'Hide Fox, and All After'

Overview

Is there anything more to say on this most-discussed of plays? It has become a hive of furious theorising, an anthill of scholarly research. J.D. Winter looks at the text afresh, seeing it as something to be viewed through a playgoer's eyes: what is taking place on stage, and that only. He adopts three phrases from the text to provide a context for his approach: the play's the thing, a rhapsody of words, and the invisible event. The first suggests the spectacle itself, without regard to what has been written about it. There is no reference to outside opinion nor is another literary work named. The second indicates an awareness of the text as poem. While the tremendous sweep of Shakespearean blank verse, the prose-paragraphs on fire with their own poetry, the whispering gallery of metaphor, can scarcely be accorded proper respect in a prose commentary, certain rhapsodic effects are everywhere noted. Finally, the play is contained within a mystery. There is the question of the prince's mental state, that so consumes other characters; there is the question of his procrastination, which he himself is desperate about. But the larger question, which in one shape or another has dogged critics down the ages, has to do with the drift of the action towards its culmination, including the way the mind of the audience (or reader) is taken on board. There can be no definitive answer to Hamlet or Hamlet. But like a signpost in a swarming mist, the third phrase may offer a faint clue: the invisible event.