Translators’ note This essay, until now untranslated, dates from the middle of Rank’s 20 year association with Freud, and between the two editions of Myth of the Birth of the Hero. It shows the psychoanalytic virtuosity for which Rank was known during the early years of the movement. Based on the traditional Freudian construct of the Oedipus complex, this essay has a complexity and depth that make it a valuable addition to the psychoanalytic approach to literature today, though Rank himself went beyond its theoretical confines in his later work, especially Art and Artist.
–Gregory C. Richter and E. James Lieberman, October, 2002
The Play within Hamlet1
Toward an Analysis and Dynamic Understanding of the Work2
Otto Rank
According to Freud, Hamlet’s inability to avenge the murder of his father by killing his uncle lies in his Oedipus complex, which prevents him from killing the man who eliminated his father — thus fulfilling Hamlet’s own unconscious wishes — and who usurped Hamlet’s father role with respect to his mother. The entire drama consists of a series of artistically depicted delays in the execution of this act, made necessary by Hamlet himself. Only at the drama’s close, in the great general death scene, does this act dare to emerge as such.
Now, within this complex apparatus of inhibitions and delays, I
would like to show the meaning of the much discussed “play within the play.” I argue that it is the climax and turning point of the work’s dramatic and psychological development.
Initially, Hamlet simply mourns the sudden death of his father [Hamlet] and is disturbed by the hasty remarriage of his mother [Gertrude]. Then, learning from the father’s ghost that he had been murdered, vengeance upon the murderer becomes Hamlet’s sole purpose in life. Yet he does nothing to avenge the murder; he just feigns madness, seemingly to develop a plan undisturbed — but the plan never materializes. On the contrary, it is only the actors’ arrival and the moving soliloquy in rehearsal that confront Hamlet: instead of carrying out vengeance he has only been holding forth like a comic actor, feigning insanity.
An internal connection, however, has a greater effect on Hamlet than this external one. Specifically, the actor’s lines concern the violent killing of a king (Priam) and the anguish of his faithful wife (Hecuba). The description moves the actor himself to tears, reminding the prince that given the events which have occurred (“for Hecuba” (3:2)), he has all the more reason to let his deepest emotions flow into action rather than idly dream. Yet even this soul-mirror fails to incite action. Just as he had been content to play a madman before, he merely imitates the actor3:
[I] Must like a whore unpack my heart with words And fall a-cursing, like a very drab, A scullion! Fie upon’t! (2:2)
At this point Hamlet hits upon the idea of staging a play depicting the murder of his father, so as to bring the murderer out from among the spectators, to reveal his guilt. Simultaneously Hamlet seeks to justify his new doubts about the specter he encountered: from the murderer’s involuntary confession, Hamlet hopes to gain the certainty he needs to enact vengeance. In fact, through its effect on the king, the play provides confirmation, but Hamlet still cannot avenge the murder. His scruples and doubts correspond throughout to the illusory considerations representing the actual unconscious source of his inhibition.4
One must not be misled by these distracting themes of both protagonist and playwright into regarding the play only in terms of its effect on the king, as proof of his guilt. Attending to the play in relation to Hamlet himself provides a new understanding of the mysterious mechanisms of the dramatic and psychological developments. Just as the actor’s speech about the slaughter of Priam admonishes reluctant Hamlet to carry out his mission of vengeance, the play depicting his father’s murder rekindles his repressed impulse for vengeance. This helps launch the decisive deed — akin to how a would-be murderer might steel himself by gulping alcohol. That Hamlet constantly needs urging is shown by the entire plot of the drama, and in great detail by specific scenes.5 This is especially true of the apparition of the dead father during the conversation between Hamlet and his mother, which serves “to whet [his] almost blunted purpose” (3:4) and
suggests that the specter had this function from the start, as revealed in its first appearance “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” (1:5).
The play is introduced by a pantomime that summarizes its plot and ingeniously informs the audience, since the actual performance of the play is of course interrupted by the king’s Ibycus-like revelation. In the chain of impulses rising against Hamlet’s inhibitions, the pantomime, both temporally and psychologically, produces the middle ground between the Priam speech, which makes the prince conscious of his inaction, and the actual play, which serves to drive him closer to revenge by making him, in effect, a witness to the crime.6 The pantomime makes its point then, by the gentler means of visual presentation (like a dream or fantasy). The action and eloquence of the play, for which Hamlet himself supplies most of the text, appear as the last, most powerful step in this sequence of impulses. There are various reasons for and consequences of the fact that the play still fails to provoke the act that Hamlet has been on the verge of carrying out all along. To understand the finer structure of the work we can investigate these reasons and consequences.
The main reason is that the dramatized regicide does not simply function to confront the murderer. Rather, as if behind a double screen, there lies a deeper, hidden meaning. Hamlet, who arranged for the performance, sees his inhibited impulse enacted: in the play, the longed-for murder of the present king is accomplished.
The king murdered in the play represents not only Hamlet’s father, but also his uncle (and stepfather), of course. This does not hinge on the player king himself, in whom both figures are melded, but on his murderer, at whose appearance Hamlet interjects: “This is one Lucianus, nephew to the King” (3:2), emphasizing the identification between himself and the present king.7 The actor’s speech sets forth Hamlet’s task according to a Classical model; in the pantomime, there is a visual demonstration of what he must do, while in the play, word and deed combine as incitement to do what he has seen. However, as he had previously imitated the actor, limiting his emotional release to words (given the example of Priam’s murder), he now limits himself with an “enacted” murder of his uncle, failing to derive from it the impulse to action. Once again, Hamlet is spared from carrying out the obligatory deed in reality. He cannot kill the king, whom he unexpectedly finds, moments after the play ends, praying penitently. Claudius’ behavior provides additional, indirect evidence for my argument that the murder of the player king is intended not to encourage Hamlet to carry out the deed, but to substitute for it. With the words “Give me some light! Away!” (3:2), Claudius hurries out of the audience, and in the next scene reveals his fear of a possible attack by Hamlet:
I like him not, nor stands it safe with us
To let his madness range. (3:3)
Claudius arranges to send his dangerous stepson to England,
accompanied by his two friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who carry secret instructions that Hamlet is to be killed. But Hamlet averts this fate by altering the “letter of Uriah” so that it applies to his companions.8 That Hamlet can do this without scruple is, as Freud points out, again the result of an external stimulus: the defeat of the Norwegian army of Fortinbras, sacrificed for “an eggshell” (4:4), which leads Hamlet to place a low value on human life.
Given that the murderer in the play is to be identified with Hamlet, the further significance of that character can now be developed. This more closely accounts for Hamlet’s subsequent failure to act. The entire conflict in his soul arises from his ambivalent orientation to his father: he is unable to kill the man who has carried out Hamlet’s own childhood wishes. It is actually the murderous impulse toward the physical father, whose place beside the mother the child wishes to occupy, that is inhibited in Hamlet by all his conscious scruples and the unconscious opposing impulses. The murderous impulse is always lurking, yearning to be satisfied. In line with this urge, he revels in recalling the patricide carried out for him by Claudius. He has the speech about Priam’s murder declaimed, and arranges the performance of a play that recapitulates the murder of his father with Hamlet himself in the role of murderer. For this reason, not because Claudius (about whose guilt Hamlet has no doubts) has been proved guilty, Hamlet is seized by a high-spirited mood with wild exhilaration after the
play — interrupted after the murder scene. Of performers I am familiar with, none has conveyed this mood in Hamlet better than Albert Bassermann [1867-1952]. Hamlet’s triumph over the death of his father is allowed to pour forth unchecked this once, under the guise of outwitting the murderer. The play thus forces the actual murderer into involuntary confession and reveals Hamlet’s unconscious “thought-guilt” through the manic emotions it brings out.
Further evidence for this comes in the scene where the exultant Hamlet — clearly so characterized in obscene remarks to Ophelia -
- seeks out his mother, to whom unimpeded access results from the removal of his father (and father’s representative, Hamlet’s uncle). The final words in this scene strikingly reveal the degree to which unconscious sexual desire for his mother drives the parricide:
…Now could I drink hot blood And do such bitter business as the day Would quake to look on. Soft, now to my mother. O heart, lose not thy nature!9 Let not ever The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom. Let me be cruel, not unnatural; I will speak daggers to her, but use none. (3:2)
With these words, Hamlet admonishes himself to moderation toward his mother, to whom clear access follows the (fictive) killing of his father. He would be no second Nero toward his mother. This
thought admonishes him against matricide consciously, but unconsciously it relates to the mother-incest inextricably connected with the name of Nero: to a degree, opportunity for incest now exists.
Until the enacted murder in the play, Hamlet required continual reinforcement of his vengeful impulses. After the play, which brought Hamlet as close as possible to real vengeance, there now appears a series of inhibitions to the now liberated incest impulse. Previously, no stimulus was strong enough to make Hamlet kill. Now no inhibition seems strong enough to keep him from incest — the second part of the deed. Summoning up the image of Nero as an example unworthy of imitation is insufficient, so on the way to his mother’s bedchamber Hamlet once again has to have an encounter with his uncle-father, who shows him the unreality of the murder scene that has just occurred, and whom he is unable to kill, despite the opportunity. Hamlet had justified the staging of The Mousetrap through doubts about the reliability of the specter, and here again he shores up his inhibitions with illusory arguments. He decides that revenge by killing the murderer during prayer would be unsuitable, and must await a better occasion:
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in th’ incestuous pleasure of his bed,
At game a-swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in ‘t. (3:3) This peculiar justification, too, hints at the identification of
the murdered king with his murderer, achieved in the play: Hamlet wishes to carry out his revenge when Claudius is asleep — as was Hamlet’s father when Claudius killed him. Immediately thereafter, Polonius, listening behind a curtain in the queen’s bedchamber, inhibits Hamlet’s lack of restraint toward his mother. He betrays his presence through a sound, and is stabbed through the curtain by Hamlet, who mistakes him for the king (“Is it the King?” — “I took thee for thy better” (3:4)).10
This actual killing of an obvious father- and king-surrogate11
constitutes Hamlet’s closest approach to real vengeance. Yet the effects of inhibition appear in that Hamlet kills Polonius without seeing him, not wishing to be certain of his victim’s identity. Further, he carries out this surrogate vengeance only when overcome by emotions relating to his mother, in whose presence it occurs: his emotions obscure his otherwise so clever evasions. And for this patricide he also receives the corresponding punishment, death at the hand of Laertes, son of Polonius, who is uninhibited in his pursuit of vengeance. But a third inhibition of his strong passion for his mother now comes into play. At the height of his tirade of accusations against her, as he speaks of her vile lovemaking with her “king of shreds and patches” (3:4), the ghost of his father, visible only to Hamlet, appears for a moment (without armor) to admonish him to be gentle with his mother and to carry out vengeance on his uncle. Thus the plot returns to the same situation as at the beginning of the drama, when the ghost
first appears to Hamlet (1:5), and from this point on he takes no steps to carry out vengeance.
Later, vengeance becomes possible only through accidental circumstances, and even then Hamlet achieves it only as he is dying, precluding his taking the place of Claudius.12 Between the first and the second appearance of the ghost, the climax is the enacted murder in the play, recapitulating the crime of patricide – carried out vicariously by Hamlet. In connection with the ghostly apparition, through this fictive killing Hamlet wishes to assure himself that his father is truly dead — that he can no longer appear to him as a ghost. But this is specifically denied by the second appearance of the ghost in the queen’s bedchamber. Similarly, Hamlet’s discovery of King Claudius in prayer contradicts his murder as achieved in the play. Here, Hamlet recognizes unambiguously that he must act in reality, kill in reality — not merely “in jest” (3:2), as in the play. This he does, in that he can kill Polonius, the least threatening of the father figures in the drama.
Yet in Polonius Hamlet kills the father figure decisive for the situation. Indeed, the three father figures, who appear to him after the play (when he comes as close as possible to realizing his fantasy-wish for their elimination), appear specifically on his path toward possession of his mother — a path otherwise unencumbered following the dramatized murder. This characterizes them as impediments to Hamlet’s relationship with women. In
addition to all the motives mentioned above, the fact that Hamlet now kills Polonius rather than Claudius has a deeper explanation; Polonius is a father par excellence, who obstructs Hamlet’s sexual relationships as did his real father in relation to Hamlet’s mother.13 For it is Polonius who spies upon Hamlet with Ophelia, disapproves, and interferes by forbidding his daughter to associate with Hamlet.
The extent to which Hamlet identifies Ophelia with his mother has previously been pointed out by Brandes, who illuminates the psychological interpretation of the drama (Rank 1912:59, 1992:48). (Goethe also noted Hamlet’s identification of Ophelia with his mother.) It is not only Hamlet’s sexual freedom that Polonius obstructs; he binds Ophelia strictly to virtue and chastity. Lapsing into insanity following his death, she pours forth obscene pronouncements: in these her sexuality, so long suppressed, can now break forth. She has twice been robbed of her love object, since Hamlet has turned away from her. To deal with this loss, she chooses the path observed in so many psychoses: she identifies herself with one of the two persons she has lost, while consciously mourning the other. On one hand, this identification occurs through her imitation of Hamlet’s insanity, which she had considered genuine, and which, as a neurosis, indeed was genuine. On the other hand, this occurs through her indecent pronouncements, which are reminiscent of the way Hamlet, in his feigned insanity, had addressed her. The fact that she, like
Hamlet, lapses into mental disease upon the death of her father makes it clear that this is an identification intended by the playwright. On the other hand, Ophelia, as the chaste counterpart of Gertrude, represents fidelity, extending beyond death, in a woman who would rather succumb to insanity than betray the man she loves (father or husband).
For Hamlet, Ophelia clearly substitutes for his mother, and in this deeper sense Polonius is correct in his supposition: “The origin and commencement of his grief / Sprung from neglected love” (3:1). For in his very first appearance (1:2), Hamlet reveals that his mother’s infidelity before him and the world has made him mad. Among numerous, often subtle indications of Hamlet’s identification of Ophelia with his mother, I shall emphasize the clearest one as it brings us back to the murder scene in the play. During Hamlet’s encounter with Ophelia, to whom, incidentally, he preaches chastity just as he does to his mother (Rank 1912:59, 1992:48), Polonius secretly eavesdrops — just as he does during Hamlet’s encounter with his mother.14 That Hamlet kills the eavesdropper in his mother’s presence, and not in the first instance, serves to emphasize Polonius’ father role. The salient fantasy of father’s eavesdropping when the son is in the mother’s bedroom can be analytically conceived as a distortion of the primal childhood fantasy in which the son is the eavesdropper in the bedroom of the parents. This distortion arises through identification of the son with the father. The fact that this
typical expression of an excessively expressed Oedipus complex is found in the drama should provide even clearer confirmation for Freud’s interpretation (cf. Rank 1912:61,224; 1992:49-50,182), provided a less distorted form of this fantasy can be identified. Indeed, that is the play within the play. Here, in fact, Hamlet appears as the spectator of the conjugal affections of his parents. (This is especially true of the pantomime, where after the wife’s affectionate encounter with her first husband and his death by poisoning, the murderer successfully woos the widow.)15
The act observed by the son is expressed, albeit distorted, in universal human symbols. For the unusual manner in which the murder is perpetrated — the dripping of poison into the ear — can be explained only through the latent meaning of the scene. The significance of the poison as semen (impregnation = poisoning) has been established not only from the symbolism of folktales, but also from individual analysis16; Jones has noted the ear as organ of conception as a folk-psychological symbol.17 Further, the entire scene exhibits overtones of the Fall theme, suggested also by the snake: it is claimed that a snake has bitten the old king in his sleep (1,5). Hamlet’s relation to the sex act itself seems “Biblical” in the sense of Genesis and original sin; he attempts to instill in Ophelia and his mother a revulsion toward sex, which he abhors as animalistic. This seems to be one of the reasons why in the play (and in its model, the murder of the king) the sex act is represented only symbolically, in its individual elements.
These elements are freely rearranged to create the image of punishment for sexual transgression. From this compromise, which unifies transgression (the sex act of the parents) with punishment (by the son) in a single “play,” we can understand why the victim must be killed specifically in his sleep (as Hamlet demands: “in the’ incestuous pleasure of his bed” (3:3)). The ambiguous nature of the scene corresponds to the sadistic conceptualization of coitus — a conceptualization developed by the child in the course of his sexual investigations.18 In this sense, one can easily understand why Hamlet identifies with the actor who portrays the murderer — not only in terms of patricide, but also in the sense of replacing the father in the sex act of the parents.
