Hamlet's Heirs by Charnes Linda;

Author:Charnes, Linda;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

As we have seen, in Hamlet adultery is the only political form; political stability, succession, and even national survival all dissolve in the wake of King Hamlet’s voracious sexual narcissism and the deformed legacy it bequeaths the prince.

Shakespeare’s fascination with the violent coercion of identity exacted by paternal legacy vexes his entire corpus, which is full of children who cannot, or will not, be ‘like’ their fathers (or their mothers, for that matter). For all the devastation this tension generates, Shakespeare shows us time and again that the only route to political change is through the lack of resemblance between parents and offspring.12 Hamlet offers no recuperable models of paternal sublimity, nothing with which to reconstitute the foundation of the royal state. In his refusal to take up the crown, a wife, the state, and father offspring, Hamlet breaks the continuity of production that would enable the dream of patriarchal ‘inevitability’ to continue. He can only, with his dying voice, give Denmark away to Fortinbras, the most perfect clone in the Shakespearean corpus.

Hamlet is a play for contemporary America, with its deep uncertainty about what kinds of stories to tell about its public figures (and by extension, ourselves) and what kind of government Americans wish to subscribe to. Is America an elective or a successive democracy? What difference does or should it make if a presidential successor is a namesake? In spite of itself, and in keeping with its British colonial heritage, America seems to be a democracy that craves Monarchs. The death of John F. Kennedy Junior in a plane crash in July, 1999 brought these longings to the surface of our national rhetoric. ‘America’s Crown Prince drowns’, headlines proclaimed, as if we still had such a thing as crown princes. We were besieged with images of ‘John-John’ playing at his father’s feet under the Presidential desk, and famously, saluting the Presidential casket, as if these images provided the ‘ocular proof’ of his entitlement to have inherited his father’s crown. No matter how much the adult JFK Jr stated his disinclination towards politics (and especially towards the Presidency), Americans thrust his greatness upon him posthumously, speaking of his ‘tragic legacy’ and ‘how lightly he wore his royalty’ ( Jonathan Alter 1999: 50), as if there were some special Providence in the fall of this sparrow. As tragic as his untimely death was, it revealed more than anything how deeply runs our sentimental desire to behold the stamp of the father in the form of the son.

Phantom Monarchy lives on not only in how we want to see our Magistrates but in the way we nurse our own sense of entitlement to what were once the prerogatives of royalty: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, with the latter increasingly defined as wealth. Even as we demand our ‘riches’, we refuse to be held responsible for how the political system is actually run. To this extent, Hamlet can certainly be regarded as a new kind of Everyman; or at least as a model of what the new American cyberdream tells us we can all be – virtual royalty.

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