The Death and Return of the Author: Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing

5. For Foucault, cf. Robert Hurley's translation of the third section of Histoire de la sexualité. For Derrida, cf. "'Eating Well': An Interview." For Balibar, cf. "Citizen Subject." 6. It may be fruitless to go over this question of the anachronicity of unified subjectivity in Hamlet all over again, but the validity of cultural-materialist and new historicist arguments concerning interiority in early modern culture has been challenged recently by Katharine Eisaman Maus's Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. Maus has, in Nora Johnson's words, "articulated a powerful critique of such theories, noting that the evidence of what she calls 'inwardness' is widespread, and arguing against historical difference as a privileged tool for dislodging the hold of the bourgeois subject" (Johnson, note 15, 701). This article seconds Maus's and Johnson's work in this matter, querying the necessity to empty early modern interiority of any content in the name of historical difference. As Hillman puts it: "On the current tendency to deny Renaissance human beings anything like inwardness in the modern sense, Maus is refreshingly sceptical, and her scepticism opens the door to textual analysis that often complements mine" (Hillman 16). My view is that Shakespeare anticipates scepticism as to the truth of private, interior experience at the same time as he dramatizes the self-slandering consequences of such scepticism. 7. This may be too commonplace to have to back up, but for an instance of this comparative thinking, see Traub, Kaplan and Callaghan's introduction to Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: "if the postmodern marks a crisis of modernity, the early modern marks the moment when we begin to see the issues of modernity developing. Without asserting that there was a full-blown Enlightenment subject in the sixteenth century or that there was nothing recognizably modern in the medieval subject, we can recognize that the early modern and the postmodern are similar in part because of their transitional status" (Traub, Kaplan & Callaghan 7). 8. Cf. Chapters 1 and 4 of Presentation. Freedman's argument is seconded by Karin Coddon, in her discussion of Twelfth Night. Coddon also sees theatricality in the plays as a means of evading the rival team's ascription of stereotyped roles: "Theatricality constitutes a site of evasion from subjectification (...) An actor does not speak a 'self'--he impersonates; his social identity is not metaphysical but infinitely manipulable" (Coddon 315). 9. Quotations from Much Ado follow Sheldon P. Zitner's Oxford World's Classics edition (Oxford: Oxford UP,

1993).

10. The OED quotes Much Ado's "skirmish of wit" as one of the earliest uses of the word in this sense, which complicates the circle somewhat. 11. Kaplan gives evidence of the rise in slander legislation after the 1560s and offers several reasons for this, but the main reason seems to have been changes in the law consequent on the state's increased use of defamation as both the means of policing and justifying royal authority and as its chief false accusation, i.e. the easiest way to control potentially dangerous subjects was to arrest them on suspicion of being treacherous slanderers of the state (Kaplan 19-27). I would only add to her argument the suggestion that the state perceived its subjects to be potentially dangerous slanderers of its use of slander because of the emergence of the idea of subversive free-thinking individualism during the same period. 12. Kenneth Gross has made this point in "The Rumor of Hamlet" (60-61). 13. Hamlet's double role as victim and parodist could also be understood as a performance of the double nature of slander, as I argue later in the article. M. Lindsay Kaplan has shown how early modern theatre was under attack from the state for its defamatory impersonation of public figures, and that writers such as Spenser, Jonson and Shakespeare were anxious to defend themselves against this charge by turning the attack against the state itself, since official slander was one of the state's chief modes of social control and propaganda: "attempts to discredit the slanderous aspects of the theatre could rebound against the state by calling into question the ruler's own use of theatrical power to expose and punish" (Kaplan 108). I would suggest that Hamlet, by displaying overtly theatrical power to slander those around him, is indeed calling into question Claudius's abuse of theatrical (slanderous) power to consolidate the illegal new regime.

