Hamlet's Other Selves

The paper discusses briefly the various versions Ernest Jones wrote of his essay on Hamlet. His central preoccupation with Hamlet as an oedipal drama is defined. Two assumptions made by Jones are then questioned: first, that it is appropriate to treat highly developed works of literature as if they were directly revelatory of the unconscious mind of the author; second, that the works themselves contain some hidden, a priori 'meaning' which it is the task of the interpreter to discover. By contrast, the author argues that works like Hamlet actually subvert the distinctions we ordinarily make between conscious and unconscious intention, between manifest and latent content, even between language and the material world. It is suggested that Hamlet itself is peculiarly concerned with the problems and dangers arising from the attempts by Shakespeare's characters to interpret each other's acts and words. Every such interpretation is shown to be ultimately an act of self-revelation. This, the argument concludes, is true not only for the characters in the play, but also for each of its readers.