Introduction: busting the Hermeneutical Ghosts in the Hamlet machine.

DeCarlo, John F.

Considering the title page of the Second Quarto, which reads The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, (2) claims to be an enlargement and correction of the First Quarto, it is curious to note that the main role that Hamlet plays throughout the play is in keeping with the description of his childhood mentor, Yorick, the court jester. When the gravedigger unearths Yorick's skull Hamlet immediately recalls how Yorick "poured a flagon of Rhenish on [someone] once" and refers to the old jester as a "mad fellow" and "mad rogue"(V.i.155-159). (3) In this respect, Hamlet's "antic disposition" or mask of madness seems to be a 'chip off the old block.'

More specifically, considering the fact that the jester made a profession of playing with, poking at, and exposing others peoples' vices, errors, mistakes, faults and general human foibles, Hamlet's biting wit continues in this tradition. In fact, the central plot of the play consists in Hamlet trying to reveal what others, whether it be his mother, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and of course, Claudius, wish to hide away. Hamlet also balances his polemical attacks against everyone, by including himself, not unlike the medieval court jester. For example, during the Play scene, after indicting the king via the dumb play, and his mother via the Player Queen who will "keep her word"(III.ii.219), Hamlet, like a jester who does not wish to cause the royal family to feel that the jester feels superior to them, indicts himself with his reference to Lucianus; thus rounding out his claim that the players do merely "poison in jest"(III.ii.221). In this respect, like many medieval and Renaissance jesters who learned the hard way, often becoming a meal for the king's hungry dogs after offending their royal and cankerous master, Hamlet must carefully monitor his behavior, juggling/judging when to 'let go' and 'hold on' to his satirical thoughts.

In relation to this jester like aspect of Hamlet's behavior there have been two recent pieces of scholarship, namely, "Hamlet", Without Hamlet (2007) by Margreta de Grazia and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003) by Harold Bloom. Curiously, both explore Hamlet's playfulness but in two divergent ways. On the one hand, Bloom re-addresses Shakespeare's most enigmatic and memorable character by qualifying in the preface that the present volume is a postlude to his earlier work Shakespeare: Invention of the Human. In deriving the present thematic title, Bloom cleverly quotes Polonius, "The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy ... or poem unlimited"; and asserts that "There is no end to Hamlet or to Hamlet, because there is no end to Shakespeare." (4) Accordingly, Bloom ends his new volume by noting: "We want to hear Hamlet on everything, as we hear Montaigne, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud. Shakespeare, having broken into the mode of the poem unlimited, closed it so that always we would go on needing to hear more." (5) Essentially, Bloom asserts that meaning for the "hero of consciousness," (6) who also "knows that he knows more" (7) than his audience, is that "Hamlet discovers that his life has been a quest with no object except his own endlessly burgeoning subjectivity." (8)

In contrast, Margreta de Grazia argues that Hamlet, the "icon of consciousness," has been mis-read and over-stated within the context of the overall play. (9) In fact, whereas Bloom exalts in Hamlet's subjectivity, De Grazia asserts that it is virtually non-existent, a mere addendum supplanted onto the character by modern criticism. In response to de Grazia's earlier essay titled, "Hamlet's Thoughts and Antics, Juliet Fleming writes: "This is a critical move that many will resist, for it severs in one blow the axiom according to which much Shakespearean criticism currently proceeds." (10) She adds: "... in contemporary Shakespearean criticism it is often developed according to a process of historical inversion that attributes to Shakespeare's plays the capacity to "speak to"--indeed to originate a conversation with-the present moment. And in this developed form the claim is one that can scarcely survive de Grazia's historical corrective." (11)

Before offering perceived limitations and critical evaluations to these two points of view, it should be noted that Shakespeare can be portrayed via the Hamlet text and the characters of Hamlet and Horatio as a far-reaching poet/proto-modern philosopher whose implicit commitment to an understanding of the philosophical nature of time, human thought, and being, as set in crisis by the mysterious Ghost, who becomes the pivot for a philosophical reading, which is more systematically and explicitly developed by later philosophical thinkers. In particular, implicit articulations of Cartesian and Kantian cognitive/epistemological concepts, Nietzschean embodied thought, along with the Heideggerian Existential-Pragmatic elements in the Hamlet text are fully explicated and compared and contrasted with the latter thinkers.

