VERNACULAR CRITICISM . . .

‘Let us . . . for a moment, put Shakespeare out of the question, and consider Hamlet as a real person, a recently deceased acquaintance.’ The suggestion comes from an essay by Hartley Coleridge, first published in Blackwoods Magazine in 1828. It is, in a way, an interesting proposal, partly because of its tone of cosy familiarity. The part about Hamlet being ‘recently deceased’ is particularly ingenious; acquaintances who have died no longer have the power to surprise or to disappoint us. They ‘achieve closure’ as characters in the narrative of our own lives. But the key point in Hartley Coleridge’s suggestion is not that Hamlet is ‘recently deceased’ but that he is someone with whom we can be acquainted in just the same way as we are acquainted with the real people who populate our own lives. A narrative has scope and extent beyond what is explicitly reported in a contingent text or performance. There are things that we can reliably infer about a fictional character’s moral disposition, motives, beliefs and desires that derive not from explicit textual cues but from everyday background knowledge of how the world generally works. The basic competence for understanding narrative as a process of filling in or completing gaps in the contingent storytelling is acquired at a very early stage of social learning. And this competence is a basic condition for the possibility of ‘getting the story’.