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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
Hor. Ill, lo, lo, ho, ho. Mar. Ill, lo, lo, fo, ho, fo, come boy, come. (Q1, 1603)
Mar. Illo, ho, ho, ho, my Lord. Ham. Hillo, ho, ho, boy come, and come. (Q2, 1604/5)
Hor. Illo, ho, ho, my Lord. Ham. Hillo, ho, ho, boy; come bird, come. (FL, 1623)
Mar. Hillo, ho, ho, my lord. Ham. Hillo, ho, ho, boy. Come, bird, come. (The Arden Edition, 1982, 1.5.117-18)
What shall we do with these only marginally significant textual variants of the falconer's call? Not this, by no means, that the critical tradition bids us do: fix the text in order to fix its meaning. Resist, for the moment, the urge to sort out speech prefixes; the hand-written correction of "Mar." on this First Quarto copy attests to the strength of that temptation. Refuse to determine referents for "boy" and the Folio's interpolated "bird"; perhaps it is enough that both "boy" and "bird," unpegged, free-flying, are called from elsewhere. Disregard the uneven impress that in this Second Quarto copy obliterates the distinction between a and i in the second letter of what is here Hamlet's line. We can live with these minor ambiguities.
Instead, notice an even more local problem--the process by which Marcellus's (or Horatio's) line comes, in 1982, to begin with an H. In terms of precedent in these earliest texts, Harold Jenkins summons that H from nowhere. And yet, because he finds it everywhere (in that line's ho ho's, which have not varied since the First Quarto, and in the H that begins the second line in both Second Quarto and Folio), and because he desires consistency, he makes what seems a reasonable emendation. Even the First Quarto's ho, [i]ll, and lo surest a logical transfiguration into "Hillo." But by equating illo and hillo, Jenkins conflates two words that are "more than kin," with a result that is "less than kind" to a topic explicitly developed during the Renaissance. Not only Shakespeare but his contemporaries Marlowe, Spenser, Jonson, and Overbury--all treated as a topos the pun on Theophrastan and literal character, a pun systematically suppressed by Dryden and the eighteenth-century critics, only to resurface in Joyce's Ulysses and to explode in Finnegans Wake. A modest investigation into the topic of H in Hamlet explores a notion the play treats more fully, namely the infinitely decomposible and recomposible nature of language. That topic embraces precisely those variations that desituate both the text and the author of Hamlet.
By the time Shakespeare took on Hamlet, both the character and the basic outlines of the story were antiques. The misadventures of the Danish hero Amleth circulated as a folk-tale before they were given connected, if episodic, written form by Saxo Grammaticus in the twelfth century. The story surfaces as a printed text in the 1514 Paris edition of Saxo's Danorum Regum heroumque Historiae. The French writer Francois de Belleforest retold it in his 1570 Histoires tragiques, elaborating episodes and moralizing Amleth's revenge with a vengeance. At least one Englisl play preceded Shakespeare's, identified now as the Ur-Hamlet, probably written by Thomas Kyd, possibly as early as 1589. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy may copy and cash in on his own (or another's) Hamlet. The story moves from Denmark to France to England, from Danish through Latin and French to English, from the oral to the written, from narrative to drama. At least 400 years old in 1601, it has refused to lie in its bed but instead has wandered, "erring and extravagant" like Old Hamlet's ghost, into the Globe Theater for yet another representation. Somewhere, presumably in Elizabethan England, that ghost has been added to the story Shakespeare inherits. And somewhere, too, the hero's name has changed from Amleth to Hamlet.
The name "Hamlet" closely resembles the name "Amleth" and is easily glossed as an Anglicization of the Danish. But the two are not identical; Amleth loses its propriety, its particularity, in Hamlet, and it does so in a fascinating way. The final H refuses its ultimate position and moves instead to the beginning of the word. In doing so, its function changes. Fully aspirated, it now initiates the linguistic action of the rest of the name. The alphabetic character circulates, revolves and metamorphoses Amleth into Hamlet: the old parts are all there, so the memory lingers, but Amleth is no longer iterable. Viewed from a different perspective, the propriety of the name Hamlet is hardly particular, because it disguises, but fails to conceal, the name Amleth. The evolution of the new name is therefore a function of the revolution of the old one. Amleth is Hamlet in potentia; Hamlet re-marks, re-inscribes Amleth. The ghostly H, wandering from its assigned position (now you see it, now you don't--now it speaks, now it doesn't), miniaturizes several of the play's major tropes: activity/passivity, seeming/being, circularity/linearity, action/delay, sound/silence, fathers/sons.