There is of course Hamlet's renowned reference to the subliminal nature of philosophy. Responding to Horatio's sense of wonderment in relation to the Ghost's underground movements, Hamlet advises Horatio that "there are more things between heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy"(I.v.167). In this respect, in terms of the relationship between Shakespeare's initial poetic exploration and subsequent philosophical developments in Western modern philosophy the monograph integrates Lakoff's and Johnson's ground-breaking work Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, which asserts that all philosophical systems are founded on an underlying embodied and metaphorical structure. (12)

In this regard, the play's opening question-Who's there?-represents both the new Cartesian epistemological subject-object relationship, as well as a new founded modern skepticism. Metaphorically and in keeping with Descartes' radical doubt, which leaves nothing but the thinking-doubting mind, Hamlet also vows to "wipe away all trivial fond records/All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past ... (I.v.99-101). In this respect, MacCary asserts that while the questioning of the role of the avenger was a "creaking convention" in the genre of the revenge drama, as demonstrated in the Spanish Tragedy, which Hamlet closely parallels, it is undoubtedly raised to the level of profound philosophical speculation in Hamlet. (13) Moreover, the symbolic posture of Hamlet standing in the graveyard contemplating the universal and fleeting nature of life while holding the skull of the old court jester, which represents all that is wild, silly and ridiculous, figuratively corresponds to the conceptual form of Descartes' Cogito, whereby a determined reason and a determined madness stand both together, and yet separate.

In keeping with Lakoff's and Johnson's assertion that all philosophical thought has a poetic-metaphorical root, Deleuze, in his work titled, Kant's Critical Philosophy, posits "four poetic formulas which might summarize the Kantian philosophy." (14) Deleuze attributes Hamlet with Kant's first poetic reversal that time is no longer subordinate to movement; rather, movement is subject to time as the immutable form of change and movement. Delueze relates Kant's second poetic reversal that time is the inner form that both regulates and splits the ego and I from each other to Rimbaud's "I is another." However, as Reiner Schurmann's rhetorically questions, "Is it to such temporality in dissension with itself that the divided man par excellence at the beginning of modern times-Hamlet-alludes when he observed, "The time is out of joint," the monograph argues that this too is implicitly evident in the Hamlet text. (15) By the same token, while Deleuze suggests that Kant presents the Beautiful and the Sublime as strange combinations, as well as pathos beyond all logic evolving freely to form as sources of time, it is asserted that the Hamlet text intimates this poetic formula later posited by Kant as well.

In terms of these implicit aspects of modern thought contained in the Hamlet text, MacCary qualifies in Friends and Lovers: The Phenomenology of Desire in Shakespearean Comedy that "Shakespeare is misread not only if he is read either as a final statement of medieval and early Renaissance order (1300-1500), but also in terms of there being too much of the Enlightenment in the Shakespeare of most critics from the opening of that period itself down to the middle of the 20th century in terms of a mis-recognition of either a moral, political, or historical order in the plays." (16) However, in keeping with the latter qualification the monograph focuses on a particular type of order/disorder. More specifically, one can compare and contrast Hamlet's subjectivity with the doubting nature and the determined reason and madness of the Cartesian Cogito; the Kantian transcendental self in terms of its temporal-categorical sense of order and the crisis of the de-centered subject resulting from the Ghost "shak(ing)" Hamlet and Horatio's Kantian (categorical and temporal) "disposition"; how Hamlet's ontological metaphor--the time is out of joint-prefigures not only Kant's conception of autonomous time but also the temporal divide between Hamlet self (the I and the ego); and Dasein's sense of temporality in relation to non-being, and correspondingly how Hamlet singularizes his own death and dying. (17) In this respect, Bloom's assertion that "There is no end to Hamlet or to Hamlet, because there is no end to Shakespeare" (18); and that "there is always something else in Hamlet" and his notion that the perspectives we turn upon Hamlet are "those (Hamlet) himself has revealed to us" (19) needs to be qualified both thematically and methodologically.

