Contrary to conventional opinion, Hamlet is a major race play in which a white prince dressed in black has a self-serving, improvisational relationship to blackness as a violent, criminal identity. Called upon to avenge his father’s murder, Hamlet designates the fratricidal Claudius a “Moore,” a racial slur for a type that had only recently gained popularity on the stage. Simultaneously, the imperative of the revenge genre requires retributive action, leading the revenger to replicate the original perpetrator’s murderous violence: Hamlet must become a “Moore” like Claudius. Cowardice, Hamlet explains, is the product of contemplation and manifests in bodily paleness, and his affiliation with a black Pyrrhus, drawn from the repertory of the traveling players, compensates for his self-ascribed white cowardice so that blackness in action becomes the revenger’s motivating passion. The theater-aficionado prince is knowledgeable about the traveling company’s repertory of black drama and uses a black Lucianus in the staging of The Murder of Gonzago to truly capture the conscience of the Moor-like king Claudius.

The listening posture that accompanied the rise of Romantic musical aesthetics in the late 1790s was decidedly inward-facing. Valorising interior response over external circumstance, Romantic listeners sought to be catapulted into a world of feeling and imagination, a world that stretched inward to the affects and outward to the realm of nature. Taking E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana as a point of departure, this essay identifies three guiding principles of musical Romanticism: that music is inscrutably deep or profound, that musical sounds penetrate into and change the listener’s inner world, and that music is capable of transporting listeners to a more ideal, and markedly spiritual, state of being. The essay shows how these principles undergird broader Romantic convictions about the relationship between music and interiority, as evidenced by authors ranging from Hoffmann, W. H. Wackenroder, and Bettina von Arnim to G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Malwida von Meysenbug.