Vanishing Point: Looking for Hamlet

Abstract

This essay begins with the aesthetic experience as an encounter with loss, exemplified by the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, when thousands flocked to view the blank space on the wall from which the painting had disappeared. This principle is then applied to writing itself via the work of Blanchot and Derrida. Writing also famously begins with a blank sheet, from which what you are about to write is by definition absent. But as the writer takes possession of it, as it comes to be, so it becomes something other, something lost, something—like the Ghost in Hamlet—“vanished from our sight” (Hamlet 1.2.219). The “vanishing point” is that disappearance of presence that makes the vanishing point itself visible, and constitutes the aesthetic experience as a form of bereavement. For Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida the “vanishing point” is the point of origin where writing both begins and ends; for Stephen Greenblatt and Christopher Pye it is both the anchor of visual perspective in painting, and the Lacanian “real”, that element of the subject that cannot be known, yet constitutes the structure of the whole being. In all these models reality is to be found at the point where presence and absence meet and part company. This approach is then applied to Hamlet, where the reality of the play is in my reading constituted by the unseen, by what vanishes. From this perspective Hamlet is a play about the afterlife, a fundamentally spiritual and religious meditation on death and on Judgement. The play's preoccupations are then linked with the religious wall-paintings in the Guild Chapel at Stratford, which Shakespeare would have partially known as a boy. The paper focuses in particular on one he could not have seen, the great fresco of the Last Judgement which was defaced under the supervision of his father John Shakespeare. The whitewashed wall which under its “dull façade” (Eliot Little Gidding 2) housed a potent vision of the Last Days is compared with the blank space left by the stolen Mona Lisa. Both are prototypes of art as loss and return, absence and presence, death and resurrection. These illustrations are then finally linked with the “Catholic Shakespeare” question that has recently been brought into much greater prominence by Richard Wilson, and latterly by Stephen Greenblatt. The work aspires to be a contribution to Catholic Shakespeare literature as well as to the “New Aestheticism” promoted by critics such as John Joughin.