Hamlet’s ‘lawful espials’: Metadrama, Tainted Authority and the Ubiquitous Informer

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the subject of my first chapter, is a play whose metadramatic structures are entirely suffused with the figure of the unseen informer, generating a duplicitous atmosphere which is integral to the movement of the narrative. Its vicious nature obscured by its own corruption, it is so much the very air that Denmark breathes that the court’s ubiquitous ‘espials’ come to seem ‘lawful’. The chapter argues that informing overtakes authorship, and self-authorship, as the means by which narrative is generated. So, Hamlet arrives at his and Claudius’ denouement as if washed there on a tide of circumstance, lashed into place by this perfect storm of informing and duplicity. In Hamlet, informing functions as a social hamartia which the play projects from the personal experience of the character onto the world of the whole court, operating as a critique of contemporary mechanisms of authority, which are based on informing. Conversely, Hamlet’s own supposed hamartia, his vacillation and procrastination, arises in fact from a self-conscious reluctance to submit to the full implications of his own role in this homicidal system. The metadramatic carnage of the play’s ending, meanwhile, has a tale to tell about the fate of such a system.

‘Subtle sleights’

“…These 'painted tales' devices' reflect the structures of hidden watching, eavesdropping and talebearing that are felt to be the domain of the informer, as I have described elsewhere. 14 Eubulus may sing that once kings' minds are made up, 'There need no subtle sleight / Nor painted speech the matter to convey' (15.4-5) but in fact those subtle sleights and painted speeches are precisely what the tyrant's corrupt power is based on. However, similar devices may also be utilized defensively by authors, to manipulate audiences' perspectives on, and responses to, the dramatis personae they involve.…”

“…6-8,10-12) 33 Though characteristically defensive, the Prologue also aims to establish the rights of the satirist, claiming the privilege 'rightly to touch / All things to the quick and eke to frame each person so / That by his common talk you may his nature rightly know' (Prol. [14][15][16]. It also asserts that anyone who questions this is disagreeing with the ancient authorities: 'if this offend the lookers-on, let Horace then be blamed / Which has our author taught at school, from whom he does not swerve' (Prol.…”