Part 2

Hamlet's "first corse":Repetition, Trauma, and the Displacement of Redemptive Typology
Heather Hirschfeld
In the opening chapter of his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Thomas Browne comments with characteristic wryness on contemporary depictions of the Fall in Eden, the cataclysmic incident he understands as both the source and model of all human error. Browne alludes to the received notion that a particularly human way of thinking—exhibited first by Adam and Eve and then passed on to their descendants—permits the misconstrual of God's earliest threat of death:
. . . They [Adam and Eve] might for ought we know, be still deceived in the unbelief of their mortality, even after they had eat of the fruit. For Eve observing no immediate execution of the curse, she delivered the fruit unto Adam; who after the taste thereof, perceiving himself still to live, might yet remain in doubt, whether he had incurred death; which perhaps he did not indubitably beleeve, untill he was after convicted in the visible example of Abel. For he that would not beleeve the menace of God at first, it may be doubted whether before an ocular example he beleeved the curse at last. And therefore they are not without all reason, who have disputed the fact of Cain, that is although he purposed to mischief, whether he intended to murther his brother; or designed that, whereof he had not beheld an example in his own kinde; there might be somewhat in it that he would not have done, or desired undone.1
Browne's narrative strategy here, his pairing of Adam and Eve's initial disobedience with Cain's murder of Abel, is a Renaissance commonplace: as Catherine Belsey has stated recently, "the conventional visual sequence in representations of the Fall . . . makes a direct link between the Expulsion and the first murder."2 But the insistence that the death of Abel is not only linked to the first parents' first sin [End Page 424] but required in order for them to believe that they have incurred death is part of a hermeneutic logic that, I will try to demonstrate, is in critical ways also at work in Hamlet. The logic is that of trauma, or the interpretive structure by which a prior devastation, precisely because its full horror cannot be comprehended at the moment when it occurs, is realized or recognized only through subsequent devastation, the impact of which is always conditioned by the earlier event. As Cathy Caruth explains, "Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual's past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on."3 In other words, according to Jean Laplanche, trauma is a "two-stage mechanism, and neither of its stages can be detected on its own. . . . it always takes two traumas to make a trauma."4
Browne's description obeys such a mechanism: it presents a picture of Adam and Eve as unpersuaded by God's curse until a second event clarifies for them the full consequences of their actions. Cain's fratricide, in this account, is not simply the result of his parents' disobedience: it retroactively instantiates a Fall whose mortal repercussions, until this point, have not been entirely acknowledged. Such a notion may indeed be an unorthodox "vulgar error," as commentaries on Genesis would suggest;5 the biblical account itself explains that, even before they endure the punishments of expulsion, enmity, and labor "in the sweat of thy face" (Genesis 3:19), [End Page 425] Adam and Eve feel the immediate effects of their transgression: "Then the eyes of them bothe were opened, & they knewe that they were naked" (Genesis 3:7).6 But, ironically, Browne's narrative can be seen to expose the depth, endorsed by early modern doctrine, of Adam and Eve's violation: for the other side of their nonchalance is the possibility that the first parents' first sin is so grievous that it becomes recognizable only in and after the first sibling's murder.
It is this type of deferred or belated recognition that underwrites the sustained allusions throughout Hamlet to the early chapters of Genesis. Although Janet Adelman suggests that references to Cain's murder of Abel serve as a "cover" for the play's more fundamental fixation on a deadly parental sexuality figured by Adam and Eve,7 I argue here that Hamlet's conspicuous references to the brothers are a species of traumatic repetition—a repetition that, like Cain's crime, not only follows from (or covers over) this mortal sexuality but confirms it. The logic of this repetition might be seen to structure Claudius's lamentation that his offense "hath the primal eldest curse upon't" (3.3.37):8 he confounds the first murder with the first curse (and thus the sin that precipitated it). Such an argument is part of a larger claim that the play represents a set of responses by the protagonist not only to the death of a father but also to the death of the first father, Adam; the death of Hamlet Senior, that is, catapults his son into the consideration of another paternal death. And the trauma of this death, as Browne's story suggests, is activated only after the murder of a brother.
In what follows, I consider the ways in which Shakespeare's play is organized according to a narrative of repeated and deferred recognitions, and I suggest that this pattern represents Hamlet's response, precipitated by the death of his father, to the traumatizing impact of the doctrine of Original Sin. The pattern thus exposes the psychic ramifications of a theological precept that depicts a scene of primal transgression and loss which configures parental generativity as both consequence and cause of sin and death. Ultimately, I argue that this pattern complicates the notion of redemptive recurrence promised by the typological hermeneutic on which [End Page 426] the doctrine of the Fall is based and on which a variety of Renaissance interpretive and literary strategies were formulated.9 At the close of the essay, I discuss the ways in which the early modern concept of Original Sin, whose theological efficacy derives from and depends on the typological relationship between the Fall and the Crucifixion,10 is frustrated by the traumatic consequences that the precept itself underwrites. Stephen Greenblatt has recently complained about psychological approaches that reduce the play, at the expense of its religious context, into effects of "the prince's traumatic memory."11 But my effort here is to understand the play's intense theological underpinnings alongside, rather than in opposition to, a psychoanalytic vocabulary.
Primal Scenes/Sins
Reformation theologians, both Continental and English, accepted a largely Augustinian reckoning of the Fall, a twofold account of an initial wrongdoing (the eating of the forbidden fruit as a sign of pride and disobedience) and its enduring punishment in radical human depravity. The character of the transgression thus becomes its penalty: both Adam and Eve find themselves "not only subject to the death of the body, but also . . . the soul," a subjection that becomes what John Ponet calls the "corruption, and disorder of lusts and affections."12 And it is not just the taint of the transgressive act itself but also the resultant corruption that is transferred—literally bequeathed—to all the world.Reformed theologians consistently defined the Fall by means of its transgenerationally infectious consequences, taking their terms from Augustine's explication of Romans 5:12—"In Adam we all die, because through one man sin entered into the world and through sin death, and thus it has passed unto all men . . . His guilt, therefore, is the death [End Page 427] of all"—which stresses the fundamental "perdition" of the human soul even at birth.13 Luther makes the sense of inheritance especially clear: "for I confess and am able to prove from Scripture that all men have descended from one man, Adam; and from this man, through their birth, they acquire and inherit the fall, guilt, and sin, which the same Adam, through the wickedness of the devil, committed in paradise; and thus all men along with him are born, live, and die altogether in sin."14 He is echoed in England by such writers as Thomas Goodwin, who recalls Adam's fault before connecting it to his contemporaries: "Seeing that [Adam's] act extinguished grace, we still being guilty of it, and wrapped and involved in the guilt of that disobedience as soon as conceived, therefore that effect which it had in Adam it hath now in us."15
A combination of allegorizing and historicizing tendencies, this understanding of the Fall was, of course, a specific reading or interpretation of Genesis 2 and 3, designed to fulfill what we recognize as particular theological and sociological purposes.16 As Paul Ricoeur explains, the overarching function of the narrative was "to gather all the sins of the world into a sort of transhistorical unity, symbolized by the first man; then to put the stamp of contingency on that radical evil; and finally to preserve, superimposed on one another, the goodness of created man and the wickedness of historical man, while 'separating' the one from the other by the 'event.'"17 For European reformers the narrative offered an account of the contemporary human predicament while leaving ample room for Christ's redemptive promise. As Philip Almond explains, the narrative functioned as both history and myth, offering "the key to interpreting the nature of the present in terms of an ideal past to which all were temporally linked, though one from which all were separated [End Page 428] by the cataclysmic event of the Fall, at least until such time as Eden would be restored and Paradise regained, for some in the inner life of every individual, for most at the end of time."18 Insofar as the account of Adam and Eve provided the doctrinal ground on which all subsequent human loss and error was retroactively explained and contemporaneously experienced, I want to suggest that it assumes the psychological position and function of a primal, and therefore traumatic, scene.
