Review: Family Romance or Family History?

Psychoanalysis and Dramatic Invention in Nicolas Abraham's "The Phantom of Hamlet" Reviewed Work(s): "The Phantom of Hamlet or the Sixth Act: Preceded by the Intermission of 'Truth'" by Nicolas Abraham Nicholas Rand Diacritics, Vol. 18, No. 4. (Winter, 1988), pp. 20-30.
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FAMILY ROMANCE OR FAMILY HISTORY? PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DRAMATIC INVENTION IN NICOLAS ABRAHAM'S "THE PHANTOM OF HAMLET"
Nicholas Rand

Nicolas Abraham. "THE PHANTOM OF HAMLET OR THE SIXTH ACT: PRECEDED BY THE INTERMISSION OF 'TRUTH."' Trans. Nicholas Rand. Diacritics 18.4 (1988): 2-19.

A voice from another world. . . demands vengeancefor a monstrous enormity, and the demand remains without effect; the criminals are at last punished, but, as it were, by an accidental blow. . . irresoluteforesight, cunning treachery, and impetuous rage hurry on to a common destruction. . . . The destiny of humanity is exhibited as a gigantic Sphinx, which threatens to precipitate into the abyss of scepticism all who are unable to solve her dreadful enigmas. -A. W. Schlegel,Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature
Nicolas Abraham's "The Phantom of Hamlet," written in 1975as a sixth act to follow Shakespeare's Hamlet, is both intimately linked with and contrary to traditions of Hamlet criticism prevalent since the eighteenth century.' His dramatic sequel reverses the effect of the final scenes of Hamlet by bringing the murdered Prince and the ghost once more on stage, and ends in the crowning of Hamlet as King of Denmark. This event follows an exchange among Hamlet, the ghost of his father, Horatio, and young Fortinbras. Assuming the role of psychoanalyst, Fortinbras investigates the probable reasons for the destruction of the royal family of Denmark (King
I . See Abraham and Torok [447-741. My translation uses a combination of blank verse, iambic pentameter, and prose. I would like to thank my colleagues and friends Andrew Bush, Gail Dreyfuss, Mary Lydon, Elaine Markr, Judith Miller, Esther Rashkin, and Marian Rothstein for reading the translation and making valuable suggestions.

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Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Prince Hamlet) along with the House of Polonius (Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes). He questions the ghost's reasons for demanding vengeance and wonders why Hamlet's interview with the ghost throws the prince into confusion instead of spurring him to action. Fortinbras further suggests that the ghost's appearance itself, and not Hamlet's indecision, is the appropriate object of inquiry. Piecing together clues from the first act, young Fortinbras conjectures that the six characters who were killed or committed suicide in Shakespeare's tragedy were doomed by the devastating effects of secret crimes. The precise nature of the crimes comes to light when Fortinbras links the double poisoning of foil and drink in the duel of Hamlet and Laertes [act 51 to Horatio's account [act 11of another duel, one that took place between Kings Hamlet and Fortinbras on the day of Hamlet's birth, some thirty years prior to the action of the play. In this duel, King Hamlet appears to have used a poisoned sword. Young Fortinbras seeks to discover the identity of the original poisoner and finds-in the actions of Laertes, and in the madness and suicide of Ophelia-sufficient evidence to surmise that the poisoner was their father, Polonius. Polonius, who served as instigator for two separate murders, those of King Fortinbras and King Hamlet, becomes one of the pivotal figures in Abraham's "Phantom of Hamlet." Abraham gives Polonius a political motive for his crime: the desire to avenge his country, Poland, which at various times had been conquered by both King Hamlet's Denmark andFortinbrasYs Norway. Theseclarifications explain Hamlet's paralysis: because his father was himself a murderer, he cannot be avenged. Shakespeare's Hamlet has been aptly called the "Mona Lisa" of literature. The play has enjoyed the same mixture of admiration and incomprehension as its pictorial counterpart. The placidly mysterious smile of Mona Lisa and Hamlet's tortured inaction have for centuries fascinated those who hoped to discover their essence or bring the clandestine core of their being to light. The comparison with Mona Lisa suggests that the character of Hamlet is an impenetrable surface whose features-perhaps through the utterly arresting finish of the depiction-fail to yield the depth requisite to make their humanity credible. Critics who do not discount the problem of Hamlet's procrastination attempt to supply psychological depth or show deficiency in Shakespeare's portrayal of his hero. Like Hamlet himself, Coleridge, Schlegel, and Hazlitt considered "the native hue of resolution sickled o'er with the pale cast of thought." These readers classified the Prince as prey to the "vita contemplativa," deftly removing the vitals from the issue of Hamlet's indecision. They saw Hamlet's inaction as inherently dilatory when it might in fact be taken to constitute the object of serious reflection: what is the impediment to Hamlet's fulfillment of his own expressed wish that, "with wings as swift as meditation and thoughts of love, he may sweep to" his "revenge"? Coleridge and Hazlitt agree that in Hamlet the "ruling passion is to think, not to act" (Hazlitt) and that "resolving to do everything, he does nothing"; thus "the great object of his life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve" (Coleridge). Yet the expositorsof this overbalancein the contemplativefaculty also point to a form of insufficiency in Hamlet: "Something is wanting to his completenesssomething is deficient which remains to be supplied" [Coleridge 477, 4791. Hazlitt tantalizes himself and the reader with the suspense of an unposed question: "Hamlet's indecision to act, and his over-readinessto reflect, are placed beyond the reach of critical discovery by his own analytical motive-hunting,so eloquently expressed in the abstruse reasoning in which he indulges" [110]. Inadequate motivation for Hamlet's flaw of paralysis is extended to include the entire play in T. S. Eliot's essay "Hamlet and His Problems" (1920). Hamlet the play is deficient because it contains "no situation or chain of events" that might justify Hamlet's feelings and behavior. "Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. It is thus a feeling he cannot understand

