Many years ago, and in the same year that Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-fashioning from More to Shakespeare ( ) was published, a volume of essays entitled Shakespeare’s Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir appeared. In their short Preface the editors argued that “such is the variety of responses which Shakespeare’s writing offers us that no single characterisation of his style will suffice.”1 The essays that fol-lowed concerned themselves with examples of ‘close reading,’ but looking back, what is missing from the volume is an engagement with the larger cultural and political con-texts in which Shakespeare’s plays appear. Some thirteen years later, and in a very different discursive register, the late Pierre Bourdieu, speaking primarily about the styles of visual art, had this to say about the whole question of ‘style’:
The ultimate truth of the style of a period, a school or an author is not tained as a seed in an original inspiration, but is defined and redefined con-tinuously as a signification in a state of flux which constructs itself in accord-ance with itself and in reaction against itself; it is the continuous exchange between questions which exist only for and through a mind armed with schemes of a specific type and more or less innovative solutions, obtained through the application of the same schemes, but capable of transforming the initial scheme, that this unity of style and of meaning emerges which, at least after the event, may appear to have preceded the works heralding the final outcome and which transforms, retrospectively, the different moments of the temporal series into simple preparatory outlines.2
This convoluted but important observation presupposes both an awareness on the part of the artist of those “schemes of a specific type” that comprise the ‘rules’ of the particular art form, and the capacity of the reader or observer to recognise them and to appreciate retrospectively, those “more or less innovative solutions” that a particu-lar work might offer. To this extent ‘style’ is both parole—that is to say, the selection and combination of particular elements of the language, the artistic ‘form’ or the genre, to produce units of meaning—and langue, or the totality of those elements that comprise the language-form-genre in its entirety. Into this formalistic equation,
1. Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank, and G. K. Hunter, eds., Shakespeare’s Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. vii.
2. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randall Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, ), p. .
Bourdieu inserts an explicitly ‘sociological’ element, since a recognition of the formal properties of ‘art’ depends upon the support of the institutions of culture and politics, and, of course, history.
Hamlet is a case in point, where individual ‘style’ and cultural-theatrical traditions converge. We know that there are three texts of this play, the first of which, according to the Arden editors who summarise the debate, is a memorial reconstruction, possi-bly for a touring performance, that shares a common ‘source’ with the Folio version.3 The play occupies a kind of terminus in a bewildering ‘doubling’ of dramatic texts that stretches back to Aeschylus and Seneca, and forward, via a line of non-dramatic prose narratives, to contemporaries such as Thomas Kyd, whose The Spanish Tragedy ( ) is thought to have established the popular genre of the English ‘revenge’ play. But Ham-let was not Shakespeare’s first excursion into the ‘revenge’ genre, as evidenced in the earlier Titus Andronicus (c. ), and ‘revenge’ as a motif surfaces throughout the two tetralogies of History Plays, oddly in Othello ( ), and mischievously in Twelfth Night (c. ) where Malvolio is punished for his overweening presumption. In his Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon ( ), John Kerrigan observes that “the idea of equilibrium-through-action is loaded not only with assumptions about justice as balance, but with psychotherapeutic commonplaces about the need for a balanced psy-che.”4 He then goes on to show how some of the leading scholars of the early twentieth century, such as W. W. Greg and John Dover Wilson, filtered their interpretations of Hamlet through the genre of nineteenth-century detective fiction.5
Of course, all criticism, like language itself, is a process of selection and combination.
Statistical analysis seeks to reduce drastically the ‘affective’ power of language and its subjective effects. Engagement with ‘the past’ from the position of ‘the present’ is also, as the late Terence Hawkes observed, not “an obstacle to be avoided, nor as a prison to be escaped from. Quite the reverse: it’s a factor actively to be sought out, grasped and perhaps, as a result, understood.”6 In his book on Shakespeare’s Language ( ) Frank Kermode observed that Hamlet is best defined under the category, and in the words of Polonius, as “poem unlimited,” in that the play “does so many different things, brings together so many styles, that no other (except possibly Pericles where the unlimitedness is due to the patchwork) compares with it.”7 And yet, for Kermode, and despite the varieties of language to which the play has access, Hamlet “is dominated to an extent without parallel in the canon by one particular rhetorical device: it is obsessed with
3. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden series, vols (London: Bloomsbury, ), I: pp. – .
