Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe by Paul A. Kottman (review)

Polonius is not buried, let alone coffined, his "guts" instead "lug[ged]" (3.4.210) across the stage. Yet because his "heart" is "made of penetrable stuff," as if it were a heart of "sense," he is wished "Peace" by Hamlet and given "farewell" (ll. 29-36).¹ Polonius receives Hamlet's offer of repentance (3.4.171) owing to the injury that that heart, deserving of revenge, has received. This scene of Hamlet's final words to Polonius is the centerpiece to the opening pages of Paul A. Kottman's Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe, a reading of Hamlet's treatment of the dead.

Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare focuses on "worldly inheritability," what Kottman calls the "relative transmissibility of rights, entitlements, possessions . . . that we might wish to bestow on those we love" (21). In Kottman's capable hands, Hamlet is a play about our attempts to assert the "relative self-sufficiency of the individual citizen," our attempts to "hold property," to "tak[e] possession without regard to 'natural' bonds, and instead through what may be called, strictly speaking, 'property rights'" (60, 55). Kottman returns us to Hamlet in chapter 2 before moving on to King Lear and The Tempest in chapters 3 and 4, but not without taking with him the question that seized Hamlet (and Hamlet) in the book's first half—what happens when those "property rights, or private property . . . supplant the care of the dead as the primary claim of culture for itself " (61)? Returning to Polonius, the concept of providing "care of the dead" (61) is perhaps most familiar in the Ghost's insistence to Hamlet, "If thou didst ever thy dear father love . . . Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder!" (1.5.23, 25). Hamlet translates "care of the dead" into a demand that he perform "this same" (3.3.77) on the "villain [who] kill[ed his] father" (l. 76). And it is what interests me in Kottman's readings.

In suggesting a somewhat clear division between "property rights" and "care of the dead," Kottman leaves unaddressed a certain aspect begged by the question of property rights, which is not only what it means to do so, but how far we can go, in "protecting and enforcing the rights of individuals to hold property," especially when those individuals to whom we would refer, in this instance Hamlet's Father, are no longer "living . . .'individual[s]'"with "a legal persona," and yet, owing to those ties of kinship, individuals "entitled to property, to what is one's own, a sphere of possession" (60).

In posing the question of property rights around the dead, Kottman locates Hamlet within a tradition of tragedies including King Lear, but also and enjoyably comedies like The Tempest, As You Like It, and, though not read by Kottman, The Merchant of Venice, works concerned with asking what it means, and so when, and for how long, one is "to be . . . understood [as] an individual person, a legal being" (60). I am thinking, for instance, of Shylock's "On what compulsion must I? Tell me that" (4.1.179), that demand which follows Antonio's "confess[ion of ] the bond" (4.1.176) and, more immediately, Portia's plea, upon Antonio's confession, that Shylock "be merciful" (4.1.178).² It is a plea, Portia's, originating out of this sense that Shylock sees Antonio not as "an individual person" but only as a "legal being," as in a person whose only obligation before Shylock is remuneration of "[t]he penalty and forfeit of [Shylock's] bond" (4.1.203). It is a way of reading, Shylock's, which does get him "the law" he "crave[s]" (4.1.202), and yet, owing to that craving, the craving, for instance, which refuses to "season justice" with "mercy" (4.1.193), "paus[ing]" (4.1.331) before the same, and pausing if only out of...