ABSTRACT
It still seems to be true that more has been written about this play than about any other work of literature. Hamlet thus remains a test-case of critical methodologies par excellence because it has been interpreted and re-interpreted for over three centuries without any sign of exhaustion. It is an ideal vehicle to illustrate the resistance of Shakespeare’s works – and ultimately, of all cultural productions worthy of the name ‘art’ – to definitive interpretation. Instead, works like Hamlet are reinvigorated and re-interpreted from one age to the next as societies, culture, and aesthetics change in an interconnected historical process. For example, for the critics of the Restoration and early Enlightenment, the age of Shakespeare was ‘barbarous’, and its origins within barbarism were cited as reasons for what almost all critics of the time saw as Hamlet’s flaws. For Modernist critics in the early and mid-twentieth century, however, the age of Shakespeare had been reconceptualized as a cultural golden age, an age of an organic society the loss of which had maimed the twentieth century but cast a new shine on the surviving documents of a better time. More recently yet, Shakespeare’s age seems to have become neither completely barbarous nor golden, but mixed, conceived as a simulacrum of our own time, and in that
way open to a different presentist allegorization, as a period of transition at the beginning of modernity that mirrors our own age of transition into an uncharted postmodernity. But whether the past is constructed as Other or as our own, it is always defined by its relation to ourselves and our self-understanding. Indeed, the re-reading and rethinking of classic literary works is one of the chief means we have for charting our own changes, our own insights into the way we live now.