4. John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), pp. – .
5. Kerrigan, pp. ff.
6. Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London: Routledge, ), p. . 7. Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (London: Penguin, ), p. .
doubles of all kinds, and notably by its use of the figure known as hendiadys.”8 My concern here is not to verify or to question Kermode’s observation, but to amplify it with reference to two moments in the play. The first, absent from Q ( ), is Clau-dius’s speech that opens Act scene and that is present in Q and (with minor emen-dations) in F ( ). I cite the Q version but I include the minor F emendations:
Though yet of Hamlet our deare brothers death [Q –F:
The memorie be greene, and that it vs befitted King.]
To beare our harts in griefe, and our whole Kingdome, To be contracted in one browe of woe
Yet so farre hath discretion fought with nature, That we with wisest sorrowe thinke on him Together with remembrance of our selues:
Therefore our sometime Sister, now our Queene [F: sometimes]
Th’imperiall ioyntresse to this warlike state [F: of]
Haue we as twere with a defeated ioy
With an auspicious, and a dropping eye, [F: one…one]
With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage, In equall scale weighing delight and dole
Taken to wife: nor haue we heerein bard Your better wisdoms, which haue freely gone With this affaire a long (for all our thankes)
(Q , sig. B v, ll. – )
Leaving aside the variations in punctuation and capitalisation between Q and F, there are four more or less substantive emendations made in the later text. The first returns this speech-prefix to its Q form “King” compared to Q ’s “Claudius,” although Q thereafter uses the form “King.”; generally social rank takes precedence, as in the case of “Queene” that is the dominant form used for Gertrude in all three texts except that in Q the shortened form “Ger.” is used throughout the Closet scene ( . sigs I -K v).
The second emendation is from Q “sometime” to F’s “sometimes.” The Q reading suggests that at some time in the past Gertrude was Claudius’s “sister,” whereas the F reading suggests that on some occasions Gertrude exchanged the identity of “sister” for that of “Queen.” We might dismiss this variation as a compositorial error, but we can also regard it as a ‘reading’ of the earlier version that reinforces Hamlet’s own sense of the scandalous nature of the relationship. The shift from “sister” to “queen” carries with it overtones of incest, but the idea in F that Gertrude alternates between two identities implicates her much more deeply in the conspiracy against Old Hamlet than the Q reading, that points to only one decisive event in the past. Editors have generally
fol-8. Kermode, p. .
lowed Q rather than F in this matter, and usually without anything other than an unelaborated bibliographical note. The third emendation exchanges one preposition for another: “Th’imperiall ioyntresse to/of this warlike state.” The Q reading emphasises Gertrude’s inferior status in that, as a woman she is attached to “this warlike state” im-plying that there is no direct connection between Claudius’s accession to the throne, and Gertrude as the imperial widow in possession of her dead husband’s lands. Claudi-us’s speech is full of unintended irony and this may simply be yet another example, hinting at her ‘weakness’ that Hamlet will later exploit when he confronts his mother in her closet. The substitution in F of the preposition “of” presupposes an intrinsic con-nection between the Queen and the “state,” between the throne and its material sup-ports, land. Again F hints at something about which Q is not explicit: the complicity of the Queen in the regicide of Old Hamlet. The final emendation in F looks very much like a sharpening of something that remains vague in Q : “With an/one auspi-cious, and a/one dropping eye.” The indefinite article “an” might suggest that Claudius has more than two eyes, even though the image as it stands is preposterous. The use of the definite article “one” in Q reinforces in a very definite way, particularly in perfor-mance, the gap between physiological impossibility, and rhetorical plausibility.
