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Page 1: 01 2 / . %% Shakespeare comedy tragedy materialism ... Terry Eagleton comments: ... Jacques Lacan suggests the prince as the subject who is deprived of the

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Page 2: 01 2 / . %% Shakespeare comedy tragedy materialism ... Terry Eagleton comments: ... Jacques Lacan suggests the prince as the subject who is deprived of the

HamletShakespearecomedytragedymaterialismpsychoanalysis

This article analyzes the relationship between comedy and tragedy through a rereading of the gravedigger scene in Hamlet, which is full of comic quality, yet is inserted before the ‘climax’ of the play, by, first, discussing the relationship between comedy and materialism, and, second, examining the mutuality between comedy and tragedy. It discusses how comedy links with the material, class struggle, and death and castration, arguing that the comic quality of the gravedigger is inseparable from his materialism, suggesting that if tragedy is about the spiritual, comedy would be about the interruption of the spiritual by the material, and these two qualities coincide in the grinning skull. If comedy signifies the material life from within, the tragic hero may be the person who resists this heterogeneous motion of life, which explains why Hamlet abhors Yorick’s skull. This article rethinks the interrelation between comedy and tragedy: while most scholars treat them as separate genres, they are interrelated, and the thin line that distinguishes them is class differences, which is significant, as it illustrates the material power of comedy to usurp the bour-geois society.

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Page 3: 01 2 / . %% Shakespeare comedy tragedy materialism ... Terry Eagleton comments: ... Jacques Lacan suggests the prince as the subject who is deprived of the

Criticism of spiritual things is to distinguish between the genuine and the nongenuine. This, however, is not the concern of language, or only deeply disguised: as humor. Only in humor can language be critical. The particular critical magic then appears, so that the counterfeit substance comes into contact with the light; it disintegrates. The genuine remains: it is ash. We laugh about it. The rays of anyone who beams excessively will also tackle those heavenly unmaskings we call criticism.

(Benjamin 1994: 84)

Humour, for Walter Benjamin, is the language of criticism. The genu-ine is the ash: the material that associates with death, and the function of criticism and humour alike is to turn the spiritual into material. It seems that comedy often has a connection with the material. Before the climax of Hamlet, William Shakespeare introduces the tragic hero to the gravedigger whose business, as my discussion is going to show, is to remind the prince of his impotence. The clown, the rustic, represents the comic anti-hero whose responsibility is to dig the base, or, to use Benjamin’s term, to ‘brush history against the grain’ (1968: 257). Through a rereading of the gravedigger scene, I am going to examine two questions in this article: (1) what is the relation-ship between comedy and the material? And (2) how can such a relation-ship tell us about the mutuality between comedy and tragedy? Based on the discussion, this article argues that the two genres are interrelated and should be understood together, for what is a tragedy for the bourgeois may just be a comedy for the proletariat.

Figure 1: Artwork by Tony Moon.

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In the first part of this article, I am going to argue for the close connection between comedy and materialism. In the beginning of the gravedigger scene, the first clown says, ‘Come, my spade. There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers; they hold up Adam’s profession’ (V.i.28-29). His words come from the proverbial rhyme ‘When Adam delved and Eve span,/Who was then the gentleman?’, Harold Jenkins suggests that ‘the Clown’s speech wittily inverts this by implying that there were none but gentlemen’ (Shakespeare 1982: 378). Adam was the first man who bore ‘arms’, which can be read as the coat of arms. The rhyme was the text that John Ball preached during the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. However, if we allow ourselves to consider the text in a bigger context, the idea of the Diggers revolt against hierarchy also recalls the Levellers in 1649, when a group of poor men started to dig the waste land on St George’s Hill, which is ‘a symbolic assumption of ownership of the common lands’ and ‘a symbolic rejection of conventional pieties’ (1972: 88). Christopher Hill writes that ‘The constitu-tional Levellers … were not in fundamental disagreement with the type of society that was being set up by the English Revolution. They accepted the sanctity of private property, and their desire to extend democracy was within the limits of a capitalist society’ (1972: 123). Even though the Levellers and the True Levellers wanted to distant themselves from being called a ‘communist’, the image of the gravedigger was again seen 200 years later in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that says ‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable’ (Engels and Marx 2008: 16). Marx uses the allegory of the gravedig-ger to suggest that the bourgeois would eventually create its own failure. Linking the working class with the colonized, Terry Eagleton comments:

