Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) “Hamlet.” by Stephen Ratcliffe, and: Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine by Simon Critchley, Jamieson Webster (review)

Written by practitioners in fields adjacent, and indebted, to literary criticism, these two writerly books give us a Hamlet invested in language’s failure to produce knowledge (Reading the Unseen) and in knowledge’s failure to produce action (Stay, Illusion!). Each provides provocative, if idiosyncratic, readings of Shakespeare’s most epistemologically elusive play.

Poet Stephen Ratcliffe wants us to notice “things we do not even notice we do not notice not taking place onstage” (14). He discusses key offstage actions in Hamlet: King Hamlet’s murder, Ophelia’s death, Hamlet’s visit to Ophelia’s closet, and Hamlet’s voyage to England. Inspired by Harry Berger Jr.’s method of “armchair interpretation,” Ratcliffe catches ambiguities ordinarily missed by audiences (xiii). Shakespeare’s words “work to make physically absent things imaginatively ‘present’” (xi). Onstage narration underscores a split between word and event that obtains whenever we read imaginatively. Hamlet’s offstage action hovers like an imaginary painting we are invited to fix and embellish in our mind’s eye.

Ratcliffe resists analyzing the “two hours’ traffic” of the stage because Shakespeare’s language goes by too fast in the playhouse. Moreover, “everything in the play reaches outward, away from what is being performed onstage, toward the unseen, unknown, and unknowable offstage world” (2–3). When teased apart by the attentive critic, Hamlet’s diegetic speech-acts undo the ordinarily seamless marriage of onstage and offstage action; instead, words foreground their own performative impotence. By highlighting words’ failure to enact the things they refer to, “Shakespeare dramatizes the possibilities but also limits of theater itself, whose representation . . . is never quite what it seems, nor as real as its performance of those actions would have us believe” (14). Hamlet performs “a kind of verbal camouflage” whose textual surface continually compacts physical action beneath it (xvi). It is this continual gap between signifier and referent that fascinates Ratcliffe.

Ratcliffe’s meticulous, if dense, approach pays off in his opening chapter, which traces the inconspicuous slippage between on- and offstage spaces in the opening lines, “whose attention to things not physically shown make them a microcosm of the entire play” (2). Ratcliffe unweaves the suture of mimesis and diegesis by demonstrating that the world of verbal action insistently fails to show the world it describes. Indeed, “Hamlet goes further than any other play by Shakespeare—perhaps than any other play—in exploring the differences between showing and telling” (2). Ratcliffe speculates that Shakespeare’s obsession with offstage action reflects an epistemological crisis, embodied by the Ghost, in the face of death’s unknowability.

Because Ratcliffe’s Hamlet is semantic network rather than temporal event, lexemes can be plucked out of context and plumbed for meanings à la Stephen Booth or Patricia Parker. This sometimes works well, as when Ratcliffe reads Hamlet’s “Up from my cabin” speech (5.2.15–28) as a sonnet or offers a tour de force reading of Ophelia’s death flowers (4.7.190–208). But by Ratcliffe’s own admission, such ultraclose readings violate Hamlet’s “physically sensuous appeal as a staged, theatrical event” (27) and entertain strained conjectures based on Berger’s “‘surplus meaning’” (94). For instance, we are free to imagine that Hamlet and Ophelia have had sex in Ophelia’s closet and that Ophelia is pregnant; if so, Hamlet’s line “I never gave you aught” registers in the study as “his attempt to put the blame of paternity on someone else’s loins” (89). But should we conjecture thus?

Ratcliffe answers that Hamlet’s truths reside in words that only imply. And it is true that we do not know what really happened, if anything, in Ophelia’s closet. But if Shakespeare “leaves the door open for us to speculate” (76), then every bush can...