In this book, we have recounted our experiences and recollections of working together in the ModLab to make a Shakespeare game. Across the five acts of this collaborative drama, we explored the entangled technical and social processes of lab-making and game-making. We addressed how platforms and applications evolve in concert, and how technical difficulties can trigger surprising changes of perspective. We described how human and nonhuman actors—hardware, software, and wetware—develop and improvise in response to one another, and how encounters with uncontrollable glitches can enhance the collective capacity for response, which is to say, responsibility. We showed how new technologies can spark insights about old texts and also, vice versa, how engaging with literature can inform technoscientific innovation. Above all, we considered questions of experimentation, and we indicated how practices of play—concretized in games, theaters, and laboratories—account for the forward-looking, speculative orientation of experimental research, which François Jacob described as “a machine for making the future.”[1] We did not venture into this brave new world alone. We had our friends with us every step of the way—and, as always, we trekked with Shakespeare.
Like the epilogues to Shakespeare’s plays, this epilogue does more than reflect back on the drama that has preceded it. It also offers a self-reflexive twist, exploring how the works of Shakespeare, in part because of their own self-reflexivity, can serve as scripts or playbooks for the postdisciplinary laboratory. Of course, many of Shakespeare’s plays are famously self-reflexive, even recursive. Foremost among these is Hamlet, a play about plays and playacting. More specifically, we submit, it is about the affordances of play itself as a method, in other words, play as an instrument of knowledge-making.
The pivotal moment of Hamlet is a play-within-the-play, when Hamlet attempts to test the veracity of a shocking rumor he heard from a ghost—a ghost claiming to be his dead father, the former King Hamlet. The rumor, the hearsay accusation, is that Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, had actually murdered old King Hamlet, and that this “murder most foul” (1.5.33) is the secret cause of everything that has happened since, with Claudius crowned as the new king and married to Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. Hamlet, tentatively persuaded but also skeptical of this remarkable claim from beyond the grave, decides to take advantage of the arrival of a troupe of actors at Elsinore Castle to concoct a playful experiment. He begins, curiously enough, with an act of modding: he commands the actors to put on an old play, “The Murder of Gonzago,” but with some significant alterations. (In this manner, Hamlet follows Shakespeare’s own scriptwriting methods: most Shakespeare plays, including Hamlet, borrow from and rewrite earlier texts.) Hamlet changes “The Murder of Gonzago,” crafting “a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines, which I would set down and insert in ’t” (2.2.567–568), and turns it into an allegory about the alleged murder of old King Hamlet.
Planning to show this modded play to Claudius and observe his reactions, Hamlet opines on “the purpose of playing”: “the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (3.2.21–26). All too often, this speech has been taken to support a general thesis about Shakespeare, if not also about theater and the arts in general: a thesis about representationalism, verisimilitude, mimesis. Legions of critics over the centuries have either praised or blamed Shakespeare’s conceit about plays as mirrors of nature, frequently using this conceit to index larger epistemic patterns. The poet William Carlos Williams wrote in Spring and All (1923), “I suppose Shakespeare’s familiar aphorism about holding the mirror up to nature has done more harm in stabilizing the copyist tendency of the arts among us,” and he objected strongly to the supposition that the reflection of nature is equivalent to nature itself: “Of course S. [Shakespeare] is the most conspicuous example desirable of the falseness of this very thing. / He holds no mirror up to nature but with his imagination rivals nature’s composition with his own.”[2] In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1978), the philosopher Richard Rorty likewise saw Shakespeare as instantiating a representationalist tendency in Western philosophy and culture, and he pointed particularly to Isabella’s quip about man’s “glassy essence” in Measure for Measure as exemplifying the problematic notion of an intellective soul capable of reflecting nature itself.[3] Of course, whatever the qualities this “glassy essence” may possesses, according to Isabella they are also the things most misunderstood, occluded by whimsical histrionics:
But man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep, who with our spleens
Would all themselves laugh mortal. (2.2.146–152)
But the question of mimetic representation, or reflecting the nature of nature, is not what’s at stake in Hamlet. We contend that Shakespeare’s recursive figurations of play and playing in Hamlet are less endorsements of the capacities of theater to mime or copy nature than protocols to intervene in nature, to produce new phenomena and observe their effects. In short, Hamlet emphasizes that plays are experiments—and that play as such is experimental in nature, more knowledge-generating than truth-reflecting.[4] Along with other works of Shakespeare, Hamlet stages an argument or defense of play as a research method—and provides an instructive tutorial for something that was likewise critical to our development of Play the Knave: translating glitches into features.
The plot of Hamlet unfolds through a series of experiments that are concocted by various characters in the play who are seeking to expose hidden causes and provide solid foundations for judgment.[5] The dramatization of these experiments provides commentary on ways of ascertaining reliable matters of fact and on the necessity of suspending hasty decisions in order to enable secure inductive reasoning. In this regard, Shakespeare’s play participates in contemporaneous debates about proper methods for natural philosophy—debates that would characterize the entire period fashioned as the Scientific Revolution—and the sufficient procedures for determining causes, or what Francis Bacon called the “secrets of nature” [occulta naturae].[6]
“For this way lies the game” | Playing with Shakespeare and Bacon, or Shake ’n Bake
For Bacon, there were two predominant methods available at the time that professed how to “penetrate to the inner and more remote secrets of Nature.”[7] One method he called the “anticipation of nature.” It was the manner of deductive reasoning from axiomatic principles, familiar to Western philosophy since the ancient Greeks, which he associated with the practice of syllogism. The other method—elaborated, for example, in his treatises The Advancement of Learning (1605) and Novum organum (1620), and presented in fictional format in New Atlantis (published posthumously in 1626)—was instead associated with the practice of empirical induction. For Bacon, it would become the basis for a reboot of human knowledge, a “great instauration” of both natural philosophy and civil society. He called this method the “interpretation of nature.” Bacon understood the two methods—one rooted in the workings of mind, the other rooted in the workings of things—to be incommensurable: “We are wont to call the ordinary method applied to Nature the Anticipation of Nature (because it is a rash and premature thing); but that method which is by due means elicited from things, the Interpretation of Nature.”[8]
According to Bacon, the problems with the first approach derive from the glitches inherent to the “glassy essence” of humankind: “For the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture.”[9] For Bacon, then, the mind can never be trusted to accurately reflect nature because it is always enchanted by illusory conceptions and fictive prejudices, haunted by deceptive sensations of the flesh and figments of desire, or what he terms idola—a key Baconian Latin term often translated in English simply as “idols,” but more accurately rendered, with an eye to Bacon’s recurring trope of the magic mirror full of superstitions and apparitions, as “phantoms” or “ghosts.”[10] He sorts these phantom idols into four categories: “There are four kinds of Phantoms which lay siege to human minds. To them (for instruction’s sake) we give names; and call the first kind Phantoms of the Tribe; the second, Phantoms of the Cave; the third, Phantoms of the Market-Place; and the fourth, Phantoms of the Theatre.”[11] The Phantoms of the Tribe are apparitions of human nature, arising from mechanisms of thought and sensation that filter the world and render it distinctly humanized. The Phantoms of the Cave or Den are predispositions shaped by individual, personal life experiences and idiosyncratic habits. The Phantoms of the Marketplace are preconceptions forged by socialization, influenced by community values, and carved by the forces of language and representation. Finally, the Phantoms of the Theatre are the fables crafted by philosophy itself, fictive dramas that pretend to be reality:
Lastly there are phantoms which have entered into the minds of men from the different dogmas of Philosophical systems, and even from perverted laws of Demonstration. These we name Phantoms of the Theatre: because we count that each Philosophy received or invented is like a Play brought out and acted, creating each its own fictitious and scenic world. Nor do we only speak of those philosophies and now flourishing, nor even of the ancient ones, since plenty more such Plays might be composed and got up . . . Nor again do we only understand this of the universal philosophies, but even of very many other principles and axioms of the sciences, which have gotten strength through tradition, credence, and neglect.[12]
Many phantoms of mind, figments of imagination, are indelible. Thus, the “anticipation of nature” approach to natural philosophy, which relies on mental ingenuity, is bound to simply expand the regime of fiction, propagating ever more Phantoms of the Theatre. In contrast, while philosophers taking the “interpretation of nature” approach would never be fully immune to these phantoms, the method itself would significantly mediate against the tendency to go astray. The imagination could be disciplined by reflecting on the enchanted glass and its glitchy reflections, using the imagination to constrain its own propensity to get carried away.[13]
For Bacon, natural philosophy must begin with natural history and the meticulous accumulation of facts, using instruments to assist observation—supplementing the tribal limitations of the senses—all while assiduously resisting the urge to rush ahead and impute causes on the basis of finite, underdetermined evidence. Crucially, observations of nature must be enhanced, elaborated, and fine-tuned with experimental tests or assays, whose effects would provide a more expansive basis for inductive reasoning. For Bacon, experiments are not about representing truths of nature but more about producing effects and creating phenomena. That is, they do not demonstrate truths but rather generate novel situations or events that make possible the discovery of hidden things. This is why Bacon describes instrument-assisted experiments as “Summoning Instances, borrowing the name from the courts of law; because they summon objects to appear which have not appeared before; I also call them Evoking Instances. They are those which reduce the non-sensible to the sensible; that is, make manifest things not directly perceptible by means of others which are.”[14] Experiments with instruments are “summoning” or “evoking” devices that prod, conjure, and incite things that nature would not otherwise be inclined to do, including strange and unexpected things that might contravene the experimenter’s anticipations.