For Marxism, history moves under the very sign of irony: there is some-thing darkly comic about the fact that the bourgeoisie are their own grave-diggers, just as there is an incongruous humour about the fact that the wretched of the earth should come to power.

(2009: 161)

In fact, if we follow Jenkins’s comments, we can see a Marxist twist in the words of the gravedigger, for Slavoj Žižek wrote:

For properly historical thought, as opposed to historicism, there is no contradiction between the claim that ‘all history hitherto is the history of class struggle’ and the claim that the ‘bourgeoisie is the first class in history.’ All civilized societies were class societies, but prior to capitalism, their class structure was distorted by a network of other hierarchical orders (castes, estates, and so forth) – only with capitalism, when individuals are formally free and equal, deprived of all traditional hierarchical links, does the class structure appear ‘as such.’

(2010: 196)

‘Bourgeoisie is the first class in history’ – does it not sound like an echo of the clown whose words imply that once upon a time ‘there were none but (original emphasis) gentlemen’? Summing up from the above, we can see that the gravedigger is an image that represents the destructive force from within, such an image demonstrates Marx’s insight in his reading of Shakespeare.

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In fact, the clown’s words have a close connection with class struggle, for he demonstrates the revolutionary power of jokes. Comparing with the coat of arms, a spade is more superior as it was there from the very beginning. The spade, which is ‘the insignium of “ancient gentlemen” like “Gardners, Ditchers, and Gravemakers”’ (Jenkins 1956: 564), recalls the late medi-eval morality play Mankind, in which it was used as the representation of honest labour, the symbol against the sin of sloth. W. A. Davenport writes that ‘Mankind’s role in the play is identified as that of honest labourer by his spade, and the self-appointed task of avoiding idleness by digging and sowing’ (1982: 43). In the play, the symbolism of spade and the allusion of earth and clay are deployed to ‘remind us of Adam and of man’s burden of original sin’ (Lester 1981: xxiv). Davenport suggests that digging ‘stands for the whole idea of man’s potential labours on this earth, as well as the idea of occupying oneself with useful tasks to fend off the Devil, and to earn salva-tion through virtuous acts, as one wins fruits from the earth by toil’ (1982: 43). Apart from this traditional reading, the spade, which digs the material base of earth, can be read as a symbol of the ‘working class’, and it belongs to nature and is primary while the coat of arms belongs to the bourgeois and is cultural and secondary. The interlude relates to the use of the gallows, as the devil Titivillus tries to convince Mankind to hang himself by saying that Mercy has been hanged. The power of comedy, as seen in Titivillus, Mischief, Newguise, Nowadays and Nought, is on the side of death, only in Mankind is it oppo-site to the one who makes their living through the spade. If the moral lesson of Mankind is to warn us against the violent use of language, the sin of flesh and excess, the theme of Hamlet is more ambiguous as it is the gravedigger who holds the spade. The power of comedy and death in the latter belongs to the working class. While the clown’s words may seem to be idle chatter, comparing Mankind with Hamlet shows that the bourgeois use of language is the real abuse of language. The teaching comes from the side of death, which is the exact opposite of Mercy’s saying ‘your body is your enemy’. The body for the gravedigger is not an enemy, because the material is the only form of existence, and it is the source of comedy, living and dying.