These are minor emendations to a theatrical text over time, and not all of them can be clearly accounted for. But what is important in a play like Hamlet is the dramatic deployment of ‘styles’ for theatrical and dramatic purposes. In this respect Claudius’s opening speech is a model of rhetorical sophistication. It begins by accumulating, and making use of, modifying conditional clauses, and takes some lines to get to the point. The first -line sentence inaugurates one of the main themes of the play, memory; the “memory” of Old Hamlet’s death is still fresh (“green”), and this has prompted a formal response: “and that it us befitted / To bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom / To be contacted in one brow of woe.” The past participle
“befitted” derives from the verb that denotes an act of making ‘suitable’ or ‘appropriate’, in relation to the formal requirement of a particular occasion. The inclusive “us” here may be the royal ‘we’, but it also suggests a formal acquiescence in ceremony that may be no more than surface-deep. We might also ask how such an extreme expression of grief: “our whole kingdom / To be contracted in one brow of woe,” can be modified in the way Claudius suggests: “Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature / That we with wisest sorrow think on him / Together with remembrance of ourselves.” What began as a straightforward “memory” of another is now conflated with a seriously mod-ulated “sorrow” and is ultimately conflated with “remembrance of ourselves.” Again, there is unintended irony here since Claudius cannot think of Old Hamlet without thinking of ‘himself’ and what he has gained by his regicide. Indeed, in the first half of the speech what begins as a ceremony for the dead king rapidly turns subtly into a jus-tification for his successor.
The second sentence begins demonstratively with what appears to be a conclusion:
“Therefore our sometime(s) sister, now our queen.” What is asserted to be the logical link between “ourselves” and “our sometime(s) sister” is, in fact a non sequitur, and
serves to release a series of paradoxes that are calculated to appeal rhetorically to an onstage audience that already knows (and has been complicit in) the conclusion, but from which a theatre audience is invited to withhold its full consent. The calculated action that Claudius has taken: “In equal scale weighing delight and dole,” is that he has married the widow Queen, but not without public support: “Nor have we herein barr’d / Your better wisdoms, which in this have freely gone / With this affair along.
For all, our thanks.” The entire court, with the single exception of Hamlet, is ‘in the know’ and thus begins a series of obfuscations that fuels the play’s ‘revenge’ plot. Here also is a language that in its detail is specifically designed to produce a discrepant effect, providing the theatre audience with clues to the ‘self’ that defines Claudius while demonstrating the effect that his rhetoric has upon an onstage audience of courtiers.
It is this smokescreen of language, of language devalued, that Hamlet will have to pene-trate if he is to obey the command of his father’s Ghost. And this represents a critical engagement with what had, by the time of the play, become a part of the genre of the revenge tragedy. Here the issue of ‘style’ is inextricably entwined with the demands of a genre, something that Bourdieu, as we have seen, referred to when he observed that “it is the continuous exchange between questions which exist only for and through a mind armed with schemes of a specific type and more or less innovative solutions, obtained through the application of the same schemes, but capable of transforming the initial scheme.”9
Shakespeare’s first major excursion into the genre of the revenge play was Titus An-dronicus, a play in which the eponymous hero is excluded from the Rome he has fought to defend, and who is forced to seek justice elsewhere. In the end, Titus replicates the savagery to which he and his family have fallen victim, in a descent into madness, as the play explores the paradox that it is, at root, an orchestrated Roman violence that sus-tains its laws. At the extreme point of Titus’s agony, when the heads of his two sons are returned to him along with his own severed hand, all he can do is laugh. When his brother Marcus asks him “Why dost thou laugh?” he replies:
Why? I have not another tear to shed.
Besides, this sorrow is an enemy And would usurp upon my watery eyes And make them blind with tributary tears.
Then which way shall I find Revenge’s cave?
For these two heads do seem to speak to me And threat me I shall never come to bliss Till all these mischiefs be returned again
Even in their throats that hath committed them. ( . . – )10
9. See note , emphasis mine.
10. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate. Arden Series (London and New York: Routledge, ).