. . . and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action" [loll. Eliot suggests that in the play "there is a motive which is more important than that of revenge and which explicitly 'blunts' the latter" 1971. Yet it would seem that the only clue pointing to the existence of such a motive is precisely that it "blunts." As Eliot states, nothing in the play allows Hamlet to understand his indecision. Eliot goes so far as to declare that "nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him" [loll. Yet Hamlet must be expressed. The motive for his feelings must be found even if it be beyond the facts of Shakespeare's play. This is the compelling inspiration behind Abraham's "The Phantom of Hamlet." Abraham creates a situation and a chain of events with which, as Eliot wished, Shakespeare's play expands into "a tragedy . . . intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight." Abraham responds to Hamlet's final plea:
Horatio, I am dead. Thou livest; report me and my cause aright To the unsatisjied. . . . 0 God, Horatio, what a wounded name, Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me! If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story. [5.2.339-501 At the start of "The Phantom of Hamlet," Fortinbras and Horatio, acting on Hamlet's behalf, make a pact to unravel the mystery. Fortinbras says: This Prince to me, his successor, bequeathed You, Horatio, his faithful witness, His bosomfriend, his heart's most inward ear, Alert to secrets th' mind prefers to shun. . . . Iplead we may as one to daylight bring, Amid the shapes which to our eyes appear, The unseen web iniquity has cast. [6.1] Fortinbras, having been given Hamlet's "dying voice," opens the story sealed in Hamlet's final words: "the rest is silence" [5.2.357]. Transcendingthis silence through apsychological explanation for Hamlet's inaction was the aim of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones. The early psychoanalyticinterpretation rests on a thematic comparison between Oedipus Rex by Sophocles and Shakespeare's Hamlet. Oedipus's unwitting parricide and incest with his mother are seen as the tragic fulfillment of a universal unconscious wish to eliminate the male child's rival for his mother's affection. Freud writes in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900): Another of the great creations of tragic poetry, Shakespeare's Hamlet, has its roots in the same soil as Oedipus Rex. But the changed treatment of the same material reveals the whole difference in the mental life of these two widely separated epochs of civilization; the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind. In the Oedipus the child's wishful phantasy that underlies it is brought into the open and realized as it would be in a dream. In Hamlet it remains repressed; and--just as in a neurosis-we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences. Strangely enough, the overwhelming effectproduced by the more modern tragedy has turned out to be compatible with thefact that people have remained completely in the dark as to the hero's
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character. The play is built upon Hamlet's hesitations overfu@lling the task of revenge that is assigned to him; but its text offers no reasons or motivesfor these hesitations and an immense variety of attempts at interpreting them havefailed to produce a result. . . . The plot of the drama shows us, however, that Hamlet isfarfrom being represented as aperson incapable of taking any action. ... What is it, then, that inhibits him infulfilling the taskset him by hisfather's ghost? The answer, once again, is that it is the peculiar nature of the task. Hamlet is able to do anything--except take vengeance on the man who did away with hisfather and took that father's place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized. Here I have translated into conscious terms what was bound to remain unconscious in Hamlet's mind. [29&991 Both Freud and later Jones [in Hamlet and Oedipus, 19491rely on the twofold hypothesis that "Hamlet at heart does not want to carry out the task" [Jones 451 of revenge, and that his countermotive-the satisfaction of seeing his father dead-is entirely hidden from him.2 "The Phantom of Hamlet," too, is infused with the Freudian idea that Hamlet's hesitation has an unconsciouspsychological basis which, though hidden, can be revealed. Yet the two interpretations diverge because Freud and Abraham seek their explanations for Hamlet's behavior in different sources: Freud in universal infantile complexes and Abraham in the text itself. In Freud's view, Shakespeare's Hamlet draws on a store of ideas absent from the play (the "text offers no reasons or motives") but present in every male child's mind. Hamlet, the would-be avenger, is a would-be parricide whose longdormant wish has become a harrowing reality. The symptom of inaction becomes transparent once the infantile mental configuration is supplied, that is, once the general applicability of the Oedipus complex is recognized. The idea of repression allows Freud to see the Oedipus complex at work even though no trace of it can be found in the play. In Jones's words: "If such thoughts had been present in [Hamlet's] mind, they evidently would have been 'repressed,' and all traces of them obliterated" [70].3 Freud assumes that, due to repression,no reason can be given in the play and therefore he seeks a solution outside it. Abraham conjectures that the motive, though not stated, can be constructed from the complex of eventsand forces in the tragedy. While for FreudandJones, Hamlet's inaction is readily understood as part of a generalizableneuroticsyndrome (resulting from an unresolved Oedipus complex), Abraham sees Hamlet's symptom as a Sphinx-like riddle--to be answered with the aid of Shakespeare's text. The difference between the two conceptions affects the attitude adopted toward Hamlet. While Freud and Jones see Hamlet's predicament in his inability to acknowledge unconscious desires not to act, Abraham interprets Hamlet's confused hesitancy as the symptom of a genuine desire to act that has been inhibited or thwarted. For Freud and Jones, Hamlet is a typically duplicitous neurotic whose flight into illness guarantees the avoidance of unbearable
2. Jones sees in thepotential reawakening of repressed infantile wishes (parricide and incest) the source ofHamletls conflict: Hamlet is torn betweenjilial piety and the murder of Claudius, the man who in broad daylight embodies desires which must remain uncomcious. Killing hisfather's murderer would be tantamount to Hamlet's mental annihilation since such an act would expose thoughts he could not consciously tolerare. 3. The German critic Hermann Pongs notes in his essay "Psychoanalysis and Literature" (1933) [Bernd Urban, Psychoanalyse und Literaturwissenschaft: Texte zur Geschichte ihrer Beziehungen (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1973)l: "The special difJiculty for the psychoanalytic interpretation resides in the absence of any trace of incest or parricide wish in Hamlet" [242]. By focusing his attention on the role of the ghost, Abraham seeks aparticular rather than a universal explanationfor Hamlet's behavior.

