framing in hamlet

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Framing in Hamlet. By: Malone, Cynthia Northcu, College Literature, 00933139,Feb91, Vol. 18, Issue 1

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FRAMING IN HAMLET

After The Murder of Gonzago has come to its premature end, Guildenstern chides theirrepressible Hamlet: "Good my lord, put your discourse into some frame" (3.2.300). Guildensternclearly means to call the wild and whirling words of the Prince into discursive order, but theformulation of his remark makes him appear even more obtuse than usual.[ n1] Hamlet hasframed a theatrical mousetrap to demonstrate Claudius's guilt, and he has surrounded thisplay-within-a-play with a framing discourse. Not only has Guildenstern witnessed The Murder ofGonzago without noticing that framing discourse, he has apparently forgotten Hamlet's discourseon framing, delivered just a few scenes earlier:

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; andindeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me asterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament,this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul andpestilent congregation of vapours. ( 2-2,295-303)

How can Guildenstern fail so completely to see the frames of Hamlet's discourse? The answermay lie as much in the figure of the frame as it does in the blind eye of the beholder. A framemarks out visual space, but the frame itself seems, paradoxically, to vanish from sight.[ n2] In thisessay, I want to bring the self-effacing frames of Hamlet into focus.

Hamlet's commentary on "this goodly frame" locates its speaker within a cosmic frame, crawlingbetween earth and heaven; but it also situates that speaker more specifically within themicrocosmic frame of the Globe theater, between the stage floor and the roof that juts out abovethe players' heads.[ n3] Thus the speech positions the text of Hamlet within the spatialconfigurations of the Globe. By calling attention to the theatrical frame, the passage offers abeginning point for theoretical inquiry into the relations between the textual and spatialconfigurations of the dramatic work. That these elements of a dramatic work are inseparable issuggested by the resistance of Elizabethan players to the publication of dramatic texts. As

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Stephen Orgel argues, that resistance implies that the players saw "the real play" to be "theperformance, not the text" (43). The play is constituted, in other words, by its embodiment withinthe theatre; and it belongs integrally to the theatrical world framed by stage floor and ceiling.

Drawing on recent discussions of framing, I want to extend the figure of the frame, to unfold itoutward.[ n4] Exploded into a hexahedron, the frame can serve as a metaphor for the theatricalstructure that demarcates the space of dramatic performance. The first section of this essay willexamine the particular theatrical frame in which Hamlet was first performed, the Globe theater.Later sections of the essay will consider thematic and formal issues of framing in Hamlet,positioning these textual issues within the discussion of the theatrical space.

In Hamlet's speech, stage and roof, "earth" and "oerhanging firmament," mark out the limits ofthe theatrical space. The speech describes no boundaries that define the width of this space, andno visible boundaries define the open sides of the Globe stage. Perceptually and practically, ofcourse, those limits are determined by the horizontal extent of the stage floor; with notableexceptions, the dramatic action is contained within the virtual boundaries of imaginary verticallines at the outer limits of the top and bottom edges.

The rectilinear shape constituted by the roof, stage floor, and open sides calls to mind the framethat edges a canvas, but the theater deploys a third spatial dimension, the dimension of depth.The framed canvas, on the other hand, appears to its observer as a relatively flat surface; anyillusion of depth within the work is a trompe-l'oeil, an effect of perspectival conventions. Yet theframed canvas involves another, almost imperceptible dimension of depth that a closer analysisof the frame restores to our sight: the structure that marks out the space between the frame'sedges and forms the foundation of the work. This structure serves as the ground on or withinwhich the work appears.[ n5] No tangible structure marks out the space between the edges ofthe theatrical frame, of course. Indeed, precisely nothing constitutes the ground of the dramaticfigure. The theatrical figure appears against or within the empty enclosure of performance space.

