saltonthewindowsill

Dissolution of Self and Meaning in Hamlet

“O, God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams” (Shakespeare 2.2.252-254): a line that distils the inward complications at the heart of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As Stephen Greenblatt observes, “corrosive inwardness [becomes] the hallmark of the entire play and the principal cause of its astonishing worldwide renown”(Greenblatt 208). Across the unfolding plot, a persistent sense of non-existence –of the dissolution of Self and Meaning – takes shape. Beginning with the fragmentation of Hamlet’s personality and his inward collapse, this atmosphere spreads outward to the gendered hollowness imposed on Gertrude, whose “contaminated maternal body” (Adelman 29) becomes the wellspring of his crisis, and to Ophelia the “object” whose identity is culturally erased (Showalter 77), and who enacts dissolution on the level of both body and language.

This essay argues that Shakespeare explores fragmented identity, silence, and nothingness by distributing them across Hamlet, Gertrude, and Ophelia: three figures through whom the play transforms inward collapse into its central dramatic principle.

“To be or not to be – that’s the question” (Shakespeare 3.1.56), “I know not ‘seems’” (Shakespeare 1.2.74), “There is nothing either good or bad” (Shakespeare 2.2.247-248): each of these famous lines articulates an inward struggle Hamlet cannot stabilise. Together, they reveal a subject whose identity is neither coherent nor singular but continually performed. Neither the audience nor Hamlet himself knows who he is. He is prince and son, friend and lover, madman and philosopher – without ever coalescing into a unified whole. His soliloquies construct a portrait of a man whose Self resists coherence: identity is something he must continually enact, adapting himself to the pressure of grief, surveillance, and revenge. A major catalyst for this fracture is the Ghost. As Greenblatt notes, the apparition is first described as a “thing” (Shakespeare 1.1.129), something that “assumes nothing and admits nothing” (Greenblatt 208). When Hamlet finally faces this “thing”, the encounter inaugurates what Greenblatt calls “the possibility of a difference between oneself and oneself” (Greenblatt 211). The Ghost thus destabilises Hamlet’s psychic boundaries, initiating the splitting that shapes his behaviour throughout the play.

The prince becomes simultaneously actor and observer, avenger and self-loather, performing madness at the very moment he fears it is overtaking him. Early on he insists he is “mad north-north-west” (Shakespeare 2.2.376), yet later he admits that “[his] wit’s diseased” (Shakespeare 3.2.311-312). His language mirrors this breakdown: when asked what he reads, the prince replies only with “Words, words, words” (Shakespeare 2.2.190), a stark sign that actions and objects turn into something devoid of sense; that words fail and signifiers detaches from meaning. Even memory collapses under the Ghost’s command that “all trivial fond records” be wiped away (Shakespeare 1.5.99), erasing, as Greenblatt argues, “the very person who does the desiring” (Greenblatt 207).

Through the collapse of memory and identity under the Ghost’s burden, the King’s son starts to construct and destroy himself through words, leading finally to a fragmentation that sets the framework for the women in the play, whose portrayals mirror his inward disintegration – particularly Gertrude, who becomes the figure who is put at fault for her son’s inability to create an identity. The parental malfunctions around Hamlet complicate “his need to make his own identity in relationship to his conception of his father” (Adelman 11). When the prince realises this, he makes it his task to “remake his mother pure by divorcing her from her sexuality”(Adelman 33). However, the disgust he feels and projects on the queen even exceeds her, leading to Hamlet being faced with a feeling not understandable.

Where Hamlet’s ‘nothingness’ is psychological, Gertrude’s is more prone to symbolism and political silencing. Her “unbridled sexual appetite” (Greenblatt 242) – ‘Lust, though to a radiant angel linked/ Will sate itself in a celestial bed/ And prey on garbage (Shakespeare 1.5.55-57) – and her refusal to maintain the mourning period disable Hamlet’s ability to identify with the paternal figure and, therefore, to stabilise himself as rightful son and heir to the throne (Adelman 13). Gertrude becomes “the site of [his] displaced feminine contamination” (Adelman 29) and the matrix of anxiety from which his withdrawal originates. His disgust spreads outward: he projects it not only onto Gertrude but also onto the court, the world, and even Ophelia.

These experiences result in Hamlet defining female sexuality as maternal sexuality, as Gertrude’s body is the only fully sexualised female body in the play (Adelman 27) and his belief that female presences endanger male authority and selfhood (Adelman 129). Hence, the queen is carved into a symbol of ‘nothing’.

This maternal contamination infects the entire kingdom, as Hamlet himself suggests when telling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern they have come not because of his father’s death but because of his mother’s marriage (Shakespeare 1.2.174-175). By being spoken about far more than spoken to, Gertrude becomes a screen rather than a person in her own right; her identity is overwritten by male interpretation. “Whatever individuality she might have had is sacrificed to her status as mother” (Adelman 34). Thus, she becomes a figure produced by patriarchal narrative pressure: ambiguous, silenced, and overdetermined by misogynistic projection. She ends up in the clutches of Hamlet’s disgust, who “hast cleft [her] heart in twain” (Shakespeare 3.4.147).

