ABSTRACT

The year 1600 is often seen as a kind of epistemic watershed with the seventeenth century ushering in an altogether new and altogether revolutionary way of thinking about humanity. The supposed newness in thinking to enter and transform the world is the famous and indeed clichéd division between the mind and the body, the notion that human beings are somehow subdivided into a physical, mechanical body on the one hand and a spiritual, animistic mind or soul on the other. What is particularly surprising about this truism within the history of the mind is the fervour with which its temporal fixity is either defended or challenged.. Gail Kern Paster is notoriously adamant about Shakespeare writing ‘in a period before psychology and physiology had divided conceptually’ and even sees readings which disregard this context as liable to succumbing to ‘transhistorical and essentialist’ beliefs. 1 Susan James at the other extreme denies that a rigorous delimitation between the mind and the body occurred at all in the seventeenth century and suggests that the Galen–Descartes divide is in need of some serious reviewing. 2 Both Paster and James look towards the passions in order to argue their respective points and it is this angle which makes the mind–body distinction relevant for my reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Shakespeare’s tragedy has been dated to 1601 which places the Danish prince squarely on the watershed I mentioned above. I want to argue that Hamlet – both the play and the prince – straddles this watershed, that the tensions and crises which he experiences are traceable to this precarious and debatable divide with the implications of the tragedy flowing in both directions.