More specifically, such a methodology distinguishes philosophical points which indicate that Shakespeare himself is in some way committed to an implicit understanding that won't be dealt with systematically and explicitly until articulated by some later philosopher; and those philosophical points that might only exist in Shakespeare once one reads them through the prism of later philosophical sophistication. For example, one might legitimately say that the atomists truly prefigure the atomism upon which modern physical science is built, but Augustine's notion of ratio seminales does not really anticipate evolutionary theory. (20) Correspondingly, in response to Bloom's contention of the open-ended poem, the monograph only definitively and restrictively articulates the particular Cartesian and Kantian cognitive/epistemological concepts, along with the existential-pragmatic elements which are implicitly committed to in the Hamlet text.

Consequently, one can provide a three-fold thematic explanatory-interpretative tool: a) illuminating the intellectual role the Hamlet text plays within the context of modern and contemporary philosophical ideas pertaining to time, human thought, and being; b) effecting a retro-reading of Hamlet and Horatio (who are situated as ad hoc philosophers) along with the Hamlet text through the lenses of Cartesian, Kantian, and Heideggerian thought, so that the characters and the philosophical themes of the play are given a more explicit and expansive exposition; c) and by reading the Hamlet text in conjunction with the latter philosophical figures and locating important resonances and dissonances between Hamlet's subjectivity and the Cartesian cogito, the Kantian transcendental self, and the Heideggerian Dasein, a significant dialectic is struck up whereby a critical reading of Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger is possible through the lens of Hamlet and the Hamlet text, just as Hamlet and the Hamlet text can be read via the lenses of those philosophical figures.

It is hoped that in comparing and contrasting Hamlet's subjectivity to the aforementioned modern philosophical figures one gains a better understanding of the philosophical issues of the modern period and of the particular questions about the Hamlet text that have often perplexed critics. In this respect, although the monograph resembles aspects of Derrida's "hauntological" reading of Hamlet in The Spectres of Marx, it is not concerned with demonstrating how Hamlet genealogically 'haunts' the Western philosophical tradition, but how it anticipates its development as it extends from Descartes to postmodernist variations on pragmatism, and as such, and how it can strike up a dialectical dialogue between them. For example, in contrast to the pristine Cartesian Cogito, which cannot endure the separate but integrated relationship between a determined reason and a determined madness, thus turning to the belief in a non-deceiving God, Hamlet, via his complicated connection to the Ghost is forced to wrestle with his connection to a determined madness. Hamlet's introspective philosophical doubt, which lacks the theological "back" offered to the Cartesian cogito, also lends insight into Hamlet's excessive judgment of his mother's shameful behavior. In these respects, one of the great gifts to modernity from the Hamlet text may very well lie in the guidance it offers on how to endure such a philosophical and interpersonal state of madness. (21)

Needless to say, such a dialectical interfacing of the Shakespearean text with specific modern philosophical figures is at odds with some aspects of modern scholarship. After all, just as Hamlet wrestles with the mysterious Ghost, we too wrestle with Hamlet as a hermeneutic subject. (22) Unfortunately, not unlike Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, critics, in their effort to "pluck out the heart of [Hamlet's] mystery" have historically "play[ed] on him," "mak[ing]" him an "unworthy ... thing" (III.ii.334-338). Despite their differences, the High Romantics and Low Modernists share something in common: by placing so much emphasis on the character of Hamlet and ignoring not only his circumstances and his formidable foes, but also the fateful forces working against him, they have in effect given the high tragedy an unwarranted Euripidean twist. For example, whereas the High Romantics have identified Hamlet's depression, weak will, over-reliance on thought, and his sensitive moral nature as the all important weakness or tragic fault that explains his so-called delays, the Low Modernists have postulated an unconscious Oedipal complex. In effect, the German Romantics (Goethe and Schlegel) (23) and English Romantics have attributed a hyper-behaviorism (24) to Hamlet, whereby he inappropriately, but consciously overreacts either emotionally and/or intellectually to given events and circumstances. In contrast, Freudians reduce his behavior to unconscious determinants, centered on the infamous Oedipal complex.

