Abstract
The aim of the thesis (Desperately) Seeking the Early Modern Self: The Self, Subjectivity, Modernity and Representation in Shakespeare s Hamlet is to explore the Early Modern self in Hamlet. A host of neo-Marxist new historicist and cultural materialist critics of the period in general and the play in particular have argued that there is no inner sense of self in Early Modern England. Hence Prince Hamlet cannot possibly claim to have that within which passes show simply because the play predates the year 1660 and the alleged inauguration of the capitalist state in England. Phenomena such as individuality, subjectivity and interiority are said to be the illusions of the new bourgeois class. Being the principal character of the pre-eminent play of transition between the Early Modern Period and the Enlightenment, Hamlet has been viewed as a prefiguration of the bourgeois fiction of the immaterial, interior subject, supposedly introduced by René Descartes Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637). On the other hand, he has also been seen as genuinely possessing a meaningful inwardness that is diverse and in constant flux, which is allegedly the idea of the self as articulated in the Essays (1580-1595) by the Early Modern French author Michel de Montaigne. Hence Hamlet has been deemed both a Montaignesque and a Cartesian figure.
The exploration of the issue of the self in this thesis involves a study of the Early Modern self in general and in Hamlet in particular. My range of enquiry about the self is both synchronic - a slice through the play of Hamlet and its historical and cultural context - and to some extent diachronic, that is, a kind of historical narrative tracing the view of the modern self over time. My approach is interdisciplinary and involves the exploration of the Early Modern self in Hamlet with reference to works of literature and literary criticism as well as works on psychology and philosophy. An extensive theoretical discussion of the notion of the Early Modern self is supported by concrete examples from Hamlet and Early Modern literature as well as from Descartes and Montaigne s work.
I argue that the Early Modern person did have an individuated, subjective, inner sense of self -- it is to be found in literature before 1660, and it is very much in evidence in Hamlet. I also claim that the evidence of Hamlet s inwardness is to be found in his soliloquies. Finally, I argue that Shakespeare s Prince is a point of convergence between Montaigne s and Descartes subjectivity or modernity, harking back, as it were, to Montaigne and antiquity and pointing towards Descartes and our own time.