Like the frame around a canvas, the theatrical frame delimits the dramatic work, at once markingout its limits and opening the edges to the space "outside." "Any building used as a theater puts aphysical boundary between the performance and the world outside," according to Kent T. vanden Berg, "but the playhouse establishes this boundary in a striking way that dramatizes theindependence of the theatrical event" (28). Closer investigation reveals, however, that the"inside" and "outside" of the theatrical frame are, on the contrary, particularly difficult todistinguish. The front of the performance space, like the sides, is a virtual boundary, a function ofthe bottom edge; and these virtual boundaries can be crossed by the extruding limbs or bodies ofactors, or, in the hall playhouses, by the visible and audible intrusions of "the elite" seated on thestage, "where they would advertise their eminence in various tiresome ways, flaunting theirdisapproval of the play or nudging the actors and engaging them in conversation," as M. M.Reese notes (99).[n6] These transgressions demonstrate the inherent doubleness of boundaries:the lines that demarcate the "inside" and "outside" function both as limits and as sites oftransition, where spectacle and spectator may exchange places.

Given the openness at three faces of the theatrical frame, the wooden edges that define the top,


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bottom, and back seem at first sight reassuringly solid, able to counter and contain the emptinesswithin which the dramatic work appears. Yet these apparently solid barriers also turn out, in thecase of the Globe, to be surprisingly permeable. The entrances and exits of the actors callattention to some holding place "behind" the stage, so that the actors' visible presence on thestage defines only one phase of their circulation. Hamlet begins by crossing an entrance and anexit in the changing of the watch, and the play's pattern of entrances and exits from "behind" thestage is complicated and doubled by its concealment of figures on the stage, "behind" itsfurnishings, as lawful or illicit spies. These concealments seem to extend backward the space ofperformance, thereby enfolding the unseen "behind."

In the same way, the space "below" the stage reaches upward, not only through the trap in thestage floor. When the Ghost calls out from beneath the stage, is he inside or outside the frame?Invisibly concealed "below," is he located in the nothingness that grounds the work, or in thenothingness that surrounds the frame? Does this audible absence belong to the dramatic figureor to the empty ground? Or is he a figure of the ground, truly "a thing of nothing"? No trappenetrates through the roof of the stage; yet for the spectator at the Globe, the space "above" theroof is always visible, so that the space of dramatic performance seems to flow uninterruptedaround the roof into the space "above," seamlessly linking "inside" and "outside."[n7]

Given the fluid boundaries of the Globe stage, only the audience's perceptual act of framing limitsthe theatrical experience to the space marked out by the stage area. However, the conditions ofdramatic performance at the Globe -- the afternoon sun, the pressing crowds, the nut-crackingand apple-crunching that punctuated the performance --would have militated against thatperceptual act. Furthermore, judging from dramatic prologues of the period, both the groundlingsand their well-dressed betters made spectacles of themselves. Indeed, the groundlings mighthave found it particularly difficult to contain the dramatic performance within a perceptual frame,since any sudden shower would surely burst open that frame.[n8] The space of performance,then, cannot be contained completely by the theatrical frame; it seeps outward: before, behind,between, above, below.

"QUESTIONABLE SHAPE"Now is come the horrible mome,

When I to my sulphureous home,

Must go `ome, must go 'ome. (Smith 223)If the frame defines the shape of the theatrical space, it also calls that shape into question, for itsedges function less as retaining walls than as sites at which "inside" and "outside" cross. Hamletplays out a sequence of dramatic frames that mirror the theatrical frame and double itsdoubleness. The Ghost, that "questionable shape" who appears by night to frame the revengeplot at Elsinore, functions as the outermost edge of the play. The revenge plot, in turn, framesThe Murder of Gonzago; and the dumb show surrounds the play-within-the-play with a margin ofsilence, with Hamlet's running commentary mediating between this frame of silence and the textit marks off.

As the outermost frame of Hamlet, the figure of the Ghost gives shape to the play as a revenge


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tragedy, for the stage ghost is a stock character of the genre.[n9] Shakespeare's Ghost calls tomind the kindred revenge ghost in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1592), Andrea. LikeAndrea, the Ghost of Hamlet functions as the play's pretext, the absence without which therewould be no revenge and no play; and like Andrea, this Ghost frames the revenge plot. But theGhost in Hamlet also differs markedly from Andrea. While Andrea immediately exposes hisidentity, his origin, and his desire for revenge, the ghost of Hamlet's father enters-the dramaticworld in "questionable shape," shrouded in mystery, darkness, and silence (1.4.43). Even as thepresence of the stage ghost in Hamlet calls to mind the genre of revenge tragedy, then,Shakespeare suggests additional possibilities for the shape of the play by deferring the call torevenge until the fifth scene.

