The Performative Utterances of Hamlet and Beyond

 When making a performative utterance, you do not just describe the world, but instead you create new facts in the world by speaking and influencing reality. This means that there is a difference between swearing to change something, and acknowledging that something needs to be changed. In Hamlet, one of Hamlet’s biggest dilemmas is that, though he is in control of his own language and very persuasive in what he says, he is not able to take the next step and physically complete the idea that he has brought into the world through his speech. Through performative utterances, it not only Hamlet that is able to find himself and changes his reality, through altering the plot and other characters, but also myself that can create a new sense of memory, expectation, and real- world results through my speech.

One of the most severe crisis’s in the play is Hamlet’s own search to find himself and understand the social climate in which he lives, after the unfair death of his father. When his father dies and his uncle Claudius takes the crown, his former ideas that power is rewarded to the just and honorable is attacked. He must watch his father, a man who he looked up to and loved, be overthrown by his uncle Claudius, a devious man who swoops in on the throne and Hamlet’s mother only a very short time after Hamlet’s father’s tragic death. Hamlet, in a sense, has an identity crisis. He knew his role for so long, as “Hamlet the prince” and “Hamlet the scholar,” that he begins to question his new roles in an aristocracy where murderers rule. This leads him to question his new status: “Hamlet the avenging son.” To figure out his new role in life, Hamlet begins playing someone that is crazed, and under this disguise he is able to navigate his own true identity by throwing off questions by appearing unable to answer them. It in his crazed persona that he is able to trick his parents and friends by playing off his madness by implying it was brought on by love, instead of his father’s death, through letters and declarations of love to Ophelia.  

But also in Hamlet’s speech he is able to change the reality of his own situation. But sometimes this is where his intentions go awry. When he learns of how his father truly died, from his father’s ghost who is not at rest, he is unable to make a true statement that he means to avenge his father. He only actually swears that he realizes what has happened and what he has to do. This is a performative utterance in the sense that he creates an idea that he seeks revenge that the audience believes in, but he is not actually tied by his word to completely this act. The power of Hamlet’s words is his shield. While talking with the players, he makes it very obvious what he finds to be good acting, and therefore the masks he puts on himself when he wants to appear crazy. Before the play, he gives a talk to the players, saying to make sure not to overact by using a “naturalistic style” when speaking, not use “overly showy gestures,” and in general to “acquire and beget a temperance that may give [your passion] smoothness" (3.2.7-8). It is in this scene that it becomes clear Hamlet’s madness is truly an act and that the death of his father has not made him crazy and blood-thirsty, though sometimes to the audience he may appear this way, and not at all calculating and in control of his emotions like he really is.

In a way similar to Hamlet, I am affected by my own self-overhearing. Thoughts are a framework to my beliefs and how I will act, but it my speech and the statements I make that will affect my reality. Unlike Hamlet, when I make a performative utterance I can truly carry out the facts I have brought into the world by speaking because my self-overhearing comes from ideas that are already there. In a way Hamlet was double acting; he was a character playing a character while I am not. Hamlet, through self-overhearing, was also self- creating, while my utterances are self- revelation. When Hamlet goes into his soliloquy of “to be or not to be” he is self-creating a character that is questioning whether he should continue to live, while I am merely completing lines that don’t at all define how I actually feel. With performative utterances, I am able to in a way convince myself and others around me of how I may feel or even be by calling “facts” into the world and then continuing to make these statements reality.

So forth, this is the greatest difference between the performative utterances of Hamlet and myself. Hamlet is creating a person through his thoughts, which he speaks out loud, by introducing a character to the audience. I can change my reality through self- revelation, and, as a person in complete control of my actions and the way I want to be interpreted, I can carry through with these utterances, changing my memory, expectation, and real-world results.