hooray for Gertrude’s lust; Hamlet in the matrix

First, it’s worth mentioning what a pleasure Heilbrun’s chapter on Gertrude was, the most gratifying critical extract thus far. Without knowing her other work I’ve no idea if her arguments are always so keen or if perhaps she was channeling some of Gertrude’s concision here, but in any case Heilbrun persuasively clarifies the motive centrality of Gertrude’s lust to the play’s action.

But if it’s not too much of a tangent I wanted to share, with reference to the historical timeline for Hamlet furnished by Prof. Kijowski, this blurb from Robert Stam, a professor in cinema studies at NYU, concerning the notion of “dialogic intertextuality,” which he develops from the late Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin:

“In the broadest sense, intertextual dialogism refers to the infinite and open-ended possibilities generated by all the discursive practices of a culture, the entire matrix of communicative utterances within which the artistic text is situated . . . The intertext of the work of art . . . may be taken to include not just other artworks in the same or comparable form, but also the ‘series’ within which a singular text is situated.”
(Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, p. 202)

Following Stam, another way of approaching Hamlet would be to locate the play as intertext, rather than a wholly self-contained emanation of Shakespeare’s unique “genius,” which at all events speaks for itself. Seen as a node in the larger cultural matrix suggested by Stam, Hamlet becomes a kind of palimpsest of earlier versions of medieval narratives dramatizing the Danish throne’s agonies, as well as the influence generating countless subsequent versions, together constituting a chain of utterances through time—Stam’s “series”—in which the precise point of origin has long since vanished into the oral past of lore and legend, and the endpoint is unlikely to arrive soon, with new productions of Hamlet appearing constantly.