Freud's notion of a "primal scene," while inchoate in his earlier writings, crystallized in his case history of the "Wolf Man," in which he traces the patient's phobic symptoms to a crucial episode—the patient, as a toddler, witnessing his parents' intercourse—whose existence and effects were experienced only belatedly.19 While Freud seems to have believed that the Wolf Man was exposed to his parents' a tergo coupling, the objective veracity of the scene was less important to him than its hermeneutic efficacy as an analytic construction of a psychic reality: a founding moment of sexual confrontation which could be recognized only later, in specifically symptomatic repetitions or realizations that he called Nachträglichkeit or"deferred action."20 More recent theorists have expanded the Freudian definition to emphasize the actual and global, as well as the specifically traumatic, aspects of such a scene. Jean Laplanche, for instance, explains the primal scene as any "situation . . . in which a new-born child . . . is confronted with the adult world," because such a situation, like the "sight of its parents having intercourse, allows, or forces, the child to see images and fragments of traumatic scenarios which it cannot assimilate."21 In addition, because the scene is "opaque" to the parents themselves, it is "the adults' own inability to explain these enigmas which produces the traumatic effect."22 In Laplanche's formulation, then, the primal scene, as an unavoidable [End Page 429] but ungraspable encounter, becomes a type—indeed, the founding pattern—of traumatic experience. Its initially incomprehensible psychological as well as physiological effects are embedded in the human mind and body, rendering inevitable the repetition of those effects and their influence on a person's present and future.23 I suggest below that the doctrine of the Fall is just such a construction, one that takes on the status and thereby the efficacy of a traumatic event. Original Sin can thus be seen to operate as a kind of primal scene—a post hoc construction, from the delayed perspective of Christ's advent, of a foundational moment of transgressive sexuality and irretrievable loss, a construction that in its own telling constitutes an incomprehensible exposure to eros and death, and which determines all subsequent ways of being and knowing. Indeed, the scene cannot be located or recognized apart from such subsequent effects. As Almond suggests, there is in the account a simultaneous distance and immediacy: "The historicity of the story of the Garden was important also because the sin of Adam and Eve, and thus the necessity of redemption, was continually constructed in the light of what was actually (and not merely symbolically) lost."24 From this perspective the precept of the Fall can be said to constitute a shared early modern narrative for structuring individual traumatic experience.25 In Hamlet's case, as we shall see, the Fall is both the [End Page 430] narrative to which he is thrust back after the death of his father and the narrative which reinforces the implications of that death.
This cultural function results partly from the content of the doctrine—its insistence on the necessary intersection of parental sex and death and its compulsive connecting of the morbid scene of generation to an inescapable threat to the offspring. In Luther's terms, "through sin and that awful fall not only our flesh is disfigured by the leprosy of sin, but everything we use in this life has become corrupt."26 Such an account configures its audience as children, viewing and being affected by distant parents whose behavior demands but resists understanding. It also insists on an irreparable, ineradicable loss, whose very telling elicits the desire for an impossible recovery. The account can therefore be said to contain the substance of the traumatic primal scene—that is, incomprehensible messages concerning sexuality and death sent from adult to child, to which the child, though called upon, is powerless to respond.
In addition, the account is structured as a primal scene. A depiction, after the fact, of a foundational horror, it operates according to trauma's temporal hermeneutic of deferred recognition, or Nachträglichkeit. Indeed, this hallmark of the traumatic relay is embedded in the story, since a Christian's knowledge of the Fall necessarily reconfirms the first parents' first sin even as it predicts the inevitability of his own. As William Perkins writes, "All men are wholly corrupted with sin through Adam's fall, and so are become slaves of Satan, and guiltie of eternall damnation."27 Deferred action and its attendant repetition are thus written into the doctrine. At its most intense, this formula endorses an understanding of sin as something that not only is conceived but that also conceives. For Thomas Goodwin, for instance, Original Sin "is compared to a womb . . . and as the mother of all lust conceives sin, sin conceives death."28 It is precisely this capacity of the doctrine to turn event into perpetuation of event that renders Original Sin traumatic, a primal experience that predicts—indeed demands—its own recurrence.
The account is repeated in theological discourses as an explanation and justification of other religious tenets, particularly those of free will and grace. Indeed, while these latter issues, and not Original Sin, are the central focus of Reformation debate and disagreement, Original Sin logically underwrites any articulation of divine election. As the religious historian Charles Lloyd Cohen suggests, [End Page 431] "With others in the Reformed tradition, Puritans recognized how horribly Original Sin had disfigured humanity and removed all from grace. Since the Fall, error inheres in one's very composition."29 Original Sin is central to the arguments of Calvin's Institutes;30 it is maintained in the sacrament of baptism;31 it is the ninth of the Anglican Church's Thirty-nine Articles; and it is the second of six foundational principles of theology for Perkins.32
Repeated recollections of the notion of Original Sin fulfill both the explanatory and consolatory purposes of theodicy: they revisit the past in a way that elucidates the present and the future by confirming the human condition's wretchedness but also by glorifying God's and Christ's mercy. But their regularity, I would suggest, goes beyond the etiological purpose theologians assign to them and even beyond the status of a productive site for the generation of associative discourse. Rather, they suggest that this given and accepted teaching, while literally understandable, remains psychically unassimilable. Retelling the scene of Original Sin should be seen as symptomatic, testimony to the fundamental impossibility of understanding or coming to terms with the primal traumatic event. As Cathy Caruth eloquently says, the preeminent attribute of trauma is its tendency to
repeat . . . itself, exactly and unremittingly, through the unknowing acts of the survivor and against his very will. . . . The repetition at the heart of catastrophe ... emerges as the unwitting reenactment of an event that one cannot simply leave behind. . . . Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual's past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the [End Page 432] way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on.33
What haunts a culture trained up on Original Sin—what is unassimilable about it—is, at one level, the unknowable, unimaginable motive of Adam and Eve's disobedience and its devastating repercussions. As Almond points out, "The present human situation of pain, suffering, and death was particularly seen in relation to what our embodied existence might have been had our first parents not sinned."34 The period's various literary attempts to explain this breach as a felix culpa, culminating with Paradise Lost,only reinforce the power and gravity of the question "why?" At another level the haunting results from the way in which the account, as a depiction of the earliest horrifying scene, continues to reinflict its shock, attacking its listeners with an unavoidable sentence or judgment, a declaration of death bequeathed by parents at the inception of life. "We are dead," Richard Sibbes tells us, "first by the sin of Adam, in whose loins we were all damned; there was a sentence of death upon all Adam's rotten race, as we say, damnati antequam nati, we were damned before we were born; as soon as we had a being in our mother's womb."35 Original Sin, in other words, makes not only existence but also conception and gestation, the elements of regeneration, defiled and deadly. Such a notion entails a vocabulary of legacy—the transmission and multiplication, the "propagation"—of initial concupiscence from the first parents to the rest of mankind. Descriptions of specifically inherited evil are available in a variety of English formulations, especially those that insist on genealogical relations in terms of sinful bequests. In a sermon on Psalm 38 at Lincoln's Inn, for instance, John Donne urges congregants to recognize that:
