Power, Perlocution, and Performativity in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Marta Belcher

Prof. David Landreth, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the honors program in

Rhetoric

University of California, Berkeley

2012

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This thesis represents my own work

in accordance with College of Letters & Science regulations.

_____________________________ Marta Belcher

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Table of Contents

Affirmation of Independent Work ii

Acknowledgements iv

Introduction 1

Chapters

“Make It So” 2

An Overview of Speech Act Theory

“A Discourse Without Illocutionary Force” 7

Speech Acts in the Theater

“A Speech Act Play” 13

Royal Performatives

“Speaking Daggers” 19

Hamlet’s Language-Power Games

“Say’st Thou So?” 26

Substantiating the Ghost

“The Play’s the Thing 38

Metatheatricality in Hamlet

“All the World’s a Stage” 48

Extending Theatrical Performatives

Works Cited 54

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deep and sincere gratitude to my advisor, Professor David Landreth,

for his guidance and insight; Professor Dr. Sabine Schülting for her advice and encouragement;

and Professor Dale Carrrico for his thought-provoking ideas.

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Introduction

J.L. Austin, the founder of speech act theory, writes in his 1979 Philosophical

Papers, “the word ‘performative’…is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it does not

mean anything very much. But at any rate there is one thing in its favour, it is not a profound

word” (Austin, Urmson, and Warnock 233). Postmodern critics disagree. In particular, post-

structuralist thinkers have appropriated the concepts of performativity and speech act theory to

probe past assumptions and deconstruct preexisting formations of institutions. The word

“performativity,” writes Jacques Derrida, “is now ineffaceable” (Without Alibi 127). In the light

of several decades of critical theory building on Austin’s concepts, Austin’s seminal works, in

retrospect, seem resolutely conservative. In particular, Austin explicitly excludes on-stage

utterances from speech act theory. While some critics have taken up Austin’s distinction to, for

example, define literature as something that begins where speech act theory ends, other more

recent theorists have problematized this separation.

Likewise, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a “speech act play” that consistently blurs the

boundaries between performance and performativity. In Hamlet, the stage is not the place where

speech acts come apart, but rather where speech acts unfold. That is, in play that is unequivocally

preoccupied with speech acts, what happens on the stage is not only a performance – it is itself

performative. In Hamlet, this is the case at several levels of performance, the first of which is

within the play itself. Far from being notable for his “irresolution, passivity, and failure,”

Shakespeare’s eponymous protagonist is actively engaged in a language-power game through

speech acts (Donaldson 30). Though for much of the play Hamlet does not undertake the

physical action necessary to avenge his father’s death, Hamlet is by no means passive. Given the

questionable nature of the Ghost, Hamlet must engage in linguistic battles with not only

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Claudius, but also with the Ghost himself. Meanwhile, the play questions the very nature of

words themselves. In his linguistic struggles with Claudius, Hamlet must come to terms with the

tangibility of words’ effects as metaphorical weapons. Pairing his quintessentially performative

monarchal powers with an insatiable appetite for information, Claudius wages his own battles

almost entirely through words. Recognizing this, Hamlet feeds Claudius words without meaning.

Hamlet’s linguistic struggles with the Ghost are equally active, setting the Ghost’s linguistic

powers in contrast with Claudius’s, as the Ghost is both a potential former king, and is

substantiated by the very words he speaks. At another performative level, Hamlet navigates not

only the possibilities of avenging his father’s death, but also his own metatheatrical position as a

character in a clichéd revenge plot. Ultimately, Hamlet’s self-awareness as a character threatens

to unveil the insidious connection between speech acts and performance, extending

performativity into the world of the audience, which, Shakespeare suggests, is substantiated by

performance as much as the play itself.

“Make It So”

Speech act theory first arises in Austin’s How to Do Things With Words (1962), and is

built around the concept of the performative utterance. Austin sets out to classify the

performative as a particular type of utterance, one “in which to say something is to do

something; or in which by saying or in saying something we are doing something” (12, emphasis

in original). That is, “to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to

describe my doing…or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it” (6, emphasis in original). The

quintessential example of a performative utterance is “I now pronounce you husband and wife”

uttered by a priest during a wedding ceremony. In this example, the marriage comes into being

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without any physical action taking place, simply by virtue of the officiator uttering the words

themselves. With his or her pronouncement, the officiator does not describe the marriage, but

performs it. For Austin, the furthest extension of the performative utterance is the Biblical

description of creation – God says, “let there be light,” and the words themselves bring about

light (Genesis 1:3). A performative utterance creates a state of affairs that did not exist prior to

that utterance simply by virtue of the utterance itself having occurred. While a marriage

ceremony does not immediately enact physical changes in the same manner as creation, it does

alter – and indeed, create – reality through its effects.

A speech act, more broadly, acts like a performative but does not necessarily announce

the act that it is performing within the utterance itself as a performative verb does. That is, a

speech act may claim simply to be describing a state of affairs, but in doing so is still changing

something. A speech act is composed of three facets: the locutionary utterance, the illocutionary

act, and the perlocutionary effect. A locution is the simple utterance of words, at the most basic

level of the bodily movements and physical events that create sound. That locution is also an

illocutionary act if it is a speech act – that is, if in saying, it is doing. Such an illocutionary act

might also have perlocutionary effects; in the case of marriage, for example, the couple may be

entitled to tax breaks or other rights that they did not previously have as unmarried individuals.

Perlocutionary effects can also be viewed from the perspective of their effect on the listener, who

might be – for example – persuaded, convinced, enlightened, advised, inspired, directed, or

commanded by the speaker’s illocutionary act. According to Austin, the distinction between the

three parts can be clarified by defining locution as the act of uttering words, illocution as an act

performed in uttering words, and perlocution as the effects performed by uttering words.

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However, for Austin, “I now pronounce you husband and wife” uttered in a play or on a

playground would not produce the same results as that very same phrase uttered by an ordained

priest during a wedding ceremony. In addition to the verbal procedure associated with speech

acts, illocutions must adhere to what Austin calls “felicitous” circumstances. Rather than

concerning himself with whether a statement is “true or false,” Austin discusses the

circumstances that result in the “‘happy’ functioning of a performative”: that is, a performative’s

felicity or infelicity, or “the doctrine of the things that can be and go wrong” (9, 14, emphasis in

original). Given inappropriate circumstances (such as an improper authority attempting to

perform a wedding), the utterance might be what Austin calls a “misfire,” when “the procedure

which we purport to invoke is disallowed or is botched: and our act (marrying, &c.) is void or

without effect” (16). Austin notes, however, that “‘without effect’ does not [necessarily] mean

‘without consequences, results’” – rather, an act is a misfire if it does not have the intended

effect (17). Another potential obstacle to a felicitous speech act occurs when the speaker does not

intend for the illocution to take place. Austin explains that “the person uttering the [illocution]

should have a certain intention” (11). Without such intention, the utterance is not “void” but

rather “given in bad faith,” which Austin names “abuse” (11). Similarly, Austin classifies uses of

language that are in jest or part of a stage performance as “parasitic” to underscore the

conditions necessary for performatives to operate successfully (22, emphasis in original).

John Searle expands upon Austin’s notion of the performative with his “Classification of

Illocutionary Acts” (1976), which revises Austin’s five “tentative” categories of speech acts

(Austin 60). Searle argues that Austin’s categories “are not classifications of illocutionary acts

but of English illocutionary verbs” (Classification 8). Instead, Searle himself focuses on the

functional syntactical implications of each classification, and divides illocutions into five

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categories: declarations, representatives, directives, commissives, and expressives. As the

paradigmatic performative, a declaration brings about the change that it is itself referring to,

simply by virtue of the success of the declaration (e.g. “you’re fired”). Representatives claim to

describe a state of affairs (e.g. “it is raining”), but in so doing are also doing. Directives are

orders, commands and requests – more broadly extending to utterances such as invitations.

Commissives, at a basic level, are promises and pledges. Finally, expressives include speech acts

such as apologizing, congratulating, thanking, and welcoming; according to Searle, expressives

are distinguished in that the acts are syntactically performed “for” something rather than “that”

something (e.g. “I thank you for” is grammatically correct in English whereas “I thank you that”

is not).

In addition to offering his own revised classification of speech acts, Searle adds to

Austin’s ideas by distinguishing between direct and indirect speech acts as well as intentional

and unintentional speech acts. In “How Performatives Work” (1989), Searle notes that “speech

acts” and “performatives” are not synonymous – rather, the latter is a subset of the former. For

Searle, “performative utterances are not indirect speech acts, in the sense in which an utterance

of ‘can you pass the salt?’ can be an indirect speech act of requesting the hearer to pass the salt”

(How Performatives Work 5). A speech act must be direct – that is, self-referentially enacting the

thing it claims enact – in order to be classified as a “performative” or, in Austin, a “performative

verb” (Austin 149). Furthermore, according to Searle, a performative has intentionality built-in:

“An essential constitutive feature of any illocutionary act is the intention to perform that act”

(How Performatives Work 12). For certain speech acts such as promising or ordering, “the

manifestation of the intention to perform the action, in an appropriate context, is sufficient for

the performance of the action” (How Performatives Work 16). Whether or not the action comes

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to fruition is irrelevant here; if a promise is broken or the performative utterance “I hereby fry an

egg” fails to yield a fried egg, for example, the speech act has still occurred simply because it

was intended to occur. If unsuccessful, such a speech act has simply misfired.

Having made such distinctions, Searle goes on to discuss Austin’s more general linguistic

applications of speech act theory in “Austin on Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts” (1968).

Over the course of the lectures that constitute How to Do Things With Words, Austin moves from

what was “supposed to be a distinction between utterances which are sayings and utterances

which are doings” to the realization that “attempts to make the distinction precise along these

lines only show that it collapses” (Searle Austin on Illocutionary Acts 405). This leads Austin to

a more “general theory of speech acts” (Searle Austin on Illocutionary Acts 405). Austin

ultimately notes that, with Speech Act Theory, “the real fun comes when we begin to apply it to

philosophy” to understand its implications and applications (Austin 169). Though Austin sets out

in the beginning of How to Do Things With Words to describe a certain class of utterances that he

calls performatives, he finds, ultimately, that all utterances are speech acts; every spoken word

alters the very world that it claims to describe. Broadly speaking, “speech act theory” refers to

this generalized, philosophical and revolutionary idea.

Indeed, philosophers have taken up Austin’s speech act theory as the lens through which

to analyze history and society. Jacques Derrida famously reads the Declaration of Independence

using speech act theory, arguing that the “we the people” to which the Declaration refers “does

not exist, before this declaration” (Declarations 10). This “we,” according to Derrida, “gives

birth to itself” in a moment of “fabulous retroactivity,” as if “the signature invents the signer”

(Declarations 10). In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler argues that when a doctor proclaims a

child’s gender upon his or her birth, “the constative (i.e. the descriptive) claim is always to some

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degree performative” (8). The speech act here purports to describe a fact, but in actuality “in that

naming the girl is ‘girled’” (Butler Bodies 11). Butler’s powerful claim, according to Elisabeth

Bronfen, is that “gender is engendered by regulatory forces which coerce us into…performing

subject positions that a given society deems to be appropriate.” That is, in being called a “girl,”

the girl becomes part of a set of expectations and enabling assumptions through which she is

continually re-girled by acting according to the available scripts that confer girlishness (and,

notably, somewhere in this lifelong script will most certainly exist the line “I now pronounce you

man and wife”) (Carrico). Butler’s theory goes beyond gender to include race and class

distinctions, and more broadly to imply that, through performativity, all of us are the subjects of

social construction. This is at once a “constrictive and a liberating discussion of the wounding

constraints imposed upon the subject by virtue of symbolic interpellation,” as it implies a certain

powerlessness in the face of performative institutions while at the same time offering the

potential to shape one’s own identity by understanding the nature of the performative (Bronfen).

