Hamlet: Fold on Fold

by Gabriel Josipovici

William Shakespeare's  Hamlet is probably the best-known and most commented upon work of literature in Western culture. The paradox is that it is at once utterly familiar and strangely elusive—very like our own selves, argues Gabriel Josipovici in this stimulating and original study. Moreover, our desire to master this elusiveness, to “pluck the heart out of its mystery,” as Hamlet himself says, precisely mirrors what is going on in the play; and what Shakespeare's play demonstrates is that to conceive human character (and works of art) in this way is profoundly misguided.
 
Rather than rushing to conclusions or setting out a theory of what Hamlet is “about,” therefore, we should read and watch patiently and openly, allowing the play to unfold before us in its own time and trying to see each moment in the context of the whole. Josipovici’s valuable book is thus an exercise in analysis which puts the physical experience of watching and reading at the heart of the critical process—at once a practical introduction to a great and much-loved play and a sophisticated intervention in some of the key questions of theory and aesthetics of our time.

Genres: Shakespeare

292 pages, Hardcover

First published April 26, 2016

About the author

Gabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 of Russo-Italian, Romano-Levantine parents. He lived in Egypt from 1945 to 1956, when he came to Britain. He read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, graduating with a First in 1961. From 1963 to 1998 he taught at the University of Sussex. He is the author of seventeen novels, three volumes of short stories, eight critical works, and numerous stage and radio plays, and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His plays have been performed throughout Britain and on radio in Britain, France and Germany, and his work has been translated into the major European languages and Arabic. In 2001 he published A Life, a biographical memoir of his mother, the translator and poet Sacha Rabinovitch (London Magazine editions). His most recent works are Two Novels: 'After' and 'Making Mistakes' (Carcanet), What Ever Happened to Modernism? (Yale University Press), Heart's Wings (Carcanet, 2010) and Infinity (Carcanet, 2012).

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is important is that we in the audience as we see and hear Hamlet, cannot quite believe him and at the same time cannot stop our hearts from going out to him.

This was my first Josipovici. He's important to a few folks whom I truly value here. I enjoyed his 270 pages -- ruminating and referencing this astounding and confounding play. The fold idea comes from Mallarmé, a notion of the entity as a fan, which can be folded or unfolded. The author asserts that Shakespeare not only anticipates Modernism but is likely amongst the first agents thereof. Josipovici references Kierkegaard, Beckett and especially Philip Larkin to frame the errant Prince of Denmark. His Hamlet remains aware he is a play, but pines in doleful resignation for a different one. Much as Godard never wants the audience to forget it is a film they are experiencing, the stagecraft of the time is noted Shakespeare's dialogue. Hell is door to be low the stage not a state of moral oblivion.

This was likely a third or fourth tome devoted to this seminal play and the riches within were deeply enjoyed. I watched the Olivier version as my primary text.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

roughly half and half of trite extemporising and genuinely arresting stuff, although reading this off the back of "what happens in hamlet" i couldn't help noting the points where josipovici says there are ambiguities which wilson clarified

[Goatboy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant and insightful ride through Hamlet and its historical and philosophical environs, with Josipovici at the wheel pointing out every modernist rock outcrop and roadside attraction along the way. Very much recommended.

[Zachary Waltz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read this commentary a few times now, and it finally struck me. This is the reading of Hamlet that I also have. The introduction ultimately sets up his thesis well.

HFOF: … Of course every work of art is full of cross-references, of echoes which gradually create something that is not so much a narrative or a play or a painting or a piece of music as an entire and consonant world. … But in Hamlet the echos are somehow too insistent, the parallels too close, the springs of action excessively overdetermined, while when one comes to examine them closely they evaporate into thin air.

To begin with, as the American lady is supposed to have said, the play is rather too full of quotations: ‘I have that within which passes show’, ‘The time is out of joint’, ‘To be or not to be’, ‘Very like a whale’, ‘O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown’, ‘The lady doth protest too much’, ‘The readiness is all.’ Partly because the play is so famous, partly because so many of its lins are so memorable, but partly too, perhaps, for a deeper, more secret reason, it feels as if we had

And then, as I've said, there are the internal parallels or echoes which are thrust into our consciousness. There is not one family at the centre of the action, as in Othello, or even two, as in Macbeth and Lear, but three: Hamlet, his dead father (with the same name), and his uncle-stepfather, Claudius; Laertes, his (soon-to-be) dead father, and his sister; Fortinbras, his father (with the same name) and his bed-ridden uncle - not to speak of Priam, Hecuba and their dead son, the subject of the Player's speech in Act II. Hamlet, we learn, was born the day his father, Old Hamlet, defeated the Norwegians, in the form of Old Fortinbras, thereby taking possession of some Norwegian land, and he dies just as Young Fortinbras invades Denmark, blessing the conquest with his dying words. The parallels are too insistent to ignore, but what are we to make of them? Again, what Old Hamlet tells his son about his murder is then at Young Hamlet's instigation acted out, first in a dumb-show and then in a play, yet Lucianus, the murderer in the play, is not, as in Old Hamlet's account, the king's brother, but his nephew - not, in other words, Claudius, if this is meant to echo the situation as Hamlet conceives it, but Hamlet himself and the victim Claudius - or is the victim actually the father he professes to adore? Insistent, yes, but, again, strangely resistant to interpretation (though a gift to those psychoanalytically inclined, some of whom, and not the most foolish, even claim that it is really Gertrude asleep in the orchard and Hamlet is not slaying his father but sleeping with his mother). Again, Old Hamlet, in the crucial fifth scene of the first act, explains to his son what has befallen him, but Young Hamlet is not sure whether the apparition is telling him the truth or pouring poison into his ear in order to drag him to perdition - no, hold on, the murder is said to consist of the literal pouring of poison into Old Hamlet's ear by his treacherous brother... It seems as if every image, every word, sends us off to other scenes, images and words in a desperate attempt to get the play under control, to make clear to ourselves exactly what is going on - yet every such attempt seems to make things more rather than less confusing.

Moreover, in no other play of Shakespeare's probably no other major literary work - are so many key episodes shrouded in mist. Has Claudius been legally elected according to Danish custom or has he usurped the throne? Is his marriage to his brother's wife seen as perfectly natural by everyone but Hamlet, or do others share his feeling that it should not have happened at all and was in any case over-hasty? Did Claudius commit adultery with his brother's wife or merely woo his widow? Why does Claudius not react to the mime, which is meant to reflect his murder back at him? Does Ophelia drown by accident or is it suicide? What exactly is the nature of the wager that Claudius enters into with Laertes over the duel? …

…Textual work on Proust and Joyce, for example, has shown us that we are pursuing a myth if we think we can ever get to 'what the author really wrote' - a myth, in fact, which has its origins in the Renaissance and the Reformation, with their desire to get back to the pure, unsullied text of Plato or the Gospels by removing the encrustation of later times. …

The really peculiar thing about Hamlet, though, is that this myth of the truth being inherent in a text (or a person) turns out to be one of its central themes. Claudius and the court try to get to the heart of Hamlet, to find out what he is 'really up to', something he is well aware of and strenuously resists. At the same time he himself is engaged in precisely the same endeavour, asking himself obsessively (as Othello, Lear and Macbeth never do) who he is and why he is acting as he does. All of which reinforces the strange sense of the play as being both inside and outside us, always known and familiar and also largely unknown and unknow- able - very like our sense of ourselves, in fact.