We are not all Davids, amabiles, lovely and beloved in that measure that David was, men according to Gods heart: But we are all Adams, terrestres, and lutosi, earth, and durty earth, red, and bloudy earth, and therefore in our selves, as deriv'd from him, let us finde, and lament all these numbers, and all these weights of sin. Here we are all born to a patrimony, to an inheritance; an inheritance, a patrimony of sin; and we are all good husbands, and thrive too fast upon that stock, upon the encrease of sin, even to the treasuring up of sin, and the wrath of God for sin. How naked soever we came out of our mothers wombe, otherwise, thus we came all apparell'd, apparell'd and invested in sin; And we multiply this wardrobe, with new habits, habits of customary sins, every day.36 [End Page 433]
Perkins stresses the sheer scope of the inheritance when he writes that "in [Adam's] sin, all his posterity sinned," figuring the displacement in topical terms: "all men are thus defiled with sin . . . by Adam's infidelity and disobedience, in eating the forbidden fruit: even as we see great personages by treason do not onely hurt themselves, but also staine their blood, and disgrace their posterity."37
This deeply imbedded sense of the inheritability of evil—and the concomitant sense of parental fault—endorses an understanding of conception, gestation, and birth as the corrupt and corrupting mechanisms by which Original Sin is transferred.38 "Natural conception," Goodwin says, "that law of generation, is the one way of conveying sin, that therefore all men . . . are corrupted."39 This premise takes shape in vivid depictions of the spoilation of the body—especially the maternal body—and the fetus.40 Calvin's statement that "we derive an innate depravity from our birth" sanctions a variety of divine meditations on the organs and process of birth, particularly what Godfrey Goodman considers the "noysomeness" of the womb.41 Goodman goes so far as to picture the corrupt fetus:
See how he crouches with his head on his knees like a tumbler, wallowing in his own excrements, feeding upon the impurest blood, breathing thorough the most uncleane passages; in so much that Christ, who came to be spit upon, to bee whipt, to bee troden, to bee crucified only for mans sake, yet would never endure the basenesse of his conception. I speake not of the foulnesse of mans sinne and concupiscence, but of his naturall uncleannesse, being the undoubted token and signe of his sinfull condition.42
Such statements witness the discursive and imaginative effects of a theology of the Fall, the condemnation of childbirth through its association with the begetting of sin.43 [End Page 434]
Of course, Goodman's argument about Original Sin, like those of other theologians, is directed to rehearsing the Good News of man's salvation through Christ; proceeding from the premise of Christ's redemptive sojourn, death, and revival, it is designed to explain the Fall in terms of the Resurrection. That is, the Christian account of Adam and Eve was, as Paul Ricoeur says, always "retroacti[ve]" to the concept of Christ's saving work on earth;44 it rendered the devastation of the Fall only in relation to the Resurrection. The more awful the Fall, the more heroic the Nativity. Richard Hooker puts the two parts together in a conventional way:
Adam is in us as an original cause of our nature, and of that corruption of nature which causeth death, Christ as the cause original of restoration to life; the person of Adam is not in us, but his nature, and the corruption of his nature derived in all men by propagation; Christ having Adam's nature as we have, but incorrupt, deriveth not nature but incorruption and that immediately from his own person into all that belong to him. As therefore we are really partakers of the body of sin and death received from Adam, so except we be truly partakers of Christ, and as really possessed of his spirit, all we speak of eternal life is but a dream.45
But Hooker's "so except" hints at a gap or a fear that is structural to the account of Original Sin, because the traumatic organization inscribed in the doctrine necessarily defies the allegorical or typological promise that seems to underpin it. Trauma insists on repetition rather than revision, a repetition that reinforces an earlier experience either in the production or from the perspective of a fresh one. So it is the sinful bequest—the chronologically older experience—rather than the salvific offering of the later one that ends up holding hermeneutic and psychic priority.
Hamlet is caught up in precisely this traumatic structure; indeed, the entire genre of the revenge tragedy might be seen as representing repeated attempts to make sense of a belief that children inherit a taint that is both motive and result of [End Page 435] the sullied parental sexuality that begot them and to which they are destined.46 So while Michael Neill has compellingly suggested that the revenge genre served as a compensation for lost Catholic ritual, functioning "as a response to a particularly painful aspect of the early modern reimagining of death—the wholesale displacement of the dead from their familiar place in the order of things by the Protestant abolition of purgatory and ritual intercession,"47 I would propose that the Elizabethan revenge vogue as a whole, along with its individual constituents, represents the impossibility of such compensation. For Hamlet, revenge is not so much a replacement as a symptomatic replaying, a structurally and psychically necessary restaging of a traumatic religious scene (the Fall) and an entire religious system (the reproduction and transmission of the Fall's consequences). Such a restaging seems to invite the protagonist, through revenge strategies, to undo or set right the original traumatic violation. These attempts must recoil on him, however, and not simply because a Christian ethical system teaches that revenge perpetuates the sin it tries to rectify.48 Rather, the attempts fail because, as a species of traumatic repetition, they inevitably revisit and reinforce the earlier trauma. They themselves become a form of suffering.49 Hamletfirst holds out hope for, and then dramatizes the failure of, any recuperation from the trauma of Original Sin and its realization through a brother's murder. Hamlet thus defies not only augury but redemptive typology.
"The First Corse"
It is, then, perfectly appropriate that the audience first sees Hamlet confront his father's death in the presence of his uncle, his father's brother.For Claudius both [End Page 436] represents as well as articulates the relay of events that concerns Hamlet—a death that thrusts the son back upon a "first corse":
But you must know your father lost a father, That father lost, lost his, and the survivor boundIn filial obligation for some termTo do obsequious sorrow. But to perseverIn obstinate condolement is a courseOf impious stubbornness, 'tis unmanly grief,. . . For what we know must be, and is as commonAs any the most vulgar thing to sense,Why should we in our peevish oppositionTake it to heart? Fie, 'tis a fault to heaven,A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,To reason most absurd, whose common themeIs death of fathers, and who still hath cried,From the first corse till he that died to-day,"This must be so."
(1.2.89-106)
Claudius's insistence that death is "common" (not just ordinary but transferable as a bequest descending from a father), though part of his effort to minimize the occasion for Hamlet's grief, ironically reinforces the devastation. In reiterating death's genealogical tree—from father to father to father—Claudius's rhetoric pushes Hamlet back to the scene of the Fall, to the first father who lies at the root of this "common" theme. But, with its reference to the "first corse," the speech does so obliquely. For the "first corse," as Donald Stump points out, belongs not to Adam but to Abel, the son and brother, not the father.50 Claudius's speech thus conforms to a traumatic logic that invokes an originary moment in terms of a succeeding one; he explains the death of one father not only in terms of the deaths of a sequence of previous fathers—a first "course"—but also in terms of the dead body of a son and brother—the first "corpse."51 For Hamlet the reference works to revive both deaths. Designed to recall Adam but able to do so only in terms of Abel, the "first corse" to which Claudius refers reminds Hamlet that while death is an inheritance from the father, its realization requires the son's demise. This is at least part of what it means to be "too much in the sun" (l. 67): to be the guarantor, through one's own mortality, of a prior death, that of a father. Such a configuration launches Hamlet into the [End Page 437] meditations he uses to make sense of the position of his own "sallied"—sullied—flesh (l. 129) in relation to these deaths.
His meditations begin by putting this flesh and these deaths into the "unweeded garden / That grows to seed" (ll. 135-36), meditations that return him to the complex of associations linking his own corrupt body with both a fallen world and images of parental sexuality:
. . . Heaven and earth,Must I remember? Why, she should hang on him As if increase of appetite had grownBy what it fed on, and yet, within a month— Let me not think on't!
