ABSTRACT
With the advent of the nineteenth century, the Western world is going to view Hamlet as the exemplification of the fate of theories of freedom in an intellectual world in which naturalism is dominating, and, where the ultimate thesis has established the meaning of determinism in science, and hence for the social sciences already on the rise. Thus, for example, in 1803, Schlegel singles out what, at the end of the nineteenth century, 1899, Freud winds up riveting the attention of virtually the entire twentieth century on in the west. What is singled out of course, to use Schlegel’s phrase, is the “dreadful enigma” of Hamlet’s fateful delay in fulfilling the ghost’s duty for him to avenge the murder of the former king, his father, by the current king, his uncle (Freud 1998 [1900]: 298-99). The issue of “delay” interpretively grows to assume the sure sign that the “I” in Descartes’s “I think” is in radical doubt.
