Rethinking Shakespeare's Skepticism: The Aesthetics of Doubt in the Sonnets and Plays

3. The Wonder-Wounded Hearers in Hamlet

109 Three The Wonder-Wounded Hearers in Hamlet Hamlet has long been identified as a vital window into early modern doubt and a defining moment in intellectual and literary history . With its vigorous interrogation of some of the most contested religious, political, and social issues of the Renaissance era, the play has stimulated a tremendous amount of critical attention to its different “modes of questioning” and a number of audacious pronouncements about its significance.1 For many readers, Hamlet is the skeptical play. According to Helen Vendler, it “marks the philosophical turning point of our Western millennium: the moment in which . . . reflective skepticism . . . becomes intellectually dominant.”2 Graham Bradshaw, focusing more narrowly on specific skeptical features of the early modern period, argues that Hamlet constitutes a landmark examination of “the consequences of the collision between different accounts of Nature and Value.”3 Bradshaw roots the play’s skeptical power in its relationship to the controversial and hypothesized Ur-Hamlet, arguing that “Shakespeare ’s Denmark ’comes of age’ when he grafts onto the old play’s framework a prince who is overwhelmingly modern and representative in his tortured sense of the insecurities engendered by the ’new Philosophy.’”4 Hamlet in this respect corroborates in its presumed textual history the very conclusion I have drawn about the sonnets, which is that the practice of grafting brings with it a host of practical and philosophical uncertainties but also great artistic potential—even, and perhaps especially, in its failure. 110 Rethinking Shakespeare’s Skepticism As Bradshaw affirms, “Hamlet is the ’graft’ which could not take [to its ’inherited framework’], since it could only take if Shakespeare had been content to write an inferior play” (123).5 Nor was Shakespeare “content to write an inferior” sonnet sequence, and in this chapter I aim (I hope, in this case, successfully) to graft the two works together, so to speak, in order to attend to their mutually illuminating qualities. For if Shakespeare’s confrontation with the canker in the rose gives his young-man sequence a tragic tone and structure, this generic dimension is only reinforced by juxtaposing the poet with Hamlet, whose epideictic skepticism, uniquely drawn interiority, and metapoetic awareness set his play apart from Shakespeare’s other tragedies and place it squarely in line with the sonnets. Like the poet, Hamlet ponders the persistence and force of the canker and the dangers of slander and praise; like the poet, Hamlet is keenly aware of the skeptical resonances of wonder and the limitations and liabilities of all forms of representation . Thus, even as Hamlet sheds light on the complexities of Shakespeare’s poetics of appraisal, the young-man poems have something vital to offer in our quest to understand Hamlet in particular and the nature of tragedy in general. hamleT’s epideicTic skepTicism The fact that Hamlet was written amid the “collapse of religious authority” and the beginning of “social revolution” is, for Vendler, one source of its power, but another lies in its identity both as a compelling stage play and as a “dramatic poem” “ruled by a single lyric consciousness.”6 In also pondering what Vendler refers to as the “lyric shape” of Hamlet, we are invited to see Shakespeare scaling the divide between lyric and dramatic, skeptically negotiating the performance of an action alongside the sometimes poetic, sometimes prosaic, representation of that action.7 In a different yet complementary manner, Hamlet himself grapples with conflicting perspectives on verbal and dramatic representation: the desire to be authentic (in Polonius’s words, to himself “be true”) and the need to “act.” Within two dozen lines of his first appearance in the play, Hamlet expresses disdain for theater, insisting that representation of internal states is a paltry endeavor. Nonetheless, he The Wonder-Wounded Hearers in Hamlet 111 later discovers that theater can be employed to his advantage, putting on an “antic” disposition, supposedly to deflect suspicion, and working with the players on The Murder of Gonzago. Thus, by the fifth act of the play, Hamlet has surrendered to more than just divine providence. He has capitulated to the exigencies of action and then to language itself—to verbal artifice—when he authorizes Horatio, the orator, to “tell” his “story” in order to repair his “wounded name” (5.2.346–50). To use again the metaphor employed by Bradshaw and developed in chapter 2, Hamlet submits to the tragic inevitability of another kind of graft...