These post-structuralist readings extend speech act theory far beyond Austin’s original project of

simply classifying a particular type of utterance that he called the performative. From a post-

structuralist perspective, speech act theory is powerful and practical, in stark contrast with

Austin’s own account. Even as post-structuralists challenge so much of Austin’s conservatism,

however, they, too, have largely ignored the implications of speech act theory in literature and

the theater, deferring to Austin’s original exclusion of the performative from performance.

“A Discourse Without Illocutionary Force”

Austin makes explicit his exclusion of performance and literature from speech act theory,

calling such language “parasitic upon its normal use” (22, emphasis in original). In terms of

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performance, Austin says only that a performative utterance would be “in a peculiar way hollow

or void if said by an actor on the stage” (22, emphasis in original). A staged wedding, for

example, would not result in a marriage if performed as part of a play, even if the actor playing

the priest is actually ordained as a priest outside of the play. For Austin, staged language does

not simply misfire in the way that someone without a skillet misfires when he or she declares, “I

hereby fry an egg.” The felicity conditions of the latter utterance have the potential to be met, if

the utterance does indeed yield a fried egg. Austin implies that speech acts uttered in fictional

circumstances do not even have the potential to be felicitous. For Austin, if an actor says “I

hereby fry an egg” on the stage, and then proceeds to fry an egg, even this cannot be considered

a successful speech act if performed as part of a play. Similarly, while written language can

certainly contain speech acts (e.g. proclamations or marriage certificates), for Austin and Searle,

such written acts are as hollow and void if contained in a work of literature as they might be if

spoken on a stage. Searle justifies this exclusion through his understanding of literature as

necessarily “invoking the horizontal conventions that suspend the normal illocutionary

commitments of the utterances” (Fictional Discourse, 327). In the following decades, language

philosophers take up the precise nature of this suspension.

Drawing on Searle, Richard Ohmann attempts to find a conclusive definition of literature

utilizing speech act theory in his “Speech Acts and the Definition of Literature” (1971). Ohmann

comes to the “unpalatable conclusion” that literature is always “encased in invisible quotation

marks” (13). Ultimately, Ohmann defines literature as “a discourse without illocutionary force”

(13, emphasis in original). Literature, for Ohmann, is “mimetic” in that it “purportedly imitates

(or reports) a series of speech acts, which in fact have no other existence” (14, emphasis in

original). According to Ohmann, a reader of literature is called upon to decipher speech acts

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within the text, but only actually participates in the speech act of “mimesis” (15). This separation

from speech acts is not merely a characteristic of literature for Ohmann – rather, it is the very

thing that defines “literature” itself.

Stanley Fish directly responds to Ohmann in “How to Do Things with Austin and Searle”

(1976), which serves as both a reading of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus through the lens of speech

act theory, and an examination of how such a reading might function. A “speech act reading” of

a work of literature is possible, for Fish, “simply by paying attention to the hero’s illocutionary

behavior and then referring to the full dress accounts of the acts he performs” (1001). However,

while such analysis can produce an understanding of a work of literature, it cannot, for Fish,

produce an understanding of literature in general. Fish argues that Ohmann’s work is a troubling

distortion of speech act theory that “turns the major insight of the Speech Act philosophers on its

head, precisely undoing what they have so carefully done” (1009, 1011). Of utmost importance

to Fish is Austin’s ultimate discovery that all utterances – even the “constatives” that purport to

simply describe a fact – are “doings” in and of themselves (Fish 1011). “The class of exceptions”

that Austin initially set out to identify “thus swallows the supposedly normative class” of

utterances by the end of How to Do Things With Words (Fish 1011). Fish argues that this is the

point Ohmann misses when Ohmann offers his definition of literature in relation to illocutionary

acts (Fish 1011). In response, Fish offers “an enumeration of all the things speech act theory

can’t do” in order to illuminate what it can do (1023, emphasis in original). According to Fish,

the limitations of speech act theory are that it cannot offer insight into the thoughts of the

performer, be elaborated into narrative, reveal what happens after the speech act, or “tell us the

difference between literature and non-literature” (1023). This is not to say, however, that speech

act theory cannot be applied to literature; Fish concludes that “one thing it can do is allow us to

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talk with some precision about a Speech Act play” (1024). A Speech Act play, for Fish, is “about

speech acts, the rules of their performance, the price one pays for obeying those rules, the

impossibility of ignoring or refusing them and still remaining a member of the community”

(1024).

Direct responses to Fish include James Marlow’s “Fish Doing Things With Austin and

Searle” (1976). Marlow expresses concern with speech act theory’s self-proclaimed

transhistoricism, arguing that Fish’s speech act analysis of Coriolanus is fundamentally

entrenched in its own discourse, which “supersedes” the Shakespearian context (Marlow 1603).

Furthermore, Marlow argues that a speech act analysis precludes the possibility “that the play be

allowed to function to its fullest extent as a tragic event” (1603). For Marlow, reading through

speech act theory is deeply problematic – it disregards the texture that is produced through an

analysis of a character’s separation from, rather than interaction with, others; it commits the

reader to one view of the nature of language while disallowing the suspension between

alternatives; and it disassociates the text from its own discourse (1603-1604). In Marlow’s

words, “with one swipe of the performative, the humanity of hermits and heroes, in whatever

discipline or epoch…is discountenanced” (1604).

Critical theorists, however, have continued to find a use for speech act theory in literature

– particularly in the realm of theater, and more specifically in Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s

Universe of Discourse (1984), Keir Elam advocates approaching a play’s dialogue “as a network

of direct verbal deeds” through which “we may begin to come to terms with the dynamic

discourse structure of the drama in its moment-by-moment unfolding” (6-7). While Elam agrees

with Michael Issacharoff that “the stage, the area of fictional utterance, is a frame that

disengages all speech acts,” Elam finds a “more fruitful concern with what comes actually to be

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done with words in a given play” (Issacharoff 9, Elam Shakespeare 7, emphasis in original).

Rather than considering “static characters represented by their diction,” Elam is interested in

“interpersonal forces responsible for carrying forward the narrative dynamic” (Shakespeare 7).

Elam takes up the notion of the language-game (Sprachspiel) put forward in Ludwig

Wittgenstein’s Brown Book (1935) and Philosophical Investigations (1953). For Wittgenstein,

the term “game” is used in a special sense to indicate language that is subject to its own rules and

behavioral context (Elam Shakespeare 10-11). For Elam, Wittgenstein’s language game adds

levels of heterogeneity to Austin’s speech act theory that are particularly useful in Elam’s own

analysis of “Shakespeare’s linguistic games” (Shakespeare 17). Yet, Elam’s analysis is

deliberately constrained by a limited view of what speech act theory can do. He explains this

view in his “Language in the Theater” (1977): “What converts objects, people and action into

signs on stage – is the removal of the performance from praxis. This may seem self-evident and

commonplace, but upon this simple act of severance rests the whole power of theatrical semiosis,

indeed its very existence” (Elam Language 144).

That the theater involves a suspension of speech act theory’s illocutionary force is taken

as a given in Elam, but his own etymological analysis of theatrical language reveals that theatrics

and speech acts are inherently intertwined. Elam points out that “drama” derives from the Greek

dran, meaning “to do,” and “pragmatics” derives from the Greek “pragma,” meaning “to act,”

which itself comes from prattein, meaning “to do” (Shakespeare 177). In English, too, “acting”

and “performing” have dual connotations, meaning both “doing” in a broad sense and “making

believe” in a theatrical sense (Estill). Indeed, Elam alludes to a potentially more complex view of

speech acts in the theater, ultimately arguing that “the main information conveyed by the

[language] game to the audience is the playing itself” (Shakespeare 19). If, as Austin argues,

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even the “constatives” that purport to simply convey information are “doings” in and of

themselves, Elam is perhaps alluding to the possibility that speech acts in the theater – albeit here

only metatheatrically – might indeed actually stick (Austin 138).

To this end, David Saltz in The Reality of Doing: Real Speech Acts in the Theatre argues

against “the virtually unanimous conclusion of speech act theorists…that actors do not and

cannot actually perform their characters’ speech acts” (63). Saltz rejects the notion that fiction

strips speech acts of illocutionary force and, inversely, that the suspension of speech acts’

illocutionary force defines and constitutes fiction (Real Speech Acts 67). To the contrary, Saltz

presents a “game model of dramatic action, wherein actors do not merely imitate actions as they

would be performed off stage, but really do commit the illocutionary acts within the theatrical

context” (How to Do Things on Stage 63). According to Saltz, the point at which the

illocutionary force of an utterance breaks down on stage is the moment of causation. Saltz

considers the example of a speech act that is a request. Theater establishes a “deviant causal

chain” whereby a request is made and the hearer might grant the request. However, on stage the

cause of the granting the request is not the request itself; rather, the reason the request is granted

is that the performance has been scripted and rehearsed (Real Speech Acts 68). For Saltz, this

point is crucial, because it emphasizes that “the fictional context of a stage performance does not

in and of itself strip a performer’s utterances of illocutionary force” (Real Speech Acts 69). For

Saltz, then, staged speech acts function like any other illocutionary act, with the sole exception

being that “their conditions of satisfaction are determined with respect to borrowed

Intentionality” (Real Speech Acts 41). Saltz argues that this not enough to deem all staged speech

acts “hollow” (Austin 22, emphasis in original). Indeed, it is possible that a request onstage will

be denied, and Saltz argues that the ultimate test of whether a command functions as a speech act

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is whether it can be unsuccessful (Real Speech Acts 73). Saltz considers the example of flicking a

light switch onstage: under normal circumstances, the flicking would cause the physical events

that would lead to the light turning on. However, in the case of a staged light switch, the actor

would flick the light switch, signaling the lighting director to turn the light on, in a moment that

transforms what would be offstage a simple, brute force, physical event into a speech act. This is

the basis for Saltz’s argument that “far from being suspended on stage as Searle suggests,

illocutionary force is often extended” (Real Speech Acts 74, emphasis in original).

Saltz’s analysis brings staged speech acts into the realm of metatheatricality. What turns a

written text into a series of speech acts, for Saltz, is the existence of a “flesh-and-blood human

being – the actor at a specific place and time in the real world” (Real Speech Acts 69). For Saltz,

denying the real illocutionary force of these speech acts is to “suppress the radically

transformative potential of theatrical performance” (Real Speech Acts 77). That performative

potential actually derives from theater’s ability to “explore and expose – and not merely to assert

or signify” the nature of what Saltz calls the “games” that structure our own lives as the audience

and “demonstrate ways we might change the rules” (Real Speech Acts 77). That is to say, Saltz’s

game model takes Wittgenstein’s Sprachspiel and extends it to the realm of reality. When an

actor engages in a language-power game with another character on stage, in Saltz’s model, that

language-power game extends to the audience as well.

“A Speech Act Play”

Whether that transformative potential is actually realized in a given play, then, is

dependent on the way in which that play engages with speech acts. What Saltz describes as the

fullest expression of theatrical performativity is what Fish means when he argues that Coriolanus

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is a “speech act play.” Fish specifies that a speech act play is not simply full of speech acts (since

“by definition this is true of any play”) but rather that it is “about what the theory is about:

language and its power: the power to make the world rather than mirror it, to bring about states

of affairs rather than report them, to constitute institutions rather than (or as well as) serve them”

(1023). For Hillaire Kallendorf, the same could be said of Hamlet, in which performative

language is “one of the primary themes of the work” (69). Susanne Wofford notes that

Shakespeare’s plays in general “are filled with examples of moments when characters either lose

or claim for the first time the capacity to perform certain speech acts,” demonstrating a general

preoccupation with performativity running throughout Shakespeare’s works (4). Indeed, the

quintessential performative power is that of a king, and more than twenty-five kings appear in

Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays, including at least twelve eponymous royals. Hamlet is

particularly preoccupied with the illocutionary powers of royalty, from the question of the

legitimacy of speech acts performed by a king’s Ghost, to the commands given by a king who is

potentially a murderer, to the performatives and performances of Hamlet himself.

