Allegoria in Shakespeare ed identità enunciativa della coscienza. Amleto ed il fantasma paterno come ‘voce’ di presentimento

Abstract

Abstract – A reading of Hamlet is proposed in which the consciousness of the Shakespearean character is highlighted as a scene which is allegorically allocutive, where his presentiment regarding his father’s death and felt inwardly becomes a paternal sentiment of enunciation, a request to the son for revenge. At the basis of the transformation of Hamlet’s inward monologue into dialogue, there is the rhetorical use of allegory as a poetic form with which to portray conscience as a dramatic space in which it ‘happens’ that the word ‘present’ becomes performative allocution, which evokes in Hamlet-the-listener the force that drives him to action, and that dispels doubt, on his part, regarding the truth of his inner word, as it is ‘dictated’ by the father. It should be underlined that it is the allegorical personification that is the real ‘active’ protagonist of the tragic action: in the form of the writing itself, a transformation of the personographic identity takes place, in which the I-idem becomes I-ipse (Ricoeur 1993): an I changed from the you of the other, an ‘agent’ character committed to ‘wanting’ what the father ‘wants’. The other part of himself that the allegorized enunciation has made authoritative you, reassures the self that what he wants (to avenge his father) has become a promise to his father, a performative act of making an oath, by virtue of which his son is ready to ‘do’ what the murdered father, rendered phantom by allegory, expects him to do, according to the divided consciousness of Hamlet’s ego.