ABSTRACT
Hamlet is characterized by a “curious” imagination that constantly interrogates the virtual boundlessness of matter—the world’s “an unweeded garden.” Although such morbid fascination with corrupt, indeterminate thingness is strongly indebted to the metaphysic-dialectical concern with determinate negation, the trope of a corrupt somatic matter unattended by the Idea runs obsessively through play’s sources (Saxo Grammaticus, Belleforest). There is, the critical tradition unconsciously attests to it, a case for reading Hamlet as an allegory of non-dissolution: political in-absolution, pragmatic irresolution, corporal non-dissoluteness and moral insolvency. Still, the rationale for the play’s tropic investment on indissoluble rottenness is ultimately ideological: what repels Hamlet is the indistinctness of people as “rabble.”