As the ultimate performative figure and “the main voice of Denmark,” the king’s words

automatically become law, by definition altering the world to conform to his utterances (1.3.33).

The entire social and legal structure surrounding the monarchy is one in which all performers in

the script ensure that the king’s illocutions are always successful in that they have the

perlocutionary effects that he intends. In Shakespeare’s introduction of Claudius in 1.2, the entire

court engages in an elaborate performance of courtly behavior determined by the system of

social mores and operating around the central figure of the king. In this scene, Claudius

compares Polonius to a “hand…instrumental to the mouth” of Denmark, underscoring the

complicity of a king’s subjects in legitimating his power by enacting his commands (1.2.50).

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Claudius fully “understands the structures that undergird his performative utterances,” and uses

them to maintain strict control over the subjects who, he realizes, must remain complicit in order

to ensure that his own perlocutions have the intended effects – that is, in order to retain

legitimate power (deBoer). One of Claudius’s first speech acts in the play is to grant Laertes

“leave and favour to return to France,” exercising control over the very movements of the

members of his court as if they were pieces in a game of chess (1.2.54). In stark contrast, only a

few lines later Claudius denies Hamlet’s request for leave to return to school, both exercising his

power to control Hamlet’s body through words, and protecting that very power by keeping

Hamlet in close physical proximity so that he can continue to control Hamlet’s movements

(1.2.119-23). Of this, Hamlet, too, is very much aware. Despite his displeasure at being “too

much i’ the sun” as far as his new stepfather is concerned, Hamlet recognizes his subjecthood,

which leads him to lament, “but break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue” (1.2.70, 1.2.163).

Hamlet is not literally silenced in this moment; no one actually holds his tongue. Indeed, he is

often vocal about his “scorn against Claudius, Gertrude and the court in general throughout the

early acts,” if not blatantly rude (Danner 43). Hamlet is, however, silenced in the sense that his

illocutions do not have the perlocutionary effects that he intends. With Claudius as king,

Hamlet’s illocutions misfire, despite his royal status. Linguistically speaking, Claudius is

infallible, and Hamlet’s only option is to “obey” (1.2.124). Though the social script that confers

power upon Claudius and relegates Hamlet to subjecthood is not predeterminitive, straying too

far from it has very real consequences. Claudius is able to literally alter reality to conform to his

utterances, which Hamlet underscores when he points to the metaphorically physical effects of

Claudius’s words on his broken heart and halted tongue.

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For Hamlet, Claudius’s abuse of language is partly what makes Claudius so abhorrent. In

1.2, Hamlet has not yet encountered the Ghost, and his only stated reason for feeling “less than

kind” toward Claudius is his marriage to Gertrude (1.2.68, 1.2.155-57). The perlocutionary

effects of this wedding are precisely what endow Claudius with the ultimate illocutionary powers

of the king. For Hamlet, Claudius has abused the quintessential performative of the wedding

itself, thereby rendering “marriage vows / As false as dicers’ oaths” (3.4.53-54) and undermining

the entire institution. For Claudius – as for Austin – the truth or falsehood of language is

irrelevant; what matters for Claudius, rather, are the tangible perlocutionary effects of words.

Elsinore, under the rule of Claudius, is an information machine that runs on words in the same

way that the human body runs on food (Landreth). Claudius places value on words – like objects

– according to their function and effects, in contrast with Hamlet’s willingness to soliloquize for

the sake of postulation, without a predetermined perlocutionary end. Claudius treats pieces of

information as if they were physical objects that he adds to a physical collection. Gertrude, who

according to James Black is functionally “interchangeable” with Claudius, demands from the

court “more matter, with less art” (42, 2.2.106). Claudius demands words that constitute a reality

– that is, substantial, useful news and information – just as he demands that the words that he

speaks be instantly transformed into reality. Yet Claudius himself uses the “art” of rhetoric

almost constantly (2.2.106). If words were coins, Claudius would never find that “his purse is

empty” or that his “golden words are spent,” unlike his vapid flunky Osric (5.2.110). As king, he

is linguistically and literally the wealthiest man in Denmark, as his collection of information

never ceases, and his rhetoric never fails.

In response to Claudius’s mounting arsenal of words, Hamlet deprives Claudius of the

information that Claudius so desperately seeks, feeding Claudius instead a stream of meaningless

  17  

words constituting nothing more than useless static (Landreth). In “Hamlet: A Document of

Madness,” Alison Findlay argues that madness is “verbally constructed,” and words are

themselves mad in that they “carry a plurality of meanings, an excess of interpretations” (189).

When Polonius, as one of Claudius’s self-proclaimed information-gathering agents, asks Hamlet

what he is reading, Hamlet’s reply is, “words, words, words” (2.2.198-200). In this moment,

several things related to “verbally constructed” madness occur. First, Hamlet points to the

tangibility of the words themselves on the page, drawing attention to the physicality of the very

words that Polonius hopes to take back to Claudius. Second, through his wit, Hamlet refuses to

give Polonius any real “words” at all. If, as Findlay argues, “madness produces and is produced

by a fragmentation of discourse,” in uttering these “words” in this context, Hamlet points to both

the cause and result of his “madness” (189). That is, Hamlet must become mad in order to evade

Claudius’s word-gathering machine, and he expresses this madness through words themselves.

At the same time that Hamlet points to the tangibility of words, he also uses this moment

to point out the inherent disconnect between words and the world. Hamlet says that though he

“most powerfully and potently” believes the words that he is reading, he “hold[s] it not honest to

have it thus set down” (2.2.204-207). In these lines, Hamlet points out that though words can be

tangible in terms of their effects on the world and their presence on paper in ink, words are still

fundamentally disconnected from what they signify. Even if the words Hamlet reads are “true,”

having it set down in words automatically creates a disconnect between the words and the reality

they claim to describe. Just as Polonius advises Reynaldo that a “bait of falsehood takes this carp

of truth,” Hamlet realizes that words – however true, false, tangible, or intangible they are to start

with – can indeed have very tangible perlocutionary effects (2.1.69). These effects are certainly

tangible – perhaps as tangible as catching a carp – but the tangibility of the perlocutionary effects

  18  

does not imply that the words themselves are tangible, or truthful, to start with. Similarly, when

Hamlet says, “there is nothing / either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” he emphasizes that

the world in its infinite subjectivity cannot be “truthfully” described using words, but all words

do affect reality by acting upon the perception of the listeners (2.2.232-33). Hamlet’s implied

distinction between the “honesty” of words and the “truth” of their physical effects is important

to speech act theory. Austin deliberately refers to speech acts as “felicitous” or “happy” rather

than “true or false” (9). In speech acts theory, a speech act occurs with every utterance. “I

promise” is still the speech act of promising regardless of whether the promise is kept or even

given in good faith. Under such circumstances, the speech act can misfire, but even misfires have

recognizable effects on the world. For both Hamlet and Austin, reality is constituted by words

that are themselves only “real” because of the reality they create.

As such, Hamlet refuses to utter any words that could have the perlocutionary effect of

providing Claudius the occasion to act against him. Claudius, unable to understand Hamlet as he

tries to extract information, snaps “I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet; these words / are not

mine” (3.2.60). Claudius phrases this as if he expects that words will be presented to him in the

form of a physical gift. However, because Hamlet’s answer is nonsense, Claudius cannot “have”

Hamlet’s words. They cannot be collected and put into Claudius’s arsenal of information.

Hamlet’s response is that the words are neither Claudius’s “nor [Hamlet’s] now” – as if in

putting them out into the world, he loses control of them (3.2.61). Hamlet agrees in this moment

that words are tangible, but by giving out only static, Hamlet ensures that Claudius cannot garner

anything useful from Hamlet. Hamlet uses this tactic to not only undermine Claudius’s

information-gathering, but also to infuriate Claudius. Addressing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,

who operate as information-gathering agents for Claudius, Hamlet says that though there is

  19  

“excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak” (3.2.267). That is, though

Claudius can prevent Hamlet’s words from having the perlocutionary effects he desires – thereby

silencing Hamlet – what Claudius cannot do is force Hamlet to speak in a manner benefiting

Claudius’s aims. Though the performative powers of the king may silence him, Hamlet cannot be

played like an instrument. Instead, Hamlet can simply refuse to emit the sounds Claudius desires,

feeding Claudius instead only meaningless static that Claudius cannot “have.”

“Speaking Daggers”

What could be perceived as Hamlet’s passivity in the first several acts is, then, actually

an active engagement in a series of illocutionary language-power games with Claudius, which

serves to bide time while Hamlet attempts to “confirm the Ghost’s authenticity as well as the

accuracy of its story” (Danner 37). In saying that he “will speak daggers…but use none” against

Gertrude, Hamlet juxtaposes words and action, finding the connection between the two to be the

possibility of violence (3.2.259). Indeed, Hamlet does use words as weapons in lieu of physical

violence, in the same way that Claudius uses words against him. For Hamlet, words can certainly

bring about physical violence as a perlocutionary effect, but more importantly, words can inflict

harm in and of themselves through “symbolic violence,” a term coined by Pierre Bourdieu. The

linguistic distinction between these two types of violence lies in the difference between

perlocution and illocution. While “off with his head” might bring about physical violence as a

perlocutionary effect, the violence of the performative has a time lag – something that Jacques

Derrida observes in Limited Inc. This time lag occurs between the utterance itself and the

realization of the perlocutionary effect. An act of symbolic violence, on the other hand, need not

have a time lag, because the violence occurs in uttering the words themselves (not because of the

  20  

utterance, as with physical violence). As Judith Butler argues in Excitable Speech, “illocutionary

speech acts produce effects without any lapse of time…the saying itself is the doing…they are

one another simultaneously” (17). This instantaneity renders symbolic violence infinitely more

reliable in its affectivity than perlocutionary physical violence. The time lag of the latter means

that its “performative force, that is, to make something happen by way of the words...is destined

to err and wander, even though it may sometimes, by a happy accident, reach the

destination...intended for it” (Miller 33). That is, an utterance intended to bring about physical

violence may or may not bring about harm. Like all performative utterances, such an illocution

(e.g. “off with his head”) would certainly have perlocutionary effects – but those effects need not

be the effects intended. In the time lag, the performative force might wander and manifest in an

entirely unintended but equally tangible perlocutionary effect. Symbolic violence, on the other

hand, occurs at the very moment of the illocution itself; it is built into the utterance.

It is precisely for this reason that Hamlet and Claudius are at a stalemate in terms of

perlocutionary physical violence. Claudius is at an obvious perlocutionary advantage given his

quintessentially performative position as king, but he is constrained in his ability to physically

harm or kill Hamlet through his mere commands – at least in Denmark – because of Hamlet’s

royal status. However, Claudius can and does control Hamlet’s physical movements to serve his

own ends – for example, by denying Hamlet’s request to return to school in Wittenberg, sending

Hamlet to England, and often calling for Hamlet’s presence. In these cases, Claudius utilizes

illocutionary commands, so that it is not just that Claudius’s perlocutionary effects often do

match his intentions, but also that the command itself does a kind of symbolic violence to

Hamlet at the very moment of its utterance (regardless of what perlocutions follow). Hamlet, in

turn, cannot use his royal status to inflict state-sanctioned violence on Claudius, but he is keenly

  21  

aware that his words are still powerful weapons of symbolic violence. Hamlet thus preoccupies

himself with language that can inflict symbolic violence on Claudius immediately – what Butler

calls “injurious” speech (Excitable Speech 2). At the same time, Hamlet attempts to find ways to

physically harm Claudius through perlocutionary effects, using only words.

