“Lady, Shall I Lie in Your Lap?”: Gender, Status, and Touch on the English Stage

nHamlet, as the court of Denmark settles in for a performance of The Murder of Gonzago, the prince asks Ophelia, “Lady, shall I lie in your lap?” She responds, “No, my lord.” As Hamlet nonetheless forces his attentions on her, an exchange, laden with sexual innuendoes, follows, of which Theobald avers that “if ever the Poet deserved Whipping for low and indecent Ribaldry, it was for this Passage”—strong words, given the competition in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Generations of readers since have found the Ribaldry in this scene, though they may not feel it warrants a Whipping. Yet, as Zachary Lesser’s recent work on the First Quarto’s reading of “contrary” rather than the infamous “country matters” suggests, gestures like Hamlet’s may encode more than one relationship between agents, more points of conflict than sexual desire. In this essay, I argue that early modern plays,Hamlet among them, employ the head-in-lap configuration to stage conflicts over such culturally pressing issues as female agency, the role of sensual pleasure in a virtuous life, and the difficulty of balancing reciprocal intimacy with structural hierarchies, all intertwined, and all negotiated through this symbolically ambiguous act of erotic touch. Recent models of early modern touch stress its role in enacting power relations, with dominance made manifest