For Bacon, the whole point of experimentation is to modify the normal course of nature, producing wonders, monsters, and other sports (“errors, vagaries and prodigies of nature, wherein nature deviates and turns aside from her ordinary course”), evoking and embracing such glitches in order to render a more complete map: “he that knows [nature’s] deviations will more accurately describe her ways.”[15] But even with a robust map, travelers would need some pointers (e.g., here there be monsters). Indeed, Bacon called the most exquisite kinds of experiments “crucial instances” [instantias crucis], experiments that take place at the “crossroads” of possibilities and that serve as “fingerposts” to guide travelers along the paths to knowledge: “Crucial Instances: a name transferred from the crosses (or fingerposts) which are put up in crossways to mark and point out the different ways.”[16] Such experiments could steer careful interpreters of nature away from the haunted roads that circle back to tribes, caves, markets, and theaters, pointing them instead toward the hidden trails of true causes.
Bacon makes clear, however, that experimentation alone would not be sufficient for mapping the highways and byways of truth. After all, too many advocates of the “anticipation of nature” approach also conduct experiments, taking the results of these little assays as confirmation of their anticipatory beliefs—and thus they remain caught in the fictions of theater and make-believe: “But the method of experiment which men now make use of is blind and stupid. . . . For so it mostly happens that men make their experiments lightly and as it were in play, by varying little by little experiments already known.”[17] For Bacon, then, there was a clear distinction between playing and experimenting, between players who toy with familiar parts and serious interpreters of nature whose experiments produce unexpected surprises. Only by armoring oneself against play and playacting, the theater and its phantoms, could experimentalists do proper natural history and establish proper philosophical conclusions.[18] This point is reinforced in New Atlantis, when the Father of Salomon’s House explains that there are special laboratories on the island dedicated to showing the false apparitions of theater and training philosophers to hate such “impostures and lies”:
We have also houses of deceits of the senses; where we represent all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures, and illusions; and their fallacies. . . . But we do hate all impostures and lies; insomuch as we have severely forbidden it to all our fellows, under pain of ignominy and fines, that they do not show any natural work or thing, adorned or swelling; but only pure as it is, and without all affectation of strangeness.[19]
Shakespeare begs to differ. In contrast to Bacon—and this is only one reason to be skeptical of the enduring Baconian conspiracy theory of Shakespeare authorship—he does not see plays or playacting as contrary to proper experimental method and the interpretation of nature.[20] Rather, Shakespeare shows that the more interpreters of nature think they may have protected themselves from the glamours of play, the more they may be deceived. (This is, of course, what the psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan meant by his quip, “les non-dupes errent.”[21]) Poking fun at the self-assurances of philosophers who would fancy themselves immunized against play, Shakespeare presents in Hamlet an alternative approach: one that recognizes that play is everywhere and that the only way to find the truth is to play along, contrarily—in a nutshell, to play the knave.
“The game’s afoot” | Two Noble Experimenters, or Anticipation and Interpretation
The plot of Hamlet is propelled by two amateur experimenters, Hamlet and Polonius. Both alike in their aptitude for wordplay and their fondness for acting—Hamlet can recite by heart Aeneas’ tale to Dido from a play he once heard (2.2.458–490), and Polonius boasts he had played Caesar at university and was “accounted a good actor” (3.2.106–107)—they nevertheless represent quite divergent approaches to natural philosophy. Polonius is a credulous anticipator of nature who never doubts the validity of his own research methodology and who is, therefore, duped by his own ingenious inventions—hoisted with his own petard, as it were. Hamlet, on the other hand, is an assiduous interpreter of nature whose persistent self-doubt—his notorious indecisiveness—embodies the spirit of Baconian method, patiently withholding judgment for as long as possible until sufficient evidence has emerged. Whereas Polonius presumes himself wise to the tricks of play, convinced of his own objective distance, Hamlet sees himself as a player among players, always questioning his own part in the proceedings and his own susceptibility to dissimulation. Indeed, Hamlet assumes that everyone is a knave: “There’s never a villain dwelling in all Denmark / But he’s an arrant knave” (1.5.37–38). He perceives fictions and deceits everywhere, and therefore he distrusts provisional evidence—the testimony of the ghost, above all, but also the results of his own assays and experiments.
The dance of these two experimenters in the spectacle that unfolds highlights their differences only to show their mutual entanglements, ultimately indicating that anticipation and interpretation are two parts of the same game. The motivating circumstances of experimentation may be consequential fictions—hypotheses, presuppositions, speculations, or figments of the scientific imagination—but experimentation does not end until their consequences are played out, staged for the scrutiny and judgment of an audience that itself becomes conscripted into the action.[22] Which is to say, knowledge-making happens inside, not outside, the zone of play—a virtual zone of both anticipation and interpretation, whose fluid boundaries are produced by the ensemble actions of the whole actor-network (there are no small parts, after all, only small actors).[23]
Shakespeare wastes no time setting up this argument. At the end of the first act, Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus investigate the ghost—a “wondrous strange” (1.5.185) matter of fact observed by several witnesses. The ghost appears to be a wondrous empirical phenomenon—as Horatio notes, “I might not this believe / Without the sensible and true avouch / Of mine own eyes” (1.1.66–68)—and its manifestation instantly expands the scope of the received order of nature, regardless of what prevailing schools of philosophy may teach.[24] In seeing this actual spirit, Hamlet dismisses the ontologies of Wittenberg philosophy as mere Phantoms of the Theatre: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (1.5.187–188). Nevertheless, because he is aware that phantoms and their philosophical avatars can lead to misdirection, Hamlet maintains skepticism even despite the spectral evidence, announcing his determination to patiently interpret the natural history of the situation at Elsinore rather than rushing prematurely to judgment and revenge. For while Hamlet wishes to believe that the ghost is “an honest ghost” (1.5.154), both he and Horatio worry that it may perhaps be a lying ghost, a goblin or a devil—an apparition of the enchanted mirror.
To determine if what the ghost has told him is, in fact, true, Hamlet immediately devises an experimental scheme to produce further evidence: an experiment in method acting.[25] He will pretend to lose his mind, and then observe what effects his playacting might have on the other residents of Elsinore Castle—which, like Prospero’s island or Titania’s fairy forest, becomes a Shakespearean laboratory, an insular domain of translations and transmutations.[26] Swearing his companions to confidentiality, Hamlet tells Horatio and Marcellus that he will “put an antic disposition on” (1.5.192) in order to disrupt the sheen of normalcy that has descended on the castle. He will modify himself, mutating his habitual behaviors to vex the normal as such. By acting “strange or odd” (1.5.190), undergoing a “transformation” (2.2.5), and becoming “much changèd” (2.2.38), Hamlet aims to evoke hidden effects and phenomena—and then, when the time is right, prove with inductive certainty why “the time is out of joint” (1.5.210). His plan aligns with what Bacon would later advise: “For as in ordinary life every person’s disposition, and the concealed feelings of the mind and passions are most drawn out when they are disturbed; so the secrets of nature betray themselves more readily when tormented by art than when left to their own course.”[27] For the sake of experiment, then, Hamlet performs madness as method. Or, as Polonius puts it, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t” (2.2.223–224).
