Can Anybody See Hamlet?

The readers open a website entitled Imagined Theatres.

There they read the telescoped description of an imagined performance.

The title of the performance is not revealed but it begins with a performer in dark clothes entering holding a skull.

The further activities of the audience that evening are considered, concluding with the observation that it didn’t even occur to anybody in the audience that the skull was a Hamlet reference. Clearly this is supposed to be a fantasy production, possible only in the imagination.

At least some of these readers may feel, as I do, that this description is not that obviously a fantasy. One can certainly imagine a performance no more unlikely than this one, in which the audience was composed entirely of pre-school children or of adults from a culture in which Hamlet icons were unknown (there indeed are such). What makes theatre possible is the assumption that the audience, as a whole, will recognize the same cultural referents, although of course they may react to them in individual ways.

Certainly one can imagine an audience that does not recognize a skull as a Hamlet reference, just as one can imagine an audience that does not recognize a soldier on stage, or a priest, or a throne. One can imagine anything one likes, but there is nothing special about Hamlet. The real point is that theatre depends on a communication of referents. One can arbitrarily remove any single referent–from a skull to a crown–from a culture in imagination, but then the entire culture is changed, not just the referent. In such a culture, for example, no one backstage would have even thought of sending on a skull in the first place.

In fact some readers will find a useful approach to this imagined paradox in one of Borges’ most provocative short stories, “Averroes’ Search.” The story tells of the frustration of the medieval Islamic theorist who is translating Aristotle into Arabic and encounters the word “theatre,” a concept as unrecognizable to him as the Hamlet skull is to this theatre’s hypothetical audience. Like that audience in the concluding paragraph, he wanders the streets, having a variety of experiences, but like them, never reaches his goal (a theatre in both cases).

Borges concludes that his own attempt to reconstruct the thoughts of Averroes from available fragments was perhaps as futile as Averroes’ attempt to understand the concept of theatre from within a culture that lacked that concept. The reader may wonder if this Hamlet/skull proposition may be considered another consciously paradoxical attempt to describe an impossible performance by removing a cultural assumption that makes possible the operations of theatre itself? And finally, of course, what epistemological position does that give to this present commentary in challenging the strategies of that proposition? Certainly a confused one.

THIRTY[1]

[1] As a curtain call is the conventional conclusion to a play, “Thirty” is used in journalism to signal the end of an essay.