An Enigmatic Play: When Skulls Speak Loudly A Deconstructive Reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Abstract

Being vivacious and colourful members of the medieval and Renaissance courts, jesters served for a variety of recreational purposes in addition to having the oblique subaltern voices in the administration of the kingdoms. Despite their ostentatious clothing and jaunty manners, which they manifested while delivering jokes and tricks, their contribution to the royal administration had to be indirect and clever. Indeed, these men of great observation and acute cunning used their humour in order to voice what cannot be expressed by the others. In their peculiar kind of way that was also associated with their divergent nature, jesters were inclined to act as the advocates of truth which had to be suppressed or ignored at times in face of royal hegemony. As a rather skilled playwright, who was also familiar with the conventions of the court manners, Shakespeare spared an exceptionally subtle role for the character of the jester in his plays. This role reveals itself through witty jokes of criticism masked by the jolly words of a fool. Nevertheless, Shakespeare ascribes a markedly grim condition for his late jester Yorick who has to deliver his criticism through his deceased body, a skull per se. Deriving mobility from the Derridean sense of decentralizing the meaning, the article employs a deconstructionist reading of Hamlet through the absence of a jester to exhibit how the lack of a critical perspective may yield catastrophic dim-sightedness.