Returning to the list of headline claims in Chap. 7 , let me take up the fourth item. Hamlet encounters the signifier of the lack in the Other here, according to Lacan, when the ghost tells him about the way in which he was murdered. Hamlet had presumably been thinking that all was well in the best of all possible worlds, everything was hunky-dory between his parents, but he was completely wrong. While his father was ostensibly in love with his mother—“With his wife […] he went so far as to shield her face from ‘the winds of heaven’” (I, ii, 141)—she betrayed him with his brother (no one says she cheated on her husband during his lifetime, but she switches husbands awfully fast). And his brother, who presumably respected him, was in fact plotting against him behind his back in the hope of taking both his crown and his queen.