Shakespeare and the Public Discourse of Sovereignty: “Reason of State” in Hamlet
DiMatteo, Anthony
Early Modern Literary Studies 10.2 (September, 2004)
Abstract
Hamlet marks a turning point in Shakespeare’s evolving sense of his function as a dramatist. An implicitly critical social theory that recognizes the danger of a new “reason-of-state” terminology and its appeal to the English and European magistracy emerges in the play through symbolic emphases of plot and diction. These political undermeanings of the play, especially in the way it recalls Virgilian poetry, offer a contemporary lesson regarding the differences of dominium and imperium or dominion and domination. Preserving this distinction promotes the interests of the commoners, one reason why Shakespeare seems to violate standards of decorum by having gravediggers, pirates, clowns, jesters and witches exchanging freely with princes and kings. Establishing a jurisprudential agenda for such dramatic infractions, Hamlet announces and anticipates a prime focus of subsequent plays, especially the tragedies. The dangers that the discourse of the absolutist state presented to legal and moral conventions of contemporary thought are stressed in provocative ways. To understand how the plays, especially Hamlet, signal their relevance in this way to contemporary political thought, one must place them against a broad spectrum of early modern views regarding sovereignty and the state running from Machiavelli to Grotius and Hobbes. Within this historical framework, one aspect of the meanings of Hamlet that needs far more recognition becomes clear. The play sounds a tragic lament for a growing loss of the once widely held belief that the family of mankind has a natural ability to govern itself.
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