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King uses the paradox inherent in the neurological definition of ambiguity—the simultaneous certainty of different scenarios, each one of which has equal validity—to triangulate the distinct creative sources of writers, actors, readers, and spectators. She argues that Shakespeare, perhaps most clearly in Hamlet, creates multiple contradictory meanings that actors, readers, and audiences experience in a process that cannot help but draw their attention to the mysteries of their own consciousness. Paying attention to the acting conditions of Elizabethan theater, in which individual actors did not possess the entire play script, she demonstrates through a close reading of the first two scenes of Hamlet how constructed holes in knowledge combine with contradictory impressions to give both characters and audiences a complex phenomenological experience.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-59541-6_7

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