The Performative Utterance notes

• a play about a man who could not make real what was found in his mind ?
• Hamlet wavers is in the physical commission of this duty, in transcending the confines of his mental determination into the physical space
• unable to move that duty from the mental to the real
• Hamlet is able to speak but not to do
• philosopher of language J.L. Austin's theory of performativity How to Do Things with Words
  (1962),
• certain language does not merely describe action but acts in being spoken
• Austin divided the performative ability of language into three main forces: the locutionary force, the ability of language to deliver a message, the force of mutual intelligibility; the illocutionary force, what is done in being said, such as denying a request, giving an order, etc.; and the perlocutionary force, what is achieved by being said, the consequences of one's utterance, such as an order being followed (or refused)
• A man saying, "I order you to submit" is not merely describing his desire for the other to know he is asking for submission, but creates in the world the fact that he has ordered. The other hears it and understands (due to locutionary force), has had an order to submit put to him (due to illocutionary force), and may submit, or be offended by the order, or similar (and these are the perlocutionary effects).
•  Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
  (1998), Harold Bloom argues that Shakespeare's characters frequently develop through "self-over hearing. "Shakespeare's characters, in this argument, overhear themselves speaking and in doing so gain self-knowledge
• the process which allows characters to realize their own utterances and in doing so realize themselves
• If Hamlet is a character who engages in this self-overhearing, and he is a man who, for most of the play, demonstrates a disconnect between what he says and what he does, it then becomes useful to consider the impact of his performative language on his overhearing self
• Shakespeare was a dramatist, his creations plays meant for performance.. What was available to audiences was what could be seen and heard on a stage
• characters therefore had to present their inner selves to the audience through speeches, soliloquies and similar
• involving concepts of self-overhearing, self-creation and performativity in an analysis of a play risks positing an interior world that, in some sense, transcends what is revealed through the utterance of lines of dialogue
• This would be a mistake; there is no Hamlet, and thus no "Hamlet's mind" to be explored outside of the specific and limited consideration of what is revealed through Hamlet's speech
• One of the most important and obvious scenes in which to consider the performative utterances in
   Hamlet is the meeting between Hamlet and the ghost of his father
• meeting contains two oaths, Hamlet's, and later Horatio and Marcellus's
• They create the fact, "a promise (or oath) has been made in the world," which by convention binds someone to some behavior. And the making of an oath demonstrates how the illocutionary force can influence or compel the perlocutionary:once someone has made an utterance of the type "I swear," the illocutionary force of an oath having been made exists in the world
• If the person who has sworn fails to perform his tasked action, the perlocutionary effect may instead be that he is called a liar, or a swearer of false oaths, and any additional punishment or consequences of this failure are themselves a part of the perlocutionary force of the utterance. In this way we can see the locutionary meaning of an utterance creating the illocutionary effect of that utterance which in turn drives the perlocutionary effect, thought to language to action
• this way it is easy to see how Hamlet, having sworn revenge against Claudius, might be driven to perform such a deed
• The problem is that Hamlet does not swear to avenge his father
• Told this incredible tale about his father being brutally killed, and compelled by his father's ghost to take revenge, Hamlet swears only to remember, an entirely cognitive act and one subject to no outside verification

• Hamlet and the ghost compel Horatio and Marcellus to swear oaths of their own. But these oaths are only of secrecy, of not doing something; their duty is defined entirely negatively 
• One of the consistent motifs in Hamlet is that of drama and playacting
• Austin considers performatives that for some reason or another fail to perform. Referring to these alternatively as "unhappy" performative acts, or "infelicities," Austin colorfully describes them as the "doctrine of the things that can be and go wrong" (Words14)
• Playacting in the context of theater or drama might be said to contain the locutionary force of intelligibility of a given utterance, but not it's illocutionary force
• A character in a play who says "I thee condemn" delivers the mutually intelligible message that he is condemning someone to the audience, but without the illocutionary force of a fact of condemnation having been created in the world, because his utterance lacks the context and appropriateness requisite for such a fact being created

To Be Continued...