ABSTRACT
This chapter presents that Hamlet both the play and the prince straddles this watershed, that the tensions and crises which he experiences are traceable to the precarious and debatable divide with the implications of the tragedy flowing in both directions. It views on the tragedy of Hamlet as a text of the seventeenth century with a seventeenth-century protagonist who looks into the passions from an angle which is not dissimilar to that of Ren Descartes half a century after him. Hamlet here assumes both a proto-Cartesian and a markedly anti-Stoic stance in that he does not regard the passions as a threat but, on the contrary, as fertile and helpful indeed as alone dependable when it comes to defining and asserting one's identity. Hamlet in fact rehabilitates the passions both as a source of human identity and more centrally as the play proceeds as an epistemological necessity.
