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When Hamlet dies the loyal Horatio is left with a pressing obligation to tell the story of his dead friend. Horatio fears that he will not do a good enough job; he is bound to tell his friend's story, as Emily Dickinson famously puts it, sinnt (Frl263). Dickinson asks her reader to be a good Horatio: we want to tell what it is we think we have seen and heard in her poetry, but rarely have we been told enough. In Dickinson's poetic universe, news often comes from nowhere, and sometimes from that "undiscovered country": the dominion of the dead (III.i.79).1
"Buzz, buzz," says Hamlet when Polonius tells him the actors have arrived: meaning that this is old, unnecessary and rather flyblown news (II.ii.389). After the death of his father, and after the appearance of the ghost, anything that happens in Hamlet's world is like the buzzing of a fly, an empty echo of the passing of meaningful human life. Like Hamlet, Dickinson is fascinated and appalled by persistent echoes and continuities which challenge our perceptions of the importance of life and death. This essay reads Dickinson through the internalized voice and plot of Hamlet, in which the text and the character will function as a heuristic device for grasping Dickinson's thoughts on death. Indebted to Páraic Finnerty's comprehensive study of Dickinson's cultural and literary engagement with Shakespeare, I take further Dickinson's imaginative engagement with Hamlet in order to show what it is she appropriates from the thought-life of Hamlet the character and the plot of Hamlet the play. Hamlet provides Dickinson with a way of thinking about death as though it were the perpetual apotheosis of life: death as an event in the drama of life. In Dickinson's metaphysical world, life and death are not separate but co-exist in the brain. It is in this interior place that drama and lyric meet, as they do in Shakespeare's sonnets, where the speaker draws us into an ongoing drama between himself and another. In her reading of Shakespeare's sonnets, Helen Vendler advises us to take the lyric as mimetic of a "performance of the mind in solitary speech" (Shakespeare 2). In Hamlet, we see a performance of the mind in conversation with itself; it is a...