Staging Nothing: Hamlet and Cognitive Science

In Hamlet, few things are as powerful as nothing. Nothing is seen by the watchman Barnardo at the start of the play. Nothing lies between Ophelia’s legs. Nothing makes the player king weep for Hecuba. Nothing is the thing that makes up the king. Nothing comes up thirty times in Hamlet.2 The presence of nothing in the text calls attention to the absence that nothing is supposed to stand for. Cognitive linguistics challenges a stable definition of nothing, illuminating the things from which no things spring. In performance, Hamlet‘s destabilization of nothing goes even further, pointing to the something that each particular nothing is. Staging nothing both sheds light on a major debate within cognitive linguistics and calls attention to the traditional assumption of a suspension of disbelief.