Shakespeare William - Shakespeares Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality

New York and London

Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman But who is that on the other side of you?

T. S. ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND

Nearly every man who loses a limb carries about with him a constant or inconstant phantom of the missing member, a sensory ghost of that much of himself, and sometimes a most inconvenient presence, faintly felt at times, but ready to be called up to his perception by a blow, a touch, or a change of wind.

S. WEIR MITCHELL, INJURIES OF NERVES

the phantom is meant to objectify, even if under the guise of individual or collective hallucinations, the gap that the concealment of some part of a loved ones life produced in us. The phantom is, therefore, also a metapsychological fact. Consequently, what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.

NICOLAS ABRAHAM, NOTES ON THE PHANTOM

An earlier and briefer version of the chapter entitled Shakespeares ghost writers appeared in Cannibals, Witches and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, ed. Marjorie Garber, Selected Papers from the English Institute 1985 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). I am grateful to the publisher for permission to reprint. I would also like to express my gratitude to the various audiences at the English Institute, the Modern Language Association, the Conference on Feminism and Psychoanalysis at Illinois State University, Dartmouth College, Haverford College, Mount Holyoke College, the University of Massachusetts, Yale University, Harvard University who have listened with care and patience to early versions of the arguments put forward in these pages. Their suggestions and criticisms have been invaluable.

My particular and heartfelt thanks go to Rebecca Monroe, who has worked tirelessly in preparing the manuscript copy, and whose perceptive comments and generous encouragement were not only welcome but, indeed, essential to the completion of this book. Janice Price and Bill Germano at Methuen have been immensely supportive and helpful. I owe thanks as well to Leonard Barkan, Deborah Carlin, Heather Dubrow, Margaret Ferguson, G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Rachel Jacoff, David Kastan, Arthur Kinney, Barbara Packer, Peter Stallybrass, Richard Strier, Nancy Vickers, and Carolyn Williams. To Shoshana Felman I am indebted for a whole way of reading. My most profound debt is to Barbara Johnson.

The lines from The Waste Land are reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich from Collected Poems 19091962 by T. S. Eliot.