(ll. 142-46)
The parental sexuality on which he is so fixated is not simply Gertrude's new liaison with Claudius. Of course this coupling will bear the brunt of Hamlet's conscious contempt. But their marriage, which has turned Denmark into an "unweeded garden," also catapults Hamlet into the linked considerations of both the death as well as the amorous prowess of his father. That is, the death of Hamlet Senior and the pairing of Claudius and Gertrude force Hamlet to recognize, repeatedly and to his explicit dismay, the pairing of Hamlet Senior and Gertrude and the "increase of appetite" that bound them. Even though one pair is idealized and one degraded, both are visions of the same traumatizing scene of parental embrace. When Hamlet breaks off, pleading "Let me not think on't!" it is not completely clear whether his wish is to avoid the memory of his mother clinging to his father or to avoid the knowledge of what has happened "within a month": his father's death and his mother's remarriage. The traumatic logic of the scene insists that the two wishes are concomitant: the latter compels recognition of the former. That Hamlet will continue to "think on't" suggests that its horror, while present and repeated, is nevertheless not completely understood or assimilable.
A similar kind of thinking is an implicit part of the associative logic of Hamlet's later explanation to Horatio of Claudius's misguided revelry, which the prince uses as an excuse to discuss general human corruption as manifested in a "vicious mole [i.e., fault, blemish] of nature" in "particular men" (1.4.24, 23). The speech is not an unorthodox permutation of the doctrine of Original Sin, as Adelman suggests, but a recapitulation of its most essential premises: that human corruption is natural, reproducible—that is, inheritable.52 For it is not only "some habit, that too much o'er-leavens / The form of plausive manners" (ll. 29-30) but also the "o'ergrowth of [End Page 438] some complexion / Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason" (ll. 27-28) that results in human fallenness. So when Hamlet suggests that men "are not guilty / (Since nature cannot choose his origin)" (ll. 25-26), he confirms the legacy of necessary taint: he connects fault with origin while he insists that the connection is not willed. Such a confirmation, in a speech clearly in excess of the terms required to condemn festivity at Elsinore, is part of what Caruth calls the "enigma of survival":
trauma is not simply an effect of destruction but also, fundamentally, an enigma of survival. . . . Not having truly known the threat of death in the past, the survivor is forced, continually, to confront it over and over again. For consciousness then, the act of survival, as the experience of trauma, is the repeated confrontation with the necessity and impossibility of grasping the threat to one's own life. It is because the mind cannot confront the possibility of its death directly that survival becomes for the human being, paradoxically, an endless testimony to the impossibility of living.53
Hamlet's deliberate confrontation in this speech with the "mole of nature," an image that invokes both his knowledge of an hereditary taint and his difficulty making sense of it, represents precisely his unsatisfiable need to grasp an inexplicable predicament.
This need is masked and sustained by the Ghost's injunction to revenge, which provides Hamlet with validation, both formal and psychological, for repeating the traumatic scene. While revenge seems to narrativize and justify the connection between Hamlet and a father all too willing to admit that he was "Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin" (1.5.76), it is here a symptomatic activity: it establishes for Hamlet the righteousness of the father's cause even as it returns him to the horrifying taint of death bestowed on him by Hamlet Senior (l. 80). So at the same time that the Ghost's command allows Hamlet to disregard that blemish (as he says, to "wipe away" or erase everything else from "the book and volume of my brain" [ll. 99, 103]), it also ensures that the blemish, the "mole of nature," will return. Revenge in Hamlet is a means of revisiting a traumatic scene, not one for resolving it.
This dynamic of return is dramatized in the play's incessant repetition, which I have been arguing is the result not of repression but of trauma—of the traumatic compulsion to return to a moment that, as Caruth explains, must be yet cannot be grasped.54 This repetition is writ large across the play, particularly in the mirroring stories of Fortinbras and Laertes and their lost fathers, suggesting that even the [End Page 439] drama itself cannot fully process Hamlet's situation. But it is most pronounced and compelling for Hamlet himself, for whom traumatic repetition takes shape as a rehearsal, in the name of revenge, of the very primal scenes—scenes of parental embrace which are attached to gardens and involve brothers—that Hamlet says he wants to efface. This is the logic behind Hamlet's so-called "delay": a symptomatic return to, despite an effort to overcome, an earlier disaster.55
The most obvious rehearsals are the Mousetrap performances, where parental sex and death intersect, twice. Ostensibly meant to trap the consciences of Claudius and Gertrude, both dumb show and spoken dialogue re-present the scenes of parental coupling and sibling murder that, with their iconography of the Fall, have fascinated and horrified—"trapped"—Hamlet Senior and Hamlet since the play began.56 But the spoken dialogue, itself already a repetition of the dumb show, offers additional duplications. As the Player King and Queen proclaim their love for one another, they worry over his approaching death. When the King suggests the Queen wed again, she refuses:
O, confound the rest!Such love must needs be treason in my breast.In second husband let me be accurs'd!None wed the second but who kill'd the first.
(3.2.177-80)
The Player Queen's ostentatious protest here, made particularly obvious by the Mousetrap's rhymed couplets, follows the logic of deferred action: as she suggests, a later event—a second wedding—testifies to a first—an earlier murder. Her next speech not only reproduces this logic but amplifies it, with the later event repeating as well as proving the first:
The instances that second marriage moveAre base respects of thrift, but none of love.A second time I kill my husband dead,When second husband kisses me in bed.
(ll. 182-85) [End Page 440]
The Queen's intimation that remarriage duplicates murder, killing a husband not just once but twice, obeys a traumatic temporality, the structure of recurrence necessary to make a prior disaster known. What the remarriage makes known is the death of the Player King—an irony of staging, since the dumb show has, in fact, already displayed his murder. Indeed, the most compelling feature of Hamlet's Mousetrap is the relation of dumb show to playlet: the spoken section follows a scene that, (chrono)logically, it precedes. The spoken play, though temporally first, is dramatically as well as psychologically second: the mortal conversation it contains between man and wife can be activated only after the murder between "brothers" is displayed in dumb show. The spoken playlet paradoxically repeats a future event that the audience has already seen: it is a repetition both of something to come and of something that has already happened.
Into this repetition Hamlet himself enters in the figure of the second poisoner, Lucianus, nephew to the king. In introducing the nephew, Hamlet shifts the figurative alignments of the playlet (which he interprets "tropically" for Claudius [ll. 237-38]), insisting that the stage as well as the real audience reconfigure the allegorical identity of the Player King, who now seems to be more Claudius than Hamlet Senior, and reassess the threat of poison, which now seems a threat not of the past but of the future. In the character of Lucianus, then, Hamlet takes his place in a theological structure that perpetuates sex, sin, murder, and death as an inheritance shared by or through the family. That Hamlet's assuming of this role is managed during a literal restaging of the primal scene—a couple's embrace followed by a murder—further attests to the play's traumatic logic, according to which a character's place is realized only through the repetition of an earlier catastrophic moment. This same logic ensures that Hamlet will continue to repeat that moment. He does, of course, in Gertrude's closet, where his berating her with portraits of husbands and siblings, "The counterfeit presentment of two brothers" (3.4.54), becomes the prelude to the construction of yet another private viewing of father and mother as the Ghost enters her bedroom. If either Claudius or Gertrude was the "mouse" Hamlet was trying to trap, he has done so only by trapping himself in the very scenes of parental sexuality he hoped to erase or put to rest.
