Acting and Being Acted Upon: Hamlet's Delay, the Secondary Ghost, and the Purgation of Agency and Patiency

Abstract:Though usually construed in terms of defective or recalcitrant agency (not doing what should be done), Hamlet's delay can be freshly illumined by considering it in terms of patiency: the liability to be affected in various ways. Like the Ghost, Hamlet's patiency involves a process of purgation—not of sin, as with the Ghost, but of a way of thinking. The purgative process is challenged by the penetrative violence of a countervailing process—the speech of others, whose words, entering the ears of auditors like the poison poured into the ear of the sleeping King, profoundly influence and disrupt their thoughts. The purgation of Hamlet involves a multistage development whereby new cognitive characteristics displace or coexist alongside old ones, in one of the most subtle, elusive, and consequential mental evolutions depicted in drama. Highlights of this essay's explication include (a) the motif of the secondary ghost, (b) the striking interrelationships between the scene in Ophelia's closet and the narrated scene aboard the ship bound for England, (c) the removal of the arras that the revenge morality hangs between act and consequence, and (d) the recasting of the notion of agency such that inaction, not action, facilitates the achievement of the agent's ends.