ABSTRACT
In Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, William Hazlitt proclaims ‘It is we who are Hamlet’, though without specifying very clearly just who is to be included by the emphatic first person plural (Hazlitt 1817:105). Emerson urges even more forcefully that Hamlet represents the ‘speculative genius’ of a rapidly developing modernity (Emerson 1968:127). These vague but in many ways crucial intuitions receive more detailed and explicit articulation in the writings of François Guizot.
