Introduction

“O what a rogue and peasant slave am I”, William Shakespeare has Hamlet, the doomed Prince of Denmark exclaim at the end of Act 2 of Hamlet. ¹ Hamlet is a prince, so is almost as far removed from an actual slave as it is possible to be. Moreover, neither in Denmark, where the play is set, nor in early seventeenth-century England, where the play was performed, was slavery common. But the idea of slavery, as Shakespeare recognised, was well known even in places where a person would seldom meet a slave, let alone become a slave oneself. Shakespeare used the imagery of slavery to get at a deeper truth. To be a slave, or to feel like a slave, was to be in the pit of despair because no condition could be worse than being a slave. Slavery was a form of exploitation in which one human was owned by another person, and in which the slave hovered uncertainly between the contradictory positions of being both a piece of property and also a person. It was also, as imaginative artists since Aristophanes and thinkers beginning with Aristotle have realised, a state of mind, a status that affected how one thought of oneself, if one was a slave, and how others thought of slaves. To be a slave, as Hamlet imagined himself to be, was to experience helplessness and degradation, even if – as in this case, but not normally in actual slavery – enslavement was not accompanied by physical violence. As Betty Wood notes in Chapter 4 of this volume, for Elizabethan English people, enslavement was dehumanisation: to treat men or women as slaves was to treat them as beasts.