Polonius, for his part, is quite familiar with such methods of experimental play. But whereas Hamlet is patient, playing for time, Polonius is reckless, always getting ahead of himself. In the scene immediately after Hamlet establishes his character as a steadfast interpreter of nature, Polonius proves himself an incorrigible anticipator of nature. Polonius sends his man Reynaldo to gather intel about any illicit activities that his son, Laertes, might be secretly enjoying in Paris. Polonius advises Reynaldo, when asking around about Laertes’s behavior, to pretend, playact, as if the presumed debaucheries of Laertes were already known. He tells Reynaldo to make up any number of fictional stories about Laertes—“What forgeries you please” (2.1.22)—and, in this way, suss out whether or not such forgeries may be, in fact, true.
Polonius proudly describes his method of using anticipatory fictions to elicit evidence of someone’s nature, their “directions” (2.1.72) and “inclination” (2.1.79): “See you now / Your bait of falsehood take this carp of truth; / And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, / With windlasses and with assays of bias, / By indirections find directions out” (2.1.69–72). Insisting that this deceitful scheme is actually a “wise” method of experimental natural philosophy, relying on technical contrivances (“windlasses”), instrumentalities (“bait of falsehood”), and rigorous tests (“assays of bias”), Polonius aims to hook the “carp of truth.” His relentless wordplay suggests that experiments are games—the phrase “assays of bias” evokes lawn bowling and the use of bowl bias to approach the kitty in a roundabout fashion. Polonius sees such playful measures, howsoever indirect they be, as the most effective way of testing or assaying Laertes’s character, his “inclination” and “bias.” But Polonius overlooks a key implication of his own punning, namely, how his experimental scheme is actually an “assay of bias” in itself, that is, a biased assay. It is an experiment based on anticipation, presupposing the nature it is supposed to be finding out, and therefore prone to what later social scientists would dub “confirmation bias”—a tendency already well known to Shakespeare, Bacon, and their contemporaries.[28]
To his credit, Polonius notes that Reynaldo should not just trust the word of witnesses, who may be lured by “the bait of falsehood” to slander Laertes, and he advises that Reynaldo should also try to directly witness Laertes’s nature in action: “Observe his inclination in yourself” (2.1.79). Of course, Shakespeare’s work often highlights the ways in which observations can be colored by bias, how presupposed anticipations of nature may, in fact, lead to misinterpretations of the evidence right before one’s eyes. For instance, Othello is famously about the ways in which “ocular proof” (3.3.412)—that is, empirical evidence authenticated by firsthand witnessing—may be mistaken.[29] Like Othello, who misjudges Desdemona on the basis of misconstrued data, Polonius is oblivious to the ways that the anticipation of Laertes’s inclination may bias any effort to observe this inclination. In other words, Polonius ignores the possibility that he himself might be prejudiced, self-deceived, already caught on his own hook of fictions.
The contrast between Polonius and Hamlet is underscored by the way they engineer instantias crucis, “crucial experiments” or “instances of the fingerpost.” Let us first consider the crucial experiment concocted by Polonius to determine the cause of Hamlet’s apparent madness. Upon seeing Hamlet’s letters to Ophelia suggesting that spurned love may be the source of his antics, Polonius decides that the real mystery to solve is not whether Hamlet is actually mad but whether love is responsible for Hamlet’s transformation. Polonius fancies himself an arbiter of truth: “If circumstances lead me, I will find / Where truth is hid, though it were hid, indeed, / Within the center” (2.2.169–171). As if he were outside the circle of the world and its events, the circle of the play itself, Polonius promises to be gradually led deeper inside by “circumstances”—the surrounding conditions, the circumstantial evidence—to uncover the hidden truth at the “center” of things. Yet instead of approaching the central question by induction, Polonius rushes ahead to preview the conclusion. He tells Gertrude: “Your noble son is mad. / ‘Mad’ call I it, for, to define true madness, / What is ’t but to be nothing else but mad?” (2.2.99–101). Polonius sees Hamlet’s “antics” as the mirror of nature, determining that Hamlet’s appearance of madness is the definition of madness, and proceeding from this axiomatic position to determine its cause:
Madam, I swear I use no art at all.
That he’s mad, ’tis true; ’tis true ’tis pity,
And pity ’tis ’tis true—a foolish figure,
But farewell it, for I will use no art.
Mad let us grant him then, and now remains
That we find out the cause of this effect,
Or, rather say, the cause of this defect,
For this effect defective comes by cause. (2.2.104–111)
The irony is overwrought, to say the least. Polonius’s experimental method always involves art and artifice, dangling the “bait of falsehood.” His pretension to “use no art” when reasoning his way to Hamlet’s madness amounts to protesting that he is not a sophist—that his rhetorical sleights of hand do not aim to persuade falsely. But his syllogistic performance reveals that he is a buffoon, a “foolish figure” fooled by the figures and figurative flourishes of his own language. Polonius is a parody of the deductive philosopher who rushes to judgment from false premises and scant evidence. Duped by Hamlet’s strange behavior into mistaking seeming for being, Polonius swaps a deduction for an axiom (“mad let us grant him then”), and then circularly takes it as the effect of an imputed cause, namely, Ophelia’s rejection of Hamlet’s overtures. The tautology is underscored by Polonius’s own tortuous wordplay—“this effect defective comes by cause”—though its significance is lost on him. The effect is defective because it is, in fact, the cause: unbeknownst to Polonius, Hamlet’s theatrical madness is the experiment, the evoking intervention that sets other effects in motion—including Polonius’s own experiment.
The flaws in Polonius’s wayward reasoning are compounded when he plans his crucial experiment. To wit, he proposes to throw Ophelia in Hamlet’s path and observe what happens. But he is already so convinced of the conclusion to this experiment that, when detailing the plan to Claudius, he stakes his career on it—indicating again that an experiment is also a game, a gamble, but one in which he believes the odds are with him:
At such a time I’ll loose my daughter to him.
[To the King.] Be you and I behind an arras then.
Mark the encounter. If he love her not,
And be not from his reason fall’n thereon,
Let me be no assistant for a state,
But keep a farm and carters. (2.2.176–181)
Behind the arras, he thinks the game is under control. His confidence is that of an elite authority looking in from outside (a playwright behind the scenes, an author behind a text, an assistant for a state and its laws), as Claudius notes when explaining Polonius’s plan to Gertrude:
For we have closely sent for Hamlet hither,
That he, as ’twere by accident, may here
Affront Ophelia.
Her father [Polonius] and myself, lawful espials,
Will so bestow ourselves that, seeing unseen,
We may of their encounter frankly judge,
And gather by him, as he is behaved,
If ’t be th’ affliction of his love or no
That thus he suffers for. (3.1.32–40)
Thinking themselves to be “lawful espials”—righteous, lawful observers who will secretly spy on the proceedings and judge the natural, lawful cause of Hamlet’s suffering—Polonius and Claudius believe that they can decisively “mark the encounter” while they remain “seeing unseen.” They enact a fantasy of objectivity, what the science studies scholar Donna Haraway has described as a “god-trick”—a scientific performance of “a conquering gaze from nowhere”: “This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation.”[30] Of course, how “unseen” their seeing actually is remains doubtful—their presence is certainly known to Ophelia, of course, to say nothing of the audience, and some of Hamlet’s behavior in the scene is more explicable if it assumed that he, too, is actually aware that the King and Polonius are hiding behind the arras—an awareness that some productions of the play make more explicit than others.[31] In any case, Polonius’s wagering on the outcome, convinced that his hypothesis is already proved by deduction, indicates that he is not—despite what he thinks—outside the experiment but inside, personally invested in the preconceived results. The fallacy of his belief to be outside, seeing unseen, is fully exposed during his later attempt to spy on Hamlet’s behavior from behind another arras: when Polonius cries out from his hiding place, Hamlet stabs him through with his sword, sight unseen. Hamlet wryly jests that Polonius is more secret and hidden in death than he was in life, more serious and grave now with two feet in the grave: “This counselor / Is now most still, most secret, and most grave, / Who was in life a foolish prating knave” (3.4.236–238).
