Chapter 5 - Ghosting Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Summary

Chapter 5, building directly on the impasse of Hamlet’s inaction, looks to Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffmann and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy in exploring how these near-contemporary plays react to Hamlet’s existential impasse and tragic theatrical deficiency. The chapter especially attends to how Chettle and Middleton translate Shakespeare’s ethics of ‘marking’ into a wild exploration of the transgressive limits of moral being on the margins of what remains, once the performance of action leaves behind it a ruined and malformed metaphysics of morality. They do so by re-focusing the genre’s theatrical energy on multiple acts of violent revenge and transgression, paradoxically framed by a moral idealism often on the verge of tipping into frantic paranoia. As this chapter finally shows, the emerging actorly agency explored in these plays bears surprising consequences for how their imagined audiences are asked to understand and experience the passions attending the revenge act.