What could account for such a discrepancy of interpretations, along with the corresponding distortions? According to the concept of determined historical structures, which occupy such an important place in Heidegger's thought, there exist a historicity and a temporality of man that are not only predicates but "the very substantiality of his substance." (25) Consequently, the explosive-revolutionary visions of France and the repression of Victorian society create a context out of which intellectual theories arise which is in turn projected into the reading of texts. The English Romantics, in particular, venerated a reason very different from that of the Enlightenment. The Romantic impulse is toward the power of imagination and creativity. Moreover, as naturalized religion, which sublimates god and divinity, human action within the context of free creative imagination has no limits. (26) For example, in one Promethean stroke, the French Revolution replaced feudal institutions with bourgeois capitalism, embodying the possibilities of social reconstruction and revolutionary transformation. So why can't Hamlet take the throne from Claudius?-posing the question as conceived by the Romantics.

In terms of Hamlet's existential plight, Auden is right in asserting that Hamlet "would like to become what the Greek tragic hero is, a creature of situation." (27) Unlike the Greek tragic hero, Hamlet is caught in an existential predicament, (28) which lacks any pragmatic or utilitarian end, such as the end of the plague in Thebes or the safe passage of troops to Troy. More specifically, although the Ghost takes on the role of the furies in mythology/tragedy in making sure that a blood murder of a family member is avenged by the son or male member of the family, Hamlet would be "cursed" in trying "to set it [all] right"(I.v.188), and yet shames himself for not doing so, in so far as his strict political/religious conscience makes him appear to himself as a coward. (29) It is precisely this double bind, with its political-philosophical dimensions, the Romantic and Freudian readings of Hamlet, overlook.

In this respect, De Grazia's recent book titled, "Hamlet" Without Hamlet aims to radically undercut the construction of the play as harbinger of "the of the modern age." (30) To her credit she is right in cutting many of the connections of the text with English Romanticism and German Idealism, along with the contemporary Freudian reading of the text. Via historical developments regarding the reception of the play, she notes that Hamlet's "hyperactivity would have linked him more with the roustabout clown of medieval folk tradition than with the introspective consciousness acclaimed by the modern period." (31) In other words, Shakespeare's audiences were not interested in Hamlet's "interiority" (32) rather "the pleasure Hamlet gave derived not from that he had within ... but from what he had put on; namely, his 'antic disposition.'" (33) She notes however that after Stubbe's Remarks the reader is left "with a Hamlet worthy of tragedy--princely, dignified, heroic and virtuous." (34) From there, Coleridge was the first modern to overlook the role of the jester and to focus exclusively on Hamlet the thinker. She also notes: "Coleridge rarely comments on Hamlet's 'antic disposition,' and when he does it blurs into his 'disposition to excessive thought.' (35) In doing so, he also eradicates the plot, reducing Hamlet's inaction to his excessive thoughts. Moreover, Coleridge introduces the question: "Why does Hamlet delay?"--so that while "there is no evidence that an introspective and inactive Hamlet appeared on the seventeenth or eighteenth-century stage" (36)--"subsequent modern philosophers, psychologists, literary critics have expounded various theories, all based on Hamlet's epochal interiority." (37)

