner" with the way James's own royalty has been compromised. Quoted in Nichols, Progresses , 1:227.

Indeed, a "reign" of plague seems to have been a standard locution. In Romeo and Juliet , Friar John explains that he was unable to convey Friar Lawrence's message because, while he was in Verona, "the searchers of the town, / Suspecting that we both were in a house / Where the infectious pestilence did reign, / Seal'd up the doors, and would not let us forth" (5.2. 8-11).

11. Wilson, Plague , 106-7.

12. Nichols, Progresses , 1:271. The second letter, also from Woodstock, is dated September 17.

13. Sir John Davies, "The Triumph of Death, or The Picture of the Plague: According to the Life, as it was in Anno Domini 1603," in The Complete Works of John Davies of Hereford , ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 2 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 1:45.

14. Proclamation no. 967, in Robert Steele, ed., A Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns . . . 1485-1714 , vol. 1, England and Wales (1910; rpt. New York: Butt Franklin, 1967), 110.

15. Joel Hurstfield, "The Succession Struggle in Late Elizabethan England," in S.T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield, and C. H. Williams, eds., Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays Presented to Sir John Neale (London: Athlone Press, 1961), 369-96: "Finally, at the time of the parliament of 1601, a bill was drafted to prohibit the writing or publishing of books about the succession on the grounds that they bred faction and inspired traitorous acts against the Queen" (372). Nevertheless, Thomas Wilson knew "that the King of Scotland will carry it, as very many Englishmen do know assuredly. But to determine thereof is to all English capitally forbidden, and therefore so I leave

it." State of England, Anno Dom. 1600 (London: Camden Society Publications, 1934), 5.

16. Conrad Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments: English History 1509-1660 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), 256.

17. The joy of ceremony, like most other functions of kingship, was dispensable in the time of an epidemic. John Chamberlain wrote his escalating despair about the matter: "Powles grows very thin, for every man shrinckes away and I am half ashamed to see myself left alone. Our pageants are prettely forward, but most of them are such small timbred gentlemen that they cannot last long and I doubt yf the plague cease not the sooner they will rot and sincke where they stand." Letters of John Chamberlain , ed. Norman Egbert McClure, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 1:195 (letter o f July 10, 1603, to Dudley Carleton).

18. "At the beginning [plague] strooke (like an Arrowe) on the head but of one Citty, but in a short time after, it flewe from Cittie to Citty, and in the end stucke in the very hart of the whole kingdome. Insomuch, that Death came (like a tyrannous Usurper) to the Court gates, & threatned to depose the Emperour himselfe." George Wilkins, The Three Miseries of Barbary: Plague, Famine, and Ciuill Warre (London, 1606 [STC 25639]), sig. C2.

19. See Clifford Geertz, "Centers, Kings, Charisma: Reflections on a Symbolics of Power," in his Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 121-46.

20. McElwee points out ( Wisest Fool , 115 ) that James's trip to London was made in a closed coach: because of the sickness, the king could not even be seen.

21. It might be mentioned that, by the end of the play, Hamlet becomes exceedingly conscious of rank: "this three yeeres I haue tooke note of it, the age is growne so picked, that the toe of the pesant corns so neere the heele of the Courtier he galls his kybe" (M3). This comment is apropos of the gravedigger's frustratingly precise responses to Hamlet's inquiries; the peasants now speak just as impassably as courtiers, and Hamlet, for once, cannot outwit an interlocutor.

Annabel Patterson discusses Hamlet as a mediator between popular and aristocratic concerns in Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 13-31, 93-106.

22. Note Laertes' assumption here that Hamlet's choice is dependent on election —on what the body of people want for him. Laertes' speech corroborates the notion of Denmark's "elective monarchy," a system answerable to the desires of the multitude. Hamlet, at least in his theatrical tastes, resists such democratic systems: he wishes to hear a speech from the player that was caviar to the general.

