Good Night, Sweet Prince

 Montaigne advised us not to bother to prepare for dying, because we would know well enough how to do it when the time came. Pragmatically, that is Hamlet's stance.

Silence is the salient aspect of what is coming for all of us, and Hamlet has been anything but a silent protagonist. What can the world do with a silent Hamlet? For Hamlet, silence is annihilation.

Hamlet's wake, his name, has not been wounded but wondrous: Ibsen and Chekhov, Pirandello and Beckett have rewritten him, and so have the novelists Goethe, Scott, Dickens, Melville, and Joyce. Playwrights and novelists will be compelled to continue revising Hamlet, for reasons that I suspect have more to do with our horror of our own consciousness confronting annihilation than with our individual addictions to guilt and to grief.What matters most about Hamlet is his genius, which is for consciousness itself. He is aware that his inner self perpetually augments, and that he must go on overhearing an ever-burgeoning self-consciousness. Only annihilation is the alternative to self-overhearing, for nothing else can stop Hamlet's astonishing gift of awareness.

I want to be as clear as I can be about Hamlet’s stance: he is pragmatically nihilist, which does not rule out spiritual yearnings, whether Catholic, Protestant, or hermetist (in the manner of Giordano Bruno, as Frances Yates suggested). Hamlet is a god in ruins, which was Emerson's Orphic definition of man. To know that you are a fallen divinity is a difference that makes a difference: annihilation becomes a welcome alternative.

Any exegesis of Hamlet takes place within the circle of the play's endless notoriety: this remains the literary work proper, the thing itself, what first we think of when we consider the experience of the reader, or of the auditor. We all are celebrants at Hamlet's wake: Russians, Germans, Celts, wandering Jews, Asians, Africans.Universality is Hamlet's glory, or is it now his stigma? In relation to the prince, we are rather like Hamlet himself in regard to the Grave-digger: “How absolute the knave is. We must speak by the card or equivocation will undo us.”

We need the shipman's card, on which all thirty-two compass points clearly are marked, but no such chart is to be available to us. Where everything is questionable, we have not just several plays in one, but ultimately a player too equivocal for any of his plays.

King Lear has a stop, as does Macbeth; Hamlet does not. We exit believing that Lear has told us everything he had to tell, and that Macbeth has exhausted tale-telling. Hamlet, as seen, tantalizes us with what he has not the time to divulge. If drama takes dictionary definition, it tells a story for per-formance, one that begins and ends. There is an end to Hamlet, but not to Hamlet: he comes alive at the wake. His whoreson dead body, after four centuries, has not decayed.

The Grave-digger, Hamlet's only worthy interlocutor, blocks the prince's wit with superb gamesmanship: “Tis a quick lie, sir, twill away again from me to you.”

The question at issue is: Whose grave is it? Rhetorically, the undertaker wins in this duet, but in truth we do not believe him, for where shall he bury Hamlet? In dying, Goethe's imitation Hamlet, Faust, declares his satisfaction, and so is satisfactorily buried, unlike Goethe, who speculated that some exemption from dying might be arranged, in the scheme of things, for a consciousness as creative as his own.