Moreover, the suggestion that Adam must dig with his ‘arms’ can be understood sexually, which means that the challenge of the working class is at the same time targeted against the patriarchal power. Discussing the play, Jacques Lacan suggests the prince as the subject who is deprived of the phallus. Comparing this Shakespeare tragic hero with Oedipus, he writes:

The situation at the beginning of Hamlet is completely different, even though it can be represented by the same notation. The Other reveals himself from the beginning as the barred Other. He is barred not only from the world of the living but also from his just retribution. He has entered the kingdom of hell with this crime, this debt that he has not been able to pay, an inexpiable debt, he says.

(Lacan 1982: 44)

The play, which he described as ‘a tragedy of the underworld’ (Lacan 1982: 39), is about the absence of the phallus and the desire for the objet a. The joke that Adam digs with his arms links with castration and death, because while it implies his sexual potency, such a substitution means that he is impotent. Avi Erlich writes, ‘The playful humor with Adam allows Shakespeare to discuss openly, in a seemingly innocent way, the unconscious fear that everywhere

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lurks in the play’s depths: “Why he had none” – fathers may be suspected of having lost their “arms”, of having lost their phallicism’ (1977: 137). The line demonstrates the anxiety of the patriarchal power: the father has always been impotent, and the supposedly authority of the father is gone and he was reduced as a laughing stock. Comedy is related to the concept of castration. In The Odd One In: On Comedy, Alenka Zupancic discusses comedy in relation to the Lacanian perception of castration:

Castration is what gives enjoyment its relative autonomy, what accounts for its possible objectification (enjoyment as object) and for its possible detachability. That is to say: it explains why, as ‘id,’ enjoyment can walk away in any direction, why it can find and real-ize itself in the most unusual or the most usual activities. This also means that it is this relative autonomy of enjoyment that makes possi-ble and opens up the space for what is colloquially referred to as the ‘fear of castration,’ that is, the fear of entirely losing control over this relatively independent part of our being. In other words, the empirical ‘fear of castration’ is always-already a consequence of castration – only if something already appears as separable/detachable can we fear that it will be taken away from us.

(2008: 192–93)

Comedy deals with the material – the object. The subject has always been castrated, but the joy comes with it. Zupancic argues that comedy is the radi-calization of this norm, and she added that ‘The human norm is a funda-mental dislocation of enjoyment, its potential objectification, detachability, independence, mobility (as fixation in another place)’ (Zupancic 2008: 193–94). Recognizing this state of existence, we can see that we do not own anything and those who chase after property and wealth are in a denial of castration, fetishistic and to be laughed at.

In the middle of the gravedigger scene, the prince enters as if he is the substitute of the second clown, and the scene continues with the encoun-ter between the tragic bourgeois and the comic proletariat. The clown throws up a skull, a memento mori. It is important for us to think about the comic nature of the skull, which is another return of the material. And it is exactly because it is material that it is deeply associated with death. The material is the only thing that truly exists yet is lifeless. It is an affirmation of existence and its opposite. Through numerous examples including Vesalius’ Skeleton Contemplating a Skull (1543) and Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), Roland Mushat Frye argues:

The visual memento mori we have examined in connection with the memento mori dramatization in Hamlet did not trap a person in the spir-itual cul-de-sac of a sterile preoccupation with death. On the contrary, they were directed toward life, and toward the effective living of life which, however long and short, should be lived in confident reliance upon the providence of God.

(1984: 252)

The skull becomes a detachment of the body. The throwing of the skull causes an uncanny feeling within us: something that is supposed to be part of us and which we cannot see is suddenly face to face with us, raising the ambiguity

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between living and dying. While Hamlet is obsessed with his father’s spectre, the gravedigger deals with the skull. The tragic bourgeois claims that there is a significant meaning when he is face to face with nothingness, yet what the comic proletariat says is that the material is everything. When the prince says, ‘That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once. How the knave jowls it to th’ ground as if ’twere Cain’s jawbone, that did the first murder!’ (V.i.70-72), he does not understand the state of ‘as if I had never been such’ as if he is holding on to the Imaginary. A ‘thing’ becomes funny when it develops its own life and takes its own flight, and the tragic bourgeois may be the ‘hero’ who resists the heterogeneous motion of life. If tragedy is about the spiritual, and comedy is about the interruption of spiritual by the material, the comic and tragic coincide in the jawbone.