Hamlet’s sardonic valediction to Polonius distinguishes their dispositions as experimentalists, their different approaches to the experimental life. It is the difference, to put it bluntly, between playing a knave and being one. Polonius cannot see how much he is trapped by his own idols and deceptions, and he bears out what Bacon described as the “blind and stupid” methods of experimenters who “make their experiments lightly and as it were in play”—he is nothing other than a “foolish prating knave.” Hamlet, however, accepts his role as a knavish actor in an actor-network, and, in so doing, critically examines and tinkers with the implications of his own performative knavery—never out but always, as it were, in play.
“We are arrant knaves, all” | Rogues and Espials, or Inside the Play Zone
Hamlet makes little disguise of the fact that he is playing the knave—even if others fail to see it. For instance, when Polonius asks Hamlet, “What is the matter, my lord?” (2.2.211)—querying the matter of the book Hamlet is reading if not also more personal concerns—Hamlet responds that “the satirical rogue says here . . .” (2.2.214), and he describes all the ways the book insults foolish old men, jabbing at Polonius. Of course, the “satirical rogue” is Hamlet himself, playing as if he were someone else, putting his own satirical words into the fictional text of an imaginary author.
Polonius catches his drift—sort of. He sees that Hamlet is playing the knave, he hears the biting satire, but not enough to doubt the legitimacy of the performance: “Though this be madness, yet . . .” (2.2.223). Already convinced of the source of Hamlet’s madcap behavior, Polonius buttresses his assumption by recollecting a “fact” of natural history, observing that madness often speaks with sentences that felicitously say more than they say: “How pregnant sometimes his replies are! A happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of” (2.2.226–220). His thinking here illustrates the mischief of an agreeable opinion, as Bacon would describe it, showing how “with far more subtlety does this mischief insinuate itself into philosophy and the sciences; in which the first conclusion colours and brings into conformity with itself all that come after.”[32]
Because Polonius decides that any suggestive wordplay in Hamlet’s pregnant discourse is just further confirmation of madness, he overlooks the clues being delivered right to him. When Hamlet tells Polonius, “You are a fishmonger” (2.2.190) and “I would you were so honest a man” (2.2.192), he implies that he knows Polonius is fishing for answers—plotting that “bait of falsehood take this carp of truth.” Moreover, Hamlet implies that he already knows the experimental scheme Polonius has planned: fishmongering or pandering Ophelia, dangling her on a hook to nab Hamlet. And so, Hamlet accuses Polonius of not even having the honesty of a fishmonger, duped by his own arrogance. But Polonius hears none of this. He takes Hamlet’s words literally instead of figuratively: “he said I was a fishmonger. He is far gone” (2.2.215–206).
Again and again, Hamlet draws others into a game of make-believe, pretending as if the literal were figurative and vice versa—and always presenting such playful fictions as heuristic tools for grappling with the masks and disguises of the world as such. For instance, he warns Ophelia not to believe him, telling her that he loved her and he loved her not, and baldly asserts that he plays the knave: “What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us” (3.1.139–140).
He advises skepticism, incredulity, and critical observation, looking beyond the “words, words, words” of texts and the amorous promises of men. Believe nothing, he says, and instead interpret and investigate, lest one get carried away by the endless knavery of all the things “crawling between earth and heaven”—in other words, the theater of nature, the performance of everyday life. Hamlet reminds Ophelia that all the world’s a stage, the men and women mere players, prefiguring what Bacon would likewise call “this Theatre of Mans life.”[33] Moreover, Hamlet points out that nonhuman actors put on performances, as well. In a letter to Ophelia, he writes,
Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love. (2.2.124–127)
Hamlet suggests that there may be “doubt” about received cosmological models, or at least grounds for debate. (He had, of course, been a student at the University of Wittenberg, one of the strongholds of debates about Copernicanism in the sixteenth century.)[34] In drawing attention to such doubts, he implies that the truth of nature itself may be no different than a dramatic fiction. It is not simply that philosophers are wont to dress nature up in various theoretical costumes. After all, the stars had appeared sometimes as fire and sometimes as aether in various cosmological philosophies over the centuries—and by the sixteenth century, there was a real question of whether fire as an element even existed.[35] In any case, the fashion shows of philosophers come and go, changing à la mode—so Hamlet indicates it may be no big whoop to take such claims with a grain of salt. But to doubt the movement of the sun is to doubt the evidence of one’s own senses. Needless to say, Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) had fed suspicions about the tricky theatricality of the cosmos, the idea that the visible universe appears to us—people of this planet—in a deceptive, fictive guise. The sun appears to move, empirically, though it does not actually do so. It plays a role for us that is untrue to its own self—completely disregarding the diurnal logic of Polonius’s injunction to Laertes: “This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man” (1.3.84–86). The sun, seen in this light, is a committed method actor—though it requires an audience on the ground to affirm its character arc, to witness its dramatic rise and fall. Indeed, Hamlet’s letter underscores that we would only doubt the authenticity of this solar charade and consider so-called truth to be a liar if we come to suspect that we are actually part of the play: human actors interacting with nonhuman actors. Once we start to think this, everything becomes doubtable.
In Hamlet’s “litany of doubt,” as the literary scholar Marjorie Garber describes it, even the meaning of the word “doubt” is put in doubt.[36] Although the first two lines indicate that “doubt” means “disbelieve” (e.g., “Doubt thou the sun doth move”), the “doubt” of the third line (“Doubt truth to be a liar”) instead means “suspect” or even “believe,” indicating that Ophelia should suspect that what she believes to be true is not. The ambiguity of doubt immediately throws shade on his subsequent enjoinder, “But never doubt I love.” In this purloined letter, then, Hamlet both disguises and reveals that he is a knave, a player, and an experimenter, operating in a world of other experimenters. He knows full well that he is, as Ophelia later describes him, “Th’ observed of all observers” (3.1.168). He knows, in other words, that the experimenter is also experimented upon—and so is everyone else. Whether he “actually” loves her or not is irrelevant—reality is a performance, he tells her, and this particular show requires him to break her heart: “We are arrant knaves, all.”
