Hamlet Within Hamlet

This introductory chapter argues that William Shakespeare's Hamlet can be read as a profound meditation on the nature of human individuality without relying on conceptual frameworks drawn from the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Just as historical discourses beyond those of Hamlet itself provide a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the political and dynastic forces shaping life in Shakespeare's Denmark, so what might be called Hamlet's “character” appears in unfamiliar and revealing relief when read against the textual contours of the psychological, rhetorical, and moral-political theorizing that lay at the heart of sixteenth-century humanism. This approach not only better locates Hamlet within Hamlet, but that it offers to rehabilitate a coherent and intensely challenging work of tragedy—albeit one in which Shakespeare steadfastly disregards the rules of Aristotelian and humanist poetics. What sets Hamlet apart from the remainder of the dramatis personae is the degree to which Shakespeare explores through him the insight that the insufficiency of received ethical and political wisdom does not just have public consequences. Transposed onto the person of Hamlet, it calls into question the fundamentals of who and what a human individual might be said to be.