Yet glimpses of Gertrude’s own voice reveal a woman motivated not by lust or carelessness but by solicitude and kindness. Still, she does not speak clearly [and] her character remains relatively closed to us (Adelman 16). However, in those instances where she does not choose to remain silent, her personality seems to be one of maternal care and loving softness. Though she initially refuses to see Ophelia, she later mourns her with tenderness – “Sweets to the sweet. Farewell” (Shakespeare 5.1.240). Her attempt to comfort Hamlet early in the play – “all that lives must die” (Shakespeare 1.2.70) – is pragmatic rather than cold. “The Gertrude we see is not quite the Gertrude they see” (Adelman 15), and her quiet complexity further contributes to the play’s blurred boundaries between selfhood and projection.

If Gertrude embodies symbolic erasure, Ophelia enacts bodily and linguistic unmaking. She “fuses with Gertrude not only as potential cuckold-maker but also as potential mother” (Adelman 14), and becomes the purest embodiment of the fractured female subject. As Showalter argues, she is ”the cipher of female sexuality and madness” (Showalter 77), her identity already shaped by cultural narratives that link femininity and incoherence. She is further dehumanised by simply becoming the object of Hamlet’s male desire (Showalter 7778). Unlike Hamlet’s madness, which is interpreted through the lens of philosophical collapse, Ophelia’s is rendered biological and erotic – the result of ‘erotomania’: frustrated desire or fragile female nerves (Showalter 81).

Both of them are experiencing a separation from their selves, with one significant aspect of difference: Ophelia is a woman in patriarchal discourse, which makes it impossible for her femininity to be expressed in any other way than “madness, incoherence, fluidity, or silence” (Showalter 78). Repeated references of “nothing” surround her: Hamlets obscene pun on “nothing” (Shakespeare 3.2.110-120), Gertrude’s description of her mad speech. She becomes a “creature of lack” (Showalter 78): lacking agency, lacking male honesty, lacking even the capacity to articulate her own suffering in a language not already scripted for her. Once madness overtakes her, the loss of identity becomes complete. Her flowers wither – “I would give you violets, but they withered all” (Shakespeare 4.1.179-180), – her speech fractures and is verbalised in snatches of song. This form of oral mediation gives her a fleeting selfassertion, but only gestures toward the void that replaces her former self.

Her drowning is the final enactment of dissolution. With “her clothes spread wide, and, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up” (Shakespeare 4.3.147-148), Ophelia’s body literally merges with nature. She becomes the feminine death-image of the play: the Self dissolved into water, into nothing. In the end, she is nothing more than that – “We can imagine Hamlet’s story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet” (Showalter 78).

In the last acts of the play, these different threads – Hamlet’s interior collapse, Gertrude’s symbolic erasure, Ophelia’s bodily dissolution – converge around the theme of ‘nothingness’. Attempting to counter relativism with providence, Hamlet turns towards a metaphysical thinking, mentioning that “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (Shakespeare 5.2.167-168). This gesture reveals a desire to impose order on a world in which meaning continually dissolves. It furthermore counterbalances the risk of identity being “swallowed up [where] boundaries cannot hold” (Adelman 28–29) and serves as a replacement structure for Hamlet to create a providential frame within metaphysical nothingness. After the Reformation, however, as Greenblatt argues, “the collapse of metaphysical certainty” (Greenblatt 209) creates a void into which Hamlet’s identity repeatedly falls. Death becomes the great equaliser, a leveller of Self, epitomised in the skull of “poor Yorick” (Shakespeare 5.1.182).

A.C. Bradley calls Hamlet “the tragedy of reflection where inwardness tends to selferasure”(Bradley and Bayley). The play concludes where it has been heading all along: in a terminal breakdown of language. Hamlet’s final utterance, “The rest is silence” (Shakespeare 5.2.312), is a linguistic entropy – speech collapsing into the void that has shadowed each character. In the end, inwardness generates the very “bad dreams” Hamlet feared until the world finally shrinks to nothing.

Returning to Hamlet’s image of the “nutshell” and its infinite inwardness, the play’s final movements reveal how space contracts into silence, death, and the various forms of nothingness embodied in its central figures. One can therefore agree with Greenblatt’s assertion that “Hamlet is a play of contagious, almost universal self-estrangement” (Greenblatt 212). Through the unmaking of identity and meaning embodied in Hamlet, Gertrude, and Ophelia, the tragedy moves inexorably towards silence; its final gesture toward metaphysical quietude. In this collapse, the play reveals that in Hamlet, all truly does end “for nothing” (Shakespeare 2.2.551).

Bibliography

Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers : Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest. With Internet Archive, New York : Routledge, 1992. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/suffocatingmothe0000adel.

Bradley, A., and John Bayley. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Penguin, 1991.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory (Expanded Edition) (Princeton Classics): 4. Princeton University Press, 2013.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet The Texts of 1603 and 1623. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden Shakespeare, 2008.

Showalter, Elaine. ‘Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism’. Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Routledge, 1985.