For Bruce Danner, Hamlet’s is able to speak daggers “only by sacrificing the…action that

he ardently craves” (32). That is, for Danner, utilizing illocutionary symbolic violence

undermines Hamlet’s ultimate goal by satisfying his desire to harm Claudius without requiring

physical force. Danner argues that Hamlet, “obligated to revenge his father’s death, fantasizes

instead about applying the brute authority of virtuous action to his speech” (42). To the contrary,

however, while Hamlet does situate “violence utterly within the structure and effect of

language,” speaking daggers does not render him passive, nor does it preclude actual violence

from taking place (Danner 43). By using words as weapons in a kind of linguistic symbolic

violence, Hamlet is very much an active player in the language-power games that take place

throughout the play (Danner 32). Hamlet does not need to inflict bloodshed in order to “give [his

words] seals” (3.2.390). Through speech acts, Hamlet’s words can inflict symbolic violence that

indeed physically manipulates the world around him “without ever risking real violence”

(Danner 42). Indeed, Gertrude confirms the success of Hamlet’s illocutionary attack, describing

her conversation with Hamlet in terms of a physical assault: “these words like daggers enter in

mine ears” (3.4.105). Gertrude points to the “proverbial metaphor of violent speech as ‘sharp-

tongued’ or ‘cutting,’” but, importantly, she uses a noun (“daggers”) rather than an adjective

(“cutting”) – just moments after Hamlet uses the same language (Danner 41). Hamlet’s words,

then, do not simply resemble something that might point to or describe violence; they perform

violence in the same way a dagger does.

  22  

Danner points out that this moment of doing violence to Gertrude’s ear is “a curious

sublimation of the revenge play’s original cause –that is, Claudius’s murder of the sleeping King

Hamlet,” which was ostensibly committed by pouring poison into the king’s ear (43). The image

of speech doing physical violence to the ear appears multiple times throughout the play: Hamlet

says he will not allow Horatio to “do [Hamlet’s] ear that violence” of hearing Horatio’s self-

deprecating humor, the Ghost warns Hamlet that “the whole ear of Denmark / is…rankly

abused” by Claudius, and Hamlet laments that the players “cleave the general ear with horrid

speech” even without an emotional attachment to the subject matter (1.2.377, 1.5.36-38,

2.2.562). The ear is particularly vulnerable in Hamlet. As an orifice, it is a site of entrance,

though not one often associated with ingesting poison outside of Shakespeare. What the ear does

absorb is language. This exposure to words is what puts the ear in peril throughout the play,

cleaving it, abusing it, and doing violence to it. King Hamlet’s murder is the literalization of the

violence that language is capable of committing. The poison enters the ear in the same manner

that words might, doing something to the recipient. In Hamlet, as in speech act theory, saying is

doing. For words to be weapon-like in the way Claudius utilizes them is for that utilization to be

as potent as poison. The ear, as the site of vulnerability, becomes also a site of preoccupation for

those who are vulnerable to Claudius’s verbal poison, and those who attempt to undermine his

linguistic power.

Indeed, King Hamlet’s murder remains the sole instance of physical violence in the plot

for three acts – and the murder itself happens before the action of the play. The possibility space

of Hamlet is, for Danner, “a world where all things convey their value through the lens of

representation, [thus] even the sword must rely on the intermediary of the pen” (62). This is most

apparent in Hamlet’s first resolution to finally enact his revenge, “And now I’ll do’t,” which

  23  

results in an illocutionary misfire (3.3.81). For Danner, this is an example of Hamlet “conflating

the violence he is called on to perform with the language by which he names it” (62). That is, it

is easy enough for Hamlet to declare his act of revenge in this moment, but the illocution itself is

not what Austin calls a performative verb. For Danner, to say “I kill you” is not necessarily to

kill in the same way that to say “I marry you” is to marry someone. Yet, Danner fails to take into

account the perlocutionary effects of Hamlet’s utterance only a few lines later in the following

scene, when Hamlet kills Polonius, whom Hamlet has mistaken for Claudius. Perhaps, then, the

speech act “And now I’ll do’t” is not a misfire, but rather a moment of Hamlet constituting his

identity, in the poststructuralist sense, as an active avenger through this speech act. If the sword

relies on the intermediary of words, as Danner suggests, it is precisely because words so often

shape, constitute, and substantiate physical action in the play. In fact, the very reason Hamlet’s

illocutionary act initially misfires is the potential perlocutionary effects of language. In this

moment, words quite literally give Hamlet the opportunity to take action, as Claudius is speaking

in prayer, making him vulnerable to a physical assault. Yet Hamlet fears that enacting his

revenge on Claudius while “he is praying” will have the effect that Claudius will be absolved of

guilt and eligible to enter “heaven” (3.3.80-81). Although Hamlet would be “reveng’d” by killing

Claudius, even in prayer, Hamlet is wary that Claudius may be doing something with his own

words that would have a powerful effect, just as Hamlet’s own resolution to act ultimately leads

to very tangible perlocutionary results, albeit upon Polonius (3.3.81).

Yet, just as Hamlet’s proclamation of action misfires in this moment, so too does

Claudius’s prayer, thus offering the counterpoint to Hamlet’s internal struggle about the potential

perlocutionary effects of prayer. Claudius confesses that while his “words fly up, [his] thoughts

remain below,” going on to say that “words without thoughts never to heaven go” (3.3.105-6).

  24  

This is, for deBoer, “a perfect example of an infelicity or unhappy performative act” (16). Here,

Claudius’s intention to pray “is defeated…by his particular understanding of what convention

requires in a successful prayer act” (deBoer 16). More than that, Claudius points out that prayer

is a particular kind of speech act, distinct from others in its requirements for success. For the

intended perlocutionary effect of expressing grief to occur, for example, grief need not be felt,

only performed – something that preoccupies Hamlet upon witnessing the players’ ability to

conjure emotion without cause (2.2.383-89). Unlike grief, however, Claudius points out that

praying is a special case, as the intended audience is an omniscient God and oneself – both of

whom know the intentions of the speaker. A successful prayer, therefore, must be backed by

genuine intentions. Yet, at the same time, the performance of prayer – kneeling with hands

pressed together – also has an outside audience that is unable to confirm the genuineness of the

act. Claudius’s speech act, then, need not be felicitous in order for it to have very real

perlocutionary effects – even though Claudius thinks it has had no effect at all. In this particular

moment, Claudius’s prayer has the perlocutionary effect of convincing Hamlet to refrain from

taking his revenge. Speech acts spare Claudius in this scene for two reasons: first, because

Claudius’s performance is sufficient to make Hamlet believe him to be performing a genuine

illocution, and second, because Hamlet is aware that words uttered in prayer might actually have

very tangible perlocutionary effects. The play’s action is indeed negotiated with words acting as

an intermediary, as Danner asserts, but if a “conflation” exists, it is only because of the inherent

interconnectedness of action and words in the play (Danner 62).

The moment of Claudius’s prayer is particularly tense given the context of the recurring

themes of suicide and dead monarchs across Shakespeare’s plays. Suicide occurs thirteen times

in Shakespeare’s thirty-seven works, and at least half of Shakespeare’s twenty-five kings perish

  25  

before the final curtain (Langley). Hamlet opens with a dead king already in play, and the central

plot point revolves around the imminent death of the current king. Indeed, the plot cannot be

resolved (or, at least, the Ghost cannot rest) until Claudius dies. In the prayer scene, the entire

plot is at stake on multiple levels: first and most obviously, the scene raises the question of

whether Hamlet can move beyond words to bring about Claudius’s death and resolve the play.

However, there is another question at stake here, and indeed another way to resolve the

play. If Claudius were to commit suicide out of guilt, this would at once affirm the Ghost’s story

for Hamlet and resolve the plot. If Hamlet were able to use his words to drive Claudius to

suicide, he would be in the ideal position that Danner describes – that is, truly acting through

words. However, such action requires not illocutionary symbolic violence but perlocutionary

effects. Hamlet cannot kill Claudius at the moment of his utterance (though he can and does

enact symbolic violence upon him), but he can use these moments of symbolic violence to affect

Claudius, and hope that this will lead to the intended perlocutionary effect of driving Claudius to

suicide. However, the time lag implicit in perlocution means that enacting the physical violence

always falls to Claudius. Claudius’s monologue emphasizes the possibility of a guilt that may

drive him to self-slaughter, at which point Hamlet enters. At this moment, Hamlet could kill

Claudius, but if Claudius indeed is in such a “wretched state,” with a “bosom black as death,”

such physical violence on Hamlet’s part may actually be unnecessary (3.3.70). Indeed, it is

precisely this perlocutionary effect through speech acts rather than physical acts that Hamlet

seeks through the play-within-the-play. Hamlet states his hope that the “cunning of the scene”

will render Claudius “struck so to the soul that presently / [he will proclaim his] malefactions”

(2.2.593-94). For Claudius to buckle under his guilt and even just proclaim his deed would

presumably be a death-sentence, and thus tantamount to suicide. Yet, Claudius seems to

  26  

undermine this potential plot resolution at the end of the prayer scene with his rhyming couplet

by bringing into doubt the sincerity of his own guilt. Hamlet’s ideal perlocutionary effect of

bringing about physical violence through words thus seems destined to wander and dissolve in

Derrida’s time lag.

“Say’st Thou So?”

Hamlet, then, is a prince caught between a living king and a dead king. Though the Ghost

is dead, linguistically speaking he still very much affects the living world, and indeed refuses to

leave Hamlet alone just as Claudius refuses his own self-slaughter. Claudius inflicts symbolic

violence on Hamlet by controlling both Hamlet’s physical movements and his familial status in

1.2. Hamlet appears to feel just as violated by Claudius’s insistence on calling Hamlet “my son”

as he is by Claudius’s refusal to allow Hamlet to leave the “cheer and comfort of [his] eye,”

rendering Hamlet at once an object of surveillance and a manipulable piece in Claudius’s game

(1.2.64, 1.2.319). In the same way, the Ghost, too, inflicts symbolic violence on Hamlet by

controlling Hamlet’s physical movements and redefining Hamlet’s familial relations, which in

turn reshapes Hamlet’s own identity. By insisting that he is Hamlet’s “father’s spirit” –

regardless of whether this is true – the Ghost does something to Hamlet at the very moment of

this illocution. The full title of the play, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, makes it

clear that Hamlet is defined by his monarchical status, which comes from his familial line. With

family ties being so essential to the structure of the monarchy, redefining a family does symbolic

violence not only to each member of that family, but also to the structure of the monarchy itself.

It makes sense, then, that Hamlet is so disturbed by Claudius’s marriage to his mother, since it at

once presumably upsets the continuity of the monarchical line and turns Hamlet into his uncle’s

son. The Ghost’s presence, however, is equally upsetting. Hamlet’s father has not simply

  27  

(apparently) returned from the dead; he has returned as a spirit (and, indeed, as a cheap special

effect), displacing Hamlet’s Herculean image of his father. At the same time that the Ghost is not

quite Hamlet’s father, he insists that Hamlet respect and obey him as if he were still the king. In

the same way, Claudius (who is also not quite Hamlet’s father) insists on Hamlet’s obedience

and respect because of his patriarchal status as the head of Denmark and the head of Hamlet’s

family. Furthermore, the Ghost has a very specific set of physical actions that he requires of

Hamlet in order to enact vengeance, and the Ghost goes beyond physical manipulation in his

attempt to control Hamlet’s emotions and self-identity. The Ghost is clear about his intentions to

give Hamlet no choice but “to revenge, when [Hamlet] shalt hear” his story, rendering Hamlet an

agent of vengeance in a clichéd plot (1.5.13). Hamlet thus emerges with two fathers and two

kings – neither one completely legitimate – both of whom inflict symbolic violence on Hamlet

through their speech acts. In response, Hamlet engages in a language-power game as much with

the Ghost as with Claudius.