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14. As Andrew Mousley has argued, "Hamlet's 'experimentalism,' his testing of received truths and accounts of events for himself, and the extension of this questioning to his own sense of self, informs this more complex, less heroic sense of agency" (Mousley 78). 15. Quotations from Hamlet follow G.R. Hibberd's Oxford World's Classics edition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987). 16. Privileging these lines as anachronistic origin of modern subjectivity is, however, extremely dubious, as Maus has shown. A couple of lines from Tottel's Miscellany, quoted in the OED, seem to be feeding into Hamlet's speech here: "Oft craft can cause the man to make a semying show/Of hart with dolour all distreined, where grief did neuer grow" (2nd edition, Clarendon Press, 1989, sense 3 of "seeming"). This would push the inaugural moment back a few decades. Similarly, Barker's line on Hamlet's soliloquies cannot work as proof of Shakespeare as anachronistic originator of the modern subject, since Hamlet's soliloquies owe such a great deal to Chaucer's Troilus--the following speech from Book V of Troilus and Criseyde is a perfect instance of the gap between the subjects of utterance and enunciation, and are clearly sources for Hamlet's intense querying of his own interior hesitancy faced with the obligation to enact revenge, as indeed they are also sources for Hamlet' s split into observed and self- observing selves and "I"s: For ire he quook, so gan his herte gnawe, Whan Diomede on horse gan him dresse, And seyde un-to him-self this ilke sawe, "Allas," quod he, "thus foul a wrecchednesse Why suffre ich it, why nil ich it redresse? Were it not bet at ones for to dye Than ever-more in langour thus to drye? Why nil I make at ones riche and pore To have y-nough to done, er that she go? Why nil I bringe al Troye upon a rore? Why nil I sleen this Diomede also? Why nil I rather with a man or two Stele hir a-way? Why wol I this endure? Why nil I helpen to myn owene cure?" (V, ll. 36-49) For fuller accounts of the long tradition of thinking about the inner and outer man, see Maus's introduction, and also Doran and Craun on slander and sins of speech. 17. William Empson is characteristically acute in understanding that the play is about Hamlet's display of secrecy, as were its sources: "the basic legend about Hamlet was that he [...] successfully kept a secret by displaying he had got one. [...] The basic legend is a dream glorification of both having your cake and eating it, keeping your secret for years, and yet perpetually enjoying boasts about it" (Empson 90-1). Empson's suggestion that this basic legend motivated Shakespeare's desire to reflect on theatricality has informed my argument throughout. 18. This is analogous to Othello's predicament, as expressed by Kenneth Gross. Gross argues that the "new and terrifying inwardness" that emerges when Iago fabricates his slander forces Othello into a sudden perception of the world as "full of secrets" but secrets which have the effect of robbing Othello of his privacy (Gross, "Slander and Scepticism," 825). 19. For slander in the early modern period, see Kaplan, Craun, Martin. With particular emphasis on Shakespeare, see Gross, Kehler, Nelson, Turner, Sexton, Jardine. The leap from political slander to misogyny is the most painful and difficult one Hamlet makes. It is difficult for us to understand the rationale for this move if we do not take it as seriously as the Jacobean revenge dramatists did. The middle term, I believe, is not only a mixture of sex nausea and straightforward sexism, but also must have something to do with the perceived relations between power and sexuality during the period. The perverse rhyme between secret sexual pleasures and abuse of political power is sustained by the fact that power resided in families, of course, with all the attendant misogynies that this entailed-- women may be exerting secret influence in court through their lustful action by exploiting their nightly access to men of power (as when Vindice calls his mother his father's "mid-night secretary" in The Revenger's Tragedy 1.2.142.) The classical record linking cruel dictatorship with debauchery obviously contributed to this sickened and sickening confusion between political and sexual corruption. Lisa Jardine, in Reading Shakespeare Historically, has an important

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argument about public acts of defamation of women in Shakespeare. For two actual cases of defamation of women during the period, see Boose. M. Lindsay Kaplan's The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England is essential reading for the crucial issue of the struggle between state and theatre over the issue of slander in the early modern period. She argues that "Spenser, Jonson and Shakespeare present poet figures who employ accusations of defamation to deligitimate official criticism of their work and to advance a critique of state- sponsored slander" (Kaplan 33).

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