Hamlet continues to repeat these scenes because his imagination, which he admits is "as foul / As Vulcan's stithy" (3.2.83-84), is trapped in a traumatic relay according to which the re-enactment offered through revenge confirms rather than alleviates the power of an earlier—and always ultimately incomprehensible—scene. At its most extreme the pattern makes life and death essentially the same for Hamlet. In his meetings with Ophelia, for instance, his vicious attacks on her chastity disguise attacks both on Gertrude's undiscriminating sexuality and on his own conception. "[I]t were better my mother had not borne me," he tells Ophelia [End Page 441] (3.1.122-23), in a compulsive invocation of a desire never to have existed. The famous and difficult "To be, or not to be" soliloquy (ll. 55-87) may similarly be seen as an effect of traumatized thinking: here Hamlet expresses not only fear (again) of God's "canon 'gainst [self-]slaughter" (1.2.132) but also his dread of the endless return of life itself. The "sleep of death" (3.1.65) represents to Hamlet the threat of recurrent nightmare, the possibility that, even after death, the images that have haunted his waking existence will persist. This is not, as Robert Watson eloquently sees it, a fear of death per se.57 Nor is it solely an attack on or protest against a concept of Purgatory designed, as Greenblatt has recently explained, to forge "a different kind of link between the living and the dead, or . . . [to enable] the dead to be not completely dead."58 Rather, Hamlet expresses here a horror at the possibility of morelife after death, at death as the threat of life.59 This is Hamlet's response to the trauma of the Fall: he understands living and dying, as he does the Ghost (the living dead), as the same thing.
So despite critical opinion that diagnoses a providential sea change for Hamlet in Act 4, his final actions—his authorization of the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and his duel with Laertes—conform to the same traumatic pattern of repetition. Whatever it is that Hamlet comes to accept in his last moving moments—that "the readiness is all," that "There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow" (5.2.222, 219-20)—none of these considerations can stop him from battling Laertes so that he himself exactly repeats the "primal eldest curse." Indeed, the play seems at pains to make this curse quite literal, first by emphasizing the similarity of Hamlet's and Laertes's predicaments and then by forcing Hamlet to imagine himself as Laertes's sibling. Hamlet's leap into Ophelia's grave may be the moment when he claims his identity as "Hamlet the Dane," but his gesture merely mimes Laertes's.60 Likewise, his insistence that "Forty thousand brothers / Could [End Page 442] not with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum" (5.1.269-71) reinforces his connection to, his interest in, the fraternal position. Finally, Hamlet names Laertes specifically as his brother:
Was't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet!If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.. . . Let my disclaiming from a purpos'd evilFree me so far in your most generous thoughts,That I have shot my arrow o'er the houseAnd hurt my brother.
(5.2.233-44, emphasis added)
In these late moments, then, Hamlet casts himself as Laertes's sibling; the prince seems to need to see himself in terms of the very fraternity whose murderous premise he has lamented from the start. The need may be seen to derive from the dependence of the paternal on the sibling relation. Juliet Mitchell has recently argued that parental attachments derive their meaning from the complex experience of sibling rivalries and animosities. She suggests that "it is the initial awareness of the presence of the siblings which produces a catastrophic psychosocial situation of displacement. This triggers in turn a regression to the earlier parental relationships which were without their psychic implications until this moment."61 In other words, Hamlet's fraternal focus on Laertes at this late moment is part of the symptomatic pattern that realizes the filial relation with which the prince has struggled throughout the play. In killing and being killed by his "brother," Hamlet repeats a fratricide that confirms or actualizes a more primal event: the death of the father.62 And this deadly repetition is more than a reflection of revenge's mimetic capacity, by means of which victim necessarily [End Page 443] becomes villain.63 Rather, it is a threat to the redemptive sensibility of Christian typology.
Trauma and Typology
Christian typology is a form of biblical exegesis designed to establish a defined, consistent relation between Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Rooted in Gospel and Pauline pronouncements, it operates according to an interpretive system that, from the first Christian exegetes and preachers, treated the "persons and things in the Old Testament . . . as figures of the Messiah, Jesus Christ,"64 and understood the Hebrew Bible as a foreshadowing of the New Testament, the New Testament as the fulfillment of the Hebrew Bible. As Gerald Bray points out, even though the first Christian preachers employed a variety of interpretive procedures in their explanations of holy texts, they all depended on the axiom that "the Old Testament was to be interpreted Christologically. Everything in it somehow pointed to him, and was fulfilled in him."65
Christian typology's hermeneutic principles, and the various doctrinal incentives for them, were elaborated by the early church fathers and were variously rehearsed in the early modern period by a range of Reformation and post-Reformation theologians as well as by popular writers.66 Luther's discussions of the Trinity, for instance, rely on the typological relation by which the Gospels reveal the enigmas of the Old Testament:
At that time [of the patriarchs] these statements [about the Trinity] had to be made so darkly by divine counsel, or at least because all things were reserved for that future Lord for whose arrival was reserved the restitution of all things (Acts 3:21), of all knowledge, and of all revelations. Therefore what had previously been taught through enigmas, as it were, Christ made clear and commanded to be preached in plain language.67
William Tyndale, in the introduction to his 1536 translation of the New Testament, explains the relation between the two books in terms of the earthly and the eternal: "The newe testament is as moche to saye as a new couenant. The [End Page 444] olde testament is an olde temporall couenaunt made betwene God and the carnall chyldren of Abraham . . . vpon the dedes & the obseruyng of a temporall lawe. . . . But the new testament is an euerlastynge couenaunt made vnto the chyldren of god thorowe fayth in Christe," he writes.68 Thomas Taylor explains Judaism and its laws as a "primer" or "free-schoole" for the Gospels, and the Protestant divine Thomas Jackson understands typological interpretation as both philosophy and science: "Now the contemplation of that most exact harmonie between Mosaicall and Propheticall delineations of Christ, and that live image of him, which the Evangelists by his Spirit have exhibited unto our view, is no lesse rationall, then the contemplation of the connexion betweene the Principles of other Sciences and their conclusions."69 In his late-seventeenth-century sermons, Edward Taylor calls the type "a Certain thing Standing with a Sacred impression set upon it by God to Signify Some good to come as Christ, or the Gospell Concerns in this Life."70 Even the playwright Thomas Middleton describes the relation of the two testaments as a wedding: Christ, he writes, "hath Married the old and new Testament together."71
These discrete strands of early modern typological exegesis (deriving from separate doctrinal and pastoral needs) were designed ultimately to accentuate the priority of Christ's earthly sojourn and heavenly promise over the "outstanding persons and leading events" of the Old Testament that Jesus both redeems and fulfills.72 Indeed, priority is an especially apt term here, since it gestures not only to the spiritual supremacy attributed to Christ's restorative capacities but also to their temporal status: for typological exegetes, Christ's sacrifice precedes Old Testament events. Typological exegesis "sublates the best of classical and Jewish [End Page 445] thought as the ground of modernity,"73 and insists that the events of the Old Testament always already come after Christ. Luther assumes this kind of priority when he explains the we of Genesis 1 as the foreshadowing of the Trinity: "Of course, he [Moses] does not say in so many words that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are the one true God; this was to be reserved for the teaching of the Gospel. It was adequate for him to indicate this plurality of Persons by means of the plural term."74 Or, as Middleton writes in an idiomatic formula meant to reassure Christian communities about the possibility of salvation, Christ "was . . .promised, euen from the beginning."75 Christian typology, then, in connecting the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, has a very particular temporal structure: it is a historical back-formation whose hermeneutic insists on, depends on, the claim to prophesy and to complete.76
