‘The single and peculiar life’: Hamlet’s heart and the early modern subject

Summary

. . . you would pluck out the heart of my mystery.

Revisionist accounts of early modern subjectivity almost invariably begin with Hamlet's accusation. Elizabeth Hanson's fine book Discovering the Subject opens with the phrase as a paradigmatic statement, in which Hamlet assumes the position of the modern subject, endowed with an inner mystery, and resistant to its penetration and discovery. In this model the subject contains something elusively called 'mystery'; the space of mystery is the interior of the subject's body, here symbolized by the heart; and other people are desperate to get access to that mystery, if necessary by tearing the heart out of the subject's body. Since this was physically accomplished in contemporary rituals of execution for crimes involving treason, especially at this time religious treason, the phrase seems to gesture towards the torture chamber, the scaffold and the whole dangerous recusant world of Catholic England and 'Secret Shakespeare'. Removing the heart from the chest was never a practical way of acquiring information, but here the torturer and the executioner merge into one, and the symbolic and literal are hard to prise apart. Torture was often a prelude to judicial killing, and methods of execution were refined to prolong physical torment. The removal of organs at execution could be seen as a grotesque literalization of the torturer's invasive inquiries, as suggested in King Lear: 'To know our enemies' minds, we rip their hearts.'