fantasies; Abraham considers Hamlet's repeatedly stated perplexity a symptom of his being someone else's involuntary instrument. Based on his evaluation of hints found in the play, Abraham suggests that the source of Hamlet's behavior is not himself but the secret influence of an other. Once the idea that the Tragedy of Hamlet conceals a mystery is taken seriously, the psychoanalysis of the entire play (and not simply of the hero) can be founded on the following methodological premise: the plot, the characters, their speeches, their death, and even perhaps their names tacitly refer to unstated or concealed events and actions that took place before the first scene of the play. Shakespeare's tragedy is then symbolically viewed as a vast graveyard scene in which the context for a hypothetical secret has remained buried. In act 1 of Hamlet, the ghost's apparition is accompanied by a persistent need for secrecy. Horatio to Hamlet: Two nights together had these gentlemen, Marcellus and Bernardo, on their march . . . Been thus encountered. A figure like your father, . . Appears before them, and with solemn march Goes slow and stately by them. . . . This to me In dreadful secrecy impart they did. [1.2.196-2071 Hamlet to Horatio, Marcellus, and Bemardo: Ipray you all, If you have hitherto concealed this sight, Let it be tenable in your silence still, And whatsoever else shall hap tonight, Give it an understanding but no tongue; [1.2.247-501 Dialogue between Hamlet and Horatio after the interview with the ghost: Hor. What news, my lord? Ham. 0, wonderful! Hor. Good my Iord, tell it. No, you will reveal it. Ham. Hor. Not I, my lord, by heaven. . . . Ham. How say you then? Would heart ofmanonce thinkit? But you'll besecret? [1.5.117-231 Hamlet bids his three companions swear and swear again: Ham. Never make known what you have seen tonight. Both. My lord, we will not. Ham. Nay, but swear't. Hor. In faith, My lord, not I. . . . Ham. Upon my sword. We have sworn, my lord, already. Marc. Ham. Indeed, upon my sword, indeed. [1.5.143-481.

