ABSTRACT
My question in this chapter is, how can we best describe the political dimension of Hamlet in its own time? To answer that question, I take Hamlet as a representative instance of theatrical public making in early modern England. To what degree my account of the public made by Hamlet will be able to stand as an adequate description of the theatrical public as a whole, not to mention publics in general, must, I admit, remain to be seen. You might want perhaps to imagine my account of this particular play and its public making as an analysis of a cellular slice taken from the larger organism of early modern public making across a range of intellectual and artistic activities. Indeed what I do say is by no means all that might be said about public making or about the play itself. In what follows I focus down on one passage from Hamlet, on one early performance, and on one parodic response to the play in order to sketch some ideas about Hamlet in relation to public making and to what I am calling the social thing.
