Abstract

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) rejected Aristotle’s view that well-being depends on virtuous action, and argued instead that productive activity trumps the ethical or political act in sustaining human happiness. Hamlet’s crisis of action can be illuminated by placing the play in a long philosophical argument about activity and act that runs from Aristotle to Smith to Hannah Arendt. Hamlet’s famous act that cannot find its hour encounters its inversion and counterpart in the ceaseless productive activity that surrounds the prince: the work of worms and maggots, armament makers, gravediggers and players. Because Hamlet’s thought gets caught up in this ceaseless, circular activity, it cannot discharge itself in its intended, heroic act. Hamlet’s dilemma makes him into an anticipatory hero for the age of political economy—an age we still inhabit. Similarly, the greatness of Shakespeare’s play is not to have imitated a memorable action but rather to have announced the eclipse of action, and to have imagined a new dramaturgy that can accommodate it.

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