The Secret Perspective: Anamorphosis in Hamlet

Abstract

Anamorphosis, or the secret perspective, was not so secret in William Shakespeare’s time. There is evidence throughout Hamlet, for example, of an anamorphic sensibility, noticeable most obviously in the form of the haunting “thing” that arrives on stage from outside the “living” world of the play, at an angle as it were, but also in the way the covert is centrally embedded in the play’s action and meaning – how much of the play remains distorted or hidden from both the characters in the play and from readers/audience beyond it, obliging them to “re-form” the world anew. In this article, I will explore anamorphosis in Hamlet in two separate but connected areas: (1) the Ghost as a “tangential clairvoyant” – Maurice Molhollo’s term in the context of Miguel Cervantes – which denotes a spectral figure that exposes what has been hidden from sight (though that object may have been visible (that is, “suspected”) all along and, in the added sense I am suggesting, sets in motion the main action of the play even though it is not a central actor itself), and (2) the secret perspective of intuited, repressed, verbal, or off-stage material beyond the immediate sight or consciousness of characters and readers/audience. In both cases – of the Ghost as tangential clairvoyant and of the wider intuited, repressed material in the play – anamorphosis in Hamlet involves a new perception of a previously distorted object or situation, which leads to two similar yet opposed responses: either one of complete surprise (“I would never have guessed”) or astonished confirmation (“I knew it all along”).