The early scenes of the play articulate these additional possibilities, for the Ghost's immediateaudience fails to link the stage ghost with the motive of revenge. Since he appears in "strangeand warlike form," wearing "the very armour he had on When he th'ambitious Norway combated,"Barnardo attributes the Ghost's appearance to Denmark's military preparations (1.1.50, 63-64).His reading seems persuasive. The King who slew old Fortinbras has returned to urge hiscountry on against the upstart son of "ambitious Norway." "Well may it sort that this portentousfigure Comes armed through our watch so like the king," says Barnardo, "that was and is thequestion of these wars" (112-15). The scholarly Horatio, reviewing Elizabethan ghostlore,hazards other guesses: perhaps the Ghost walks to warn of a danger it knows to threatenDenmark, or perhaps it has stored up "Extorted treasure in the womb of earth" (140). Mystery --or, in Maynard Mack's phrase, "the interrogative mood" -- is the predominant impression of thisscene ("World" 504).

The Ghost frames the play definitively as a revenge tragedy when he tells young Hamlet that heis "bound" to exact "revenge" once he has heard the story of his father's murder (1.5.6, 7). TheGhost's words define the origin of the threat to Denmark: it is not an external military threat but apoison, both literal and figurative, at the very center of the state; and it is not Fortinbras butClaudius whose deeds prevent the Ghost from finding rest. The shrouded and mysterious form ofthe play emerges as the Ghost breaks out of silence to issue the call for revenge. "If thou didstever thy dear father love," the spirit intones, "[r]evenge his foul and most unnatural murder"(1.5.23, 25).

As the Ghost defines the task of revenge, he also defines a boundary between the dramaticworld and that which lies beyond. Here again, this Ghost is reminiscent of Andrea. Along with theallegorical figure of Revenge, Andrea remains onstage in The Spanish Tragedy, visibly framingthe central action of the play; Andrea and Revenge, the victim and the motive, are static figuresthat remain outside the action yet set the plot in motion. The Ghost in Hamlet, on the other hand,is a liminal figure, for he repeatedly crosses the boundaries of the dramatic world. Hamlet beginsby demarcating these boundaries; the changing of the guard that opens the play involves anentrance and an exit, and these movements simultaneously define the visible space where theaction of the play will unfold and gesture to the undefined space beyond. Passing in and out ofthe dramatic world, the liminal figure of the Ghost opens up Elsinore to the world outside itstemporal and spatial limits.

Entering the stage from a world whose "secrets" he is "forbid to tell," the Ghost describes his


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suspension between these realms:

I am thy father's spirit,

Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,

And for the day confin'd to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purg'd away. (1.5.9-15)Alternating between the world of Hamlet and the world beyond, this ghost is an apt reminder ofthe boundary of mortal experience. He seems to embody the point at which space and time meetemptiness and eternity. Even during his nocturnal walks, he appears between midnight and thefirst hour of the ensuing day, the temporal margin between one day and the next. Similarly, he isvisible and seems to occupy space, but he cannot be located physically -- as Horatio and thewatchmen learn when they attempt to strike him. And when he descends beneath the stage,issuing the command to "swear," he seems to inhabit the very borders of the dramatic world; bothinside and outside that world, he frames the action taking place onstage. A dramatic figure withinthe emptiness of the ground, as we have seen, the Ghost serves as a site of exchange betweenfigure and ground.

Just as the Ghost mediates between the dramatic world and the world beyond, he also mediatesbetween speech and silence -- that which is beyond speech. The Ghost is completely silent whenhe first appears; furthermore, his appearance interrupts language. He materializes as a visualimage of the description that Barnardo is about to give:

Last night of all

When yond same star that's westward from the pole

Had made his course t'illume that part of heaven

Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself,

The bell then beating one--

ENTER Ghost. (1.1.38-42The spirit of King Hamlet here enacts a dumb show of the drama he will frame in his encounterwith Hamlet.[n10] This silent apparition is both enigmatic and infinitely suggestive, as the rangeof speculation demonstrates.

