Chapter 2 - Hamlet, the Fall and Hermeneutical Tragedy

Summary

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves

Julius Caesar, I.ii.141–2

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world, and all our woe

John Milton, Paradise Lost, i, 1–3

O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,

Things standing thus unknown, shall I leave behind me!

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart

Absent thee from felicity awhile

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

To tell my story.

Hamlet, Hamlet, V.ii.328–33

As Hamlet dies, hermeneutical concerns are on his mind, as they have been throughout the play. Hamlet fears that he will be misunderstood. Not even death offers him release from the unknowing that shadows Hamlet's characters as they are carried forward, seemingly inescapably, to their tragic ends. Theirs is, indeed, a ‘harsh world’. Moreover, as suggested by Shakespeare's foregrounding of his characters’ interpretive predicaments, it is a harsh world that brings out the hermeneutic nature of their being in it. Hans-Georg Gadamer's influential thesis about modern human subjectivity rings true, it seems, of Hamlet. For Gadamer, understanding is both intrinsic to human being and always interpretive. As such, individuals’ mode of experiencing all things – other people, one's situatedness in history, one's own existence and the world – ‘constitute[s] a truly hermeneutic universe’.

Pairing Hamlet with this hermeneutic framing of subjectivity points to a preoccupation within the ever-expanding hermeneutical situation of the play's afterlife. Since the late eighteenth century, the task of unearthing the self signified by Shakespeare's characters, especially his protagonist, has occupied a sizeable portion of the vast field of Hamlet criticism. Hamlet has come to represent the liberal humanist self, or the socially delineated self, or the secular (or else the spiritual) self, and more. Other writers have summarised the mountain of now-familiar, conflicting arguments about selfhood (both early modern and modern) that invoke Shakespeare's hero.