Comedy is the material life from within, and it is also exemplified in the wordplay between the prince and the clown. Mixing damnation with salvation, and, therefore, shattering the distinction between life and death, the first clown asks if Ophelia should be ‘buried in Christian burial’ (V.i.1-2). The second clown replies that since Ophelia’s burial is a Christian one, they should make her grave straight, playing on the meaning of ‘straightway’ and ‘strait’, therefore, making her grave a confinement (V.i.3-4). His words imply that to believe in absolute sense is to be an essentialist, which is a strait-jacket, who hastens to the imaginary meaning of death. Such ‘essentialists’ are trapped inside their Imaginary, for they make living a confinement and fantasise the significance of death, denying the values of living. The clown’s word is opposite to gravedigger’s emphasis of ‘hanging’ (And the more pity that great folk should have countenance in this world to drown or hang them-selves more than their even Christen (V.i.26-29)) that means both death and ‘delay’. The clown shows the importance of the material and its relationship to living and dying as he demonstrates that to live is to ‘hang around’ but is also in itself a postponement of death.

Referring to Hamlet’s ‘action’, the gravedigger says that an act contains three elements, namely, to act, to do and to perform (V.i.11). We ‘lose the name of action’ since action becomes a performance. The clown says, ‘he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life’ (V.i.18-19). The line may mean that if a person does not shorten his own life, he is not guilty of his own death. However, through the comic stoppage and interruption, the statement can be read as ‘he that is not guilty of his own death, shortens not his own life’, which makes the statement a tautology. But, once again, his words are unreliable either, as he says ‘here lies the point’ (V.i.10). Using the ubi sunt motif, Hamlet and the gravedigger enter into an argument relat-ing to wordplay. In face of the skull, the prince asks ‘Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?’ (V.i.91-92) The ques-tion that he fails to ask is whether there is a difference between the inherent nature or essence of things and a quibble, a witticism, a quip. If the nature and essence of things are quibbles, it means that the essence is itself unsettling. When the clown says that the grave is his, the prince agrees because he thinks that the clown lies in the grave. The gravedigger says ‘I do not lie in’t, and yet it is mine’ (V.i.114), which suggests that the power of lying and telling truth is simultaneously possessed by the comic figure who speaks from the side of death. Hamlet, who can only see one side of meaning, disagrees and thinks that the grave is for the dead, and not for the living, suggesting that the gravedigger is lying. In response, the clown argues that what the prince says is a ‘quick lie’ (V.i.117). Within the Symbolic, there is a material force

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that creates the deferral of language, and meaning is always floating and ambiguous.

Aristotle writes that comedy ‘is a representation of inferior people, not indeed in the full sense of the word bad, but the laughable is a species of the base or ugly’; and tragedy is ‘a representation of an action that is heroic and complete and of a certain magnitude… it represents men in action and does not use narrative, and through pity and fear it effects relief to these and similar emotions’ (1932: 19–23). The clown’s materialism makes the notion of purification impossible and leads the play away from the Aristotelian model of tragedy, questioning the role of Hamlet as a tragic hero.

In the previous part, I have discussed the close tie between comedy and materialism; in this part, I am going to examine the ambiguity between comedy and tragedy by linking Yorick’s skull with other similar figures in the two genres, and, more importantly, arguing for the comedic revolution power of the proletariat.

