The Play’s the Thing

Abstract

This article brings to bear aspects of Heidegger and Derrida’s critiques of traditional Western understandings of being as presence on Hamlet. Within the context of an exploration of tensions and contradictions in Hamlet related to notions of copy and original, and representation and true being, it argues that, even as the character of Hamlet emerges within the play, the interplay of those very elements that constitute his character and thereby present his being simultaneously displace and endlessly disperse that being in such a way that he cannot be understood to have a cohesive, concealed originary ‘depth’ or definite ‘character’. The article suggests that this playful dispersedness is part of the essential structure of the play, of what might be termed its ‘syntax’ – that is, the meaningful arrangement together of its constituting elements. The play’s cohesion arises, therefore, from the very elements that unravel its cohesiveness.