We might recall that at the beginning of the play Titus’s condoning of the ritual slaughter of Tamora’s eldest son that is “religiously” demanded by his own dead sons is met with Tamora’s response of “O cruel, irreligious piety!” ( . . ).
This is a significant advance on Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, where Hieronimo, the Knight Marshal of Spain and custodian of law is unable to secure justice for the murder of his son Horatio. Faced with the judgement against the overconfident criminal Ped-ringano, who has murdered Balthazar’s servant Serberine, at the behest of the suspicious Lorenzo (the real murderer of Horatio), who is suspected of revealing the truth of Ho-ratio’s murder and the identities of his murderers, Hieronimo pinpoints the nature of his own dilemma:
For blood with blood shall, while I sit as judge, Be satisfied, and the law discharg’d;
And though myself cannot receive the like, Yet will I see that others have their right.
Despatch! The fault’s approved and confess’d,
And by our law he is condemn’d to die. ( . . – )
However, Hieronimo’s delay in pursuing the murder of his son is part of what Lorna Hutson has brilliantly observed to be a journey to revenge that is “punctuated by pain-ful remembrance” and whose “sequence and progress are determined by this cautious investigatory process and the retaliation it duly provokes”; this is the source of Hieron-imo’s ‘problem’ of “how he is to turn this private knowledge (his son’s murder) into public accusation.”11 Hutson notes Shakespeare’s imitation of this moment in the play in Titus Andronicus, and adds that here “sequence is rendered into space, and investiga-tion or deliberainvestiga-tion into a choice of paths to worlds other than this, or to the traversing of a place where judgement is enacted as pain and torment.”12 Of course, by the time we come to Hamlet this relatively straightforward account of a catholic Purgatory is restricted to the predicament of the Ghost, and Hamlet’s delay extends far beyond the question of simply making public, and demanding justice for, Claudius’s crime, since he, himself is charged with being both “scourge” and “minister”—punisher and physi-cian—to Denmark ( . . ). In the later play the elevation of murder to regicide raises the ideological stakes considerably, just as the role of the revenger, merged with that of natural successor to the throne, introduces new complications.
It is here that a key feature of Shakespeare’s dramatic ‘style’ manifests itself: forms of repetition embedded in the play’s structure, that generate meaning as they develop. It has long been observed that the name Hamlet applies to father and son, that there are two kings in the play (three if we count the ‘player king’ in The Mousetrap), and two
11. Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. – .
12. Hutson, p. .
revengers, three fathers, two mothers, and at least three sons. In a play that is concerned with the problem of ‘action’ and with bringing the past into the present, we would do well to recall Gilles Deleuze’s gloss on this process of repetition when he observes:
Historians sometimes look for empirical correspondences between the present and the past, but however rich it may be, this network of historical correspond-ences involves repetition only by analogy or similitude. In truth, the past is in itself repetition, as is the present, but they are repetition in two different modes which repeat each other. Repetition is never a historical fact, but rather the his-torical condition under which something new is effectively produced.13
This too has some serious implications for the study of Shakespeare’s ‘sources’. It also produces the axiom that “[R]epetition is a condition of action before it is a concept of reflection.”14 Hamlet repeats the ‘revenge’ formula, its ‘styles’ internalise a series of repe-titions that reflect both identities and opacities, and in the process something new emerges from a ‘past’ whose ghostly residue haunts the present. The ubiquity of the Ghost, its periodic entry into the present as a ‘reminder’, its bodily incarnation in the figure of the son, Hamlet, in whom resemblance and difference co-exist uneasily, ener-gises the ‘style’ of the play, and reaches down into the texture of specific events. This is not unlike the distinction that J. Hillis Miller draws—in a very different context—
between ‘Platonic’ repetition which, he argues “is grounded in a solid archetypal model
between ‘Platonic’ repetition which, he argues “is grounded in a solid archetypal model