Only when the Ghost is alone with Hamlet will his silence give way to speech, but his very words,in scene 5, speak of silence. Prohibitions from the world beyond suppress free speech. "But that Iam forbid to tell the secrets of my prison-house," he tells Hamlet, "I could a tale unfold whoselightest word / Would harrow up thy soul" (1.5.13-16). As he tells the tale of the murder, speechthreatens to lapse into silence. The "scent" of the morning air presages his return to the otherworld, so the Ghost must make his tale "brief" (58-59). Silence, in Hamlet, is not merely theabsence of speech, the blank ground and margin of the dramatic text. Rather, silence is a forcethat counters speech, defining the conditions of its possibility. Silence penetrates into speech and


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threatens to choke it off.

The Ghost fades into silence while commanding silence, echoing Hamlet's instruction to Horatioand the watchmen. Hamlet takes up the role of marginal commentator, providing a commentaryon silence. His companions must vow never,

With arms encumber'd thus, or this head shake,

Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase

As "Well, we know," or "We could and if we would,"

Or "If we list to speak," or "There be and if they might,"

Or such ambiguous giving out, to note

That you know aught of me -- this do swear,

So grace and mercy at your most need help you. (1.5.182-88).Hamlet's words highlight the strictness and solemnity of silence. The most cryptic comment -- themost "ambiguous giving out"-and the briefest gesture must be suppressed alike.

Hamlet's companions are visible reminders of this oath for the remainder of the play. Horatio,especially, is the silent margin framing Hamlet's speech. As Mack points out, he is a foil for thistragic hero, but surely he is the most reticent of foils; since the Prince is "of all heroes the mostvoluble," Horatio is given "as little speech as may be" ("Jacobean" 214). That this all but silentfigure should be named "Horatio" gives pause, since the name bears strong phonemicresemblance to "oratio," "speech" or "language."[n11] The opposition of name and functionserves to mark him as another border creature, like the Ghost, and it predicts the crossing fromspeech to silence at the conclusion of the play, when Hamlet bids Horatio tell his story. Until thatturn, Horatio frames the play with the pregnant, Ghostlike silence of forbidden speech.

Ghostly silences delimit the dramatic world by gesturing toward that which is beyond speech; butthe Ghost's speech also shapes the play by defining the boundaries of Hamlet's revenge. TheGhost instructs Hamlet to demand payment in blood from Claudius, but to leave Gertrude toheaven and her own conscience. The physical act of murder is to be repaid in kind, with an actthat belongs to the dramatic world, a world of space and time. But retribution for Gertrude's sinbelongs to the world beyond, the world of heavenly justice.

The Ghost reappears when Hamlet violates this boundary. On his way to answer Gertrude'ssummons after "The Mousetrap" has sprung shut, Hamlet comes upon Claudius praying. Theimpulse to seize the moment and "do it pat" gives way to reflection, and Hamlet's attention turnsfrom the physical act of revenge commanded by the Ghost to the problem of divine justice. Theterrible irony of the moment is that the prince cannot fill the part he takes on; he exchanges therole of revenger for that of Almighty Judge, but he cannot read the impenitent heart ofClaudius.[n12] Thus as Hamlet condemns his mother, railing on about the "king of shreds andpatches" whom she has taken in his father's place (3.3.103), the Ghost returns to recall him tohis proper task:


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Do not forget. This visitation

Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.

But look, amazement on thy mother sits.

O step between her and her fighting soul.

Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.

Speak to her, Hamlet. (110-15)Hamlet has usurped the role of divine justice and left undone the part of the revenge whichbelongs to the dramatic world, "th'important acting" of the Ghost's "dread command" (108).

Having prescribed the boundaries of Hamlet's revenge, the Ghost does not permit this reshapingof the story.