For Hamlet, then, playing the knave is a pose of critical discernment as well as an ethical act, an experimental procedure that works by consistently disclosing its own bias, its own knavery. As he tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear” (4.2.23–24). In other words, those ill attuned to the human and nonhuman knaveries of the world, including their own, are easily tricked. Hamlet intimates to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he would like “to speak to you like an honest man” (2.2.288–289), as if feigning the truth in plain sight. But Rosencrantz and Guildenstern miss the point. After all, they are not good actors, and they cannot even disguise their investigative purpose; as Hamlet observes, “there is a kind of confession in your looks which your modesties have not craft enough to color” (2.2.301–303). Hamlet quickly preempts them, providing an “anticipation” of their secret purpose: “I will tell you why. So shall my anticipation prevent your discovery” (2.2.316–317). He infers that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been summoned by the king and queen to “assay him to any pastime” (3.1.16) and “bring him on to some confession / Of his true state” (3.1.9–10), namely, the cause of his melancholic antics—a cause that, so he claims, remains a mystery even to himself. Hamlet professes that his anticipation will “prevent your discovery,” graciously relieving Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from having to betray the secrecy of their cause; but it will also prevent their investigation from making any discovery at all, impeding them by misdirection. Later, Hamlet asserts that he sees they are trying to play him—but playing him badly, fretting him without ever coaxing a truthful note from him—while he is playing them with finesse:
You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me. (3.2.392–402)
Yet, despite his confidence, Hamlet can never be entirely sure about his own instrumentality. For he recognizes that he is a player among other players, and that he may be getting played as much as he is playing. Is the ghost duping him? Is he deceived by his own desires, his own idols of the mind? He knows that he cannot presume to be a lawful espial, somehow safe and secure outside the scenes. He can only scramble to find secure grounds amid the uncertain knaveries of lived experience:
The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil, and the devil hath power
T’ assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds
More relative than this. (2.2.627–633)
He bewails that his method of playing the knave forestalls more direct and honest action: “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” (2.2.577), “I, / A dull and muddy-mettled rascal” (2.2.593–594), “Who calls me ‘villain’?” (2.2.599), “Why, what an ass am I!” (2.2.611), and so forth. Yet it is precisely by owning its own knavery that his playful method provides “grounds more relative than this”—to wit, foundations more secure than the authority of a king’s word, the testimony of an epistemological phantom, or the personal convictions of a distraught and melancholy man. Despite the detours needed to get there, Hamlet seeks grounds that are “more relative,” that is, measured in regard to the circumstances of this world in which they credibly appear, instead of privileging claims from out of this world (even if taking such claims under advisement).[37] As a relativist, Hamlet is critically attentive to the circumstances and contexts of justification; as a player, he knows that fiction can render such contexts visible, indirectly and metaphorically, assessing their contrivances by relating its own artifice.[38] This is precisely why he orchestrates the play-within-the-play, as a way to find out if he has been played (by the ghost, by his own imagination) or rather steered in the right direction: not from a distant place of espial but from within the situated zone of playful knowledge.
“There’s no such sport as sport by sport o’erthrown” | Knavish Ludology, or It’s a Trap
The play’s the thing that points the way. As Hamlet describes it, the play-within-the-play represents an instance of the fingerpost: “I’ll tent him [Claudius] to the quick. If he do blench, / I know my course” (2.2.626–627). The play is figured as a mechanical contraption—as suggested by its title, “The Mousetrap”—and it works as a blenching test by presenting an “image” that functions more haptically than visually (“it touches …”).[39] Moreover, its quality as an instrument seems to depend on its “knavish” features:
“The Mousetrap.” Marry, how? Tropically. This play is the image of a murder done in Vienna. Gonzago is the duke’s name, his wife Baptista. You shall see anon. ’Tis a knavish piece of work, but what of that? Your Majesty and we that have free souls, it touches us not. Let the galled jade wince; our withers are unwrung. (3.2.261–267)
The murder depicted in the play is certainly knavish, but the play, too, is “a knavish piece of work.” Hamlet had previously used the phrase “piece of work” to illustrate his cynical perception of the human condition—“What a piece of work is man” (2.2.327)—and also to index this particular play, “The Mousetrap,” when confirming with Polonius that Claudius and Gertrude would agree to hear “this piece of work” (3.2.48–49). But why is the play knavish? What makes it a knavish piece of work? Of course, it is a cobbled thing, kludged and modified from other sources—wantonly mixing new material with old. But more specifically, it is a knavish piece of work because it plays make-believe, crookedly: it turns artful fiction into a trap, loaded with bait to catch the rodent of truth.
How, then, does the knavishness of the play, a rude mechanical device, square with the idea of holding a mirror up to nature? When Hamlet opines that the “purpose of playing” is to hold a mirror up to nature, he is not claiming that the images it casts back are necessarily mimetic, accurate, literal, or truthful.[40] Rather, holding a mirror up to nature is an intervention. Knowledge is an effect of the mirror’s warped reflections, its glitchy distortions. Indeed, Hamlet insists that the play functions “tropically”: it is a figurative mousetrap, and it works precisely because its representations are allegorical figures or tropes that produce a “turning” or a “swerving” of the path—a tropical effect, in other words, a torquing of current conditions. The play, as Bacon would put it, is an “evoking device.” It aims to produce a specific, evocative phenomenon—and this is why Hamlet prevails on the actors not to ham it up or indulge in off-script clowning, which might distract the audience right when “some necessary question of the play be then to be considered” (3.2.44–45). As Hamlet explains, playing can be a way to evoke matters of fact, but technique matters: the more precise the experiment—the more focused the reflected light—the more effective the judgment. Done in this way, playing can persuade any witnesses, not only the “unskillful” (3.2.27) but also the most skeptical and “judicious” (3.2.28). Hamlet explains this to Claudius, though disingenuously: the play is precisely engineered to affect, to touch the members of its target audience, to wring their withers and make them wince.
In this regard, Shakespeare aligns with Bacon’s accounts of mirrors as scientific instruments. When Bacon discusses mirrors [specula], it is usually to disparage the “speculum inaequale” or “speculi alicujus incantati, pleni superstitionibus et spectris”—the uneven or enchanted mirror of the mind, full of superstitions and specters.[41] Yet Bacon also discusses other mirrors that can be used as tools to cut through the illusions. Indeed, the only other specula that Bacon regularly discusses in his writings are “specula comburentia,” burning-mirrors or burning-glasses. He describes many experiments with such scorching devices, encouraging his readers to try them at home: “heats of every kind, with their effects, should be diligently collected from all quarters and investigated,—the heat of heavenly bodies by their rays direct, reflected, refracted, and united in burning-glasses and mirrors.”[42] He advises trying one experiment and then modding it, testing different variations: “The rays of the sun are so intensified in heat by burning-glasses or mirrors [specula comburentia], that they can set on fire any combustible matter; can the rays of the moon by the same process be actuated to any degree of heat however mild?”[43] For Bacon, then, holding a mirror [speculum] up to nature usually involves trying to burn some object of interest, focusing heat and light to vex it. The whole point, after all, is that “the secrets of nature reveal themselves more readily under the vexations of art than when they go their own way.”[44]
This is exactly how Hamlet treats playing, as a mirror that will vex Claudius and pry out his secrets. Hamlet asks Horatio to observe the “Mousetrap” experiment with him—not to assess whether the performance is naturalistic or plausible, but rather to watch its effect on the audience, specifically, on Claudius. Hamlet supposes that plays as mirrors operate on bodies physically, surgically (“I’ll tent him to the quick”). Horatio is called upon as a reliable witness of this probing, tenting intervention:
There is a play tonight before the King.
One scene of it comes near the circumstance
Which I have told thee of my father’s death.
I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot,
Even with the very comment of thy soul
Observe my uncle. If his occulted guilt
Do not itself unkennel in one speech,
It is a damnèd ghost that we have seen,
And my imaginations are as foul
As Vulcan’s stithy. Give him heedful note,
For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,
And, after, we will both our judgments join
In censure of his seeming. (3.2.80–92)
Emphasizing the null hypothesis, Hamlet again frames the play as an instance of the fingerpost: if Claudius does not react, then there is no “occulted guilt” at all, and thus, the ghost was not truthful—just another knave. But as the play unfolds, its themes highlighted by Hamlet’s interruptions and color commentary, Claudius appears to react strongly to the depiction of treacherous fratricide; he halts the play and leaves. Hamlet asks, “What, frighted with false fire?” (3.2.292). Claudius calls out, “Give me some light. Away!” (3.2.295)—effectively disrupting the “false fire” cast onto him by the burning-mirror of the play, flooding the room with “lights, lights, lights!” (3.2.296) so that his secret will not be exposed. Yet his vexed reaction is a mote of evidence. Hamlet asks Horatio if he saw what he saw. Horatio confirms, “I did very well note him” (3.2.316).
Hamlet trusts this observation—a mental inscription of a circumstantial effect—because he considered Horatio one of those “Whose blood and judgment are so well commeddled / That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger / To sound what stop she please” (3.2.74–76). Horatio is not easily played, it seems. In contrast, by this point Hamlet is too personally invested—his “imaginations are as foul as Vulcan’s stithy,” as he says, tainted like Bacon’s “menstruous and distain’d” mirror.[45] His filthy, haunted imagination eventually leads him to play biased assays, just like Polonius. For instance, in Gertrude’s bedroom, Hamlet wants to hold up a mirror to nature yet again: he threatens to “set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you” (3.4.24–25). He implies not merely that he will show her outward reflection, but that he will evoke deeper secrets, opening her up, exposing her insides to the mirrored surface: recalling, perhaps, the Renaissance figure of Anatomia, whose instruments were the looking glass and the knife.[46] Whatever his plan in holding up another mirror to nature may be, Gertrude certainly intuits that he intends violence: “What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me?” (3.4.26).
