ABSTRACT
In cultural materialist accounts of Hamlet, Hamlet is to be found struggling for agency within a matrix of constitutive factors: social, historical and theatrical. His line ‘I have that within which passeth show’ (1.2.85) 1 is a desperate grasping for a selfhood that had not yet been fully imagined. For Francis Barker,
…interiority remains, in Hamlet, gestural…. At the centre of Hamlet, in the interior of his mystery, there is, in short, nothing. The promised essence remains beyond the scope of the text’s signification: or rather signals the limit of the signification of this world by marking out the site of an absence it cannot fill. It gestures towards a place for subjectivity, but both are anachronistic and belong to a historical order whose outline has so far only been sketched out. 2