However, in response to Margreta de Grazia, as noted above, one does not aim to minimize the role of Hamlet's jester like behavior; rather, to probe it more deeply, exploring the implicit dynamics of Hamlet's Cartesian like doubt and madness/"antic disposition" in relation to the strange and mysterious Ghost and Hamlet's mother's disturbing behavior. (38) Also, in keeping with the textual fact that it is only in retrospect that the audience learns of Hamlet's emotional and psychological connection to Yorick in Act V, which suggests that it is provided not only as a tool to help the viewer makes sense of preceding events but also as an important lens to view the final actions of the play, one can examine the symbolic connections between the medieval court jester and the representations of Cartesian determined reason and determined madness in terms of Hamlet's final decision to attend the duel. It can be asserted that the deadly duel represents not only Hamlet's 'juggling' of human and divine action, synthetically culminating in his willingness to "let be," but how a Cartesian sense of instability frames Hamlet's final contradictions with his sense of self and what he believes awaits him after death. In these respects, de Grazia seems to overlook the Cartesian aspects implicit in Hamlet's jester like behavior in her examination of the nature of Hamlet's theatrical play for his/Shakespeare's contemporary audience. In other words, as Polonius instructs Gertrude to tell Hamlet that "his pranks have been too broad"(III.iv.2), the reinstatement of the interpretative value of Hamlet's antics has been over-extended, thus overshadowing the deeper philosophical elements contained in his playful and yet serious attitude toward life and death. (39)

Margreta de Grazia also asserts that Hamlet was "remov[ed]" from Shakespeare's time into the mindset of modernity by the emergence of speculative German philosophies of mind, including those of Marx and Hegel. However, as noted above in relation Delueze's reading of Kant, what is overlooked is how Hamlet poetically pre-figures numerous strains of Kantian thought. For example, Hamlet's and Horatio's "shake(n) disposition" in response to the strange mysterious Ghost foreshadows Kant's critical articulation of our underlying pre-linguistic cognitive categorical mind-set. Moreover, as also noted above, Hamlet's ontological metaphor--the time is out of joint--prefigures not only Kant's conception of autonomous time, but also the temporal divide between Hamlet self (the I and the ego). In these respects, in keeping with Kant's intellectual connection with the spirit-seer Emanuel Swedenborg, whereas Kant warns against transcendental illusions in The Critique of Pure Reason and offers counsel on how the individual follows the a prior synthesis of practical reason in The Critique of Practical Reason, he seems to succumb to the same transcendental illusions he has warned against in the writing of The Critique of Pure Judgment. (40) In a similar fashion, Hamlet, moving beyond his sublime intimations of the Ghost, temporarily suspends all logic, not only believing the Ghost to be his father's spirit but also identifying with its temporal-categorical state of mind; thus accounting not only for his deferment of action, but also his decision-making process during the Prayer scene. (41) Margreta de Grazia also asserts what truly characterizes modernity "is not just inwardness but sub-inwardness," (42) and in doing so, discusses Freud's impact on the play's dramatic presentation of Hamlet's delay. To her credit, she correctly asserts that the notion of the subconscious is a 20th century imposition on the Hamlet text. However, what is overlooked is Nietzsche's emphasis on embodied thought, as opposed unconscious thought, and how it sheds light not only on Hamlet's lack of self-consciousness, but also Nietzsche's own mis-reading of Hamlet's thought and behavior.

While Harold Bloom agrees with de Grazia regarding the mis-steps of the English Romantics, in his latest book titled Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, his corrective differs from hers. He asserts that the play represents Hamlet's playful and radical revenge on the role of the avenger in the revenge drama. (43) In this regard, Bloom's indirect reaction to Goethe and the English Romantics seems to be two-sided: while it is an apt inversion, it is also an undue compensation. More specifically, whereas the Romantic reading not only disregards the play's larger elements of circumstance but also reduces Hamlet's fault to a kind of hyper-behaviorism, (44) complete with his depression, weak will, and impractical intellectualism, Bloom exalts in Hamlet's inner freedom and related subjectivity at the expense of the play's more grave dimensions. In this respect, the play might be titled, Hamlet In Bloom, for Bloom, in effect, compares Hamlet's playfulness to Sartre's Being-In-Itself in its state of nothingness, where it takes on a Kantian sense of play as a series of absolute beginnings. For example, he asserts that "Hamlet's unique appeal lies in the fact that no other protagonist of high tragedy seems so free"; (45) and "Hamlet's intellectual liberty is such that, "the freedom to infer in Hamlet's praxis is a sublime mode of surmise, metaphoric because it leaps ahead with every change in circumstance. (46) In these respects, Bloom writes in the new text that "it is a play about playing, about acting out rather than avenging." (47)