This scene of interrogation shows Hamlet to have become vulnerable to the idols and phantoms of imagination that underlie any rash anticipation of nature. He presumes Gertrude’s guilt, her foreknowledge of the murder. He berates her and threatens her, exhibiting none of the patient subtlety he undertook when trying to ascertain Claudius’s occulted guilt. Accordingly, it is precisely at this moment—his method derailed by his foul imagination and his anticipation of Gertrude’s inmost part—that the ghost once more appears to intervene: a nonhuman actor whose purpose, transparently, is to remind Hamlet about the phantoms of the enchanted mind that abduct patient induction.
The ghost, always a reminder—“Remember me” (1.5.98)—halts Hamlet’s rush to mistaken judgment and yanks him back to the path of just interpretation: “Do not forget. This visitation / Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.” The ghost directs Hamlet to look more carefully: “But look, amazement on thy mother sits” (3.4.126–128). The abrupt intercession of the ghost—a glitch that turns out to be a much-needed feature—prompts a methodological reset. It helps Hamlet to recall that, if the truth is to play out in a way that will satisfy not only his own mind but also the judgment of others, he must, as Gertrude puts it, “sprinkle cool patience” (3.4.141). What is more, he needs Gertrude to play along with his crafty fiction, involving her in the experimental apparatus: “Not this by no means that I bid you do: . . . / Make you to ravel all this matter out / That I essentially am not in madness, / But mad in craft” (3.4.203–210). Gertrude agrees—and thus, the play continues. By expanding rather than collapsing the charade at this moment, adding another actor to his play, Hamlet now sets his sights on flipping the script—all according to the same rules of play, without ever stepping out of bounds. As he tells Gertrude, he will in this manner foil the “knavery” of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the trip to England, sealing their fates with the same treacherous epistle, the same incendiary device they aim to use on him. It is, after all, just part of the game:
They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work,
For ’tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petard. (3.4.227–230)
The engineer, the gamer, the philosopher, the experimenter: all become part of the experiment, inextricably, once it is set in motion. There is no outside the laboratory. As Hamlet says, by the time the experimenter knows what’s happening, the play is already well underway: “Or I could make a prologue to my brains, / They had begun the play” (5.2.34–35). Certainly, by the end of the final act, all the tables have turned—all the petards have hoisted their inventors. Laertes, caught by his own contrivances with a “treacherous instrument” (5.2.347), a poisoned blade, confesses everything: “The foul practice / Hath turned itself on me. … / I can no more. The King, the King’s to blame” (5.2.348–350). Death follows upon death, but the truth comes out—publicly, experimentally. Hamlet, too, is trapped by the treacherous instruments of this, his very own play—reflecting how the production of experimental knowledge is often figured as an exercise in self-abnegation, risking life, limb, and reputation for the sake of science.[47] Of course, even Francis Bacon gave his life in pursuit of experimental knowledge. According to a rumor, a legend—first reported by John Aubrey as told to him by Thomas Hobbes, who had been Bacon’s secretary for a time—Bacon ran afoul of his own fowl experiments in April 1626:
Mr. Hobbs told me that the cause of his lordship’s death was trying an experiment: viz., as he was taking the aire in a coach with Dr. Witherborne (a Scotchman, Physitian to the King) towards High-gate, snow lay on the ground, and it came into my lord’s thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt. They were resolved they would try the experiment presently. They alighted out of the coach, and went into a poore woman’s howse at the bottome of Highgate hill, and bought a hen, and made the woman exenterate it, and then stuffed the bodie with snow, and my lord did help to doe it himselfe. The snow so chilled him, that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not returne to his lodgings (I suppose then at Graye’s Inne), but went to the earle of Arundell’s house at High-gate, where they putt him into a good bed warmed with a panne, but it was a damp bed that had not been layn-in in about a yeare before, which gave him such a cold that in 2 or 3 dayes, as I remember he a told me, he dyed of suffocation.[48]
Perhaps Bacon should have read Shakespeare a bit more carefully. After all, only moments before the “Mousetrap” experiment begins, Hamlet exclaims that he, as a chameleon of playful assays, thrives on the forward-looking promises of his own experimental efforts: “I eat the air, promise-crammed.” But he cautions against stuffing chickens with such speculative stuff: “You cannot feed capons so” (3.2.99–101). In any case, Bacon did not follow Hamlet, and so, he died as he lived—playing a game of chicken with nature itself.[49] Hoisted with his own petard, indeed.
Experimenters are always part of the experiment. The interpretation of nature takes place inside, not outside, the scene of experimental play. In the end, Hamlet calls upon Horatio to record what has happened here—“report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied” (5.1.371–372)—asking him to play the role of orator (oratio) and public interpreter of events.[50] Horatio’s closing speech tries to sum things up:
And let me speak to th’ yet unknowing world
How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on th’ inventors’ heads. All this can I
Truly deliver. (5.2.421–428)
In rehearsing this catalog of tragedy, the natural history of Elsinore, Horatio returns to the core theme of experimental involvement, the trope of glitchy inventions that reflect back on themselves: “purposes mistook fall’s on th’ inventors’ heads.” He reminds us that, despite his exemplary judgment and his promise to “truly deliver” the occulted truth, to disclose “how these things came about” in an epilogue yet to come, he, too, has been part of the things that transpired. Horatio is not the final arbiter of objectivity, a lawful espial, seeing unseen. His interpretation is another modification that shifts the burden of proof to the audience—not only to Fortinbras and company, but to the whole “yet unknowing world,” that is, to any audience who may yet observe this play, now or in the future.
All the members of this speculative audience are therefore made players, involved in the play, tasked to become active interpreters—invited, in fact, to play the knave. Horatio’s reporting may try to sway the skeptics (“the unsatisfied”) and preempt those who have yet to see the evidence (“th’ yet unknowing world”). But the play has encouraged its audience to question the words of philosophers, phantoms, and kings, neither simply accepting nor rejecting them outright, but instead using them as materials or tools for further experimentation, further testing of knowledge claims—and continuing to modify them, as needed. Earlier, in the graveyard, Hamlet’s banter with the gravedigger makes him exclaim, “How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us” (5.1.140–141). The thing with knaves, of course, is that they tend to interpret things contrarily, against the grain—whether literally or figuratively, whether following the route pointed by the compass card or wandering waywardly in equivocation. First one way, then the other. Not sticking to one fingerpost trail but exploring many of them, just to be sure—or just for fun. The knave may follow the straight and narrow and then undo it in equivocation, deconstructing the pretenses and anticipations of the prevailing order. Of course, the knave has the last laugh—even beyond the grave—because there is no end to interpretation, no end to knavery in a universe of “infinite jest” (5.1.191–192).
So, there you have it, as you like it: this is what it means to play the knave. The point is not to undermine objectivity but to make for better objectivity, more relative objectivity (“I’ll have grounds more relative than this”).[51] Playing the knave describes a manner of engaging with the situated actions and actings of the mutable actors who make up an actor-network. It is a way to experience an actor-network in more ways than one, to reconfigure and sometimes to undo things so they can be remade again. We have tried in this book to articulate a theory of how postdisciplinary collaborations operate in such ludic fashion, through intersecting modes of play—material, textual, and performative—in which actors try on different roles, ventriloquize different perspectives, goof around with various and sundry humans and nonhumans, and entertain the “what if” and the “why not?” even when thinking in other directions. In short, it is a rascally theory of play as research—a knavish ludology.
