ABSTRACT
I In a rather remarkable little essay, ‘Notes on Hamlet’, C.L.R.James writes, rather aptly, that ‘Shakespearean criticism is a jungle, a wilderness and a forest; and the wildest part is the jungle of modern criticism on Hamlet James 1992 [1953]: 243). For C.L.R.James, Hamlet is above all a political drama, ‘in which two ideas of society are directly confronted’, and more importantly for our present concerns, ‘the two societies confront one another within the mind of a single person’ (ibid.: 243). What James asserts, in a manner reminiscent of Freud, is that Hamlet is ‘the central drama of modern literature’, and further:
What gave Shakespeare the power to send it expanding through the centuries was that in Hamlet he had isolated and pinned down the psychological streak which characterised the communal change from the medieval world to the world of free individualisation.
