From the Editor: Surviving Hamlet

A specter is haunting Hamlet criticism. In recent years, scholars have become increasingly enthralled by Horatio. Of course, it's hard for academics not to see themselves reflected in him: "Thou art a scholar-speak to it, Horatio," Marcellus commands (1.1.40), and even though (or maybe because) Horatio's speech to the Ghost proves ineffective, many a Shakespearean who has endeavored to speak with the dead might hear herself hailed in Marcellus' remark. ¹ Yet I'd argue that the fascination with Horatio is not just because he is the doppelgänger of modern Shakespeareans. It's also because he seems to be the very opposite of the specter to whom he speaks: Horatio's special power, after all, is that he survives.

Horatio might get low marks for his ability to engage ghosts, but he succeeds spectacularly in avoiding dangerous hiding places behind arrases, brooks with willows growing aslant them, cryptic death warrants, or poisoned épées and chalices (to mention just four of the thousand shocks to which the flesh is heir in Hamlet). But survival is not without its own spectral complications. In this issue's opening essay, Lee Edelman exfoliates the distinction that Jacques Derrida, citing Walter Benjamin, draws between "überleben . . . to survive death as a book can survive the death of its author or a child the death of its parents, and . . . fortleben, living on, to continue to live." ² To survive in the first sense presumes a temporal break, a rupture that divides the dead from those who outlive them. To survive in the second sense involves, by contrast, a continuation, an afterlife whereby the dead are preserved for (and even as) the living. Which sense underwrites Horatio's mode of survival?

Surviving Hamlet is Horatio's fate, and in a fashion that suggests Benjamin's überleben. But Horatio is also committed to making Hamlet live on in future narrations, a project that anticipates how Hamlet also survives, in the sense of fortleben, on stage, in film, in criticism, and in popular culture. Margreta de Grazia's "Hamlet" without Hamlet evinces a desire for both types of survival. The engaging possibility of a Hamlet that no longer contains Hamlet suggests that, like Horatio, we might outlive Hamlet-at least the modern Hamlet who is a byword for modernity itself, for an "intransitive inwardness" that turns its back on the play from which it emerges. ³ But the teasing syntax of de Grazia's title also confirms another fantasy of survival: a Hamlet without the modern Hamlet cannot help but presume a "Surviving Hamlet"-an original Hamlet we are deeply invested in protecting and keeping alive for the future, even if it means reinventing it again and again.

The essays in this special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly are all concerned, in their own ways, with the problem of Surviving Hamlet. Some focus on the Horatio who outlives (überlebt) Hamlet: Allison Deutermann examines Horatio's practice of cautious listening, which survives Hamlet's reckless histrionicism; the cluster of short pieces by Lars Engle, Karen Newman, and Jonathan Crewe scrutinizes Hamlet's gnomic pronouncement that Horatio is "e'en as just a man / As e'er my conversation coped withal" (3.2.48-49)-a prehumous epitaph for the friend who will survive him. By contrast, Bernice W. Kliman's essay discusses the survival (or fortleben) of the canard that Hamlet was performed in 1607 on a ship off the coast of Africa. And Elizabeth Hanson considers how the Wittenberg friendship of Hamlet and Horatio intimates a modernity that will outlive, even as it is absorbed by, the codes of feudal nobility in which Hamlet is embedded: in other words, university-Hamlet survives (überlebt) noble-Hamlet and noble-Hamlet survives (fortlebt) as university-Hamlet.

The problem of Surviving Hamlet is tackled most explicitly in this issue's Positions section, which boasts a new essay on Hamlet, "Against Survival," by queer theorist Lee Edelman, as well as responses by Kathryn Schwarz and Carla Freccero. In his groundbreaking book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Edelman considered how the future, figured...