If the works of Shakespeare thematize the epistemic functions of play in these terms—and this is, of course, our contention—then Shakespeare-themed games are mechanisms for rendering the theory in playable format. Indeed, many Shakespeare games are recursive in this regard, reflecting on play itself as a means of investigating the theatricality of the world. Players of these games use their avatars to experiment not only with constraints and affordances but also with speculative alternatives and potentials for becoming otherwise.[52] In Elsinore (2019, Golden Glitch), for example, the player-character is Ophelia, who tries to gather intel through various gambits and assays: talking to other characters to figure out what they know, searching different rooms to see who or what is there, and so forth. Every time Ophelia makes a mistake in her investigations, she goes back to the beginning, respawning in her room—but now armed with the knowledge that she has gathered in prior rounds, prepared to try again. In accord with Shakespeare, Elsinore foregrounds play as an experimental act: a way of finding things out, modding the canonical narrative, and achieving a different outcome—in other words, a machine for making the future.
Similarly, in Ryan North’s hilarious choose-your-own-path novel To Be or Not To Be? (2013)—an adaptation of Hamlet that has itself been adapted into a video game (2015, Tin Man Games)—Ophelia is a scientist. She realizes the castle is too cold and so tries out various experiments with the aim of inventing indoor heating. In one of the narrative pathways, she succeeds; in other pathways, she and other characters find different quirky endings. Part of the fun is exploring all the narrative routes, noting the fingerposts, and realizing that the actual story of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (this is the conceit of North’s text) is derived from a set of limited observations—an “anticipation of nature” extracted from a much larger field of data seen and unseen. North’s novel underscores Hamlet’s plot as a network of actions taken and untaken, an assemblage of potential events actualized and unactualized. The purpose of playing through many different narrative options is to bring these otherwise virtual or occulted pathways to light. Only by situating the actual plotline of Hamlet in the context of a fulsome natural history of other ways to go—some vexed, some unprompted—can we begin to interpret what it means “to be or not to be.”
Along with other Shakespeare games, Play the Knave encourages experimentation—even exuberant, unbound experimentation with its own apparatus. Through our experiences in building this game, working together and tinkering with the works of Shakespeare, we have discovered something quite interesting: laboratories, theaters, and games are all evoking devices, mirrors of nature that do not represent as much as they intervene. Often, they produce some glitches in the process—ghosts, idols, monsters, accidents, and lusus naturae. Often, they lead explorers and experimenters away from the beaten paths, astray from their disciplined comfort zones, and into strange new territories. But if glitches and weird wanderings are approached not as distractions or failures but as serendipitous elements of the game—as opportunities for more play—then they can become beloved features that provide unexpected twists of experience, suggesting ways of playing differently. It is often by embracing our mistakes and taking misdirections that we discover new truths and co-create new worlds—and, hopefully, better things to come.
We wrote a book to put these ideas in words, words, words. We made a game to put them in play.
Williams, Spring and All, 208.
Peter Galison argues that while experiments may begin with theoretical and experimental presuppositions, they conclude once they have generated enough persuasive arguments to “stand up in court”—with evidence compelling enough to be remembered by the audience: “For, like Shakespeare’s Gaunt, experimentalists know that they will be remembered for what they say last”; see Galison, How Experiments End, 277, 4. On scientific fictions that stake out the circumstances of experimental knowledge in advance, underscoring the interplay of interpretation and anticipation, see Milburn, “Ahead of Time.”
Peter Galison argues that while experiments may begin with theoretical and experimental presuppositions, they conclude once they have generated enough persuasive arguments to “stand up in court”—with evidence compelling enough to be remembered by the audience: “For, like Shakespeare’s Gaunt, experimentalists know that they will be remembered for what they say last”; see Galison, How Experiments End, 277, 4. On scientific fictions that stake out the circumstances of experimental knowledge in advance, underscoring the interplay of interpretation and anticipation, see Milburn, “Ahead of Time.”
Bacon, Novum organum [trans. Spedding and Ellis], 352 (bk. 2, aph. 40); italics in the original.
Bacon, Novum organum [trans. Spedding and Ellis], 352 (bk. 2, aph. 40); italics in the original.
Bacon, Novum organum [trans. Spedding and Ellis], 352 (bk. 2, aph. 40); italics in the original.
Bacon, Novum organum [trans. Spedding and Ellis], 352 (bk. 2, aph. 40); italics in the original.
Bacon, Novum organum [trans. Spedding and Ellis], 352 (bk. 2, aph. 40); italics in the original.
Bacon, Novum organum [trans. Spedding and Ellis], 352 (bk. 2, aph. 40); italics in the original.
Bacon, Novum organum [trans. Spedding and Ellis], 352 (bk. 2, aph. 40); italics in the original.
Bacon, Novum organum [trans. Spedding and Ellis], 352 (bk. 2, aph. 40); italics in the original.
Williams, Spring and All, 208.
Peter Galison argues that while experiments may begin with theoretical and experimental presuppositions, they conclude once they have generated enough persuasive arguments to “stand up in court”—with evidence compelling enough to be remembered by the audience: “For, like Shakespeare’s Gaunt, experimentalists know that they will be remembered for what they say last”; see Galison, How Experiments End, 277, 4. On scientific fictions that stake out the circumstances of experimental knowledge in advance, underscoring the interplay of interpretation and anticipation, see Milburn, “Ahead of Time.”
Williams, Spring and All, 208.
Williams, Spring and All, 208.
Williams, Spring and All, 208.
Williams, Spring and All, 208.
Williams, Spring and All, 208.
Williams, Spring and All, 208.
Williams, Spring and All, 208.
Williams, Spring and All, 208.
Williams, Spring and All, 208.
Williams, Spring and All, 208.
Peter Galison argues that while experiments may begin with theoretical and experimental presuppositions, they conclude once they have generated enough persuasive arguments to “stand up in court”—with evidence compelling enough to be remembered by the audience: “For, like Shakespeare’s Gaunt, experimentalists know that they will be remembered for what they say last”; see Galison, How Experiments End, 277, 4. On scientific fictions that stake out the circumstances of experimental knowledge in advance, underscoring the interplay of interpretation and anticipation, see Milburn, “Ahead of Time.”
Peter Galison argues that while experiments may begin with theoretical and experimental presuppositions, they conclude once they have generated enough persuasive arguments to “stand up in court”—with evidence compelling enough to be remembered by the audience: “For, like Shakespeare’s Gaunt, experimentalists know that they will be remembered for what they say last”; see Galison, How Experiments End, 277, 4. On scientific fictions that stake out the circumstances of experimental knowledge in advance, underscoring the interplay of interpretation and anticipation, see Milburn, “Ahead of Time.”
Peter Galison argues that while experiments may begin with theoretical and experimental presuppositions, they conclude once they have generated enough persuasive arguments to “stand up in court”—with evidence compelling enough to be remembered by the audience: “For, like Shakespeare’s Gaunt, experimentalists know that they will be remembered for what they say last”; see Galison, How Experiments End, 277, 4. On scientific fictions that stake out the circumstances of experimental knowledge in advance, underscoring the interplay of interpretation and anticipation, see Milburn, “Ahead of Time.”
Some ancient cosmologists, such as Anaximander, taught that the stars were fiery apertures in celestial rings of fire—but later philosophers gave quite different accounts. In the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system, the fixed stars were made not of fire but of aether, and their heat came from the motion of the celestial spheres grinding against the elemental spheres. Any “new” stars in this system, including comets, could only emerge in the elemental sphere of fire, below the moon. By the sixteenth century, however, the nature of the stars and the existence of fire itself were in dispute. Paracelsus and his followers shifted fire from the sublunary region to the heavens, remaking the fixed stars into fire-stuff. From a different direction, in his popular and widely circulated work De subtilitate (1550), the Italian natural philosopher Girolamo Cardano argued that “all heat is from the stars”—but he deduced that the element of fire does not exist anywhere in the universe; see Cardano, The De Subtilitate of Girolamo Cardano, 1: 78. Later, from their observations of the appearance of a new star (nova stella) in 1572, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe and the English astronomer Thomas Digges both determined that new stars are not formed in the Aristotelian sphere of fire but instead appear farther away, beyond the moon; see Pumfrey, “‘Your astronomers and ours differ exceedingly.’” Tycho agreed with Cardano that there exists no sublunary sphere fire at all—but he instead allowed, along with the Paracelsians, that the substance of the heavens might itself be fire. Though, really, he was not too sure; see Christianson, “Tycho Brahe's German Treatise on the Comet of 1577.” For his part, Francis Bacon adopted a quasi-Paracelsian view and understood the stars to be made of sidereal fire, more pure than terrestrial fire, suspended in the cosmic medium of aether; see Rees, “Francis Bacon’s Semi-Paracelsian Cosmology.” The nature of fire and its role in the cosmos would remain topics of debate for quite some time; see Coffin, John Donne and the New Philosophy, 160–174.
