"Where be his quiddities now?": Law and Language in Hamlet

Abstract

Abuses of monarchy, nobility, church or wealth are certainly central to Shakespeare. However, depictions of law and its abuses do not casually blend into other critical images of power or authority in the corpus. In Hamlet, we see how it is language that Shakespeare identifies both as central to law’s specific mode of exercising power, and as a distinct means by which law’s veneer of justice conceals the manipulation of power towards oppressive ends. That theme is richly foreshadowed in the earliest plays, as exemplified by the pseudo-trial of the jurist Lord Saye during the peasant rebellion depicted in Henry VI, Part Two. Saye’s humanist, proto-liberal view of law is assailed precisely on grounds of the manipulative linguistic techniques that it conceals. In Hamlet, the medieval trappings of Shakespearean political drama have worn thinner. That same duplicitous character of legal language now re-emerges in a more overtly modern, Foucauldian surveillance state. It extends beyond the conventionally legal or political, encompassing the play’s familiar existential crises.