Hamlet the Bonesetter

Summary

‘The time is out of joint. O cursed spite/That ever I was born to set it right!’ It is Hamlet’s moira, his pitiless lot, that he is cast as bone-setter to the time, and he does not look upon it as a privileged role. The play Hamlet is, in one dimension of Aristotle’s thought, a goat-song, and in what follows I shall be importunately concerned with the lines of continuity between the tragic play and its primordial spectre, the sacrificial ritual. An interest in Shakespeare cannot in itself be expected to shed light on perplexities that have for so long engaged and divided classical scholars and anthropologists, but when some of Shakespeare’s plays are viewed with such perplexities in mind, certain features of their structure and process become, I believe, distinctly visible. In attempting such a perspective there is no necessity to begin with Hamlet. Titus Andronicus, for example, in its anthropological as distinct from its historical setting, looks back to rituals of human sacrifice and exemplifies a primitive logic and elemental feeling carried unexpectedly in the vehicle of a decorated and sophisticated art.