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Before they can consent to swear again, the ghost cries under stage: Ghost. Swear. Ham. . . . Consent to swear. Hor. Propose the oath, my lord. Ham. Never to speak of this that you have seen. Swear by my sword. [1.5.155-591 The ghost calls on them twice more. They repeat their vows of secrecy, yet upon entering the castle, Hamlet again says: "And still your fingers on your lips, I pray" [1.5.188]. What an extraordinary insistence on secrecy this is! It links Hamlet and the ghost of his father. But to what end? Shakespeare's play does not tell us explicitly. In the context of "The Phantom of Hamlet," the calls for secrecy signal the presence of a secret out of both Hamlet's and his companions' reach. Here, the excessive secrecy functions as the telltale symptom of a genuinely inaccessible secret. What the ghost tells Hamlet is but a part, itself merely the trace of a silence the ghost declines to break.
I am thy father's spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burned and purged away. But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison house, I could a tale unfold. . . . Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder. . . . Murder most foul, as in the best it is, But this most foul, strange and unnatural. [ l S.9-281

As before, even here insistence is a clue. The word "foul" recurs four times, once in selfreference to the crimes of the ghost, thrice refemng to the murder committed by Claudius. Horatio completes the series of hints addressing the ghost: Ifthou hast sound or use of voice, Speak to me. . . . . . . if thou hast uphoarded in thy life Extorted treasure in the womb of earth, For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death, Speak of it. Stay and speak. [l.1.130-401 The psychoanalyst-detective has a suspicion: the ghost walks with a secret, seeming to reveal one while withholding another. "Claudius is amurderer, letthere be no secret! But why I am doomed to walk, none will ever know."4 In Abraham's fiction, Fortinbras the analyst contends that traces of King Hamlet's secret are scattered throughout Shakespeare's text. No more than traces; the "rest" unfolds as the invention of the psychoanalytic imagination. One clue is the "unionw-the pearl. "Richer than that which four successive Kings In Denmark's crown have worn"
4 . This reconstruction of clues constitutes the groundwork of Abraham's premise: "The 'secret' revealed by Hamlet's 'phantom' . . . is merely a subterfuge. It masks another secret, this one genuine and truthful but resulting from an infamy which the father, unbeknownst to his son, has on his conscience" ["The Phantom of Hamlet" 31.

[5.2.274-751-that Claudius dropped in Hamlet's poisoned cup. It tells of poison at the root of Claudius and Gertrude's union. Hamlet in act 5 says: "Here, thou incestuous, murd'rous, damnedDane,/Drink off this potion. Is thy union here? /Follow my mother" [5.2.326-281. The poison-laden union bespeaks foul play in the union of lands that occurred when King Hamlet slew King Fortinbras, "who did forfeit, with his life all those lands Which he stood seized of, to the conqueror" [1.1.88-901. These facts and clues combine with invention in "The Phantom of Hamlet" to reveal a situation that remained out of reach for Shakespeare's Hamlet. A situation concerning King Hamlet's duel with King Fortinbras of Norway can be imagined, given that the ghost's appearanceevokes that contest in Horatio's mind: "Such was the very armor he had on /When he the ambitious Norway combated" [I.1.10-1 11. The ghost intends to reveal his murder by Claudius,yet he comes dressed in the armor that is llnked to his duel with the King of Norway. What may this mean That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel, Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous, and we fools of nature So horridly to shake our disposition With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls? Say, why is this? [1.4.51-571 Nowhere in the play does Hamlet receive an answer. Fortinbras provides one in "The Phantom of Hamlet." "The story opens with a wager. With a wager it nearly ended. .. . Of the two duels, fought thirty years apart, the second must include the first. . . . A memory must have inspired Laertes] to anoint his sword with poison" 651. Claudius and Laertes conspired to poison the naked sword and royal drink. Why resort to risky stratagems when Laertes was ready to avenge his father's murder openly by cutting Hamlet's throat in church? Why does the King bid Laertes keep close within his chamber and in secret requite Hamlet for his father? In Hamlet secrecy appears to outweigh the need for revenge. The venomous plotters Claudius and Laertes are heirs to King Hamlet and Polonius. Could their actions repeat their elders'? Was King Hamlet, murdered by Claudius, a secret murderer? Was Polonius, whose son proposes poison, in truth a poisoner? This is what young Fortinbras deduces in "The Phantom of Hamlet."s Fortinbras further imagines that Polonius successively served Kings Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Claudius, providing each in turn with his deadly instrument^.^ But why Polonius, and how did he come to be associated with Kings Hamlet and Fortinbras? Listen again to Horatio speaking of the ghost in act 1, scene 1: Such was the very armor he had on When he the ambitious Norway combated: So frowned he once, when, in an angry parle, He smote the sledded Polach on the ice. 'Tis strange. [ l .1.60-651
5. Ophelia's madness*alled "the poison of deep grief' by Claudius*ombined with her suicide amidfantastic weeds, seem. to Fortinbras afurther conviction of Polonius. Let Polonius's foul deeds be seen; the "dead man'sfigers" [4.6.171]with weeds andflowers wrought confiusion followed by death. 6. Claudius hints at the crucial role Polonius has played in his acquiring the crown. He displays gratitude when speaking tolaertes: "The head is not more native to the heart, I The head more instrumental to the mouth, / Than is the throne of Denmark to thy father [1.2.4649].

