ABSTRACT
Hamlet spoke with sudden urgency to the early Romantic writers who, like Hamlet himself, were struggling with alienated consciousness in an uncaring and oppressive society. Hamlet can be seen as occupying a space between the two paradoxical roles of the Romantic poet: the uniquely gifted individual as the idealised embodiment of his culture and at the same time the implacable critic of that culture. If the question of who becomes king at the end of Hamlet matters, as life goes on, it’s a matter of indifference at the end of Lear, as the prevailing note is nothing to do with fulfilment and continuity but sheer exhaustion after the anguish exacted in Cordelia’s death and then Lear’s.