"COUNTERFEIT PRESENTMENT"Whenever that undecided Prince had to ask a question or state a doubt, the public helped himout with it. As for example; on the question whether t'was nobler in the mind to suffer, someroared yes, and some no, and some inclining to both opinions said `toss up for it'; and quite aDebating Society arose. (Dickens 275)

From the closing scene of act 1 until the final moments of the play, Hamlet does not enact therevenge that the Ghost commands; instead, he replays the crime in a series of counterfeitpresentments. In an exchange with Horatio, Hamlet rationalizes the performance of The Murderof Gonzago as a means of testing the honesty of the Ghost, but it may be that the prince alsofinds representing the crime easier than achieving revenge. He seems to think that he can setright the out-of-joint world by showing it a picture of its folly, but his carefully framed theatricalmousetrap does not bring about revenge. In the closet scene with Gertrude, Hamlet contrasts theportraits of his father and Claudius: "Look here upon this picture, and on this," he commandsGertrude, "The counterfeit presentment of two brothers" (3.4.53-54). One framed portraitcontains "the front of Jove himself," the other, "a mildew'd ear" (56,64). Hamlet's counterfeitpresentments-The Murder of Gonzago, the account of the murder, and the contrasting portraits--mirror the heinous crime that has taken place at Elsinore, but they cannot restore Denmark torightness. Hamlet cannot carry out the commands of the Ghost by forcing mirrors into frames.Through The Murder of Gonzago--tropically, "The Mousetrap"-Hamlet frames a silenced truth, themurder of his father. The framing play halts, except for Hamlet's running commentary, when thisembedded play begins. Revenge drama is enacted within revenge drama, with the players of thecentral drama as audience, and the stage as theater.

The distinction between the "inside" and "outside" of the theatrical performance, as we haveseen, is always problematic, and the play-within-the-play calls attention to the difficulty of definingthis distinction. As the Players enact The Murder of Gonzago, the boundaries between framingplay and framed play, between elements inside and outside the spectacle, become pointedlyblurred. When the court of Elsinore serves as audience to the framed play, its attention fixed onthe dramatic spectacle, it seems to be partly assimilated to the larger audience of the Globe; atthe same time, the court remains part of the dramatic spectacle, for the Globe audience, like


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Horatio, watches closely for Claudius's reaction. Of course, Hamlet's role all but erases thedistinction between the framing and framed plays. Having written "a speech of some dozen orsixteen lines" to be inserted in the drama (2.2.535), and having given detailed instructions for itsperformance, Hamlet mirrors the mediating role of the Ghost; he inhabits the boundary betweenthe dramatic world and this "world-within-a-world."[n13]

Hamlet also mediates between the framed dramatic text, The Murder of Gonzago, and themargin of silence that surrounds it, the dumb show. This pantomime is evidentlyincomprehensible to the viewers, as Ophelia's comments suggest. "What means this, my lord?"she asks Hamlet as the dumb show concludes (3.2.134). Hamlet's reply is not illuminating, andshe contents herself with speculation: "Belike this show imports the argument of the play" (136).Once again, silence is full of meaning, but as Dieter Mehl observes, "without an explanatoryprologue or presenter . . . the significance of the pantomime for the play that follows could not beimmediately intelligible" (117). The prologue, however, is more mystifying than illuminating:

Prol. For us and for our tragedy

Here stooping to your clemency

We beg your hearing patiently. (EXIT.)

Ham. Is this the prologue or the posy of a ring? (144-47Hamlet takes up the role of presenter, but his mediating commentary is equally unhelpful. Still,the telling silence of the dumb show actually reveals more of the story than does The Murder ofGonzago, for the dumb show represents both the murder and the wooing of the queen, whileClaudius interrupts the framed play at the moment of the murder. "The players cannot keepcounsel: they'll tell all," says Hamlet during the dumb show, but Claudius will cut their tale short.

Hamlet shapes the play-within-the-play as it is performed, leading Ophelia to remark that he is"as good as a chorus" (3.2.240). At once inside and outside of "The Mousetrap" he frames,Hamlet provides marginal commentary, as if his own choric role were the speech he has insertedinto the play. He is also audience to the spectacle--a particularly intrusive audience, heckling thePlayers as an obnoxious member of the Globe audience might heckle the players of Hamlet.Hamlet inveighs against the actor playing Lucianus, who is tearing a passion to tatters: "Begin,murderer. Leave thy damnable faces and begin. Come, the croaking raven cloth bellow forrevenge" (246-48). Hamlet's criticism of the archaic, melodramatic style of The Murder ofGonzago emphasizes the differences between the framing and framed plays, but his words alsoerase the distinction. Lucianus doubles both Hamlet and Claudius, since he is both the nephewand the murderer of the king; when Hamlet instructs this "murderer" to hasten the act of"revenge," his words reinforce this merging of doubles, for murder and revenge will be conflatedin the poisoning that Lucianus performs in the play-within-the-play.

"HAMLET THE DANE"Guildenstern: I'm talking about death-and you've never experienced that. And you cannot act it.You die a thousand casual deaths--with none of that intensity which squeezes out life . . . and noblood runs cold anywhere. Because even as you die you know that you will come back in adifferent hat. But no one gets up after death--there is no applause--there is only silence and


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some second-hand clothes, and that's--death--Stoppard 123)

The frame that snaps shut when Claudius arises begins the process of closure for theconfiguration of frames. "The Mousetrap" compresses the crime and the revenge, anticipatingthe closure of the framing play even as its own closure is forced. "The Mousetrap" dissolveswhen the murderer/revenger poisons his victim--as it must, since this figure of merged doubles isself-annihilating. The final moments of Hamlet's play, when revenger and murderer will mergeand dissolve, are prefigured here. The Ghost, too, has pointed ahead to the act of revenge. Hisfinal "remember me" and his return to whet the revenger's purpose fix the vision of the play onthe realization of revenge.

While both the core and the outer edge of the framing configuration of Hamlet are focusedobsessively on the moment of revenge, neither demonstrates the mechanical closure one mightexpect. All of the frames in the play undergo some transformation in the process of closure: "TheMousetrap" is violently wrenched to a premature close, while the Ghost is absorbed into thecentral action.

As Claudius arrests the play-within-the-play, silence is shown once again to be a force thatthreatens language, a ground that bursts into the text, constricting and finally strangling itslanguage. When the text of The Murder of Gonzago is choked off by Claudius's outcry, the finalspeech is forced to do double duty--duty to each of the merged doubles, the murderer and therevenger, and their "thoughts black" (3.2.249). The character of Lucianus shows us that therevenger becomes the murderer in order to enact revenge, that his voice is their chimed voices,that the revenge is ultimately a recapitulation of the crime. The opening frame of "TheMousetrap" was the silence of the dumb show, but the closing frame is the silence of abortedspeech.

The revenge scene prefigured by the play-within-the-play closes the outer frame. At the momentof revenge, the son of slain Norway arrives to provide visible closure. Hamlet gives his "dyingvoice" to Fortinbras, who posed the military threat against Denmark at the opening of the play(5.2.361). Denmark slew Norway long ago, and the son of Denmark now grants the forfeitedlands and all Danish lands to the son of Norway in acknowledgment of his "rights of memory"(394). Fortinbras's gesture of homage to Hamlet provides another visible frame of closure; hehas "four captains / Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage," the stage on which the tragedybegan. The final issue was contained in the opening moment, so frame meets itself here toencircle the dramatic world of Hamlet.

Even as Shakespeare offers this visible frame for his play, however, he subverts his audience'sexpectation of witnessing the Ghost's satisfaction at the conclusion of the tragedy. Despite theGhost's obsession with the moment of revenge, he does not reappear at the death of themurderer and the revenger. The visible frame of the Ghost has become, in John T. Matthews'sterm, a "sinking frame," as though the frame that borders a painting were to sink into the canvasto become the frame over which the canvas is stretched (26-29).

If the framing Ghost of Hamlet has undergone this transformation, he continues to shape the


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revenge plot; he is now absorbed into the revenger and the act of revenge he prompted.Typically, in revenge tragedy, the call to revenge is uttered by the stage ghost, but "this `spirit ofrevenge' also rises inside the avenger," Charles and Elaine Hallett observe, so that the exteriorvoice of persuasion is internalized (9). Hamlet himself signals this internalization. He shares hisfather's name, but he appropriates it fully only in act 5: "This is I, / Hamlet the Dane" (5.1.250-51).To become the revenger has meant taking on the role of murderer, as Claudius's double, and therole of victim, as "Hamlet the Dane." For the revenger to merge with murderer and victim meansdeath; thus at the moment of the revenge, the revenger will merge into the emptiness of theground.

