CHAPTER 22.
Hamlet's "mousetrap" reference to the image of bread in Ezekiel -- a prophetic prefiguring of the
fate of the Eucharist in a reformed world -- is no isolated display of scholastic pyrotechnics. His
consciousness operates on a higher level of awareness than that of any other character in the drama.
When Claudius admits out loud "if thou knewest our purposes in sending thee to England,” Hamlet is
three steps ahead of him: "I see a cherub,” he announces, "that sees them" (4.3.50). Far from being
insane, then, Hamlet represents the most developed manifestation of the deep Shakespearean archetype of
the holy prophet. Like Feste or Touchstone, he speaks in riddles and enigmas. Unlike them, he is a
Prince of the realm who is destined to inherit power and influence -- if he survives.
The prophet belongs to the class of mythic character-types in Shakespeare. Indeed the plays, as
Harold Goddard has apprehended, are a prolonged symphonic meditation on the dilemma of the
artist/prophet confronted by brute force. Cordelia, Hamlet, Lucrece, Feste and many more, are characters
whose knowledge of the unspeakable brings them into unavoidable conflict with the prevailing social
norms of the world in which they live and make symbolic acts. They understand that "where force rules,
truth must either undergo martyrdom, be silent, or speak a language its enemy cannot understand”
(Goddard 61). These Shakespearean characters are nourished by the deep well-spring of their literary
antecedents in Ovid and other sources. The author's mythic paleo-symbols -- Philomela, Orpheus, or even
David -- embody the quest for a language which can survive the disfiguring rituals imposed by political
power and still communicate critical truths. They live in a world, like that of the marked Bible verse
Hosea 9.7, in which political corruption and moral blindness decree that "the Prophet is a fool" and the
"spiritual man is mad” (figure sixty-seven).
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