Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- PART I SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET, SELFHOOD
- 1 Hamlet and failure
- 2 ‘A room … at the back of the shop’
- 3 Egyptianism (our fascist future)
- 4 ‘Become who you are!’
- 5 Hamlet and self-love
- 6 ‘To thine own self be true’
- 7 Listening to ghosts
- 8 Shakespeare's self
- PART II SHAKESPEARE AND EVIL
- PART III SHAKESPEARE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT
- Conclusion: Shakespeare's ‘beauteous freedom’
- Index
- References
1 - Hamlet and failure
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- PART I SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET, SELFHOOD
- 1 Hamlet and failure
- 2 ‘A room … at the back of the shop’
- 3 Egyptianism (our fascist future)
- 4 ‘Become who you are!’
- 5 Hamlet and self-love
- 6 ‘To thine own self be true’
- 7 Listening to ghosts
- 8 Shakespeare's self
- PART II SHAKESPEARE AND EVIL
- PART III SHAKESPEARE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT
- Conclusion: Shakespeare's ‘beauteous freedom’
- Index
- References
Summary
A person may … to all appearances be someone, employed with temporal matters, get married, beget children, be honoured and esteemed – and one may fail to notice that in a deeper sense he lacks a self. Such things cause little stir in the world; for in the world a self is what one least asks after, and the thing it is most dangerous of all to show signs of having. The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. is bound to be noticed.
Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (1849), trans. A. Hannay (London, 1989), 62–3.Hamlet does seem to make a terrible hash of things. Instead of immediately avenging his father's murder he procrastinates (the famous delay) and only after an inner struggle kills Claudius. But this act seems almost a piece of by-play in a long tortuous drama that leaves dead not only Claudius but Hamlet, Gertrude, Ophelia, Laertes, Polonius… The disaster is political too: Norway acquires Denmark. Could a worse result be imagined for Hamlet's aim of setting things to rights? ‘So shall you hear’, Horatio says,
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause,
And in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on th' inventors' heads …
(V.ii.380–5)The action of the play is chaotic, appalling.
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- Information
- Shakespeare's Individualism , pp. 45 - 50Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010