“I Could Tell You”: On Speaking, Not Speaking, and <i>Hamlet</i> ’s Metalanguage of Interiority

This essay tracks a speech act that has flown under the radar of scholarship on Hamlet: utterances about utterances that are yet to be uttered. From the Ghost’s early words to Hamlet, to Hamlet’s own dying words, Shakespeare’s tragedy is punctuated by such speech acts. Attending to them helps us to rethink the relation between metalanguage and interiority in Hamlet, exposing the latter to be a projection of the former. So long as one has something to say, but has not said it yet, then one can project the illusion of a stable and composed interiority. Hamlet, in this regard, is a tragedy that ultimately works to expose the inexpressible as a fantasy of interiority, one that is projected from out of the very speech its characters use to converse with one another.