However, it is important to recognize how each of Hamlet's creative improvisations comes back to haunt him creating the need for a new improvisation, as well as setting the terms or boundaries of its creative leap. Indeed, notwithstanding MacCary's (48) assertion that the role of the avenger was a "creaking convention" in Shakespeare's time, Bloom over-states Hamlet's theatrical playfulness at the expense of Hamlet's tragic circumstance, complete with a series of double binds, which are complicated by the kingly power of his nemesis. For example, just as the jester needed to balance his jestful accusations with self-indictments, Hamlet notes that Lucianus is nephew to the king, notwithstanding the fact that it inadvertently clouds the issue of the king's guilt. He also plays down Hamlet's implicit recognition of the limitations of human thought and action. After all, Hamlet loses confidence in his own abilities and eventually recognizes the limits of human understanding and human action: "when our deep plots do pall." Alternatively, he looks to the "divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew how we will," so how can Hamlet be an "mortal god in an immortal play." (49) In these respects, it seems that Bloom incorrectly asserts that Hamlet plays along in the revenge on the "poem unlimited masking as revenge tragedy." (50)

In all fairness to Bloom's notion of Hamlet's "capricious spirit," Erikson notes that pure play also suggests that the actor "intermingle with things and people in an uninvolved and light fashion. (51) In the sense that Hamlet shows no remorse for his "vicious badgering of Ophelia, manslaughter of Polonius, and gratuitous dispatch of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their undeserved deaths" (52) Hamlet is playful. In fact, like Horatio, Bloom is stunned by Hamlet's cruelty to the latter two characters, and rightfully so. Not only is it a callous act, but Hamlet also wrongfully assumes that they, who he likens to "Adders fanged," actually know what their mission to England entails. However, their relative innocence does not erase another double bind: before the arrival of the pirate ship, Hamlet has little or no choice but to change the royal commission if he wishes to stay alive and eventually return to Denmark. In this regard, Bloom seems to qualify Hamlet's playful carefree attitude in both his books, observing that there is a "savage triumphalism" (53) in Hamlet's nature; and in support of his view that "there are no traces of Oedipus in Hamlet," he notes that the Hamlet Complex should be spoken of as "a murderous theatricalism." (54) But can one be playful and murderous? Here again, Erikson, following Schiller's notion of free and authentic play and its connection to intrinsic value notes the actor must also "do something which he has chosen to do, without being compelled by urgent interests or impelled by strong passion. In short, he is on vacation from social and economic reality." (55) In other words, "when a child is playing and physical excitement or instinctual involvement becomes evident, then the playing stops." (56) In these respects, Hamlet's playfulness and acts of murder are not reconcilable.

In sum, Bloom understates Hamlet's dark side, failing to acknowledge how it not only contributes to Hamlet's tragic fault/fall, but also contaminates and limits his playfulness and related freedom and subjectivity. Thus, despite his necessary corrective to the Romantic reading of Hamlet and the play, which belittles him as a man of action, Bloom re-propels another misguided Romantic impulse; namely, to set human action in the context of free creative imagination--with no limits. In contrast, it is argued that what is alluring about the character of Hamlet is actually Shakespeare implicitly 'playing' with (via the character of Hamlet) a series of four different types of philosophical subjectivity in relation to the mysterious and paradoxical Ghost and the modern philosophical issues that it raises. In this respect, one can concretely articulate the particular Cartesian and Kantian cognitive/epistemological concepts, along with the existential-pragmatic elements which are implicitly committed to in the Hamlet text. Thus, contrary to Bloom's broad claim that Hamlet is a "Poem Unlimited," its philosophical ideas, as stated above, are given a more restrictive and explicit exposition. In other words, Bloom's assertions about the philosophical nature of the Hamlet text have been critically evaluated, separating the wheat from the chaff.