In fact, it is profitable to pause a little longer over this exceptional name. Ham-let: little pig, little Danish swine. Hamlet doesn't like the blazon that links Danes with pigs:
This heavy-headed revel east and west Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations. They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase Soil our addition; and indeed it takes From our achievements, though performed at height, The pith and marrow of our attribute. (1.4.17-22)(1)
If an "addition" to a proper name particularizes it and gives it character, then an abusive addition paradoxically subtracts "attribute" (or character) from achievements, "though performed at height." Besides piggishness and drunkenness, Hamlet addresses two other topics here--noise and character. The "heavy-headed revel" steals the "pith" of the essential, proper character, much as an aspirated H at the beginning of the name Hamlet steals the final unaspirated H from the name Amleth. The revels are "a custom/More honoured in the breach than the observance" (1.4.15-16), says Hamlet, honoring the breach (the silent initial H) like a native "to the manner born."
Shakespeare makes at least two explicit references to the behavior of H, a fact that justifies our attention to it here. The following exchange appears in Much Ado About Nothing:
Beatrice: By my troth, I am exceeding ill. Heigh-ho. Margaret: For a hawk, a horse, or a husband? Beatrice: For the letter that begins them all, H. (3.4.49-51)
In Antony and Cleopatra, Scarus reports to Antony, "I had a wound here that was like a T,/But now 'tis made an H" (4.7.7-8). Both cases involve a pun on the words aitch and ache, but the sound of H figures in Beatrice's "heigh-ho" and Margaret's "a hawk, a horse, or a husband"; and Scarus certainly broaches the topic of character transformation.(2)
The aspiration of H, the exposition of both literal and Theophrastan characters, indeed the writing of a new Hamlet, all involve the attendant risks of legibility, which itself depends on iterability.(3) Alphabetic letters bear distinguishing characteristics, but these traits are generically repeatable. Character in the Theophrastan sense finds its way by virtue of the stereotype. A revenge drama like Hamlet is structured by the formulaic assumptions of the genre. Hamlet's name itself doubles not only his father's proper name, but also the English common noun for a small settlement. Even the abbreviated speech prefix "Ham." brings to mind Danish pork, the son of Noah who saw him naked, and the ancient noun for an enclosed plot that survives as a suffix in the proper names of towns.(4) In each ease, the notion of particularity is problematized by the generic. And in the economy of reproduction, the generic elides felicitously with the genetic.
Hence, Hamlet continues his "heavy-headed revel" meditation by using the metaphor of a mole, a distinguishing characteristic that reappears in succeeding generations, perhaps placed slightly differently but nonetheless always a legible mark. This "vicious mole of nature" (1.4.24), "the stamp of one defect" (1.4.31), is nature's impress, a mark that becomes inevitably visible through the exposition, the disclosure, the making naked of character. As soon as the Ghost appears a few lines later, Hamlet must recognize his own "mole of nature": "Ghost. Swear by his sword./Ham. Well said, old mole. Canst work i'th'earth so fast?" (1.4.169-70). His father's command to revenge will motivate young Hamlet to spell out his own character, writing a role, writing letters, writing a plot, attempting to write a name that is already hopelessly elided--all the while trying to keep his hands clean. The "book and volume" of his mind are already written, nature (and history) having placed the genetic, generic selection of letters there already. And legibility leaves a character vulnerable to the devaluations of forgery and anonymity. But these are lessons Hamlet has yet to learn and arguments yet to be established. To this purpose, names, letters, and plots will be considered all of a piece, as vehicles for the sketching of character. And then we will pay special attention to the Graveyard...
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