As Hamlet becomes "Hamlet the Dane," the dumb show provided by the Ghost, that openingframe of silence, is answered by another dumb show, this time in the form of slain bodies strewnacross the stage. Again the mimed story requires a presenter, and Hamlet appoints Horatio tothe task. Before Horatio takes up the story, however, Hamlet offers his final commentary,mediating once again between the margin of silence that surrounds the tragedy and its text. "Therest is silence," he asserts as he takes his place in the dumb show.

When Horatio is released from his vow of silence, his function is transformed from providing themargin of silence surrounding Hamlet's speech to presenting the now-dumb Prince. But when theconstriction of silence has been lifted, Horatio's explanation of events is an unmistakable echo ofan earlier prologue. Horatio directs Fortinbras, regarding the positioning of the silent figures, to

give order that these bodies

High on stage be placed to the view,

And let me speak to th' yet unknowing world

How these things came about. So shall you hear

Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,

Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,

Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause

And, in this upshot, purposes mistook

Fall'n on th'inventor's heads. All this can I

Truly deliver. (5.2.382-91).Belike this speech imports the argument of the play, but it is no more illuminating than "the posyof a ring." Horatio's words mark the assimilation of the Prince into the emptiness of death; thespeech he inscribes over the silent figure marks Hamlet's passing from the world of speech to theworld beyond. Fortinbras adds the voices of "soldier's music and the rite of war" to mark Hamlet's"passage" across this boundary; but no voice--neither Horatio's voice nor the military musicsummoned up by Fortinbras-can "Speak loudly for him" (5.2.403-05).

But Hamlet has already marked his own passing. As his body is borne from the stage, "the rest issilence." In the final moments of the play, a figured silence closes the frame and dissolves intothe background of life resumed.


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NOTES[n1]. The OED cites this line as an example of the usage of "frame" to mean "Adapted oradjusted condition; definite form; regular procedure; order, regularity, `shape'"; see act 1 scene 5.While the most literal senses of the word in Hamlet should be noted, the multiple resonances of"frame" invite an examination of the metaphorical functions of framing in this play.

[n2]. frame characteristically "disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment itdeploys its greatest energy," Jacques Derrida points out in The Truth in Painting (61). See alsoJohn T. Matthews, "Framing in Wuthering Heights": "Frames are meant to be forgotten" (25).

[n3]. See Kent T. van den Berg's discussion of the "local circumstances" of the theater and "worldtheater" in relation to "the medieval emblem of the Christian cosmos" (49).

[n4]. See Goffman and Young. For particularly suggestive theoretical discussions of framing, seeDerrida, Felman, and Matthews.

[n5]. Derrida describes this structure, the "passe-par/out," as a "supposedly virgin surface,"

generally cut out of a square of cardboard and open in its "middle" to let the work appear. Thelatter can, moreover, be replaced by another which thus slides into the passe-partout as an"example".... Without ceasing (that goes without saying) to space itself out, it plays its card or itscardboard between the frame, in what is properly speaking its internal edge, and the externaledge of what it gives us to see, lets or makes appear in its empty enclosure: the picture, thepainting, the figure, the form, the system of strokes [traits] and of colors. (12)

[n6]. Reese does not specify that the practice of providing stools on the stage is a custom of thehall playhouses, but Andrew Gurr asserts:

The practice of allowing the most important patrons to sit on the stage began with the first boycompanies probably as early as the 1570s. The adult players never offered it at the openamphitheaters. There the interference which the stool-sitters created for everyone else's visionwould have been rather worse, given the greater height of the stage, and the numbers occupyingthe flanking galleries and standing at the sides of the stage. Moreover the public stages, lackingthe rails which divided the actors from the audience in the hall playhouses, and raised five ormore feet above the ground, would have seemed more precarious even without the mews andhisses of the penny-payers standing close up against the stage platform. (30)

[n7]. The argument can be extended further, of course, for the walls of the theater are equallyproblematic boundaries between "inside" and "outside"; consider the obvious sites of exchange,the open roof, the doors, and the windows. As Derrida asks parenthetically, "Does a window formpart of the inside of a building, or not?" (59).