From the first line of the play, the Ghost’s interactions with the sentinels and later Hamlet

represent the first moves in this language-power game, introducing the stakes of speaking with

successful illocutionary force. Though “performativity has often been discussed as a theme” for

Hamlet, according to Hilaire Kallendorf, “few have interpreted the Ghost in light of this same

performativity theme – an essential element of the play as a whole” (69, 80). Kallendorf asserts

that the “diabolical linguistic register…expands the performative potential of the ghost,” making

him an ideal subject for a performative reading of the play (69). Critics like Neil Rhodes have

agreed, noting that the Ghost’s “scenes constitute an exchange of imperatives or, in the terms of

speech act theory, an exchange of performative utterances: speak/revenge/remember” (Rhodes

32). Notably, Rhodes points to an exchange of performatives; Hamlet is not simply a passive

  28  

recipient of the Ghost’s imperatives, but rather an active player in a language-power game with

the Ghost, just as he engages actively with Claudius through his speech acts.

Indeed, Hamlet and the Ghost are adversaries in this language-power game, in a manner

similar to the adversarial, pseudo-paternal relationship of Hamlet and Claudius. Hamlet and the

Ghost are set against each other, first, because Hamlet cannot “make up [his mind] unequivocally

about the nature of the ghost” (Black 39). Indeed, Horatio expresses concerns that the ghost

might “tempt [Hamlet] toward the flood… / Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff” (1.4.69-70).

This uncertainty makes Hamlet reluctant to behave according to a familial relationship secured

by paternal bonds. Second, as Nigel Alexander writes, “the Ghost exists to create Hamlet’s

problems, not to solve them” (31). The Ghost wants something from Hamlet. Hamlet does not

simply hear the Ghost’s story and leap into action; rather, “a promise [is] extracted from him”

(Black 35). James Black argues that in the first few scenes, a “pattern of social and familial

reflexes is set: deference to authority and experience, obedience to parents” – yet at the same

time, Shakespeare also emphasizes the difference between the older generation that “expects

compliance and exacts promises” and the younger generation, which struggles with these

commands (35). For the Ghost to exercise parental authority over Hamlet, then, is not simply to

evoke the Fifth Commandment as interpreted by St. Paul – “children, obey your parents”

(Ephesians VI: 1-3 qtd. Black 35). Given the questionable nature of the Ghost’s parental

authority in the first place, such an exercise of power must draw from linguistic positioning

rather than automatic authority. Thus, the Ghost engages Hamlet in a language-power game in

order to achieve his own ends. As Rhodes puts it, “Hamlet’s father may be dead, but he can still

do things with words” (32).

  29  

The first move in this language-power game involves no words at all. The play opens

with the Ghost refusing to speak to the guards, though he has chosen to appear before them.

Through this refusal, the Ghost sets the terms for his interactions with Hamlet, placing himself in

the position of power by being able to withhold his speech even when Hamlet and the guards

demand it of him. Presumably, the Ghost is able to appear wherever – and to whomever – he

chooses, since he appears to Hamlet in 3.4 but Gertrude sees “nothing at all” (3.4.150). Yet,

despite the fact that in the opening scene the Ghost has a message for Hamlet, he silently parades

in front of the guards rather than going directly to Hamlet (1.5.161). The Ghost ignites the

conflict of the play, but does not even speak in the opening scene. Instead, Shakespeare

introduces not only the plot, but also the set of illocutionary acts that will serve as the primary

negotiation of the play’s conflicts. The linguistic battles in Hamlet start with the guards’

illocutionary failure to illicit the perlocutionary effect of a simple locution from the Ghost.

Despite their use of a variety of tactics – such as their plea for the Ghost to speak “if thou hast

any sound, or use of voice… / If there be any good thing to be done… / If thou art privy to thy

country’s fate” – the guards are unsuccessful in having any effect on the Ghost at all (1.1.145-

51). Indeed, as Hamlet, Horatio, and the officers wait for the Ghost, what they get instead is “[a]

flourish of trumpets, and ordnance shot off within” interrupting the scene (1.4.10, emphasis in

original). This is “the sound of the king’s carousal,” as the king “[k]eeps wassail” (Burke 38,

1.4.13). That is, Claudius has revived the custom of firing a cannon every time the king drinks –

which, for Hamlet, is “petty and vainglorious,” and “a custom / More honour’d in the breach

than the observance” (Black 35, 1.4.21-22). What is so remarkable and “very strange” about the

Ghost, then, is not necessarily its existence, but rather that “answer [makes] it none” (1.2.232,

  30  

1.2.226). In Elsinore, where a cannon sounds every time Claudius drinks, such silence is

unimaginably odd behavior.

The Ghost’s silence arguably problematizes the notion that he is substantiated by his

words, since indeed the Ghost has a profound effect on the guards without uttering even a sound.

In this sense, however, the Ghost’s silence is itself a speech act. In the post-structuralist sense,

even inanimate objects make speech acts. The question in these cases just becomes who exactly

is “speaking.” It is the answer to this question that affirms the agency (and existence) of the

Ghost. It is presumably the Ghost’s own intentions that bring him to the guards in 1.1, and this

act at once implies an agency and an effect. Indeed, the Ghost’s encounter with the guards in the

opening scene has powerful perlocutionary effects, ensuring that the Ghost starts with the upper

hand in his language-power game with Hamlet. By withholding his own speech, refusing to go to

Hamlet directly, and making Hamlet seek him out instead, the Ghost puts his own illocutions in a

more powerful starting position. Because the Ghost cannot kill Claudius himself, he must

manipulate Hamlet into doing it for him. To do so, he must ensure that his illocutionary

commands have the perlocutionary effects he intends – that is, that Hamlet ultimately does kill

Claudius. To this end, the Ghost puts himself in the position of illocutionary power – and ensures

that his utterances are valued – by refusing to speak except on his own terms. This refusal

constitutes both a speech act and a power move despite the silence of the performance.

Hamlet, though, proves a worthy adversary in the language-power game that the Ghost

himself initiates. In line with Horatio’s prediction that “This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to

[Hamlet],” the Ghost’s interactions with Hamlet differ completely from the Ghost’s interactions

with the guards (1.1.191). Hamlet enters the exchange with the obvious advantage that he, unlike

the Ghost, is alive and therefore has the agency to carry out the Ghost’s wishes. However, the

  31  

Ghost’s obvious advantage is that he appears to be Hamlet’s beloved father – and though Hamlet

is immediately on his guard because the Ghost “comest in such a questionable shape,” he is still

immediately willing to “call [the Ghost] Hamlet, / King, father, royal Dane” (1.4.49-51). The

Ghost utilizes his position as the image of Hamlet’s father as leverage to get Hamlet to avenge

him; the line “If thou didst ever thy dear father love” mirrors Claudius’s tactic in 4.7 to spur

Hamlet’s foil, Laertes, to avenge his own father, Polonius (1.5.29). Assuming the Ghost actually

is Hamlet’s father and the former king, the Ghost would have previously had the unquestioned

performative power of a sovereign. In his present state, however, he must engage in linguistic

games in order to gain the upper hand.

Unlike the Ghost, Hamlet is still alive and still a prince, and thus demonstrates an

expectation that the Ghost will obey Hamlet’s own royal commands. It is his frustration that the

Ghost “will not speak” that prompts Hamlet’s decision to “follow it” (1.4.71). In this moment,

the Ghost is presumably gesturing to Hamlet, leading Hamlet to say, “Still am I call’d” (1.4.95).

The Ghost’s commands are successful even in their wordlessness. This too could be said to be

part of the Ghost’s game. In order to follow the Ghost, Hamlet must assert his own illocutionary

powers over the sentinels, commanding them to “unhand” him (1.4.95). However, because the

servants believe that “’tis not fit thus to obey him,” Hamlet’s command misfires and he has to

threaten them with physical violence, declaring, “I’ll make a Ghost of him that lets me” (1.4.99,

1.4.96). Though Hamlet, as prince, feels entitled to the royal powers of performativity, in this

moment his intended perlocution fails. This in itself is a move in the Ghost’s language-power

game. By leading Hamlet away from the sentinels, which prompts Hamlet’s guards to disobey

him, the Ghost ensures (intentionally or not) that Hamlet experiences an unsuccessful illocution,

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thereby reminding Hamlet that Hamlet does not have the royal performative capabilities that a

king (such as the Ghost’s former self) might.

Yet Hamlet ultimately sets his own terms for speaking with Ghost. At this point in the

scene, “the internal stage directions tell us that the ghost walks away” (Kallendorf 75). Hamlet

turns the encounter in the moment when he says, “speak; I’ll go no further” (1.5.3). This move is

risky, because, as Reginald Scot writes, “[n]o man is lord ouer a spirit, to reteine a spirit at his

pleasure” (516). The Ghost has not spoken up to this point, and Hamlet’s refusal to continue

following him opens up the possibility that the Ghost could simply leave. However, Hamlet’s

illocution has the intended perlocutionary effect, and the Ghost yields. In this moment, he

successfully commands the person who could very well be the former King of Denmark, and his

father. This move is the fulfillment of what Kenneth Burke argues the audience has been

anticipating: “Program: a speech from Hamlet. Hamlet must confront the ghost…the flood-gates

are unloosed” (39). Just as the Ghost begins the language-power game with a refusal to speak,

Hamlet’s own opening move is a refusal (to continue following the Ghost). This refusal is both

powerful and successful, which underscores the importance of Hamlet’s other major abstention

in his parallel language-power game with Claudius. Just as Hamlet is very much an active player

by refusing to follow the Ghost, Hamlet’s strategy of declining to provide Claudius the words he

wants is very much combative. These opening moves emphasize the idea that not speaking can

still very much be a speech act, and, similarly, not doing can be a powerful action. Rather than

rendering Hamlet passive, these evasions constitute Hamlet’s action against Claudius and the

Ghost.

Though by speaking, the Ghost relents to Hamlet’s command, the Ghost’s reply (his first

utterance) is equally forceful: “Mark me” (1.5.4). This demand refers to itself; the Ghost

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commands Hamlet to take his commands seriously. The language-power game continues when

Hamlet, in return, commands the Ghost, “Speak; I am bound to hear” (1.5.12). In saying that he

is bound to hear, Hamlet asserts that his illocutionary command has already set into motion a

chain of events that is “bound” to lead to the successful perlocutionary effect that the Ghost will

“speak” (1.5.12). The Ghost’s reply is equally forceful: “So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt

hear” (1.5.13). The Ghost implies that just as Hamlet has commanded him (and indeed, bound

him) to speak, so too will the Ghost bind Hamlet to action with the Ghost’s own illocution – this

very illocution that Hamlet demanded in the first place. With his own command, Hamlet actively

“binds” the Ghost, who in return “binds” Hamlet with that very same metaphorical rope.

The Ghost expects, then, that his story will enact a symbolic violence on Hamlet

powerful enough to ensure the fulfillment of his own intended perlocutionary effects. However,

he also utilizes a refusal to tell these stories as a kind of symbolic violence. In refusing to “tell

the secrets of [his] prison-house,” the Ghost also asserts that he “could a tale unfold whose

lightest word / Would harrow up [Hamlet’s] soul, [and] freeze [his] young blood” (1.5.20-22).

