The Long Nightwatch: Augustine, Hamlet, and the Aesthetic

While the innovation of William Shakespeare's Hamlet is usually discussed in terms of a selfhood that has become a problem to itself, I argue that this kind of problematic selfhood is not especially original, emerging as it does out of Augustine. Rather, what is original is how the play shows that this selfhood has reached a dead end, where nothing meaningful seems any longer possible, and then reconfigures this entrapped state as a problem not of the self but of its new analogue, the literary work. In so doing, the play anticipates notions of the aesthetic that have generally been considered post-Kantian.