The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance

4. That Within Which Passes Show

120 4. That Within Which Passes Show Mourning, Melancholy/Melancholia, and “the Hamlet mystery” In a farcical piece of stage business with a flute, Hamlet issues a famous rebuke to the courtier spies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that applies equally to the spectators, readers, and critics who attempt to cash out the meaning of his melancholy: HAMLET: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from the lowest note to [the top of] my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet you cannot make it speak. ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be play’d upon than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me, [yet] you cannot play upon me. (3.2.343–351) Hamlet works to create a desire for the articulation of a buried content whose expression he teasingly withholds. There is a temporal structure to this promissory dynamic; revelation is always at hand—but not yet. Interpretation is the occasion for a kind of performative shame at the incapacity of some other (impressed into service as a local representative of a Big Other of “court,” “the world,” “Denmark”) to penetrate the occulted interiority of the melancholic figure—who places himself on display—while also decisively closing himself off from any access. This shame is ostensibly experienced by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but the reception of the play has considerably amplified this pervasive, unwelcome emotion. Hamlet understands himself as the site of a particular projection of his own That Within Which Passes Show 121 spectator’s interpretive desires, and works to rhetorically inflame and provoke those very longings even as he forecloses their possibility and preemptively shames his would-be interpreters; but his aggression in doing so marks his discourse with eruptions of desire and lines of force that may, all the same, be telling in their own symptomatic manner. Faced with such a deadlock, what is needed may be a certain salutary resistance to interpreting Hamlet’s abyssal interiority where it announces itself directly, a certain refusal to take up the problem of his “mystery” as he has conveniently staged it for our consumption. Margreta de Grazia’s provocative Hamlet without Hamlet has recently attempted to do just that, and yet the subsequent responses to de Grazia’s historicist intervention have demonstrated that her attempted shift toward the political dimensions of Hamlet’s disinheritance from Denmark’s succession constitutes an additional motivational gloss upon, rather than a replacement for, the enduring mystery of Hamlet’s inwardness.1 Laying springes to catch his would-be interpreters, Hamlet has played a part in fashioning the very topology of abyssal subjectivity which conditions many of the critical attempts to pluck “out” the heart of a mystery felt to be somehow “in” an epistemological strongbox bounded by his person. Responding to Gertrude’s query about his persistent gloom with an aggressively self-righteous attack upon her, Hamlet forcefully announces an absolute epistemological division between an outside and an inside, and uses this division to subtly undercut her mourning as inadequate when compared with his unverifiable yet insistent proclamation of his own authentic mourning. It is a response pregnant with meaning, yet maddeningly empty: HAMLET: Seems, madam? nay, it is, I know not “seems.” ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected havior of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes, of grief, That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, For they are the actions that a man might play, But I have that within which passes show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (1.2.76–86) 122 That Within Which Passes Show It is all here. In a productive, indeed foundational, conflation of the two states, Hamlet offers a blazon of mourning which is also a blazon of melancholy , itemizing a full repertoire of external signs and symptoms, from the physiological (tears) to the affective (psychological dejection) to the sartorial (black clothing), which the two conditions share equally. In a play which obsessively restages the iconographic depiction of the melancholy figure, Hamlet’s founding act is to self-anatomize...