Typology's temporal claims—that second events not only realize but redeem a single, earlier one—connect them to as well as distinguish them from the effects of trauma. As we have seen, both traumatic symptomatology and typological procedure maintain that the meaning of an earlier experience, whether a trauma or a type, "'cannot be known until it has been fulfilled in its antitype.'"77 But typology defines antitypes, second events, as more powerful, since they simultaneously underwrite and redeem, even nullify, the first. Trauma, on the other hand, privileges the earlier event, cedes to it both interpretive and psychic primacy. Of course, moments of repetitive fulfillment, as theorists explain, are a requisite for the realization of an original trauma ("it always takes two traumas to make a trauma"). For some theoreticians, these repetitions are ultimately therapeutic and restorative.78 But others stress that because "trauma is often reproduced in actions," it "mire[s victims] in a continual reliving of the past."79 That is, repetition cannot redeem, or cancel out, the earlier event.80 Rather, repetition increases its power to dominate, [End Page 446] even to determine, thought and action: the primal event, while depending on a second event to instantiate it, is primal precisely because it is "timeless and ego-alien."81
Repetition of a primal trauma, as we have seen, dominates Hamlet's existence after the death of his father. This primal trauma—the moment of the Fall, the death of the first and all fathers, with its set of recriminations and consequences—is precisely the scene around which Christian typology is structured, and which it exacerbates even as it attempts to rectify it. That is, although the past reality and future promise of Christ's sacrifice are meant to allay the bitter loss entailed in Original Sin, the devastations of this loss are inculcated precisely by the same Christological claims meant to subdue it. As Ricoeur explains, "Christology . . . consolidated Adamology."82 Hamlet and Hamlet, by showing the prince at every moment engaged in the repetitive action that throws him back on primal scenes of sex and sin, suggest the potential of "Adamology" to overwhelm "Christology." The trajectory of Hamlet's experiences calls attention to the paradoxical dynamic written into the heart of Christian typology. Thomas Luxon has recently explained this paradox as the result of Reformation theology's emphasis on the literal historicity of the Testaments at the expense present reality. The effect of typological thinking, he says, is to push
Reality . . . beyond a new telic horizon. Protestant Christians may assert the historicity of the ancient Hebrews and even figure their own experiences of God increasingly on Hebraic models, but they do so at a cost. The cost is that of identifying one's self and one's own experience as figural, rather than fully real. . . . Under the totalizing force of Christianity's allegory, the Reformers' redefinition of the historically real as figures could only have the effective result of radically emptying out [that very category].83
The faithful, in Luxon's terms, are thus "condemn[ed] . . . to a perpetual struggle to be made real."84 I am suggesting that we view this cost as the result of the structural and ideological trauma at the heart of the typological axis of Fall and Crucifixion, as, that is, the "horrible, . . . horrible, most horrible" image (1.5.80) of an inexplicable parental transgression whose psychological force could be more compelling than the salvific image meant to transform or redeem it. [End Page 447]
Certainly some Reformed theologians and writers were aware of this paradox, which is why, perhaps, a writer as attuned to religious anxiety as Philip Melanchthon emphasizes the immediacy of redemption (Christ is known to Adam and Eve) even as he reiterates the seriousness of the Fall: "God was not willing that mankind's creation be wholly in vain and for eternal damnation. For the sake of his Son Jesus Christ he wants always to have among men a small company to know and invoke him, and later to live with him. . . . This Church of God is thus reconstructed when Adam and Eve are consoled with the promise of God's son."85 Such awareness also explains the interrogations, by early modern writers such as Hooker and Milton, of certain kinds of analogical and anagogical interpretation.86 And of course various kinds of Renaissance drama and literature—including As You Like It, which reclaims the fallen orchard of the first act with the (re)unions of brothers and lovers in the forest of Arden87 —are committed to the potential ascendancy of salvation and renewal. But in Hamlet the logic of trauma overrides the logic of typology. The play might be said to reveal typology's traumatic core, its foundation on a primal scene to which it repeatedly returns but can never redeem. Thus Hamlet closes his play by asking Horatio (oratio) to retell his tale, demanding the repetition of the very story bequeathed to him by the Ghost and performed by him on the stage. Hamlet's death, if it operated according to typological principle, should have released him and the audience from a repetition in which it instead ironically mires them. We are fascinated by this repetition because it shows the irreconcilable effects of a doctrinal precept the psychic repercussions of which cancel out its own promise of redemption.
Heather Hirschfeld, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is the author of Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater (2004).
Footnotes
I wish to thank Ty Buckman, Frances Lee, Graham Hammill, participants in the "Rivalry" seminar at the 2001 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Nora Johnson, Katherine Rowe, Shannon Miller, Lauren Shohet, Garrett Sullivan, the editors of and anonymous readers for Shakespeare Quarterly, and especially A. Leigh DeNeef.
1. Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica in Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1977), 163-259, esp. 172.
2. Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1999), 131.
3. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), 4. Consider also Linda Belau: "The trauma pertaining to an event is less an inherent aspect of the event itself than it is an effect pertaining to the impossibility of integrating the event into a knowledgeable network" because the trauma is "'too horrible to be remembered'" (Topologies of Trauma: Essays on the Limit of Knowledge and Memory, Linda Belau and Petar Ramadanovic, eds. [New York: Other Press, 2002], xvi).
4. Jean Laplanche, New foundations for psychoanalysis, trans. David Macey (Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 88.
5. Cf. Andrew Willet's invocation of early church fathers, including Jerome: "Adam began in the same day [as the transgression] to dye, not actually, but because then he became mortall and subject to death. . . . And beside that, then actually Adam entred into misery and sorrow, labour, hunger, thirst, which are the forerunners of death. Adde unto this also, that in the same day, death entred by sinne into the soule of Adam, in the very same day of this transgression" (Hexapla in Genesin [London, 1633], sig. C2v). John Calvin writes: "the sorowes and miseries both of the soule and also of the bodie, wherewith he [man] is compassed about so long as he liueth in earth, are a certeine entrie of death, vntill death it selfe vtterly swallow him vp. For ye scripture tearmeth them dead men, which being oppressed with the tyrannie of sin & of sathan, liue to their destruction. Wherfore it is a vaine & superfluous question, how God threatned death to Adam at what time he shold touch the forbiden fruit, when as he deferred the punishment for a long time. For then Adam was giuen vnto death, and death began his kingdome in him vntill the grace whiche ouershadowed him brought a remedie" (A Commentarie of John Calvin, upon the first booke of Moses called Genesis, trans. Thomas Thynne [London, 1578], sig. E4r).
6. The Geneva Bible glosses this latter passage: "They began to fele their miserie, but they soght not to God for remedie" (The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, intro. Lloyd E. Berry [Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1969], 2).
7. Janet Adelman sees the Cain and Abel story as a way of "occlud[ing]" maternal presence: "On the surface of the text, that is, the story of Adam and Eve has been displaced. . . . But if the plot rewrites the fall as a story of fratricidal rivalry, locating literal agency for the murder in Claudius, a whole network of images and associations replaces his literal agency with Gertrude's" (Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest[New York and London: Routledge, 1992], 24).
8. Quotations from Hamlet follow the text in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).
9. For readings of typological patterns in Renaissance literature, see J. M. Evans, "Paradise Lost" and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); and Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, "Typological Symbolism and the 'Progress of the Soul' in Seventeenth-Century Literature" in Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present, Earl Miner, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1977), 79-114.
10. For a discussion of the necessary role of a maximal Fall in the notion of Christian redemption, see J. M. Evans, 59.
11. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001), 229. My own essay, in its attempt to correlate religious contexts and psychic constellations, also differs from, even as it shares a common theme with, Deborah Willis's recent essay on trauma and Titus Andronicus, in which she discusses the play's patterns of revenge as "a perverse therapy for traumatic experience" ("'The gnawing vulture': Revenge, Trauma Theory, and Titus Andronicus," Shakespeare Quarterly 53 [2002]: 21-52, esp. 25).
12. John Ponet, "A Short Catechisme" in English Reformers, T.H.L. Parker, ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966), 145-82, esp. 162.