This statement at once underscores the Ghost’s unique position as a supernatural being, and

serves as a kind of linguistic threat. The Ghost implies that the perlocutionary effects of

describing his own existence would be so powerful as to have not only the physical (albeit

metaphorical) effect of freezing Hamlet’s blood, but also metaphysical effects on Hamlet’s soul

(1.5.22). The Ghost is using occultatio in this moment by emphasizing the very thing that he

claims not to discuss. He does not even need to utter the words themselves in order to make his

power-move – just telling Hamlet of the potential effects of such a “tale” is the equivalent of

claiming to be in possession of an unlimited linguistic arsenal (1.5.21). In this moment, the

Ghost also takes Hamlet’s implied advantage – that Hamlet is indeed alive and able to perform

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physical acts that the Ghost presumably cannot – and turning it so that Hamlet’s aliveness

actually functions as a disadvantage. The Ghost says that “this eternal blazon must not be / To

ears of flesh and blood,” which reminds Hamlet that in being alive, Hamlet is made of vulnerable

flesh and blood, as opposed to the Ghost, who is immortal and infallible (1.5.27-28).

Kallendorf’s interpretation is that this passage is an indirect “boast of the demonic powers to

which [the Ghost] has access,” which further emphasizes for Hamlet the vulnerability of his own

mortal state (75).

For many critics, Hamlet does agree to undertake the Ghost’s charge when Hamlet

promises that the Ghost’s “commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of

[his] brain” (1.5.110-11). Black argues that this moment is “the climax to an act which has

presented a series of obedient gestures, the most profound of which has been Hamlet’s solemn

undertaking to perform an act of revenge” (38). To the contrary, however, it is not simply that

“Hamlet’s hatred of cynicism and betrayal… [makes it] an easy task for the Ghost to indenture

his son to a bond” (Black 36). The Ghost scene is not simply a series of obedient gestures

performed by a son for his dead father; Hamlet is very much engaging in the same performative

moves as the ghost, including during what Black calls the “climax” of the scene (38). Reading

closely, what Hamlet is referring to when he says, “I have sworn’t” is to “remember” the Ghost

and his command – not necessarily to follow through with it (1.5.119-20). On the other hand,

Hamlet does ask the Ghost for the details of the murder so that he “may sweep to [his] revenge,”

and in the following scenes he seems to seems to think that he has agreed to kill Claudius. It is

not that Hamlet is averse to this course of action – indeed, the Ghost’s story seems to have a

particularly trenchant effect on Hamlet. However, Hamlet’s utterances in this scene do not

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constitute a vow to act in revenge – but rather simply to remember the Ghost and his tale

(1.5.37).

Hamlet actually emphasizes the felicity conditions necessary for an oath to constitute a

successful performative utterance in this same scene. Horatio and Marcellus explicitly state that

they “will not” make known what they have seen, and further assert, “In faith, / My lord, not I”

(1.5.163-66). For them, this is enough to constitute a promise, demonstrated by their statement

that they “have sworn…already” (1.5.168). Hamlet, however, insists that they follow a particular

ritual in order to render the illocutionary act of vowing successful. Hamlet must “propose the

oath,” and the others must “swear by [his] sword” in order for the vow to hold (1.5.74-76). This

particular oath emphasizes the tangibility that is intertwined with language, as Hamlet is adamant

that a sword – a physical object – must be part of the swearing ritual. This literalizes the

tangibility of the perlocutionary effects of the oath, as well as the tangible results of breaking it.

Perhaps in saying “Indeed, upon my sword, indeed,” Hamlet points to the act – that is, the deed –

that occurs through swearing on a tangible object (1.5.169). The implication is that these

conditions – and not the conditions under which Hamlet speaks to the Ghost – constitute what

Hamlet considers to be a binding promise.

Hamlet, then, does not promise to obey the Ghost’s command – but even so, the Ghost’s

illocutionary act of commanding has very real perlocutionary effects on Hamlet. Hamlet says

that the Ghost’s “commandment” – as opposed to the story of the murder itself – will live on in

his mind (1.5.110). Here, Hamlet implies that the story alone without the Ghost’s accompanying

illocutionary command would not necessarily be enough to leave a lasting imprint. Hamlet

follows this up by “writing,” which literalizes the idea of his brain as a “book and volume” – as

if he truly creates a blank tablet “unmix’d with baser matter” on which to inscribe his now-only

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thought (1.5.111-12, emphasis in original). In this moment, Shakespeare specifies with stage

directions that Hamlet actually writes (presumably on a tablet), literalizing the tangibility of

words (1.5.120). In promising to remember the Ghost, Hamlet actually does something – in the

sense of illocutionary action, but also literally through a physical act.

If the effects of language are as tangible as the words Hamlet writes down, it is not

surprising for Hamlet to question the very existence of a Ghost who, on the one hand, is unable

to affect the world through physical acts such as writing, but on the other hand, is certainly able

to have measurable effects on the world through speech acts. When Hamlet asks, “art thou there,

true-penny?” he is doubting the Ghost’s very existence – but immediately before proposing this

question of being, Hamlet asks, “say’st thou so?” (1.5.171). This illustrates the connection that

exists, for Hamlet, between the Ghost’s physicality and its ability to speak. Indeed, with the

nature of the Ghost’s existence in doubt, one of the first questions that Hamlet asks Horatio when

trying to navigate the concept of his dead father’s return is, “Did you not speak to it?” – as if the

answer to this question could corroborate what Horatio claims to have seen (1.2.224). The

Ghost’s existence, however, is only in doubt until it speaks, at which point the question shifts

from whether the Ghost is “but [a] fantasy” to whether the Ghost is “the devil [in] a pleasing

shape” (1.1.30, 2.2.436). Once the Ghost utters words, the question is no longer whether the

Ghost even exists, but rather what kind of Ghost it is. The Ghost, before it speaks, could simply

be an “illusion,” since it has not had any measurable, tangible effects on the physical world

beyond those that a visible illusion might have on onlookers (1.1.145). However, as soon as the

Ghost engages in a language-power game with Hamlet, the Ghost mobilizes illocutionary forces

that affect the very world that the Ghost claims to have left.

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The reason that Hamlet comes to accept the Ghost’s existence is that, just as one must

exist in order to speak words, so too do words themselves have the ability to substantiate the very

existence of the speaker. This is underscored by Gertrude’s assertion that, “words be made of

breath, / And breath of life” (3.4.218-19). Gertrude’s understanding of words is, like Hamlet’s,

very literal. For Gertrude, as for Hamlet, words can be measured by the effects they have on the

physical world through their mere utterance. However, it is the physical effects of a simple

locution, rather than the perlocutionary effects of an illocution, that preoccupy Gertrude in this

moment: the physical movement of air with breath, as opposed to words that are tangible through

their effects on the listener. The idea that words are physically observable – as breath or on paper

– introduces the concept that words are indeed things that must always be produced by

something real. To think of words as simple noises or marks, even taking into account their

effects, is incomplete. Words are in themselves objects, they have effects, and, indeed, they

always have a source. Something tangible must actively create words, and therefore the very

existence of the words themselves implies the reality of the speaker.

Furthermore, if, as Gertrude asserts, “breath [is made] of life,” the implication is that

without life, one cannot breathe and therefore cannot speak; the existence of words actually

implies the existence of the speaker (3.4.219). This presents problems when coping with a dead

but animate Ghost, and is what Danner refers to as “a curious and unresolved doubleness, a state

neither truly ‘real’ in the material sense nor mere ‘fantasy’” (Danner 43). The question Hamlet

faces is how something dead can speak, if speaking so profoundly affects the world of the living.

The answer may be found in the nature of words themselves. Because words are, for Hamlet,

substantial, they themselves can actually substantiate the speaker. Perhaps it is not simply that

breath is made of life, but also that life is made of breath – the same breath that Gertrude

  38  

connects with the tangibility of words. This explains why, once the Ghost has spoken, Hamlet

can no longer deny its existence, since he can no longer deny the Ghost’s ability to have tangible,

substantive perlocutionary effects on the living world.

While this certainly does not render the Ghost “alive,” it does make him an agent in the

living world. However, though the Ghost’s affect is undeniable for Hamlet in this moment,

Hamlet still questions how it is that this insubstantial thing has come to have a substantial effect

on the world – and to that end, Hamlet turns to the nature of performance itself. Indeed, it is the

substance of physical words that makes up the play itself, and the breath of the actors that brings

the performance to life – or, rather, brings it to the space of the living world. Like the Ghost,

actors have substantive effects on the world through speech acts, and in doing so they also

substantiate themselves as characters. The indeterminate nature of the Ghost, then, becomes

something of a metaphor for the indeterminate nature of the stage.

“The Play’s the Thing”

Thus, while Danner argues that “Hamlet employs theatricality as a vehicle for clarifying

the Ghost’s indeterminate nature,” Hamlet actually turns to metatheatricality. Hamlet notably

draws attention to the “fellow in the cellarage,” whom he addresses as “old mole,” presumably

pointing out the special effect of an actor under the stage (in the cellarage), yelling “swear”

(1.5.172, 1.5.184, Landreth). Shakespeare even specifies multiple times that the sound of the

Ghost yelling “swear” must come from “Beneath” (1.5.170). Considering the specificity of this

stage direction and the selectivity with which Shakespeare uses stage directions at all, it is clear

that exactly where the sound comes from is vitally important; that is, if the sound were to come

from anywhere but “beneath,” Hamlet’s moment of metatheatricality would not function. When

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Hamlet says, “Come on – you hear this fellow in the cellarage,” the “you” he is addressing is not

only Horatio and the guards, but also the audience – pulling them out of the imaginary setting of

the play and into the reality of sitting (or standing) in a theater (1.5.172). In asking the audience

if it can hear the special effect, Hamlet is comparing his own experience to that of an actor

listening to another actor yell “swear” from under the stage. He is also pointing out that the

audience can indeed hear the words – and something real is creating them. Later in the play,

Gertrude can neither “see / nor…hear” the Ghost, though Hamlet can (3.4.150-51). In this scene

in the third act, the ghost is also visible to the audience, just as the audience can hear the Ghost

yell “swear” in act one. Hamlet is pointing out that the Ghost is indeed real, if only because the

Ghost is really just an actor on a stage. For Danner, “Hamlet employs theatricality as a vehicle

for clarifying the Ghost’s indeterminate nature,” but in so doing, he succeeds “in exposing the

theater as similarly dubious” (37).

Through metatheatricality, Hamlet draws a parallel between his own relationship to the

Ghost and the audience’s relationship to the performance. Just as Hamlet questions the reality of

the Ghost standing before him, so too does the audience, prompted by Hamlet’s

metatheatricality, question the reality of the play. In both cases, the existence of the object in

question relies on the performative power of words. In the same way that speech acts substantiate

the Ghost, words, too, make up the substance of the play. While the physical space and bodies of

the actors exist in front of the audience, what Elam calls the “founding principle of dramatic

[fiction]” is that it “is not so much narrated as conversed” (15). That is, “the plot of the

play…[unfolds] as a series of direct speech acts” (Elam 15). This is true in Hamlet through

spoken language on stage, and the written lines of the play, but is complicated by the dumb

show. The dumb show, too, is a dramatic fiction, but it is arguably wordless. Hamlet himself

  40  

reconciles this when he complains that “the groundlings… / are capable of nothing but

inexplicable dumb-shows and noise,” (3.2.11-12). For a dumb show to be explicable, it, too,

must “suit the action to the word” (3.2.16). That is, a dumb show is as much substantiated by

speech acts as a spoken play, even if words are not spoken but implied. The Ghost exists for

Hamlet once the Ghost is substantiated by the perlocutionary effects of speech acts. In parallel,

the play itself exists as a series of speech acts that have effects on hearers both within the play

and in the audience. These effects, arising from a play that explicitly claims its own illocutionary

nature, are the perlocutionary results of the speech acts that substantiate the play – rendering the

play, too, a part of reality.

