Hamlet and His Home

Hamlet and His Home

Hamlet begins at the open mouth of the Void. Barnardo and Francisco call out to each other and into darkness; they stand atop a guard platform that is naked to the open air and to the night. Every character's entrance is marked by a series of interrogatives, as characters already on stage try to ascertain the identity of those who are newly arrived and yet unseen. Darkness isolates these men from each other as they stand on the edge of civilization, the place where the solid stones of Elsinore castle open up into the world of night and the supernatural. The nature of the ghost remains debatable: Horatio has initially insisted that the guards' delusions have conjured the phantom (1.1.21), and, even accepting the reality of the apparition, Catholic teaching (ghosts are spirits of the dead coming up from purgatory) and Protestant doctrine (all ghostly apparitions are demons in disguise) hold divergent opinions on the nature and source of phantoms (Garber 12/15). The men have gathered together on the guard platform, which has become a kind of stage within a stage. They have come to see a visitor who is a creature of hallucination, purgatory, or hell. This ghost is coming out of the open maw of night above and around the platform; what is known clings to the battlements, and all else in existence hails from the empty, the unknown, the imagined, the demonic. When Barnardo reports to Marcellus, "I have seen nothing" (1.1.20), the word "nothing" takes on a number of meanings. He has not seen the apparition; gazing out into the dark, he has barely seen anything at all. But "seeing" is still phrased in the positive, and so "nothing" becomes something to see. It is more than absence: emptiness itself exists as an ...

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...st famous moments deal with a nothing that is the absence of what is known: as Hamlet asks what it would be not to be, the ultimate opaqueness of death is fearsome enough to make him go on living. It is too much for the prince to stare Nothing in the face. Later, in the play's most famous tableau, Hamlet literally stares at an embodiment of Nothing as he holds Yorick's skull. The skull's eye sockets are without subjectivity, empty of their tenant organs and the mind that saw through them; they contain, in a word, "nothing." But from their hollows something maddeningly elusive stares back: simultaneously a presence and an absence, as haunting as Hamlet's own dead father, and opaque as the darkness that envelopes Elsinore. Part of the play's power is in this substantive "nothing," a portal of slippage that relentlessly destabilizes what is known and what is knowable.