Abstract
Budra assesses the ontological dilemma raised by the attribution of consciousness to literary characters using Hamlet as a test case. Hamlet, as a literary character, has no consciousness, yet for hundreds of years critics have imagined and written about this nonexistent quality. Budra demonstrates that the language which defines Hamlet’s consciousness is not only the text of Hamlet but the supplementary textual, historical, or theoretical contexts that are brought to bear on it. Hamlet has become the nexus for consciousness studies because Hamlet does display a self-consciousness of the type that was discussed in early modern England. What is not clear is whether this self-consciousness is synonymous with self-aware consciousness, that defining step in the evolution toward modern subjectivity, or is an ahistorical attribution.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83.4 (1974), 435–450, esp. 435.
- 2.
Ibid., 436.
- 3.
Susan J. Blackmore, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 6.
- 4.
See Ned Block, “On a Confusion About a Function of Consciousness,” The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates, eds Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1997), 380-85.
- 5.
Nagel, 439.
- 6.
Ibid., 441.
- 7.
See Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider, eds, Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 5.
- 8.
See Amie L. Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 14–23, for a full discussion of these theories and objections to them.
- 9.
Thomasson, 14.
- 10.
For a comparison of realist and antirealist theories see Stacie Friend, “Fictional Characters,” Philosophy Compass 2.2. (2007), 141–156. See also Peter Lamarque, “How to Create a Fictional Character,” The Creation of Art: New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics, eds Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 33–52.
- 11.
For the dependencies of fictional characters, see Thomasson, 35-38.
- 12.
Trevor Ponech, “The Reality of Fictive Cinematic Characters,” Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons, eds Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 41–61, esp. 51. For a discussion of several theories of the ontology of fictional characters see Thomasson, 5-23.
- 13.
Ibid., 52.
- 14.
See Ponech, 55.
- 15.
Ibid., 53-54.
- 16.
Ibid., 59.
- 17.
Bert O. States, Hamlet and the Concept of Character (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), xxi.
- 18.
Anthony B. Dawson, Hamlet (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 25.
- 19.
Ponech, 57.
- 20.
Nagel, 439.
- 21.
Quoted in Marvin W. Hunt, Looking for Hamlet (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 112.
- 22.
Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 65.
- 23.
E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), vi.
- 24.
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 8.
- 25.
Quoted in Sean McEvoy, ed., William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 45.
- 26.
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 416.
- 27.
References to Hamlet cite Hamlet, eds Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), which is based on Q2. References to the Folio, which are marked as “F” in the text, cite Hamlet, eds Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006). Quotations from Shakespeare plays other than Hamlet cite The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. Herschel Baker et al. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 2nd ed.
- 28.
Margreta De Grazia, “Hamlet’s Thoughts and Antics: Draft Version” Early Modern Culture 2 (2000–2), np. Web. December 2013.
- 29.
Natsu Hattori, “‘The Pleasure of Your Bedlam’: The Theatre of Madness in the Renaissance,” History of Psychiatry 6 (1995), 283-308, esp. 293.
- 30.
See Hattori, 307.
- 31.
Udo Thiel, The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 6.
- 32.
John Lee, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of Self (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 158.
- 33.
Graham Holderness, “‘The Single and Peculiar Life’: Hamlet’s Heart and the Early Modern Subject,” Shakespeare Survey 62, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 296-307, esp. 303.
- 34.
Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 33.
- 35.
Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 26-27. See Holderness, esp. 301 ff.
- 36.
See William Miller, Faking It (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 11.
- 37.
David Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of the Early Modernist; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject’,” Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 177–202, esp. 182.
- 38.
Peter Iver Kaufman, Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 16.
- 39.
Ibid., 18.
- 40.
Ibid., 16-17.
- 41.
See Louis K. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1954), 118-19.
- 42.
See Martz, 121-24.
- 43.
Ibid., 128.
- 44.
Ibid., 137.
- 45.
Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 105.
- 46.
John Michael Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in Renaissance England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 17.
- 47.
So much so that “during the time of the Cold War, in countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia, Hamlet was not seen as some existential drama of indecision in a world of bourgeois anomie but as an allegory of life in a totalitarian regime.” Simon Chritchley and Jamieson Webster, The Hamlet Doctrine (London and New York: Verso, 2013), 48.
- 48.
See Katja Crone, Katja, Kristina Musholt, and Anna Strasser, Facets of Self-Consciousness (New York: Editions Rodopi, 2012), viii.
- 49.
Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 177.
- 50.
David Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 85.
- 51.
R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (London: Tavistock, 1960), 122.
- 52.
Kaufman, 118.
- 53.
Holderness, 298.
Acknowledgment
I thank Clifford Werier for his wise help with this essay.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Budra, P. (2016). Hamlet in the Bat Cave. In: Budra, P., Werier, C. (eds) Shakespeare and Consciousness. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59541-6_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59541-6_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-59671-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-59541-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)