13. See Saint Augustine, The Grace of Christ and Original Sin, Two Books against Pelagius and CaelestiusI in The Works of Saint Augustine, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill, 26 vols. (New York: New City Press, 1990-97), 23:403-63, esp. 446-54.
14. Martin Luther, Confession Concerning Christ's Supper, trans. Robert H. Fischer, in Luther's Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann et al., 55 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955-86), 37:362.
15. Thomas Goodwin, Man's Guiltiness before God (London, 1685), 52, emphasis added.
16. See A. M. Dubarle, The Biblical Doctrine of Original Sin, trans. E. M. Stewart (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1964), 7-10.
17. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 251-52. N. P. Williams writes that "considered historically and with regard to the circumstances of its origin, the theory of the Fall and Original Sin does not rest upon that Paradise-story of Genesis iii. Its true foundations are psychological, based on the bed-rock facts of ethical and spiritual experience—the consciousness of moral struggle, and the feeling of a ceaseless strain and tension between duty and the clamorous appetite, which ever and anon burst victoriously forth into crude external expression, whilst reason looks on in helpless dismay and shame" (The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin [London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1927], 31).
18. Philip C. Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1999), 2.
19. See Sigmund Freud, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 12:7-122, esp. 29-47 and 89-103, hereafter cited as The Standard Edition.
20. Freud writes: "It does not necessarily follow that these previously unconscious recollections are always true. . . . All I mean to say is this: scenes, like this one in my present patient's case, which date from such an early period and exhibit such a content, and which further lay claim to such an extraordinary significance for the history of the case, are as a rule not reproduced as recollections, but have to be divined—constructed—gradually and laboriously from an aggregate of indications" (51). For his explanation of deferred action, see 45n. For a discussion of the primal scene as "founding" but not temporally "first" in any objective way, see Jean Laplanche, New foundations, 115.
21. Laplanche, New foundations, 89-90 and 127. Consider also Ellie Ragland: "From the start of life, one traumatically loses objects that satisfy both corporally and psychically. Indeed, loss and trauma could be used interchangeably" ("The Psychical Nature of Trauma: Freud's Dora, the Young Homosexual Woman, and the Fort! Da! Paradigm" in Belau and Ramadanovic, eds., 75-110, esp. 96-97).
22. Laplanche, New foundations, 128.
23. For the classic discussion of the "compulsion to repeat" as a violation of the pleasure principle which suggests the possibility of a death drive (Todestriebe), see Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle in The Standard Edition,18:7-64. For formulations of repetition as a productive or therapeutic as well as damaging symptom, see Max M. Stern, Repetition and Trauma: Toward a Teleonomic Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. Liselotte Bendix Stern (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1988), which explains repetition as a way of making meaning of the traumatic experience (101-14). See also Lucy Berliner and John Briere, "Trauma, Memory, and Clinical Practice" in Trauma and Memory, Linda M. Williams and Victoria L. Banyard, eds. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999), 3-18. Joyce McDougall argues that even symptoms which appear pathological are life-preservative: "I am taking issue . . . with Freud's concept of the 'repetition compulsion' as exclusively serving the death drive. The compulsion to maintain and repeat deep unconscious patterns of behavior, even those that are manifestly pathological, is frequently revealed to be on the side of life" (The Many Faces of Eros: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Human Sexuality [New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1995], 120). This view of repetition as productive or therapeutic has been contested by various researchers and clinicians, who associate it with a dangerous vulnerability to future trauma. In addition, they see such vulnerability as the result of psychological and biological factors. See, for example, Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery, rev. ed.(New York: Basic Books, 1997), 111; and Bessel A. van der Kolk, "The Complexity of Adaptation to Trauma: Self-Regulation, Stimulus Discrimination, and Characterological Development" in Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weisaeth, eds. (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1996),182-213, esp. 188.
24. Almond, 69, emphasis added.
25. I am suggesting, then, that while categories of traumatic experience (such as death, loss, violence) are transhistorical, the narratives through which they are felt and lived are historically embedded. I would like to thank Garrett Sullivan for clearly articulating this possibility.
26. Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis, trans. George V. Schick, inPelikan and Lehmann, eds., 1:3-73, esp. 64.
27. William Perkins, The VVorkesof That Famous and VVorthy Minister of Christ . . . Mr. William Perkins,2 vols. (Cambridge, 1612), 1:1.
28. Goodwin, 349.
29. Charles Lloyd Cohen, God's Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), 26.
30. "But that primal worthiness cannot come to mind without the sorry spectacle of our foulness and dishonor presenting itself by way of contrast, since in the person of the first man we have fallen from our original condition. From this source arise abhorrence and displeasure with ourselves, as well as true humility; and thence is kindled a new zeal to seek God" (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960],1:242).
31. Consider the baptism service in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer: "Dearly beloved, forasmuch as all men be conceived and born in sin, and that our Savior Christ saith, None can enter into the kingdom of God, except he be regenerate and born anew of water and the Holy Ghost: I beseech you to call upon God the Father . . . that of his bounteous mercy he will grant to these children that thing which by nature they cannot have, that they may be baptized with water and the Holy Ghost, and received into Christ's holy Church, and be made lively members of the same" (The Book of Common Prayer 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book, ed. John E. Booty [Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976], 270).
32. Perkins's near contemporary Richard Sibbes also invoked the concept of Original Sin in his discussions of human misery and death; see The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. Alexander Balloch Grosart, 7 vols. (Edinburgh: J. Nichol, 1862-64), 1:13, 2:336, and 2:335.
33. Caruth, 2 and 4.
34. Almond, 69.
35. Sibbes in Grosart, ed., 2:336. This structure resonates with Caruth's discussions of the way in which trauma "is not simply an effect of destruction but also, fundamentally, an enigma of survival" (58).
36. John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1955),2:95-118, esp. 101.
37. Perkins, 1:4.
38. For the beginnings of this tradition with the patristic fathers through its articulation in Aquinas, see Henri Rondet, Original Sin: The Patristic and Theological Background, Trans. Cajetan Finegan OP (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1972), 61 and 164.
39. Goodwin, 10.
40. Adelman makes a persuasive psychoanalytic argument for the role of the maternal body in Shakespearean drama in Suffocating Mothers. She does not, however, approach the problem as the result of religious as well as psychological entanglements. Gail Kern Paster, in The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993), emphasizes the intersection of popular and elite gender ideologies in medical discourses on the female body, but she does not focus concerted attention on the intersection of specific religious doctrines with these discourses.
41. Godfrey Goodman, The Fall of Man (London, 1616), sig. D2v.
42. Goodman, sig. D2v.
43. David Cressy discusses conflicting early modern messages about procreation which, though they emphasized that "giving birth was a Christian duty that was fully consonant with God's law," were haunted by a "tension"between "the spiritual rewards of procreation and . . . the inherent sinfulness of the carnal act" (Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997], 18). He explains that "few preachers went so far as to suggest that lawful sexual intercourse was unclean or that childbirth inherently involved pollution. But some of the sterner sort drew attention to the fundamental corruption in which all human beings were conceived and born. This sinful state . . . was a consequence of humankind's post-lapsarian condition and had nothing directly to do with the processes of reproduction. But some godly writers were so overwhelmed by the discourse of sin and salvation that they could not mention childbirth without reference to defilement and the 'spot of child-bed taint'" (18-19).
44. Ricoeur, 238.
45. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity in The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill et al., 7 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977-98), 2:239-40.
46. My reading of the traumatic in Hamlet thus differs from that of Bennett Simon, who relies on certain features of traumatic symptomatology to diagnose not only characters but also the overarching "tone" of the play, its "imagery of spatial dislocation . . . [its] shaking of fundamental beliefs ... and frantic attempts to regain stability and certainty" ("Hamlet and the Trauma Doctors: An Essay at Interpretation," American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture 58 [2001]: 707-22, esp. 714). Rather than applying contemporary notions of trauma directly to the environment of Elsinore, the interpretation that follows relies on a historicized notion of trauma which treats it as the result of a particular set of doctrinal and hermeneutic tensions.
47. Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 46.
48. For the seminal discussion of this system, see Eleanor Prosser, "Hamlet" and Revenge (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1967).
49. According to Bessel A. van der Kolk, "It is thought that the persistence of intrusive and repetitious thoughts, by means of the process of kindling, sets up a chronically disordered pattern of arousal. A patient is victimized by having memories of the event, not by the event itself" ("The Body Keeps the Score: Approaches to the Psychobiology of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder" in van der Kolk, McFarlane, and Weisaeth, eds., 214-41, esp. 218).
50. Donald V. Stump, "Hamlet, Cain and Abel, and the Pattern of Divine Providence," Renaissance Papers 1985 (1986): 27-38.
51. I would like to thank Paul E. J. Hammer for pointing out this pun.
52. See Adelman, 23.
53. Caruth, 58 and 62.
54. On Hamlet and Hamlet's repetition compulsion as a result of repression, see Marjorie Garber, "Hamlet: giving up the ghost" in Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as uncanny causality (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 124-76.
55. I would like to thank an anonymous reader for clarifying the relation of my argument about traumatic repetition to the perennial question of Hamlet's delay. I do not see trauma as an explanationfor the putative delay but rather as a way of suggesting there is no delay, at least not in delay's pejorative connotation.
56. Lee Sheridan Cox has linked the repetition of the performances to the Fall: "That [the drama] takes place in a garden, that the destroyer is envious and treacherous, that he wishes to usurp the place of another, that he is called a 'serpent,' that he attacks by way of the ears, that the immediate effect of his evildoing is a species of confinement for the victim . . . these details . . . echo the first act of treachery in a garden, its circumstances, cause, and effect" (Figurative Design in "Hamlet": The Significance of the Dumb Show [Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1973], 35).
57. See Robert N. Watson, "Giving up the Ghost in a World of Decay: Hamlet, Revenge, and Denial," Renaissance Drama 21 (1990): 199-223, esp. 199. Watson quotes and agrees with C. S. Lewis, "Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem," Proceedings of the British Academy 28 (1942): 139-54, esp. 147-52.
58. Greenblatt, 17.
59. Alexander C. McFarlane and Rachel Yehuda make an important distinction between fear and horror in trauma. They explain that a "particularly prejudicial view" of traumatic symptomatology is based on the assumption "that fear is the cause of PTSD" ("Resilience, Vulnerability, and the Course of Posttraumatic Reactions" in van der Kolk, McFarlane, and Weisaeth, eds., 155-81, esp. 171-72). Instead, they say, it is "the sense of threat and horror that becomes imbedded in the memory of an individual who may have coped well at the time of the trauma" (171-72, emphasis added).
60. This reading of the graveyard scene (5.1) assumes that the stage direction for Hamlet to leap into Ophelia's grave, found only in Q1 (1603), is valid.
61. Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 22. Mitchell's argument is that the sibling relation is actually more "primal" than the parental one. As she says, "in Freud's account, love and hate derive from the parental relationship and are subsequently transferred to siblings. I read these events the other way around" (23). But despite her desire to see the sibling relation as originary, Mitchell's language betrays her when she explains that "faced with a sibling, the child regresses to its wish for infantile unity with the mother; it is then that it finds the father in the way" (23, emphasis added). The sibling relation is, in other words, the chronologically later event that recalls the earlier one in a new way. The relation is thus perfectly traumatic in its temporal logic of deferral.
62. That Hamlet's "dying voice" (5.2.356) approves the sovereignty of Fortinbras, who claims "some rights, of memory in this kingdom" (l. 389), continues to participate in, not to dismantle, this structure: Fortinbras stands for the inherited revenge of a lost father.
63. René Girard explains the urge to revenge as a species of mimetic desire in A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford UP, 1991), 271-89.
64. Edward Taylor, Upon the Types of the Old Testament, ed. Charles W. Mignon, 2 vols. (Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1989), 1:xxxiv.
65. Gerald Bray, Biblical Interpretation: Past and Present (Leicester, UK: Apollos Press, 1996), 64.
66. See Jean Danielou, From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers (London: Burns and Oates, 1960).
67. Luther, Lectures on Genesis, 1:59.
68. William Tyndale, "W. T. to the Reader," The New Testament of Our Sauiour Iesus Christ ([London], 1536), sig. *viir.
69. Thomas Taylor, Christ Revealed (London, 1635), sig. B2r; and Thomas Jackson, The Knowledge of Christ Jesus. The Seventh Book of Commentaries upon the Apostles Creed (London, 1634), sig. C4v.
70. Edward Taylor, 1:3.
71. Thomas Middleton, The Two Gates of Salvation Set Wide Open, or, The Mariage of the Old and New Testament (London, 1609), sig. B3r.
72. Danielou, 11. Julia Reinhard Lupton frames the ideological investments of a reading practice that "describes the exegetical relation between the Old Testament and the New, in which the prior text forms both the hallowed origin and the superseded beginnings of the latter work" (Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature [Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996], xvii). See also Jill Robbins: "Against the chronological and logical order, the New Testament asserts its priority over the old. . . . The reversal of the priority of the two testaments is of the order of value. Promise and fulfillment oppose deferred presence to full presence. The reversal is also of the order of truth. The oppositions hidden and manifest, shadow and reality, imply the epistemological valorization of the second term" (Prodigal Son/Elder Brother: Interpretation and Alterity in Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka, Levinas [Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1991], 4).
73. Lupton, xviii.
74. Luther, Lectures on Genesis, 1:12.
75. Middleton, sig. B1v.
76. This paradox may be what we hear in Hamlet's response to the Ghost's revelation in 1.5: "O my prophetic soul!" (l. 40). He sees himself as having foretold an event that, ironically, has already happened.
77. William Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth: Studies in Milton's Symbolism (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1968), 5.
78. See, for example, Stern, Berliner and Briere, and McDougall.
79. Van der Kolk, "The Body Keeps the Score," 222.
80. Laplanche suggests that this fact, the priority of the primal trauma, actually offers hope for healing: "Even in so-called physical trauma, the way to find a point of entry was in what was psychic, in how it revived something from infancy. If there weren't this revival of something personal and sexual, there would be no way of coping with those traumas" (Cathy Caruth, "An Interview with Jean Laplanche" in Belau and Ramadanovic, eds., 101-25, esp. 111).
81. Van der Kolk, "Trauma and Memory" in van der Kolk, McFarlane, and Weisaeth, eds., 279-302, esp. 295.
82. Ricoeur, 238.
83. Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1995), 43.
84. Luxon, 67.
85. Philip Melanchthon, Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: Loci Communes 1555, ed. and trans. Clyde L. Manschreck (New York: Oxford UP, 1965), xlvi. Consider also John Calvin: "and specially let him note, that after Adam by his mortall Fall, destroyed him selfe and all his posteritie, this is the foundation of our saluation, this is the originall of the Church, that we being taken out of most deepe darkenesse, haue through the meere grace of God obteined a newe life" (A Commentarie of John Calvin, upon the first booke of Moses called Genesis, trans. Thomas Thynne [London, 1578], sig. B3v).
86. See Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990), 30-35; and Joseph Wittreich, Interpreting "Samson Agonistes" (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1986), 180-81.
87. For a discussion of the allusions to Genesis in As You Like It, see Russell Fraser, "Shakespeare's Book of Genesis," Comparative Drama 25 (1991): 121-28.