Hamlet, Humanism, and Performing the Self

This chapter discusses the place of William Shakespeare's Hamlet in relation to the humanist moral philosophy of the long sixteenth century. This was principally developed around the writings of the Roman rhetorician, lawyer, politician, and moral theorist Cicero, for whom one of the governing metaphors of civic existence was derived from the stage. The Ciceronian tradition is important not only on its own terms, but because it offers the wherewithal to generate readings of life in Shakespeare's Denmark that are as novel as they are revealing, and that bind together the personal, the political, and the religious into a richly interpenetrative whole. The chapter then outlines the doctrines of moral philosophy as the humanists understood them, before demonstrating Shakespeare's familiarity with these doctrines. It suggests that Hamlet offers a portrait of refractory moral dislocation that, as it was intended to, leaves these doctrines in ruins.