3.Hamletcan be seen in light of its fulfillment of nondeliberated inten-
tions. For example, it is written in early modern English, and it was not
Shakespeare’s deliberate intention to have early modern English as his native
language. Together with having this language may come certain intentions
and habits of expression that arenotobjects of conscious deliberation. Per-
haps many people who speak a given language and who live in particular
times are significantly but unconsciously affected by a variety of continuing
subtexts of their concern with public self-presentation. Almost all of us have
views that arenotfully articulated about how to dress, how to hold our
bodies, and how to interact with various other sorts of people in conversa-
tion. Though we can sometimesbecomeaware of these views, we do not
always do so. We have largely simply taken them on from our social sur-
roundings. Continuing subtexts that give shape toHamletmay include such
things as the Freudian thematics of the Oedipal crisis, gender anxiety and
same sex interest, or class anxiety–anything that people may be supposed
significantly to care about covertly in their struggles to form and maintain
themselves as subjects in a social setting.
4.Hamletcan be seen as an essentially visionary work, the product more of
literary language’s possession of Shakespeare than his possession of it. That is,
onemaysuppose that Shakespearecamepredominantlytowriteout ofhis spirit,
ear, or feel for the language, as used by his literary predecessors and contem-
poraries, beyond any conscious or unconscious preoccupations of his society
and independently of any conscious address to problems. Central toHamletmay
be a kind of compulsive making of metaphors and images, cobbled together out
of literary examples and contemporary speech in a way that is more inspired
than controlled. According to this view, what makes the play what it is as art is
this compulsive, visionary meaning-making as a work of inspiration or genius.
To understand the play according to this view will centrally require close,
attentive tracing of its patterns of metaphor and imagery, and it will require
relating those patterns to related patterns in precursors such as the Bible and
Spenser, so as to demonstrate their density, extent, and originality.
5.Hamletcan be seen as an object to be performed or otherwise to be made
use of creatively. It is, among other things, a very long play, and in most
performances there will be some cuts to the text. Decisions will have to be
made about costuming, lighting, diction, and blocking. Directors and per-
formers will have to settle how to use the stage and how to have the charac-
ters interact physically. As a radical extension of this view, one might decide
Understanding art 143