The politics of conscience

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the action of William Shakespeare's plays and explains in detail how various concerns, points of references, and sets of narrative expectation are brought together and resolved. It highlights the depiction of Hamlet's spiritual crisis and his obsession over the prospect of suicide. It puzzles over the extent and the spiritual and epistemological consequences of Hamlet's own madness or melancholy, analysing whether he is the subject of demonically induced delusions and lies. The chapter looks into the term “atheist” in its Elizabethan sense, which is someone who is acting, or trying to act, as though God, the soul and the afterlife do not exist. It also compares Hamlet's soliloquies to someone talking like an atheist but acting like a Christian.