Dear Daniel,

Here's a simplified version of my general thesis on [William Shakespeare|Shakespeare].

With something like [The Divine Comedy], you have one single frame of reference that lasts you all the way through [Inferno], [Purgatorio], and [Paradiso] -- [Dante]'s idiosyncratic vision of Christianity.

With something like [Hamlet], or [King Lear|Lear], or [Macbeth], you have multiple, contradictory frames of reference operating simultaneously, though the key is that you don't actively notice these contradictions or conflicts while you are experiencing the play itself.

In [Hamlet], the Ghost says to leave [Gertrude] to a [Christian] heaven, but also to revenge his murder. At the end of the play, [Horatio] goes from offering his own suicide, which is understood as a generous act ("felicity," Hamlet calls it) to asking for flights of Christian angels to lead Hamlet to his rest. And maybe most jarringly, Hamlet refers to death as "The undiscover'd country from whose bourn / No traveller returns," which is true in all contexts of human existence, except of course for the play Hamlet, where the entire motivating action is set by the return of King Hamlet's ghost from beyond the grave. Other examples fill the play.

Error, or inappropriateness, or clashes in frames of reference also work as themes of the play. The play opens on two soldiers, and it is the wrong sentry who challenges, though the play corrects this error immediately. In the last lines of the play, Fortinbras shows up and directly comments on the contextual inappropriateness of the dead bodies on stage:

Take up the bodies: such a sight as this

Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.

Fortinbras's next lines -- "Go, bid the soldiers shoot" -- is itself a demonstration of the malleability of this same context, since the same soldiers that held the potential for warmaking are now repurposed to show martial honor after Fortinbras's context is likewise shifted. In between these first and final lines, there is a cornucopia of inappropriate contextual enjambments.

What's interesting about this effect, which I believe generates quiet [frisson] in the mind of its audience, is that it works because it is unnoticed. How does Shakespeare get away with it? Through the power of his [poetics], which are so strong that they substitute for conventional logic in the play.

One big example among many is the play's insane, repeated [motif] of doubling. From “double, double, toil and trouble” to the plot of [Twelfth Night], Shakespeare has a career-long obsession with 2s. Hamlet is unusually full of this repetition-as-motif, which scales from “too too solid flesh” all the way to the play’s extended joke on the interchangeability of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Many of the play’s famous speeches, such as Polonius’ paternal advice to “neither a borrower nor a lender be,” Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy or Claudius’ speech at prayer comparing his soul to his crown are either a comparison or a contrasting of two objects. Gertrude insists that Hamlet “hath cleft {her} heart in twain,” and he jests to Ophelia that the Queen looks merry despite the fact that it has only been “two hours” since his father’s death. “Nay, ’tis twice two months,” Ophelia corrects. And so on.

A complete list of similar motifs, or rhetorical [slights of hand], or other poetic techniques is outside of the scope of the present email, but my belief is that poetic techniques such as this one help to coax the minds of an audience into a feeling of orderliness that helps to paper over the forms of illogic that are also working upon them.

You can think of this as a form of benevolent [gaslighting].

[F. Scott Fitzgerald] once said something to the effect that the mark of a first-rate mind is its ability to hold [contradictory] thoughts at the same time. If that is so, then Shakespeare's plays are bicycles for the creation of such minds.

I hope you are well.

--agm

August 25, 2021