[n8]. For contemporary accounts of performance conditions, audience, and performancepractices, see Appendix 2, "References to Playgoing," in Gurr (205-51).

[n9]. As Eleanor Prosser points out, however, the Ghost in Hamlet is not typical; in her survey of


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Elizabethan revenge ghosts, she points out, "Almost all studies of the revenge play imply that theSenecan ghost who appeared to further his revenge by inciting a revenger was a conventionalfigure." Yet the only examples of this kind of ghost in the plays she surveys are "Andrugio inAntonio's Revenge and the Ghost in Hamlet" (262).

[n10]. P. J. Aldus also sees this scene as one of the dumb shows in Hamlet (106).

[n11]. "James L. Calderwood comments on the significance of "Horatio" in To Be and Not to Be(7).

[n12]. See Howard Felperin's discussion of Hamlet's role as chief virtue and preacher in thisscene (49-52).

[n13]. As Charles A. Hallett and Elaine S. Hallett observe in their introduction:

The point is always made in revenge tragedy that the revenger is personally responsible for theplay-within-the-play. Whether it be the Soliman and Perseda of Hieronomo, "The Mousetrap" ofHamlet, or the closing masque of Antonio's Revenge, this world-within-a-world is established bythe revenger. The play-within-the-play is to be the arena in which he shall accomplish his ownends. (10)

WORKS CITEDAldus, P. J. The Mousetrap: Structure and Meaning in Hamlet. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1977.

Calderwood, James L. To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet. New York:Columbia UP, 1983.

Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and lan McLeod. Chicago: U ofChicago P, 1987.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Ed. Angus Calder. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.

Felman, Shoshana. "Turning the Screw of Interpretation." Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977):94-207. Rpt. in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Ed.Shoshana Felman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 119-38.

Felperin, Howard. Shakespearean Representation: Mimesis and Modernity in ElizabethanTragedy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.

Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge:Harvard UP, 1974.

Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare's London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Hallett, Charles A., and Elaine S. Hallett. The Revenger's Madness: A Study in Revenge TragedyMotifs. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1980.


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Mack, Maynard. "The World of Hamlet." Yale Review 41 (1952): 502-23.

-----. "The Jacobean Shakespeare." Stratford-upon Avon Studies 1. Ed. John Russell Brown, etal. London: Edward Arnold, 1960; New York: St. Martin's, 1961. Rpt. in Othello. By WilliamShakespeare. Ed. Alvin Kernan. New York: NAL, 1963. 208-44.

Matthews, John T. "Framing in Wuthering Heights." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 27(1985): 25-61.

Mehl, Dieter. The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention. Cambridge:Harvard UP, 1966.

Orgel, Stephen. "Shakespeare Imagines a Theater." Shakespeare: Man of the Theater. Ed.Kenneth Muir, Jay L. Halio, and D. J. Palmer. Newark: U of Delaware P; London and Toronto:Associated University Presses, 1983. 34-46.

Prosser, Eleanor. Hamlet and Revenge. 2nd ed. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1971.

Reese, M. M. Shakespeare: His World and His Work. Rev. ed. New York: St. Martin's, 1980.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. London: Methuen, 1982.

Smith, Stevie. "The Royal Dane." Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith Illustrated byHerself. Ed. Jack Barber and William McBrien. New York: Vintage, 1983. 223.

Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstem Are Dead. Consulting Ed. Henry Popkin. NewYork: Grove, 1969.

van den Berg, Kent T. Playhouse and Cosmos: Shakespearean Theater as Metaphor. Newark: Uof Delaware P; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985.

Young, Stephen. The Frame Structure in Tudor and Stuart Drama. Salzburg: U of Salzburg P,1974.

~~~~~~~~By Cynthia Northcutt Malone

Malone teaches English at the College of St. Benedict/St. John's University. She has publishedarticles on Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle, and is working on a book-length study ofself-representation in Dickens's novels.

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