23. Here I follow E. A. Honigmann, "The Politics in Hamlet and 'The World of the Play,'" in Statford-upon-Avon Studies , vol. 5, Hamlet (New York, 1964), 129-47. He argues that Claudius's first speech "creates a mystery about the succession that is not resolved." Also important is A. P. Stabler, "Elective Monarchy in the Sources of Hamlet ," Studies in Philology 62, no. 5 (October 1965): 654-61. Stabler asserts that ''the question as to who is rightfully king . . . would be an example of one more ambiguity, one more 'question' which Hamlet has to

face, and in whose treatment by Hamlet we come to know his character. . . . It is an ambiguous, rather than a clear-cut case of usurpation as the term is generally understood" (660). Contrary views are provided by Harold Jenkins in his "longer note" to Claudius's speech ( Hamlet [London: Methuen, Arden, 1982], 433-34). Although Jenkins rightly mentions the parallel to Norway's situation, where the brother of Fortinbras the Elder, not the son, succeeded to the throne, we must remember the conditions under which Norway came to rule. There was a clear and public vacancy after the single combat between the elder Hamlet and Fortinbras; with the king of Norway gone, it only makes sense that his adult brother should take the reins, for it seems unlikely that young Fortinbras is much older than Hamlet—and the fight occurred the very day young Hamlet was born. Had King Hamlet lost the fight with Fortinbras, it would be reasonable to expect that his brother Claudius would have taken control of the nation, if only until the male heir reached majority, at which point (perhaps) an election would occur. So Jenkins's point about the succession is misplaced, because the significant parallel is not in political process but in subject position: Norway, "impotent and bedrid," tames his nephew in a brief power struggle over the issue of foreign policy; Claudius, who seems so much more potent, never can handle Hamlet completely.

24. On this point Stabler agrees with Honigmann's hypothesis that Claudius was never elected in the first place, that he simply "pop't in," as Hamlet later says, with no vote having been made: "Hamlet had hoped, in the normal course of events, for an election, in which he would certainly have stood an excellent chance against Claudius with the electorate; but Claudius has . . . by taking over the government at that time and through such means, come between Hamlet and the realization of the hoped-for election" (659 n. 14).

25. The submerged discourse about birth in these lines—in the words "purse," "seal," "folded," "form," "impression,'' and "changeling"—suggests that Hamlet's conception and bringing to light produce only death, in the best tradition of autogenetic Shakespearean villains such as Iago: "I have't. It is engend'red. Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light" ( Othello , 1.3.403-04). Hamlet did not, we should remember, need to forge the orders to escape his compatriots; his forgery thus highlights the mortality he creatively disperses.

26. The generally erotic character of this passage was first called to my attention by Sharon Berken.

27. Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique (1560), ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), 99.

28. A word about the second quarto's reading of this line. "Though you fret me not" makes as much sense as "though you fret me," the standard editorial choice: it just makes different sense. In Q2, Hamlet suggests that simply because the friends do not actively worry him does not mean that he is relaxed or off his guard around them. The folio reading "though you fret me, you cannot . . ." gives Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a bit more power to aggravate Hamlet. Either reading strikes me as valid, with the folio's "Though x , not y " having more logical (if not necessarily thematic) integrity than "Though not x , not y " of the quarto.

29. For an interesting reading of Hamlet's latent femininity, see David Leverenz, "The Woman in Hamlet : An Interpersonal View," in Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn, eds., Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1980), 110-28.

30. Stabler has made this point: "No matter that here the 'rabble' is in fact 'abusing the custom' and choosing to 'ratify and prop' inappropriately; the point is that they, the people, and not Claudius's cronies of the royal Council, are asserting the elective privilege" ("Elective Monarchy," 659-60).

31. In the folio, just after "is't not perfect conscience / To quit him with this arm?" thirteen lines intervene in which Hamlet (1) further justifies killing Claudius; (2) agrees with Horatio that the king will soon know "the issue of the business" from England; (3) apologizes to Horatio for his disgraceful behavior at Ophelia's funeral, and (4) resolves to "count [Laertes'] favors." Hamlet's eleventh-hour remorse here thus paves the way for Osric's challenge, which Hamlet might well justify taking up as a courtesy to the wronged Laertes. Hamlet's wholesale flight from the revenge on which he was perched thus has a dramatic point in the folio version, and the digression from the prince's intentions may seem less noticeable. But have lines been cut in the second quarto or added in the folio? Neither text will answer.