Indeed, Hamlet is a “pervasively metatheatrical character” who appears to be removed

from the very performance in which he is engaged. The metatheatricality of the play is

complicated by the possibility that another play also named Hamlet appeared on the London

stage as early as 1589. This work is sometimes attributed to Thomas Kyd, and was dubbed “Ur-

Hamlet” by Frederick Samuel Boas, utilizing the German prefix “ur,” which means “original”

(Owens). The Ur-Hamlet – if it indeed existed and was not simply an early version of

Shakespeare’s work – has been lost, but references to it appear in multiple historical documents,

including the diary of Thomas Lodge, who describes a “Ghost which cried so miserably at the

theatre…Hamlet, revenge!” (Jenkins 83). This suggests that the Ur-Hamlet was a revenge

tragedy with a similar premise to Shakespeare’s version, opening the possibility that

Shakespeare’s work was a remake of the earlier play.

This same plotline appears in Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, The Murder of Gonzago,

which requires minimal changes to be an exact reenactment of the murder scene described by the

Ghost: “He poisons him i’ the garden for ’s estate…[and] the murderer gets the love of

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Gonzago’s wife” (3.2.200). The theatrical device of the dumb-show is so old-fashioned that

Ophelia does not recognize it, demonstrated by her realization, “belike this show imports the

argument of the play” (3.2.89, Landreth). The “stilted rhymes” of the play’s text are entirely

unlike the sophisticated poetry of the Hecuba speech that Hamlet so admires (Landreth). Hamlet

mocks both The Murder of Gonzago and revenge tragedy in general when he cites a line from a

“third-rate revenge play” entitled The True Tragedy of Richard III: “‘the croaking raven doth

bellow for revenge,’” taken from a speech which has the word “revenge’” fifteen times in sixteen

lines. (Gottschalk 150, 3.2.193). Summarizing David Landreth’s argument, it is apparent that in

this moment, Hamlet finds not only The Murder of Gonzago, but also revenge tragedy in general,

clichéd.

As a student and a scholar, Hamlet is particularly well versed in the theater. This is

apparent through his familiarity with the Players, whom he welcomes as “good friends,” as well

as his citations of speeches such as “Æneas’ tale to Dido” (2.2.66, 2.2.303). As someone who

gives constant direction to the players – asking them to “speak the speech…as I pronounced it to

/ you” – Hamlet considers himself more sophisticated as an audience than The Murder of

Gonzago is as a performance (3.2.1-2, Landreth). At the same time, he realizes that this is the

very same revenge that he himself has been called upon to perform – a task Hamlet laments in

the line, “what an ass am I” (2.2.417). Hamlet has seen this plot before – the revenge tragedy that

rehashes tired clichés about murder and revenge (Landreth). In addition to mocking it, he says

that watching this kind of bad acting – running around yelling “revenge” – “offends [him] to the

soul,” and he certainly does not want to participate in his own performance of it (3.2.6). This is

the kind of acting that Laertes engages in when he makes his “vows, to the blackest devil” that

he will “be reveng’d / Most thoroughly for [his] father” (4.5.129-34). By opening up the

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potential of metatheatricality, Shakespeare implies that Hamlet knows that he is too good for the

play in which he is performing – indeed, the play in which he is the eponymous protagonist.

Hamlet’s greatest “affliction, passion, hell itself” is being a character in a cliché revenge play

that, despite his self-awareness, he nonetheless cannot escape (4.5.159, Landreth).

Hamlet’s interactions with the Ghost in this moment of metatheatricality underscore his

disappointment with not only the revenge tragedy plot, but also his father’s return as a “cheap

special effect” (Landreth). Hamlet does not need the Ghost in order to to see his father; he tells

Horatio that he sees his father “in [his] mind’s eye” before he ever meets the Ghost (1.2.192,

Landreth). In Hamlet’s memory, his father is superhuman, evidenced by his comparison of his

father to “Hercules” (1.2.157). Here, Danner finds it ironic that “the ghostly image of historical

antiquity becomes far truer than reality” – referring both to the reality of the “false and

insubstantial” contenders to the Danish throne, and the reality of the ghost’s return (46). When

the Ghost commands Hamlet to “remember [him],” it is redundant. Hamlet not only remembered

the ghost before this comment, but he also remembered his father better before the appearance of

the Ghost (1.5.99, Landreth). This remembrance, for Hamlet, substantiated his father in a way

that was actually more real than the Ghost standing before him. Mieke Bal argues in Travelling

Concepts that “memory itself is, by definition, a re-enactment, and in that sense, performative”

(176). Just as speech acts substantiate the Ghost, the performativity of memory substantiates

King Hamlet in Hamlet’s mind. It is through this performativity of remembrance that Hamlet is

able to prefer the memory of the dead King to the King’s return to the living world.

Hamlet’s disappointment with his father’s return as a cheap special effect in a clichéd

revenge play is apparent first when he bitterly breaks the effect by drawing attention to the actor

yelling “swear” under the stage, and second, in the disrespect with which he addresses the Ghost:

  43  

“well said, old mole! canst work i’ the earth so fast?” which Horatio finds “wondrous strange”

(1.5.84, 1.5.186). This metatheatricality undermines the premise upon which the theater relies:

that the audience leaves their sense of reality behind. This is particularly true of the Renaissance,

when plays were performed in broad daylight with relatively few props, and the audience only

knew the time and setting of a given scene because of the tone that the actors set (Landreth).

Indeed, Hamlet denies the audience one of the few special effects available in the play – the actor

who plays the Ghost yelling “swear” from the cellarage. Hamlet’s thus points to the inadequacy

not only of the tired revenge tragedy plot and its cliché characters, but also the stage itself –

which he nevertheless cannot escape.

Grappling with his theatrical entrapment, Hamlet attempts to use the stage as a vehicle

for escaping his own revenge plot. Critics have picked up on “comparisons between Hamlet’s

increased distraction from his revenge and the metadramatic elements of Shakespeare’s art,”

which points to the uses of metadrama as an escape from Hamlet’s task (Danner 29). Yet

metadrama serves not only as a mental escape for Hamlet, but also as a stand-in for his revenge

“without risking real violence” (Danner 42). In the play-within-a-play, Hamlet represents the

murderer Lucianus as “nephew to the king” rather than brother to the king, thus conflating

Claudius’s murder of King Hamlet with “the revenge that the prince intends to exact for it”

(3.2.188, Danner 32). Hamlet relies “on the stage as a tool of his revenge” not only by using it to

“catch the conscience of the King,” but also to stand in for the action required of him by the

revenge tragedy plot (Danner 37, 2.2.601). Danner argues that through the play-within-a-play,

Hamlet’s “notion of the theater as a world…develops into a conception of theater as the world, a

mirror of historical event, a lens for determining guilt or innocence, and, ultimately, an agent for

conducting worldly action” (Danner 37). For Danner, this is “perilous” for Hamlet, since “this

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instance of symbolic violence satisfies his desire to harm Claudius” without requiring him to

“give [his words] seals” (Danner 32, 3.2.390). Yet Danner assumes it is “action that [Hamlet so

ardently craves” and sacrifices by “speak[ing] daggers” rather than using them (Danner 32).

Perhaps what Hamlet actually craves is an escape from his own endless performances – both

within the revenge tragedy plot, and as a performer of “conventional social roles”: “‘Hamlet the

mourning son,’ ‘Hamlet the student,’ ‘Hamlet the heir to the throne,’ [and] even ‘Hamlet the

avenger’” (deBoer 15).

Hamlet thus problematizes not only stage performance, but also the roles that are put on

during everyday experience. According to Danner, “Hamlet’s harping remarks on his mother’s

use of ‘seems’ in 1.2 typify how the problems of representation and theatricality are linked to his

tragic paralysis” (30). In this moment, Hamlet is deeply offended by his mother’s implication

that his grief is a performance. When he says of his grief, “Nay it is; I know not ‘seems,’”

Hamlet expresses his frustration that “customary suits of solemn black” and a “river in the eye”

are sufficient to express grief, when they are simply “actions that a man might play” (1.2.80-84).

In contrast, Hamlet says that he himself has “that within which passeth show,” implying that his

genuine experience of grief is entirely distinguishable from an experience that merely “seems” to

be grief-stricken (1.2.80). At the same time, Hamlet recognizes that though performance cannot

in itself substantiate genuine grief, genuine grief is not in itself enough “to have [the]

illocutionary force of having mourned in an exteriorized sense” (deBoer 8). That is, experiencing

grief internally without also putting on the external “forms, modes, [and] shows of grief” is

insufficient to have perlocutionary effects on the outside world (1.2.86). In this moment, Hamlet

points to the paradox of performativity – that authenticity without performance is insufficient to

affect the world, but inversely, a performance without authenticity is indeed enough to enact

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perlocutionary effects. Performatives (and performance itself) need not be genuine in order to

affect reality. This is precisely why Austin entirely disregards the concept of truth in speech acts

and focuses instead on “happy” performatives (Austin 9). The tangibility of an utterance’s effects

does not imply that the illocution is in any way “true,” but it does render the illocution

substantive. However, though successful illocutions need not be “true,” they do ultimately affect

the world through perlocutionary effects. It is the performative space, then, and not any kind of

“truth,” that creates the space of reality.

Hamlet underscores the hollowness of performativity in his soliloquy about the players,

who are able to produce all the effects of grief for a public audience while Hamlet, who has a

real cause for grief, cannot replicate the performance. Hamlet finds it “monstrous that this player

here, / But in a fiction… / Could force his soul so to his own conceit… / and all for nothing!”

(2.2.383-89). Hamlet harps on the performance that he imagines the player would give “had he

the motive” for revenge that Hamlet has (2.2.393). Hamlet believes that such a display would

actually have physical effects on the audience, such as to “cleave the general ear with horrid

speech,” and “make mad the guilty and appall the free, / Confound the ignorant, and amaze

indeed / The very faculties of eyes and ears” (2.2.395-97). Here, the image of the ear returns,

bringing with it the idea of the tangibility of perlocution. Notably, Hamlet does not lament that

the players, given a genuine cause, would actually act, but rather that they would speak in such a

way as to have measurable perlocutionary effects. Hamlet imagines that the perlocutionary

effects of combining true passion with a truly convincing performance would be physical and,

potentially, dangerous. While Hamlet recognizes that the performance of grief alone is enough to

achieve perlocutionary effects, he fantasizes that the performance’s effectiveness would increase

exponentially if given a “cue for passion” (2.2.393). Just as Hamlet conflates staged murder with

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real revenge in the play-within-a-play, here Hamlet once again “situate[s] violence utterly within

the structure and effect of language” (Danner 43).

This is what Danner calls an “essentialist, almost naïve conception of theatrical

performance (29). However, Hamlet is aware that enacting his revenge through words alone is

merely a fantasy, given the nature of the cliché revenge plot in which he finds himself. Knowing

that it is possible to have tangible effects on the world through performance without passion, but

not vice versa, Hamlet is unsure how to proceed. While he has genuine passion for his cause, the

specifics of the performance elude him. Talking is not enough, as Hamlet suggests when he

laments, that he “[m]ust, like a whore, unpack [his] heart with words, / And fall a-cursing”

(2.2.419-20). To have intended perlocutionary effects on the world, it is not enough to

soliloquize without an audience. Hamlet finds himself stuck “a-cursing” without action – that is,

failing to perform the perlocutionary effects of revenge that his words can only have in fantasy

(2.2.420).

