Richard Wagner: A Poisonous Drink

Abstract

The drink, drink! I am poison'd.l These are Gertrude's dying words in Shakespeare's Hamlet. In a certain sense, play appears as a counterpart to Wagner's work, where it is always salvation that flows from sacred chalice. Before focusing on consequences of Wagner's oeuvre, I shall therefore briefly dwell on Shakespeare's play, which although written as early as turn of seventeenth century appears to criticize very images that explain continuing attraction of Wagner's work up through present. Shakespeare's Hamlet has often been interpreted as a work about incest that is to say, about unresolved oedipal relation of a son toward his mother. Yet in only scene that could be interpreted in this way dialogue between Hamlet and Gertrude (the queen, his mother) in her bed chamber ghost of father appears in order to come between mother and son. This scene seems like an almost paradigmatic translation of Lacan's Name-of-the-Father, particularly if one bears in mind Lacan's dictum that the symbolic Father is, in so far as he signifies this Law, Dead Father.2 There is, however, another possible interpretation of incest theme in Hamlet. In this interpretation fact that Gertrude shares conjugal bed with her dead husband's brother is not understood as actual incestuous crime (which, in fact, it is not). Rather, it is understood as a parable for a far greater transgression that of a fusion of sexes, of abolition of difference