Some ancient cosmologists, such as Anaximander, taught that the stars were fiery apertures in celestial rings of fire—but later philosophers gave quite different accounts. In the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system, the fixed stars were made not of fire but of aether, and their heat came from the motion of the celestial spheres grinding against the elemental spheres. Any “new” stars in this system, including comets, could only emerge in the elemental sphere of fire, below the moon. By the sixteenth century, however, the nature of the stars and the existence of fire itself were in dispute. Paracelsus and his followers shifted fire from the sublunary region to the heavens, remaking the fixed stars into fire-stuff. From a different direction, in his popular and widely circulated work De subtilitate (1550), the Italian natural philosopher Girolamo Cardano argued that “all heat is from the stars”—but he deduced that the element of fire does not exist anywhere in the universe; see Cardano, The De Subtilitate of Girolamo Cardano, 1: 78. Later, from their observations of the appearance of a new star (nova stella) in 1572, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe and the English astronomer Thomas Digges both determined that new stars are not formed in the Aristotelian sphere of fire but instead appear farther away, beyond the moon; see Pumfrey, “‘Your astronomers and ours differ exceedingly.’” Tycho agreed with Cardano that there exists no sublunary sphere fire at all—but he instead allowed, along with the Paracelsians, that the substance of the heavens might itself be fire. Though, really, he was not too sure; see Christianson, “Tycho Brahe's German Treatise on the Comet of 1577.” For his part, Francis Bacon adopted a quasi-Paracelsian view and understood the stars to be made of sidereal fire, more pure than terrestrial fire, suspended in the cosmic medium of aether; see Rees, “Francis Bacon’s Semi-Paracelsian Cosmology.” The nature of fire and its role in the cosmos would remain topics of debate for quite some time; see Coffin, John Donne and the New Philosophy, 160–174.
In the social sciences, the study of “confirmation bias” or “bias toward verification” as a psychological predisposition is usually traced back to Peter Wason; see Wason, “On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task”; and Wason and Johnson-Laird, Psychology of Reasoning. Wason’s own studies drew on the work of philosophers of science, such as Karl Popper, who argued that science went astray when trying to “confirm” rather than “falsify” a hypothesis or theoretical construct; see Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Moreover, Wason frequently referenced Bacon’s critique of “induction by simple enumeration,” which Bacon saw as a “childish” method prone to interpretive bias. Bacon described the problem thusly: “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion . . . draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious pre-determination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate”; see Bacon, Novum organon [trans. Spedding and Ellis], 265 (bk. 1, aph. 46).
In the social sciences, the study of “confirmation bias” or “bias toward verification” as a psychological predisposition is usually traced back to Peter Wason; see Wason, “On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task”; and Wason and Johnson-Laird, Psychology of Reasoning. Wason’s own studies drew on the work of philosophers of science, such as Karl Popper, who argued that science went astray when trying to “confirm” rather than “falsify” a hypothesis or theoretical construct; see Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Moreover, Wason frequently referenced Bacon’s critique of “induction by simple enumeration,” which Bacon saw as a “childish” method prone to interpretive bias. Bacon described the problem thusly: “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion . . . draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious pre-determination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate”; see Bacon, Novum organon [trans. Spedding and Ellis], 265 (bk. 1, aph. 46).
In the social sciences, the study of “confirmation bias” or “bias toward verification” as a psychological predisposition is usually traced back to Peter Wason; see Wason, “On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task”; and Wason and Johnson-Laird, Psychology of Reasoning. Wason’s own studies drew on the work of philosophers of science, such as Karl Popper, who argued that science went astray when trying to “confirm” rather than “falsify” a hypothesis or theoretical construct; see Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Moreover, Wason frequently referenced Bacon’s critique of “induction by simple enumeration,” which Bacon saw as a “childish” method prone to interpretive bias. Bacon described the problem thusly: “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion . . . draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious pre-determination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate”; see Bacon, Novum organon [trans. Spedding and Ellis], 265 (bk. 1, aph. 46).
In the social sciences, the study of “confirmation bias” or “bias toward verification” as a psychological predisposition is usually traced back to Peter Wason; see Wason, “On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task”; and Wason and Johnson-Laird, Psychology of Reasoning. Wason’s own studies drew on the work of philosophers of science, such as Karl Popper, who argued that science went astray when trying to “confirm” rather than “falsify” a hypothesis or theoretical construct; see Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Moreover, Wason frequently referenced Bacon’s critique of “induction by simple enumeration,” which Bacon saw as a “childish” method prone to interpretive bias. Bacon described the problem thusly: “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion . . . draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious pre-determination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate”; see Bacon, Novum organon [trans. Spedding and Ellis], 265 (bk. 1, aph. 46).
In the social sciences, the study of “confirmation bias” or “bias toward verification” as a psychological predisposition is usually traced back to Peter Wason; see Wason, “On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task”; and Wason and Johnson-Laird, Psychology of Reasoning. Wason’s own studies drew on the work of philosophers of science, such as Karl Popper, who argued that science went astray when trying to “confirm” rather than “falsify” a hypothesis or theoretical construct; see Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Moreover, Wason frequently referenced Bacon’s critique of “induction by simple enumeration,” which Bacon saw as a “childish” method prone to interpretive bias. Bacon described the problem thusly: “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion . . . draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious pre-determination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate”; see Bacon, Novum organon [trans. Spedding and Ellis], 265 (bk. 1, aph. 46).
In the social sciences, the study of “confirmation bias” or “bias toward verification” as a psychological predisposition is usually traced back to Peter Wason; see Wason, “On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task”; and Wason and Johnson-Laird, Psychology of Reasoning. Wason’s own studies drew on the work of philosophers of science, such as Karl Popper, who argued that science went astray when trying to “confirm” rather than “falsify” a hypothesis or theoretical construct; see Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Moreover, Wason frequently referenced Bacon’s critique of “induction by simple enumeration,” which Bacon saw as a “childish” method prone to interpretive bias. Bacon described the problem thusly: “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion . . . draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious pre-determination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate”; see Bacon, Novum organon [trans. Spedding and Ellis], 265 (bk. 1, aph. 46).
In the social sciences, the study of “confirmation bias” or “bias toward verification” as a psychological predisposition is usually traced back to Peter Wason; see Wason, “On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task”; and Wason and Johnson-Laird, Psychology of Reasoning. Wason’s own studies drew on the work of philosophers of science, such as Karl Popper, who argued that science went astray when trying to “confirm” rather than “falsify” a hypothesis or theoretical construct; see Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Moreover, Wason frequently referenced Bacon’s critique of “induction by simple enumeration,” which Bacon saw as a “childish” method prone to interpretive bias. Bacon described the problem thusly: “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion . . . draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious pre-determination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate”; see Bacon, Novum organon [trans. Spedding and Ellis], 265 (bk. 1, aph. 46).
For examples, see Drucker, SpecLab; Balsamo, Designing Culture; Hayles, How We Think; King, Networked Reenactments; S. Jones, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities; Klein, Interdisciplining Digital Humanities; O’Gorman, Necromedia; Lane, The Big Humanities; Svensson, Big Digital Humanities; Deegan and McCarty, eds., Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities; Davidson and Savonick, “Digital Humanities”; McPherson, Feminist in a Software Lab; Malazita, Teboul, and Rafeh, “Digital Humanities as Epistemic Cultures”; Wershler, Emerson, and Parikka, The Lab Book; and Zurr and Catts, Tissues, Cultures, Art.