Still, The Murder of Gonzago performs a symbolic violence, having very real effects on

Claudius, and thus serves as Hamlet’s first vengeful action. By intertwining action and

performance, Shakespeare literalizes Hamlet’s switch from passive passion to performative

effectiveness. Hamlet hopes that this literal performance – in addition to performing an

illocutionary symbolic violence – will have the perlocutionary effect of revealing Claudius’s

guilt, as he has “heard that guilty creatures sitting in a play… / presently have claimed their

malefactions” (2.2.423-27). Indeed, it is clear that speech itself is enough to have the effect of

drawing out Claudius’s guilty conscience. Polonius does so accidentally, when he says, “with

devotion’s visage / And pious action we do sugar o'er / The devil himself” (3.1.55-57). This

leads to Claudius’s aside: “how smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience” (3.1.59). Even

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speech not intended to catch Claudius’s conscience does have that symbolically violent effect.

As Claudius describes it, Polonius’s speech has effects that feel as physical as a “lash.” For

Claudius, “painted word[s]” are comparable to the “plastering art” of a whore’s makeup in that

they cover up Claudius’s “deed” (3.1.60-62). If words are all that Claudius uses to cover his

deed, then, words are perhaps sufficient also to uncover it. While it is not enough for Hamlet to

use only words to avenge his father, it is at least enough for him to use performance to force

Claudius to reveal his guilt. Through performance, Hamlet hopes to catch Claudius’s conscience,

thereby breaking Claudius’s performative front. Indeed, despite Hamlet’s derision of The Murder

of Gonzago, the play is still effective. If only momentarily, Hamlet does “catch the conscience of

the king,” and that small crack in Claudius’s “plaster” is all Hamlet needs to confirm the ghost’s

nature and story (1.2.440, 3.1.60). The play-within-a-play puts Claudius in the position of having

illocution turned against him, forcing Claudius to act and giving Hamlet the occasion to finally

react.

By performing this symbolic violence against Claudius, Hamlet puts himself in a position

of knowing – having enough information to move forward in the revenge tragedy plot. That is,

Hamlet’s many wandering speech acts finally manifest in his intended perlocutionary effect – to

affect Claudius, which simultaneously confirms Claudius’s guilt and forces Claudius to act. This

is not quite Hamlet’s linguistic bliss as described by Danner; Hamlet ultimately must employ

physical violence to resolve his revenge plot. For Hamlet, words do not quite do that much. The

physical violence, however, is delayed for at least three acts by the many instances of symbolic

violence that stand in its place. The question becomes whether the physical violence in the end is

a perlocutionary effect of the various performances of illocutionary violence throughout the play,

or whether those illocutionary acts might have forestalled the tragic ending – were it not

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“providence” (5.2.202). While symbolic violence has physical perlocutionary effects and is thus

tantamount to a kind of physical violence, Hamlet’s final words – “the rest is silence” – make it

clear that the reverse is not necessarily the case (5.2.323). That is, while words do violence,

violence does not do words. In fact, physical violence serves as a kind of silencing. Physical

violence does not simply replace words in the same way words often stand in for violence, but

rather renders them unspeakable and unheard. In the process, physical violence erases the speech

acts that would otherwise wander in a chaotic and complex world – that world that so fascinates

Hamlet and his audiences. One might imagine that it is no surprise that the Ur-Hamlet, in its

insistence on violence rather than speech, is lost to us today. Meanwhile, Shakespeare’s Hamlet,

who fights his battles through speech acts, has come to stand for the essence of “culture.”

“All the World’s a Stage”

Given this preoccupation with speech acts, then, it is arguable that Hamlet’s climax is the

moment at which the perlocutionary effects of the play-within-a-play elicit a physical response

from Claudius, just as “any enactment also appeals affectively to its audience [and] prompts a

visceral response” (Bronfen). Thus, just as the play-within-a-play has physical effects on

Claudius, so too, Shakespeare implies, does Hamlet have real, tangible effects on its own

audience. While Austin classifies theatrical language as “non-serious” and “parasitic,” excepting

it from speech act theory, Wofford sees this exclusion as “problematic” and “ideologically

constrained,” particularly when taking into account “the kind of language at issue in a

Shakespearean play” (4). Hamlet, like Fish’s Coriolanus, is a Speech Act Play, and what Austin,

Searle, and Ohmann fail to take into account is the “extent to which performance itself takes on

performative power” (Wofford 5). Saltz argues that far from being suspended on stage, speech

  49  

acts are actually extended. Saltz’s argument relies on, first, the normal functioning of speech acts

on stage with the caveat that the utterances are pre-rehearsed and have borrowed intentionality,

and second, the actors’ movements and words cuing the crew to change the lighting or engage

special effects. These are two ways that performance is performative among those on stage (and

behind the scenes), but the argument that speech acts do indeed function in the theater can be

furthered using the same shift that Burke advocates in “Psychology and Form”: focusing “not

[on] the psychology of the hero, but [rather on] the psychology of the audience” (40).

In the same way that post-structuralist thinkers argue that all language acts

performatively upon the listener and the speaker – indeed, shaping culture and identity – the

action of the theater lies as much in shaping the audience as in shaping the plot. For Bronfen,

every play “is a kind of letter; a text addressed privately to each of us” that is at the same time

enacted publicly. To say that “representations engender their own cultural effect and their own

effects” is to extend the post-structuralist argument onto the stage (Bronfen). It is to recognize

that all utterances, and perhaps especially those that are part of the theater, make a claim that has

an effect on the listener. Such a claim is rarely explicitly part of the utterance; in fact, these

claims draw their power from their invisibility. To say, for example, “I now pronounce you man

and wife,” is not simply to perform a marriage. This utterance, regardless of whether it is

successful, also includes an assortment of assumptions – what Stephen Toulmin calls “warrants”

in The Uses of Argument – about the institution of marriage, the participants in the wedding, and

even those witnessing the event. Even (or especially) utterances that claim to merely describe a

state of affairs actually serve to performatively create reality. Through the assumptions

underlying our every utterance and every act, we together substantiate a social script, a culture,

each other, and ourselves.

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The theater, then, is not exempt from speech act theory – it is, as Saltz argues, a space

where the performative is actually extended. Going to the theater is often spoken of as a

“cultural” experience, where audience members are rendered “cultured” by their mere presence.

To say that members of the audience are “cultured,” however, need not imply an inherent or

preexisting state of culturedness. Rather, the theater cultures its observers, who become both

passive recipients of and active participants in the culture that the theater imparts. For Wofford,

“the audience is the addressee of the ‘serious’ second-order performative at issue in the case of

ritual or of theater” (5). The “second-order performative” indeed refers to illocutions that occur

on stage, but is concerned not with how these speech acts affect the performers or the

performance, but rather their perlocutionary effects on the audience. Bronfen describes the

experience of the audience at a play: “we wake up from having entered into a fictional world to

take note that we have been sharing [in]…this poignant cultural moment.” On one hand, the

theater engenders its own cultural effects on the audience through “an act that makes its

claim…on us, on our present and our future,” and “once a performative rhetorics is involved, the

reader can no longer withdraw from the claim this text makes on her or him” (Bronfen). That is,

the audience absorbs the culture that the theater creates. On the other hand, however, each

individual “becomes a participant” in the culture that the theater performs (Bronfen). This

participation in the substantiation of culture operates in the same way as Foucault’s model of

institutional power, in which each individual is complicit in the power exercised upon him or

her. A nebulous formation of “society” does not simply diffuse culture to spectators at a show,

though every act of staging “embod[ies] certain ideas, values, or retrieved knowledge” that the

audience certainly experiences (Bronfen). However, by receiving, understanding, accepting,

applauding, or rejecting the assumptions and claims of a theatrical performance, the audience

  51  

participates in this cultural formation, “even while the act of cultural commemoration transforms

us as well” (Bronfen). For Bronfen, “the performative lies in the affective force of this two-way

transmission.”

Hamlet as a play and Hamlet as a character are both deeply preoccupied with this stage-

to-audience transmission. The play-within-a-play is designed to affect Claudius by evoking,

through the stage, a “double” of Claudius. It reflects reality in order to affect reality. For Hamlet,

Danner argues, “the ‘double’ or ghost [is Hamlet’s] own environment in theatrical performance”

(Danner 37). Hamlet is his own double – or rather, through Hamlet’s “meta-dramatic self-

consciousness,” Hamlet the character is the double of the actor playing the role of Hamlet. What

unites these two doubles is the indivisibility of performance and performativity. The reason

becomes clear in Peter Hughes’s description of performativity as “a spectacular technique that

breaks up the action…[and] endlessly threatens (or promises) to revert to its theatrical origins, to

collapse into theatricality" (118). Here, Hughes points to the connection between everyday

performative language (that is, all utterances – since Austin ultimately concludes that all words

do something) and performance. In speaking performatively, we are always performing in the

post-structuralist sense. Hamlet’s metatheatricality marks this same overlap.

By “insistently call[ing] attention to itself as a play,” Hamlet both “encourage[s] and

discourage[s] belief” (Danner 40, Miola 62). The question becomes how exactly

metatheatricality – which functions precisely to pull the audience out of the action – could

possibly encourage the very belief that it consistently undermines. The answer lies in the

possibility that Hamlet makes a “disruptive cultural statement: that all performatives are staged,

pronounced by multiple or troped selves” (Wofford 13). Hamlet is an actor in every sense of the

word, with multiple doubles: he is an actor on a stage playing the character of Hamlet, he is a

  52  

self-aware character in a cliché revenge tragedy plot, and he – like all of us – puts on a

performance with every utterance he makes. That is, the double-remove of metatheatricality

implies a further level: that the audience, too, is subject to the same performative space as

Hamlet. Like Hamlet, we are all trapped in our own plot, which we collectively substantiate.

That is, every member of the audience is affected by Hamlet as a play in the same way that each

individual affects others through their own daily performances. The connection between

performance and performativity is precisely what Hamlet points out, again and again, through

metatheatricality. Hamlet is, retrospectively, a post-structuralist project.

As an art form, the theater can do more than just pass on culture through performatives

with “conventional force” (Wofford 5). Wofford argues that the reason Austin’s exclusion of

theatrical language is so problematic is because it “necessarily marginalizes those moments in

which cultural conventions and social expectations are being challenged or reshaped” (5). The

“cultural space” of the theater, for Wofford, is also a place where “challenges are stated and

changes are given palpable form” (5). This is precisely what Bal means when she asserts that

“theater [is] a form that, by virtue of its artificiality, is the most authentic one possible, and thus

the site of a paradoxically Utopian cultural agency” (201). This potential for the subversion of

the same culture in which it participates is precisely what makes Hamlet a dramatic staple.

Through metadrama, Shakespeare “present[s] us with the duplicitous but richly complex

experience of Hamlet’s world caught in the perspective of theatrical art” (Calderwood 191).

Hamlet has come to stand for the culture of the theater, yet, perhaps ironically, it consistently

undermines both culture and theater as self-supporting concepts. Despite the sense of cultural

and theatrical subversion that runs throughout the play, however, Hamlet itself does not collapse.

Perhaps this is the answer to the question of how metadrama can possibly encourage, rather than

  53  

simply discourage, belief. Danner suggests, “the metadramatic…events have not simply

distanced the prince from his unknowable theatrical audiences but have also bound him

inexorably to them throughout the centuries” (39). Ultimately, this bond between Hamlet and his

many audiences is made possible by performativity’s potential to render all of us, on and off

stage, actors.

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