ABSTRACT
Ever since the publication of Specters of Marx, though perhaps as a minor and unintended consequence, English departments have been looking at Hamlet with renewed attention. The play, we now recognise, begins in mystery, with an enigma, a Ghost, which cannot be classified with certainty as either alive or dead, and thus exceeds the frame of what we seem to know. This apparition, a ‘thing’ that presents a puzzle for epistemology and defies both semantics and ontology, 1 also prompts within the play an ethical question that I want, very tentatively, to pursue.
