Shakespeare

Introduction 3assumes also the power of making Shakespeare his mouthpiece, his Player Kingwho takes instruction. This is very different from Hamlet’s serving asShakespeare’s mouthpiece. Rather, the creature usurps the creator, and Hamletexploits Shakespeare’s memory for purposes that belong more to the Prince ofDenmark than to Shakespeare the man. Paradoxical as this must sound, Hamlet“lets be” Shakespeare’s empirical self, while taking over the dramatist’sontological self. I do not think that this was Shakespeare’s design, or his overtintention, but I suspect that Shakespeare, apprehending the process, let it be.Foregrounding Hamlet, as I will show, depends entirely on conclusions andinferences drawn only from the play itself; the life of the man Shakespeare givesus very few interpretative clues to help us apprehend Hamlet. But Hamlet, fullyforegrounded, and Falstaff are clues to what, in a Shakespearean term, we couldcall the “selfsame” in Shakespeare. That sense of “selfsame” is most severelytested by the character of Hamlet, the most fluid and mobile of allrepresentations ever.Presumably, Shakespeare had read Montaigne in Florio’s manuscriptversion. Nothing seems more Shakespearean than the great, culminating essay,“Of Experience,” composed by Montaigne in 1588, when I suspect thatShakespeare was finishing his first Hamlet. Montaigne says that we are all wind,but the wind is wiser than we are, since it loves to make a noise and move about,and does not long for solidity and stability, qualities alien to it. As wise as thewind, Montaigne takes a positive view of our mobile selves, metamorphic yetsurprisingly free. Montaigne, like Shakespeare’s greatest characters, changesbecause he overhears what he himself has said. It is in reading his own text thatMontaigne becomes Hamlet’s precursor at representing reality in and by himself.He becomes also Nietzsche’s forerunner, or perhaps melds with Hamlet as acomposite precursor whose mark is always upon the aphorist of Beyond Good andEvil and The Twilight of the Idols. Montaigne’s experiential man avoids Dionysiactransports, as well as the sickening descents from such ecstasies. Nietzscheunforgettably caught this aspect of Hamlet in his early The Birth of Tragedy,where Coleridge’s view that Hamlet (like Coleridge) thinks too much is soundlyrepudiated in favor of the truth, which is that Hamlet thinks too well. I quote thisagain because of its perpetual insight:For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of theordinary bounds and limits of existence contains, while it lasts, alethargic element in which all personal experiences of the pastbecome immersed. This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds ofeveryday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everydayreality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea:an ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of these states.In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both haveonce looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained