The conscience of the prince

Abstract

This moral dilemma is made more difficult of resolution by Hamlet’s coming to grips with the change in his fortunes that so radically affect the symbolic order or ‘economic system of his psyche’. Not only is his father dead and his mother precipitately remarried so that he has, in another formulation of Lacan, ‘lost the way of his desire’ (1977, pp. 12, 14), but he has been displaced as heir-presumptive. Towards the end of the play he attempts to explain this to Horatio: Claudius, he says,

hath killed the king and whored my mother, Popped in between th’election and my hopes …

[v.ii.64–5]

The metaphor in the second line suggests musical beds in a French farce. Even at this stage in the action, Hamlet cannot separate the private from the public, experience from idea, the sexual from the political. Those internalised figures of father and mother, authority and security, have been displaced. Under his father’s reign Hamlet’s role had been to uphold the order of the kingdom — and, besides, he had latterly lived away from Elsinore: now he is not only confronting a new peace-seeking settlement but his sexual identity has been shattered. After the visitation of a Ghost ardent for revenge, Hamlet is, as a malcontent revenger, fitfully aware that he is set to disturb the whole fabric of the court at a time when he is not yet ready to know himself.