32. My account of the Mary-Darnley-Bothwell episode is drawn principally from two sources, J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1957), 130-76 (see p. 135 for the description of Darnley), and William McElwee, Wisest Fool , 19-33. (Both works are hereafter cited in the text.) I have also consulted David Harris Willson, King James VI and I (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), 18-19; hereafter cited as Willson, King James .

33. Duncan Thomson, Painting in Scotland 1570-1650 (Edinburgh: Trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland, 1975), 18-19; quoted in Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), 32. Frye reproduces Livinus de Vogelaare's painting The Darnley Memorial , and George Vertue's eighteenth-century engraving of the same, on 32-33.

34. Lillian Winstanley was the first to show that many of the essentials of Hamlet 's characters and plot derive not from literary source but from Jacobean biography. Winstanley's Hamlet and the Scottish Succession (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1921) is the most thorough exposition of the relationship between the Darnley murder and the plot, language, and meaning of the play. James, she argues, resembles Hamlet far more closely than the Scandinavian avenger Amleth does. Winstanley realizes that a convergence of historical events need not be represented perfectly in a literary text. If the parallels she draws are too pat, her conclusions sometimes stretched a bit, she still provides a treasure trove of information and suggestions about the Jacobean Hamlet , and her work is indispensable to my reading.

35. It is interesting to note that the marriage of Mary and Darnley united, in the eyes of many contemporary observers, the two people with the strongest claim to inherit England's throne; and when Elizabeth heard of the proposed union, she sent word that the marriage was "dangerous to the common amity" of the English and Scottish nations.

36. Paul Slack provides a suggestive historical footnote about the plague that

unites these apparently disparate issues: "Francis Herring called 1603 'the women's year,' and a thorough study of St. Boltoph's Bishopsgate parish in London has amply confirmed that male deaths vastly outnumbered female deaths in that epidemic." Slack, Impact of Plague , 179, citing Herring, Modest Defence (1604), sig. A4. The women in Hamlet do not fare conspicuously better than the men, but all anxiety, including misogyny, is exacerbated in the context of epidemic outbreaks and further heightened by political upheaval.

37. On "screen memory," see Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life , trans. Alan Tyson (New York: Norton, 1966), 43-52. Freud supposes that the screen memory covers for or even subconsciously eradicates an unpleasant or threatening primal event.

38. In psychoanalytic theory, this inference would be unacceptable or heretical: the mother always matters, perhaps even more so in her absence than in her presence. But in terms of James's conscious and public anxieties, the lack of parental (and familial) influence was important only insofar as it affected his chances at succession. In the context of explaining why he was heading off to Denmark to obtain his bride in 1589, James describes his childhood: "I was alone, without father or mother, brother or sister, king of this realm and heir apparent of England. This nakedness made me to be weak and my enemies stark. One man was as no man, and the want of hope of succession bred disdain." G. P. V. Akrigg, ed., Letters of King James VI and I (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 98. It is noteworthy that James constructs his deprivation of family not as a personal but a political liability and that as early as 1589 he regarded himself unequivocally as next in line to the English throne. Jonathan Goldberg gives an account of James's complex attitude toward Mary in James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), 11-17, 25-26, 119.

39. This oscillation also speaks of the strain Hamlet feels in confronting maternal sexuality. For a fine, extended explication of this point, see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Sbakespeare's Plays, "Hamlet" to "The Tempest" (New York: Routledge, 1992), 11-37.

40. Frye, Renaissance Hamlet , 34.

41. Shrewsbury, History of the Bubonic Plague , 264. Plague was widespread in Scotland just before the major outbreak in England, but it is impossible to tell where the epidemic began. The most likely suspect was the Low Countries; Stow writes in his Annals of 1605: "the plague of pest. being great in Holland, Sealand, and other the low countries, and many souldiers returning thence into England, the infection was also spied in divers parts of this realme" (quoted in Wilson, Plague , 86).