Not only does the material life illuminate our understanding of comedy, it blurs the distinction between comedy and tragedy. Hamlet and the gravedig-ger play with words such as ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘is’ and ‘was’ until, finally, the prince says ‘How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equiv-ocation will undo us’ (V.i.126–127). Acknowledging the power of the material makes heroism impossible, and comedy is amoral because morality is the crea-tion of the bourgeois. Playing the game of words makes the prince aware of his impotence. He thinks that the gravedigger is ‘absolute’, therefore he must speak according to the rule. The powers of being absolute and to equivocate, which seem to be opposite to each other, belong to the same side, to the gravedigger. The prince fears that the wordplay will ‘undo’ them, and the word is used by Vindice in The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), who unmasks the skull and says, ‘Methinks this [the skull] mouth should make a swearer tremble,/A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo ’em / To suffer wet damnation to run through ’em’ (III.v.58–60); ‘Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours/For thee? for thee does she undo herself?’ (III.v.72-73). The fear of the shattering of subjectivity recalls the power of Dionysus, which, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, associates with carnival and tragedy. Defining tragedy as ‘an Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian insights and power’, Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, writes that while Apollo represents the principium individu-ationis, Dionysus, who has a smiling mask on his face, signifies the shattering of principium individuationis (1956: 56–57). On the mask of Dionysus, which is a reminder of the grinning skull, Jean-Pierre Vernant suggests that it ‘is a means of expressing absence in a presence’. He writes:

The mask, with wide staring eyes that fix one like those of the Gorgon (Medusa), expresses and epitomizes all the different forms that the terri-ble divine presence may assume. It is a mask whose strange stare exerts a fascination, but it is hollow, empty, indicating the absence of a god who is somewhere else but who tears one out of oneself, makes one lose one’s bearings in one’s everyday, familiar life, and who takes possession of one just as if this empty mask was now pressed to one’s own face, covering and transforming it.

(Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988: 396)

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Underneath a seemingly unified form and structure is the Dionysiac power that runs contrary with them, which is not unlike the gravedigger who is a disruptive power from within.

The gravedigger’s confusion of words and our inability to tell his intention show the clown, and the comic, as undecipherable. Another similar example can be found in a different ‘Marx’ – Harpo. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan writes:

It is enough to evoke a face which is familiar to everyone of you, that of the terrible dumb brother of the four Marx Brothers, Harpo. Is there anything that poses a question which is more present, more pressing, more absorbing, more disruptive, more nauseating, more calculated to thrust everything that takes place before us into the abyss or void than the face of Harpo Marx, that face with its smile which leaves us unclear as to whether it signifies the most extreme perversity or complete simplicity? This dumb man alone is sufficient to sustain the atmosphere of doubt and of radical annihilation which is the stuff of the Marx brothers’ extraordinary farce and the uninterrupted play of ‘jokes’ that makes their activity so valuable.

(1992: 66–67)

The grin and the mute of Harpo throw the others into abyss and void. Elaborating on Lacan, Simon Critchley suggests that a fool, who is a figure of both comedy and tragedy, is ‘a thing – an uncanny mixture of perversity and simplicity, of wisdom and stupidity, of familiarity and strangeness – who speaks the truth, often by remaining mute’. He argues that ‘the fool is that thing that speaks the truth to power, that speaks in refusing speech, that subverts protocols of everyday, polite language’ (Critchley 1999: 231). Emphasizing Harpo’s significance, he writes:

So Harpo is dumb, and yet in his muteness, in his point de réponse, a word is articulated that hits the bull’s eye – il fait mouche en faisant mot. And Lacan has a strong point here, namely that Harpo’s wide-eyed dumb grin is extremely ambiguous, particularly with regard to its sexual intent … Harpo’s face is a mute mot, a void that the subject cannot avoid, an abyss into which all attempts at comprehension or judgement are annihilated. Harpo stands over against the subject als Ding, his muteness blocks the subject’s attempts at judgement and comprehension. In the endlessly surrealistic play of the Marx Brothers, in the sheer calling into question of the subject who still laughs in a recognition that destroys recognition, an identification that annihilates identity, a relation to das Ding is opened. At the heart of the laughter’s complicity is hidden an ethical relation of Fremdheit that radically calls the subject into question.

