Hamlet's Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium (review)

Has the regime of President George W. Bush turned us into a nation of Hamlets?

This is not a question that would have occurred to me before reading Linda Charnes's new book. But her discussions of legacy politics and electoral perplexity, of the world of film noir and the complex fictional condition of being "modern," suggest that we have indeed inherited, or have had foisted upon us, some of the prince's complexes.

In Hamlet's Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium, Charnes takes Hamlet through several complementary iterations, creating a multifaceted portrait: historical, psychological, theoretical, pop-cultural, and (primarily) political. Writing a hybrid literary criticism about "contemporary political culture" (6), Charnes analyzes "Shakespeare's influence on . . . beliefs about 'legacy' " (7), specifically, "the legacies bequeathed to . . . the princes Hal and Hamlet" who each embody a "drastically different model of the . . . politics of succession" (8).

Hamlet (rather than Hal) gets most of the attention. The book reads the Danish prince as an avatar of noir (chapter 3), vessel for contested ideas of historicity and the "early modern" (chapter 4), mannequin of disowned monarchical rights and ambitions (chapter 5), problematic owner of non-narratable interiority and figure of both American and British action and inaction (chapters 5 and 7), and a Bartleby-before-his-time (conclusion). There are two chapters on theory (chapters 2 and 4) and a treatment of the Henriad, which discourses perceptively on nationalism, doctrine, and the epochal meanings of monarchy (chapter 6). Throughout, Charnes uses Bruno Latour but especially Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Lacan to multiply the meanings inherent in the Hamlet/Hal dichotomy (about which, more in a moment). She weaves complex readings of sociology and poststructuralism with her own expert observations into an often brilliant tapestry. The figures in the carpet are George W. Bush and the national trauma of the second Bush presidency.

Several of the chapters are explicitly linked by the themes of legacy and succession or "by the anxieties triggered by England's laws of 'perpetual entail'" (7), but all are connected implicitly by Peter Sloterdijk's notion of "cynical idealism" (2)—cognizant self-delusion which (particularly in the Bush administration) ratifies so many acts and articles of insincere faith. In chapter 2 ("The Fetish of 'the Modern' "), Charnes uses Latour's idea of "the Modern Constitution" or "the laws . . . and strategies used by the self-styled 'moderns' to categorize and control legitimate and illegitimate forms of knowledge" (18). That idea helps her assert the lability and limitations of "the modern," its "strictly Eurocentric and western vision of historical development" (16) and its warped commitment to rationality. Even if one begins to suspect that Latour himself spins artificial (or overly rational) historical binaries merely to decry them, Charnes recuperates him with style: she suggests that, like the "fetish" in Freud or Marx, "the Modern" is a stand-in or critical metonym for a kind of ongoing cynical idealism: the Modern "assures us that our epochs of 'irrationality' are behind us" (24). Her claim leads us crucially into the heart of the book: Hamlet and the Henriad as containers of the cultural fetish (to reuse her term) of monarchy, the ever-problematic ideological fantasy underwriting all of Shakespearean politics.

This fantasy is the subject of her important fifth chapter ("The Hamlet Formerly Known as Prince"). Here, Charnes digs into the buried fact of Hamlet's royal prerogative, plumbing the play's primal moment of the hushed-up single-combat challenge between King Hamlet and King Fortinbras. She notes that this tale is shadowed by shame ("At least the whisper goes so,"¹ Horatio says of the event [Hamlet, 1.1.80]), and rightly so, for the story speaks volubly of both kings' willingness to risk disinheriting their only sons and losing their rule on a whim. Because the legendary fight occurred "that very day that young Hamlet was born" (5...