Performing Publicity

Shakespeare's theatre was the leading arena of public-making practices in early modern England. I deploy an account of Shakespearean theatre in order to challenge the emphasis in public-sphere theory on what Jürgen Habermas calls "rational-critical debate," and in order to instate the passions, playfulness, and private personhood as legitimate attributes of public speech and action. Hannah Arendt helps put Habermas in dialogue with Hamlet. I conclude with a speculative reading of 1.5, Hamlet's confrontation with the ghost, as an instance of the public-making capacity of theatrical make-believe, especially in relation to the trauma that was one outcome of the Reformation.