Hamlet As Mourning-Play: A Benjaminesque Interpretation (Essay‪)‬

ONE OF THE MOST CHALLENGING and variously interpreted masterworks of twentieth-century critical theory is Walter Benjamin's 1928 Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiele, translated into English by John Osborne as The Origin of German Tragic Drama. (1) However, neither the examples Benjamin studied of the seventeenth-century baroque plays called Trauerspiele in German nor the term Trauerspiel itself has ever had much currency in the English-speaking world. If the book is familiar to readers interested in Benjamin's singular critical theory, it has been largely either because of its "Epistemo-Critical Prologue," where Benjamin first developed his antitotalizing concept of the "constellation" (which organizes ideas into selected, inter-connected groupings); or through the later prescient deconstructing demonstration of how the concept of allegory was a devalued binary opposite of the privileged term "symbol," in a relationship, Benjamin wrote, similar to that of writing to speech. (2) For readers of Shakespeare, however, the book presents ideas and analysis little discussed in English about Shakespeare's relation to his historical moment and to the dramatic form in which he wrote his noncomic plays. (3) The first half of Benjamin's study after the prologue is devoted to a multifaceted argument that the dramatic form of the Trauerspiel is fundamentally different from that of ancient Greek tragedy and needs to be distinguished from tragedy proper (Tragodie in Benjamin's German). (4) But since for many German critics, before and after Benjamin, Trauerspiele were thought of as forms of tragedy, the confusion is built into the language. (5) I will nonetheless use the German form Trauerspiel(e) in this essay with the understanding that Benjamin's sense of the word is meant, and not that of a broader German critical tradition.