Hamlet before Its Time

No work in the English literary canon has been so closely identified with the beginning of the modern age as Hamlet. By speaking his thoughts in soliloquy, by reflecting on his own penchant for thought, by giving others cause to worry about what he is thinking, Hamlet draws attention to what is putatively going on inside him. It is for this psychological depth and complexity that Hamlet has been hailed as the inaugural figure of the modern period, "the Western hero of consciousness." ¹ That he has retained this status for a good two hundred years is remarkable, for what constitutes modern subjectivity has continued to change. It is not the same in 2000 as it was in 1950 or 1900, much less in 1800. All the same, Hamlet has kept pace with the advancing time; he is timeless in value precisely because he is found timely by each successive age. He remains perennially at the vanguard of the contemporary, anticipating back in 1600 the cutting edge of the most recent now. Quite a feat--especially for a character famous as a procrastinator.

But what a strange prolepsis. How can a work be anachronous with its own time and contemporaneous with one several centuries later? What does it mean when a work has to wait several hundred years before history catches up with it and it can be properly appreciated and understood? Are we assuming a typological relation by which Hamlet must await its recognition and fulfillment in the present, as the Old Testament awaits its own in the New? Or do we still believe in the sentimental but no less mystical genius of Shakespeare's "prophetic soul / . . . dreaming on things to come"? ² Or does the name early modern guarantee a special affinity with the late modern or the postmodern, as if by grammatical necessity? In an attempt to understand this prolepsis, I will focus on the work that possesses perhaps the longest history of being ahead of its time. What follows may be no more than a demonstration of the obvious: Hamlet acquired its precocious modernity only with the arrival of the modern period itself. ³ Yet without such a demonstration, what appears modern in Hamlet seems not to have been acquired at a later point in history but to have been present from the start. This essay centers precisely on the period between that start in 1600 and that later point in 1800. These interstitial two centuries tend to be phased out by Hamlet's identification with the modern, not unlike the millennium-long interval between the Renaissance and antiquity that we still call the Middle Ages.

Hamlet was decidedly not always considered modern. Early allusions suggest that it was regarded as behind the times. To begin with, it was a recycling of an earlier play. ⁴ Even the supposed original, the Ur-Hamlet, was remembered not for its novelty but for its tired formulas and stock devices. A remark from 1589 satirizes the play for its dependence on the Senecan elements of murder, madness, and revenge and for its timeworn diction, fraught with commonplaces ("good sentences") and set pieces ("handfuls . . . of tragical speeches"). ⁵ Another reference, from 1596, indicates that the play was already so familiar that the ghost's injunction--"Hamlet, revenge!"--registered as a byword.

These responses to the Ur-Hamlet might just as well have greeted Shakespeare's Hamlet when it was first staged several years later. Like its precedent, it was set in the remote times of Nordic legend. It, too, depended on the Senecan formula of murder, madness, and revenge. It, too, was made up of old-fashioned stage conventions (the dumb show and the play-within-the-play), stiff set pieces (like the Player's speech), and a grab bag of sententiae (e.g., "All that lives must die" [1.2.72], "To thine own self be true" [1.3.78], and "There's a divinity that shapes our ends" [5...