In conclusion, it is hoped that having "busted" the ghosts of the textual machinery conjured up by not only the modern Romantic and Freudian interpretations, but also de Grazia's pre-modernistic reading and Bloom's Neo-Romantic reading, one can begin to approach what Derrida would consider the supplemental text of Hamlet's unspoken or at least implicit philosophical assertions which have been historically suppressed and/or denied; and also appreciated how they dialectically interact with specific intellectual figures of the philosophical tradition which give Shakespeare's thoughts more explicit development and articulation. In doing so, it is also hoped that Hamlet, the great poetic meditation on human thought, time, and being in relation to the human condition, is awarded its significance as both a great poetic drama and also a relatively far-reaching philosophical meditation.

John F. DeCarlo, Hofstra University

(1) I am indebted to Dr. Pellegrino D'Acierno for this particular title, which was suggested to me by him in an earlier reading of this overall project. It was also his broad-minded and inspired wisdom which gave this project its initial impetuous.

(2) The average London theatergoer might have had a somewhat negative reaction to the title. As Claudius notes: "since yet thy cicatrice looks raw and red"(IV.iv.57), the impression of the Danish invasion and occupation of Britain from 900-1050 AD would still be in the collective memory, so that one might very well expect a short and bloody revenge drama. And yet, Hamlet distinguishes himself from his fellow Danes, who are "more honored in the breach than in the observance" (Act I, scene iv).

(3) All subsequent quotations are from The Norton based on the Oxford Edition, Second Edition.

(4) Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (New York: Riverhead Books, division of Penguin, 2003), p. 153.

(5) Ibid., p.152.

(6) Ibid., p. 94.

(7) Ibid., p. 144.

(8) Ibid., p. 96.

(9) Margreta de Grazia, "Hamlet" Without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. i.

(10) Juliet Fleming, Response to Margreta de Grazia's "Hamlet's Thoughts and Antics," p. 5.

(11) Ibid., p. 5.

(12) The authors claim that western Philosophy was founded on a mistaken view of reason, especially the ideal, transcendent, universal notion of reason of philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Kant. Johnson and Lakoff. Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York, Basic Books, 1999).

(13) Thomas MacCary, Hamlet: A Guide To The Play (Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 17.

(14) Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy, trans. By Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. vii.

(15) Reiner Schurmann, Broken Hegemonies, trans. Reginald Lilly (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 417.

(16) Thomas MacCary, Friends and Lovers: The Phenomenology of Desire in Shakespearean Comedy (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987), p. 23

(17) Just as Heidegger modifies Kant's notion of time as a site/intuitive form for something else, Hamlet conceives of time in Act V in terms of its own site--for his own death.

(18) Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (New York: Riverhead Books, 2003): p. 153.

(19) Ibid., pp. 142-144.

(20) In this regard, I am indebted to Dr. Glenn Statile for his intellectual guidance and crucial assistance.

(21) The Cartesian Cogito needs the reassurance of God that its thoughts and perceptions of the external world are not completely delusional: that God is not a Great Deceiver.

(22) I am indebted to the late Dr. Stanley Brodwin, who in conversation with me noted how the entire play was encapsulated in the opening line, to the degree that, if one understood the opening line, one was disposed to understanding the entire play. Also, in keeping with the monograph's interest in mapping parallel ideas between the Hamlet text and Kant's intellectual development, it is interesting to note that just as the Ghost remains a moral and ontological mystery, for Kant, notwithstanding the fact that our transcendental self makes sense of our sensory experiences, its categorical mindset can not be projected into the noumenal realm: we can not assert any definite propositions about how the ideas that correlate to our immediate experience might apply to that which transcends our known experiences.

(23) Schlegel, in particular, argues that Hamlet's thinking interferes with concrete and practical action, but his own logic is undercut in his observation that Hamlet fails to mention the Ghost in the "To be or not to be"--for Hamlet purposely and pragmatically excludes such information in fear of him being watched and listened to by the King. See: "Criticisms on Shakespeare's Tragedies: Hamlet" from Lectures On Dramatic Art and Literature, 1808.Trans. by John Black, London, 1846.

