IN his reply to his mother, his first extended utterance in the play, Hamlet distinguishes between the elaborate external rituals of mourning and an inner, invisible anguish. His black attire, his sigh, his tear fail to denote him truly not because they are false – Hamlet’s sorrow for his father is sincere – but because they might be false, because some other person might conceivably employ them deceitfully. Even reliable indicators or symptoms of his distress become suspect, simply because they are defined as indicators and symptoms. It is hard to imagine what could possibly count as ‘true denotation’ for Hamlet. The mere, inevitable existence of a hiatus between signs – ‘trappings and suits’ – and what they signify – ‘that within’ – seems to empty signs of their consequence. Substitutes for something imagined to be more real, more true, and more primary, the ‘trappings and suits of woe’ derive their power from that reality, but ought never to be confused with it.

Hamlet’s conviction that truth is unspeakable implicitly devalues any attempts to express or communicate it. The exemplary instance of this devaluation is the theatre: ‘for they are actions that a man might play’. The frank fakeries of the playhouse, its disguisings and impersonations, stand for the opacities that seem to characterise all relations of human beings to one another.

The issues Hamlet touches upon in his speech to his mother pervade the drama of the English Renaissance, which is very often preoccupied with the a.ictions and satisfactions that attend upon the gap between an unexpressed interior and a theatricalised exterior: with the epistemological anxieties it generates, the social practices that are devised to manage it, and the socio-political purposes it serves.