42. One possible cause for Hamlet 's conflicted relationship to its contexts rests in the play's multiple, indeterminate chronology; it is out of temporal joint. In its Elizabethan time frame, the play looks to be wistfully valedictory for an heroic age now faded, one which Troilus and Cressida decisively inters a year or two later. Q1 (pre-1603) has a more powerful, affirmative queen than the subsequent quarto; but the plot of royal blockade and the murderous stepfather (i.e., the Jacobean plot) exists there all the same. Straddling two regimes, the Hamlets of Q1 and Q2 both belong to both: the play(s) cannot be synthesized, but neither

do they independently seem "characteristic" of an age or a regime. Q1 and Q2 both conduct their most intense referentialities pointing simultaneously in two directions, looking before and after. The supersession of cultures in 1603 and the subsequent supersession of texts in 1604—Q2 supplanting and usurping Q1—produces agitations in any attempt to interpret them as if they were fully complementary.

43. John Harington, in Nugae Antiquae , ed. T. Park, 2 vols. (London, 1809), 1:179.

44. Wmstanley, Hamlet and the Scottish Succession , 172. For an extended application of the idea that Essex is inscribed in Hamlet , see ibid., 139-64.

45. See Akrigg, Letters of King James , 173.

46. James McManaway, "Elizabeth, Essex, and James," in Herbert Davis and Helen Gardner, eds., Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 226; hereafter cited in the text.

47. Quoted in Hurstfield, "Succession Struggle," 393.

During the previous year Essex had made serious overtures to James that indicated an armed Scottish threat would be the best way to compel Elizabeth to declare James as her successor. James cautiously responded to Essex's tempting invitation for support; he wrote that he "would think of it, and put [himself] in a readiness to take any good occasion." This readiness for James, unlike for Hamlet, was martial. In June 1600, the Scots king tried to solicit money from his lords for an army to support his bid for Queen Elizabeth's crown. On these issues, and the quotation from James, see John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), 445.

After Cecil's support was offered, James repented of his itchy trigger finger. He realized "what a foolish part were that in me if I might do it to hazard my honour, state, and person, in entering that kingdom by violence as a usurper" (quoted in Hurstfield, "Succession Struggle," 392-93). For a brief but significant moment in history, the moment in which the succession may, in fact, have been engineered, James remarkably resembled—in intention, in desire—not just the prince denied his place but, more tellingly, Claudius, Laertes, and Fortinbras. I discuss further kaleidoscopic possibilities of the royal image, and Hamlet's relation to the same, below. See Hurstfield, "Succession Struggle," for a fine account of Cecil's role in the smooth transition of power.

On English invasion anxiety about James, the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series [ CSPD ] (1598-1601) contains suggestive summaries and excerpts from the letters of John Petit to Peter Halins. Here is but one dispatch, dated October 11, 1599: "Rumours fly that the King of Scots is preparing to war against England, and that his brother-in-law of Denmark has broken the ice already" (327). References to the CSPD letters and John Guy are from Stuart Kurland's essay "Hamlet and the Scottish Succession?" which I was fortunate to see in manuscript. My thanks to Leah Marcus for drawing this essay to my attention.

48. Frye, Renaissance Hamlet , 330 n. 87.

49. John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton, 22 February 1600, in Letters , 1:87.

50. Jon Elster perceptively comments that the conditions of what we con-

ceive of as rational choice are often really the selections we make from a set of extreme restrictions. See Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983).

51. It is a curious irony that the man leading the charge for revenge was Francis Stewart Hepburn, fifth earl of Bothwell—the nephew of Mary's second husband. The younger Bothwell proved to be a painful thorn in James's side, as I discuss below.

