ABSTRACT
What is a prince? In Renaissance English, “prince,” from princeps, meaning “first” (as in the German Fürst), could refer to the monarch as such, regardless of gender; Elizabeth was often called “prince.” More often in Shakespeare’s lexicon, however, a prince is a monarchin-waiting, a future king: the Henriad is Shakespeare’s royal Bildungsroman, charting the education of Hal from prentice prince to successful sovereign. Other princes in Shakespeare live in order to die, the very word coming to evoke the tender shoot of a blasted future, from the slaughtered princes of Richard III to young Mamillius of The Winter’s Tale. To these sovereign, developmental, and elegiac senses of the prince we must add the distinctively Machiavellian turn impressed on the word by Renaissance political philosophy. For Machiavelli, il principe is he who makes a beginning-Machiavelli addresses the new prince, an innovator in search of legitimacy through the tactics of fear and love. The word itself derives from the Roman emperors, who called
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The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a meditation on the origins and destinies of princeliness. In Hamlet’s Heirs, Linda Charnes’s Hamlet is always a prince, never a king, pursuing the curriculum of the princely Bildungsroman but kept out of office by the Ghost’s undead resistance to his own succession. Hugh Grady (2002) and Agnes Heller (2002: 8) are among the most recent critics to test Shakespeare’s Machiavellian motives, finding in both Claudius and Hamlet traces of the Machiavel (see also Husain 2004). Responding to these recent reflections on Shakespeare’s princes, this essay teases out the political possibilities embedded in the juridical conceit of princeps as First Citizen. What might it mean to encounter Hamlet as “First Citizen,” understood not as the imperial terminator of representative rule, but rather as the initiator of the chance for constitutionalism, an emperor in reverse? The outlines of such a possibility take shape around Hamlet’s friendship with Horatio, his Machiavellian moments, and his election of Fortinbras, political factors brought into literary focus by Hamlet’s affiliations with Orestes, tragic subject of constitutional change.
