by ANDREW LANHAM
Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine by Jamieson Webster & Simon Critchley
During a long, misogynistic, masochistic tirade early in his eponymous play, Hamlet accuses himself of being a coward who “Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words.” Hamlet overflows with words to describe himself — the play sometimes chokes on its own verbal excess — but after some 400 years of commentary and criticism, writers who want to analyze the Danish prince face the opposite problem: there’s only so much left to say. A chorus of great thinkers has confronted him already.
In Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine, husband and wife Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster turn this backlog of criticism to their advantage. In their kinetic, sometimes frenetic, always penetrating study, they examine Hamlet in the light of others’ illuminations. At the same time, they reflect on the nature of modern life by gleaning what Hamlet’s critics have revealed about themselves in their interpretations of the play. T. S. Eliot, after all, said critics only manage to see themselves when they look at Hamlet.
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When Freud abandoned his first theory of sexual hysteria in 1897, he wrote his colleague-cum-mentor Wilhelm Fliess that he patiently awaited a breakthrough: “I vary Hamlet’s saying, ‘To be in readiness’: to be cheerful is everything.” Three weeks later, Freud wrote Fliess again to announce the Oedipus complex, anchoring it in Hamlet: “How does [Hamlet] explain his irresolution in avenging his father […]. How better than through the torment he suffers from the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same deed against his father out of passion for his mother.” Freud founded psychoanalysis by identifying himself with Hamlet’s desire for readiness, then discovered Hamlet’s desire as a repressed Oedipal urge — an urge Freud subsequently mimicked when he violently disowned his mentor Fliess in a series of bitter letters (sometimes a postcard, Critchley and Webster imply, isn’t just a postcard).
Hamlet castigates himself because of his repressed desire, splitting himself in two. In his soliloquies, we hear one self who desires and another self who punishes, just as he feigns his mad persona — “I am but mad north-northwest.” Hamlet also splits himself externally, projecting his self-disgust onto Ophelia, whom he both desires and debases. In the scene immediately after he calls himself a “whore,” Hamlet launches his vitriolic diatribe against Ophelia, “be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go.” Freud thinks Gertrude’s hasty marriage robs Hamlet of the time he needs to mourn his father, and so he can only ritually degrade himself by degrading Ophelia, strangling his desire for her in the process.