(24) This is not to be closely identified with Skinner's behaviorism, which denies the existence of the mind.

(25) Jacques Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics," trans. Allan Bass in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University Press, 1978), p. 87.

(26) Cornel West, The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), p. 153.

(27) Quoted by Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 410.

(28) From a contemporary point of view, Hamlet is presented with an untenable existential dilemma: he must objectively discern the ontological and moral nature of the Ghost before he can fulfil his filial/princely duties of taking revenge on Claudius; and yet, the Ghost's ambiguous and paradoxical features comprise a challenge for discernment of its ontological/moral nature. As Gabriel Marcel would note, this dilemma is particularly vexing since determining whether Claudius guilty or not is a question which can be objectively answered, while the issue of the Ghost's ambiguous spatial, moral, and ontological coordinates may not only be presently unknowable, but even ultimately mysterious.

(29) It can be argued that Shakespeare foreshadows Erikson's insight that doubt is the brother of shame, for Hamlet, the poet of doubt, is so burdened by his unanchored philosophical doubts about the ontological and moral nature of the Ghost and its commandment for revenge, that his corresponding sense of shame results in his self-effacing indictments, paranoia, and defiant shamelessness.

(30) Margreta de Grazia, p. 7.

(31) Ibid., pp. 8-9.

(32) Ibid., p. 18

(33) Ibid., p.8.

(34) Margreta de Grazia, "Hamlet's Thoughts and Antics," p. 17.

(35) Ibid., p. 21.

(36) Ibid., p. 9.

(37) Ibid., p. 4

(38) In keeping with Margreta de Grazia's assertion that the categories of tragedy and comedy are also modern impositions, the Cartesian Cogito with its determined reason and determined madness precedes the division of these two mindsets, incorporating the both closed and deterministic structure of tragedy and the open-endedness of comedy: the latter is clearly noted by Hamlet's evaluation of Yorick as a "fellow of infinite jest" (V.I.)

(39) In Chapter 3 of her book Hamlet, Without Hamlet, Margreta de Grazia connects historiography with genre, suggesting that as with Bradley as well as with the publishers of the First Folio, genre was more a matter of how to showcase books in an increasingly competitive market. However, as Bloom cleverly does, quoting Polonius' reference to the entire range of genres, including the poem-unlimited, such distinctions were obviously present in Shakespeare's time.

(40) Kant explains in the Transcendental Deduction how there is a necessary correlation between our thoughts about the world and the reality of the external world, but qualifies in the Transcendental Dialectic that those same thoughts can't be extended beyond our known experiences.

(41) In this respect, a connection between Shakespearean and Kantian thought is explored in terms of the common element between them; namely, the realm of the supernatural. Drawing on Kant's early work: Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated through Dreams of Metaphysics (1776), edited and translated by Gregory R. Johnson, it is explored how Kant possibly infused his own synthesis of Rousseau's theory of rational and free moral agents and Newton's mechanistic world of physics with the metaphysical speculations of the spirit-seer Emanuel Swedenborg.

(42) Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet Without Hamlet, p. 20.

(43) Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (New York: Riverhead Books, 2004).

(44) As already noted: this term should not be identified with B.F.Skinner's movement, which denies the mind as an actual entity.

(45) Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 420.

(46) Ibid., p. 419.

(47) Bloom, Harold, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (New York: Riverhead Books, 2004), p. 11.

(48) Thomas MacCary, Hamlet: A Guide To The Play (Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 26.

(49) Harold Bloom, Ibid. p. 88.

(50) Ibid., p. 152.

(51) Erik Erikson, Erik. Childhood and Society (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. New York, 1950), p. 212.

(52) Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), pp. 408-409.

(53) Ibid., p. 414.

(54) Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (New York: Riverhead Books, 2004), p. 55.

(55) Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Riverhead Books, 1950), p. 212.

(56) Ibid., p.39.