The surface structure of the text appears to be one in which the incestuous mother is reviled and the dead father is idealized and mourned. Its deeper layers of imagery suggest a structure in which the father as male principle is by-passed and the emphasis is laid on the son as begetter. The death of old Hamlet prompts a 'regressive reverie', (Kristeva 1987, 25) a pre-oedipal fantasy of fusion with the mother. The emergence of a new father explodes Hamlet's construct, reactivating oedipal issues. Hamlet's first soliloquy thus juxtaposes the pre-oedipal and the oedipal pattern, the dyad and the triad, the merger and the end of the merger. It is the anguished outcry of a dispossessed son bemoaning foreshortened felicity and splitting the mother into a good (gratifying) and a bad (frustrating) object as a result. His melancholia results from an incomplete detachment from the mother as much as from grieving for a dead father. He is too much in the (mother's) sun. Too much in the (black) sun.