52. See Peter Wentworth, A Pithie Exhortation About the Succession (London, 1598).

53. Hurstfield, "Succession Struggle," 391.

54. In the gravedigger scene, the second "clowne" says to the first about Ophelia's death that "the crowner hath sate on her, and finds it Christian buriall" (Miv). That a coroner was a "crowner" seems entirely but elusively significant in Hamlet ; it does continue a sustained association between kingship and death, but it may also suggest that in death people receive their apotheoses, their crowns or rewards, for their earthly lives.

55. Indeed, the play quickly dispenses with the possible influence that communities might have; Laertes refuses to let the mob that seeks to elect him into the royal presence chamber with Claudius.

56. Even a casual perusal of the multiple murders, betrayals, and treasons that pepper Scottish clan history in the sixteenth century reveals that the revenge code was an integral part of family and political life of the new king's time. James was, in fact, called on frequently to avenge the death of kinsmen and friends—most notably (other than that of his father, Darnley) the death of the earl of Moray. See McElwee, Wisest Fool , 70.

57. This outcome may well be pinned to Claudius's deeds rather than Hamlet's, insofar as the king has permitted Fortinbras to use Denmark as a shortcut on the way to Poland and, presumably, on the way back. Imagine the danger involved: Claudius gives free passage through his lands to armed forces which until fairly recently were threatening his kingdom. While it seems improbable that he would make such a broad tactical error, the audience and Hamlet must be allowed to track the progress of Fortinbras the fortunate.

58. As the OED notes under the verb "haunt," "From the uncertainty of the derivation, it is not clear whether the earliest sense in French and English was to practise habitually (an action, etc.) or to frequent habitually (a place)." As part of a potentially relevant etymology, note Eric Partridge's intriguing inclusion of the word "hamlet" beneath the stem ''haunt" in Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (New York: Greenwich House, 1983).

59. Quoted in Nichols, Progresses , 1:258-59.

60. For a closer look into James's foot-in-the-mouth anger with Elizabeth over the Bothwell affair, see Akrigg, Letters of King James , 112-28.

61. Winstanley, Hamlet and the Scottish Succession , 90-91.

62. Christina Larner, "James VI and I and Witchcraft," in Alan G. R. Smith, ed., The Reign of James VI and I (London: Macmillan, 1973), 81. On Bothwell and witchcraft, see also McElwee, Wisest Fool , 70-74.

63. Like the end of Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet evokes an absence of a

dominant ideology, missing from or unavailable in transitional culture. (The crushing but vague object called "patriarchy" must be excepted from this generalization.) It has been suggested that the notion of "dominant ideology" be abandoned, and this abandonment might be appropriate in a plague world, where that which is most contagious and infectious (i.e., persuasive) is also and obviously most unstable and fatal. See Nicholas Abercrombie and Bryan S. Turner, "The Dominant Ideology Thesis,'' British Journal of Sociology 29 (June 1978): 149-70, and T. J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (1985): 567-93. I am indebted to Frank Donoghue for these references.

64. "In 1580, the Stratford-on-Avon archives record an inquest on Katherine Hamlett, drowned in the Avon. Verdict—misadventure." Eric Sams, "Taboo or Not Taboo? The Text, Dating, and Authorship of Hamlet , 1589-1623," Hamlet Studies 10 (summer/winter 1988): 14.

65. I refer the reader to Roland M. Frye's impressive compendium of such contexts in The Renaissance Hamlet .

66. The experience of dangerous sequence and design in history brought the word "plot" an actively threatening connotation: James himself publicized the evils of plot, first in the Gowrie conspiracy, then, most fully, in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. As Peter Brooks suggestively writes: "The fourth sense of the word ['plot'], the scheme or conspiracy, seems to have come into English through the contaminating influence of the French complot , and became widely known at the time of the Gunpowder Plot. I would suggest that in modern literature . . . the organizing line of plot is more often than not some scheme or machination, a concerted plan for the accomplishment of some purpose which goes against the ostensible and dominant legalities of the fictional world, the realization of a blocked and resisted desire." Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage, 1984), 12. Blocked and resisted desire is the foundation of Hamlet 's plot; the play undoes plot without resolving the blockage or resistance.