(Critchley 1999: 232–33)

Harpo forces those in front of him to be face to face with a void and an abyss. Comic language refuses ordinary language, and comic faces reject recognition. While tragic death allows the subject to escape from matter and evil, comedy forces the subject to face the annihilation of subjectivity. Comedy connects with death and finitude, hence the significance of ‘comic death, of dying onstage, or corpsing out’ in comedy (Critchley 1999: 233). Critchley suggests

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that ‘the comedian traumatizes the subject’ and laughter ‘return[s] us to the place of the guilty family secret’ (1999: 234), evoking Claudius’s fratricide. As he argued, ‘it only hurts when you laugh’ (Critchley 1999: 236), pleasure and pain are inseparable, and so are the comic and tragic.

If comedy and tragedy cannot and should not be easily separated from each other, how can we distinguish the two? In Hamlet, the clown curses in the face of the skull as if the jester were alive, suggesting its uncanniness. The skull represents death and mortality, yet its grinning shows an ambiguity, as if it is at the same time comic. It is a façade that rejects single interpretation and comprehension. Hamlet suggests that Yorick is ‘a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy’, which associates with the wordplay between him and the gravedigger, and how comedy links with the notion of hanging, and the deferral of language and meaning, which is the death drive. Mladen Dolar argues that the death drive is not a preoccupation with death, instead ‘It is a drive which itself cannot die. It is a pure thrust of persistence which cannot be annihilated, it can merely be destroyed from outside, a pure life in the loop of death, emerging on the verge of nothing’ (2005: 159). The word ‘fancy’, which signifies the power of imagination and deception, draws atten-tion to the phantasmagoric quality of the skull, confronting the prince as if it is a mirror image that lures and captures him, reversing the subject and the object position (Lacan 2002: 75–81). The Dionysiac power overwhelms the prince, as Nietzsche, connecting the two together, wrote, ‘What, both in the case of Hamlet and of Dionysiac man, overbalances any motive leading to action, is not reflection but understanding, the apprehension of truth and its terror’ (1956: 51–52). At this point in the play, the prince is holding the skull in his hand, talking to it as if it is speaking to him. Therefore, his words are a challenge and a response to the mocking grin. In other words, he thinks that the grinning skull is talking to him, smiling to him. He sees himself in the skull and realizes that he will be the same as Yorick one day, which suggests the overwhelming power of death. The prince feels threatened because of the incomprehensibility of the skull, which is at the same time the abyss. In such a moment, he evolves from acting like the second clown to becoming Yorick, which explains why the gravedigger has started digging the grave ever since Hamlet was born: behind the grinning is the threat of death and impotence. After learning that even Alexander looks the same as the skull and smells like the corpse after death, the prince, abhors such comic/tragic moment, throws down the skull. ‘To what base uses we may return, Horatio!’ he says. Why does Hamlet’s imagination abhor Yorick’s skull? It is because of the ‘base’, or, more specifically, the materiality of life. The OED suggests that ‘baseness’ has the meaning of ‘Low birth or rank, membership of a lower social class; lowly or mean estate’. Therefore, what the prince fears is also the violation of class differences. We should notice that it is Hamlet’s ‘imagination’ that abhors the skull, as if Shakespeare is suggesting a confrontation between the Imaginary and the Real. The imagination only exists in his head now, and what is left, what remains as ash, and what the prince can get a glimpse of, is the material, which shatters any notion of subjectivity, heroism, or even any form of genre distinction. Comedy represents the revolutionary power of the material. Death is always present, and it/id flashes itself in this uncanny moment.

