| Popis: |
This article situates Shakespeare's Hamlet in the context of the changing political uses and readings of the history of Hamlet through the late 16th and early 17th centuries. It argues that by revising the story, Shakespeare's play introduces to the English stage a new perspective on the realm of politics. Instead of focusing on issues of legitimacy and on agents making public arguments about those issues, Shakespeare's play withdraws from the public, polemical mode of discussion implied by these topics (a mode of discussion Francois Belleforest's histoire tragique of Amleth was intensely engaged in), and restricts its attention to the political agents' private interests and loyalties. The elimination of open political opposition to royal power, and the parallel emergence of the character of the low-born, upwardly mobile friend provide the templates for the play's dramatization of the contemporary shift of emphasis in political discussion from counsel to statecraft. In this reading, the various "tragical histories" of Hamlet allow us to recognize a much-discussed change in the modality of political discussion as a function of the changed in the understanding of the political agent. |