There is evidence for this symbolic interpretation, which also makes more comprehensible the emotional dynamics and the corresponding dramatic portrayal. In the play, Hamlet arranges for a performance of the killing of his father, and, through identification with the murderer, eliminates his current competitor with respect to his mother. Yet he also sees in the play the sex act of his parents, and based on the same identification plays the role of the eliminated father. Just as the “sadistic” significance of the scene is intended to inspire him to vengeance, its sexual significance is intended to provoke him to incest (cf. the references to Nero). Yet, here again, he is satisfied with its mere portrayal. The extent to which the play does actually have this effect, though, is seen in the obscene
pronouncements Hamlet directs toward Ophelia before and especially
during the play.19 He attempts incest, as it were, not with his mother, who invites him to speak with her in vain, but with Ophelia, who for him is a complete mother substitute, and whom he had repelled just before the play, probably since he was in a position to win his actual love object, whom Ophelia merely represents. To this extent, while he “lies” in Ophelia’s lap (3:2), the play functions as a substitute not only for the killing of his father, but also for the sex act with his mother — given the example of the parental relationship depicted. On the other hand, this significance of the play places Hamlet in the childhood role of spectator of the parents’ affections, which, as a primal trauma, underlies his Oedipus complex and unites all its components in a single focus. Indeed, I have shown that the dramatic expression of this focus is the play.
In conclusion, I shall attempt to pursue Shakespeare’s personal relationship to the material and to its treatment in somewhat greater depth than has previously been achieved. There can be no doubt that the great significance given in Hamlet to the dramatic art and to actors relates to Shakespeare’s professional interests and his artistic ambitions. As is well known, he also worked as an actor, sometimes playing roles he wrote. I have tried to explain this psychologically in claiming “that acting is a fully valued psychic act and a more basic release for psychic states than the activity of the playwright. It is actually the actor who must
complete the drama, who must do what the playwright wishes to do but, owing to psychic defenses, cannot achieve. The actor ‘experiences’ what the playwright can only ‘dream’” (Rank 1912:231, 1992:187).20 If we compare this psychological formula to insights derived from the analysis of the play within the play, we find that there, too, Shakespeare has supplied an unconscious admission of how drama offered him a substitute for many things he had to renounce in life, just as for Hamlet the play replaces acts he cannot carry out due to powerful inhibitions. From the nature of drama itself, it is clear which psychic mechanism allows an actor the release, forbidden to the playwright, of blocked emotions that cannot otherwise be overcome. This is identification, taken as far as the temporary suspension of one’s own personality. In Hamlet, of course, broad use is made of identification, and in the interpretation of this drama I have often had occasion to make recourse to it.21 Our investigation shows how such identification functions as a significant component in dramatic talent; it also shows us a motive for selecting an acting career — a motive not to be underestimated. In the child’s relationship to the parents, as shown in the analysis of Hamlet, there arise certain forces that can push a personality with talent for identification, that universal artistic ability, directly into an acting career: the wish to be grown up, the wish to enact and imitate the father22, to put oneself in his place — all based on the observations the child has made, though he slyly attempts to
conceal this from his parents. The actor’s favorite roles offer him the opportunity truly to enact these tendencies and to allow himself to be overheard by the spectators, who have essentially become the precondition for his (portrayed) ability to carry out actions.23 This is the reverse of the childhood situation, which he has partially retained, while partially overcoming it through identification with the father. Thus this brief analysis of the “play within the play” extends to the entire drama Hamlet, which I believe I have made somewhat more comprehensible in its dynamic significance for the inner life of actor and spectator alike.
FOOTNOTES
1 Originally published 1915. Das Schauspiel in Hamlet. Imago, v. 4, no. 1. [English Shakespeare citations are from the David Bevington edition, 1988.]
2 Cf. Freud 1900:183 ff, footnote (Freud 1914:199 ff, footnote); Rank 1909; Jones 1910b; Rank 1912 (1992), Chapters 2 and 6.