The gravedigger’s jokes are a revolution: they turn the class domination upside down, for they signify the utmost fear of the bourgeois who believes in private property and personal subjectivity. As Eagleton writes:

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For revolutionaries, who live continually in the shadow of the gallows, this negative comedy is not to be underestimated. Joking with the rope around your neck is a feeble way of transcending your oppressors, but it is a sort of transcendence all the same, which someone else may always find a use for.

(2009: 170)

The proletarian is a comedian because he recognizes that he does not own anything ultimately. Behind the jokes and the laughter of a proletariat lurk the fear and anxiety of the bourgeois. Comedy, jokes and laughter can be the revolutionary tools of the working class as it confronts the bourgeois with death and castration, challenges and disintegrates the solemnity of those who are obsessed and possessed. The question remains is how to flash this de-capitalized and decapitating power of the material.

Aristotle (1932), The Poetics, London: Heinemann.Benjamin, Walter (1968), ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’, in Hannah

Arendt (ed.) Illuminations (trans. Harry Zohn), New York: Schocken Books, pp. 253–64.

—— (1994), in Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (eds), The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940 (trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Critchley, Simon (1999), ‘Comedy and finitude: Displacing the tragic-heroic paradigm in philosophy and psychoanalysis’, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought, London: Verso, pp. 217–38.

Davenport, W. A. (1982), Fifteenth-century English Drama: The Early Moral Plays and their Literary Relations, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.

Dolar, Mladen (2005), ‘Nothing has changed’, Filozofski vestnik, XXVI:2, pp. 147–60.

Eagleton, Terry (2009), Walter Benjamin, or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, London: Verso.

Engels, Friedrich and Marx, Karl (2008), The Communist Manifesto, in David McLellan (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Erlich, Avi (1977), Hamlet’s Absent Father, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Frye, Roland Mushat (1984), The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hill, Christopher (1972), The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, London: Temple Smith.

Jenkins, Harold (1956), ‘How many grave-diggers has “Hamlet”?’, The Modern Language Review, 51:4, pp. 562–65.

Lacan, Jacques (1982), ‘Desire and the interpretation of desire in Hamlet’, in Shoshana Felman (ed.), Literature and Psychoanalysis: the Question of Reading: Otherwise, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 11–52.

—— (1992), in Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII (trans. Dennis Porter), London: Routledge.

—— (2002), ‘The mirror stage as formative of the I function as revealed in psychoanalytic experience’, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English

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(trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg), London: W. W. Norton & Company, pp. 75–81.

Lester, G. A. (ed.) (1981), Three Late Medieval Morality Plays: Mankind, Everyman, Mundus et Infans, London: A & C Black.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1956), The Birth of Tragedy & The Genealogy of Morals (trans. Francis Golffing), New York: Anchor Books.

Shakespeare, William (1982), Hamlet, Harold Jenkins (ed.), London: Methuen.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre and Vidal-Naquet, Pierre (1988), Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (trans. Janet Lloyd), New York: Zone Books.

Žižek, Slavoj (2010), Living in the End Times, London: Verso.Zupancic, Alenka (2008), The Odd One In: On Comedy, Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hui, I. (2013), ‘ “To what base uses we may return, Horatio!” – Hamlet, Comedy and Class Struggle’, Comedy Studies 4: 2, pp. 155–165, doi: 10.1386/cost.4.2.155_1

Isaac Hui is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Department of Translation in Hong Kong’s Lingnan University, teaching translation and literature. He earned his Ph.D. in a department of comparative literature in the University of Hong Kong, researching on Ben Jonson and comedy studies.

Contact: HSH106, Department of Translation, Lingnan University, 8 Castle Peak Road, Tuen Mun, New Territories, Hong Kong (SAR).E-mail: [email protected]

Isaac Hui has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submit-ted to Intellect Ltd.

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Anthem QualityNational Songs: A Theoretical Survey

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Christopher Kelen is associate professor in the English department at the University of Macau, China.

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