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In "The Phantom of Hamlet," Polonius-whose name means Poland-is assumed to be a compatriot of the "Polacks" attacked by King Hamlet. Moreover, young Fortinbras"with conquest come from Poland" [5.2.329]-might well imagine that his own triumphant "Polack wars" are but the continuation of his father's, waged in competition with King Hamlet. Abraham hypothesizes that Polonius, caught between rivals equally bent on conquering his country, vowed to have revenge on both; he contrived to have King Fortinbras killedby old Hamlet and helped the latter perish at the hands ofclaudius. What else might he have done, had he not himself been slain? Killed Claudius and had Laertes elected King? Abraham's "Phantom of Hamlet" creates aprehistory for Shakespeare's Hamlet with the purpose of extrapolatingfrom the play a fictive dramatic and psychological situation that motivates the symptom of Hamlet's blunted revenge. Abraham locates in the vengeful actions of Polonius the ultimate source of the drama? From Polonius's scheming flows the rigged duel between Kings Hamlet and Fortinbras, resulting in the latter's murder. On the day of the infamous combat was born Prince Hamlet, the unwitting heir to a crime perpetrated in secret by his father. Hamlet's psychic inheritance of the secret occurs through the tacit transmission of his mother, whose thwarted love for the deadFortinbras ofNorway motivates her complicityin poisoning King Hamlet. Hamlet's haunting confusion or "phantom" is provoked by his unconsciously dawning yet incredulous suspicion that something shameful was left unsaid during the life of the The decea~ed.~ Sphinx-like quality of Shakespeare's play is derived from the faint yet pervasive presence of a secret shared silentlyby some (Polonius, Claudius, Gertrude) and insidiously haunting others (Hamlet, Ophelia, Laertes). Abraham considers the perplexity of readers to be an echo of the play itself. Hamlet's own dilatory speculation and bafflement at the absence of motive for his inaction are paralleled by the myriad efforts to interpret his predicament.

I do not know Why yet I live to say this thing's to do, Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means To do't. . . . How stand I then, That have a father killed, a mother stained, Excitements of my reason and my blood, And let all sleep [4.4.44-591

7. Abraham calls this the ultimate and abominable "Truth" of the play. The "truth" (in Abraham's cautionary quotation m a r h ) is understood here as the willfully concealed point of origin whose manifestations are consequently lies. Furthermore, "truth" is specific (not an abstraction or ontological absolute) in thut the actions of the play can be traced to their individual source. 8. Elaborating on the interpersonal consequences of silence, the concept of the phantom is a direct extension ofAbraham and Torok's workon secrets and crypts. SeeThe Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986);L'Bcorce et le noyau; and "Notes on the Phanfom" in FranqoiseMeltzer, ed., TheTrial(s)of Psychoanalysis(Chicago: UofChicago P, 1988). For an exposition of "The Phantom of Hamlet" in the larger context of Abraham and Torok's work, see Esther Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (forthcoming). The reader intrigued by the implications of Abraham and Torok's work for the study of literature, philosophy, and Freudianpsychoanalytic theory may wish to consult my Le cryptage et la vie des oeuvres (Paris: Aubier, 1989) (now in press).

0 what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in afiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit Thatfrom her working all his visage wanned, Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect. . . . And all for nothing? . . . What would he do, Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have? . . . Yet I , A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak Like John-a-dream, unpregnant of my cause, And can say nothing-no, not for a king, Upon whose property and most dear life A damned defeat was made. Am I a coward? Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across, Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face, Tweaks me by th'nose, gives me the lie i'th'throat As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this? (2.2.502-271

Hamlet's question "Who does me this?" receives an answer in "The Phantom of Hamlet." By revealing a secret and inventing concealed dramas in King Hamlet, Gertrude, and Polonius's past, Abraham lends coherence to aspects of the play that have been repeatedly designated as inconsistencies. Samuel Johnson summarized some of the disparities in 1765:

The conduct is perhaps not wholly secure against objections. The action is indeed for the most part in continual progression, but there are some scenes which neither forward nor retard it. Of the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause,for he does nothing which he might not have done with the reputation of sanity. . . . Hamlet is, through the whole play, rather an instrument than an agent. After he has, by the stratagem of the play, convicted the King, he makes no attempt to punish him, and his death is at last effected by an incident which Hamlet has no part in producing. . . . The poet is accused of having shewn little regard to poetical justice, and may be charged with equal neglect of poetical probability. The apparition left the regions of the dead to little purpose; the revenge which he demands is not obtained but by the death of him that was required to take it;and the gratijication which would arise from the destruction of an usurper and a murderer, is abated by the untimely death of Ophelia, the young, the beautiful, the harmless, and the pious. [Bronson 344-451
The forcible confluence of characters who actively conceal and of those who stagger under the oppressive seal of secrecy accommodates the madness of Ophelia and the discomfiture of Hamlet to the apparition of the ghost, the scheming of Polonius, and the probable complicity of Gertrude. Shakespeare's Hamlet is traditionally classified as a revenge tragedy. Yet, as our four-centuries-old fascination has shown, it is also a tragedy of enigma. Abraham's sequel proposes that the fateful acts happen before the opening but are never revealed to the hero. In this respect, Hamlet is radically different from Oedipus Rex. While in
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Oedipus Rex-another revenge tragedy-the decisive act (the murder of Laios) also occursbefore the opening,the play itself performs an investigation,the murderer is found, and the crime is avenged. In Hamlet, too, a murder has been committed before the first scene and an investigation carried out, through the ploy of Hamlet's Mousetrap, a part of the drama itself. The murderer is found-yet no revenge takes place. As in OedipusRex, our attention is graduallyfocused on the inquirer himself. In the ancient play, the process of self-discovery by Oedipus constitutes the plot, and the recognition of his identity coincides with the climax of the tragedy. In Shakespeare'sHamlet, the process of inquiry remains incomplete since the recognition of King Hamlet's murderer does not produce the clarity necessary for the play to reach its catharticresolution.Whereas in OedipusRex the revelation sought is achieved, in Hamlet what persists, despite the investigation, is a bewildering sense of nonrevelation. "The Phantom of Hamlet" provides Shakespeare's play with a fictive structure of catharsis similar to that of Oedipus Rex. The inquiry is carried to the end until all the precipitating causes of the tragedy have been revealed or invented. "The Phantom of Hamlet" thus supplies the process of discovery exemplified in Oedipus Rex but mysteriously absent from Hamlet. By casting young Fortinbrasas the analyst of secret dramas inherited from another generation, to which Hamlet's perturbed mind is an unwitting host, Abraham has created an emblematicexpression of psychoanalytic inquiry into haunting. He has thereby altered the terms of Hamlet criticism, since the hero's inaction has ceased to be the main focus of the inquiry. Rather, Abraham sees in the general obscurity and structural unrest of the play a mark of the unspeakable secret that constitutes its unrevealed core.
WORKS CITED Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. L'icorce et le noyau. Paris: Flammarion, 1978; 1987. Will be published in English by the University of Chicago Press as The Shell and the Kernel. Bronson, B. H., ed. Selectionsfi-omJohnson on Shakespeare. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. Coleridge, Samuel. Lectures on Shakespeare. New York: Dutton, 1951. Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood. London: Methuen, 1972. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Avon, 1965. Hazlitt, William. Characters of Shakespeare's Plays. London: Reynell, 1817. Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus. New York: Norton, 1976.