Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Literary Humanism, Wisdom and Modernity
- Part I Denaturing Human Nature
- 1 Questioning the Human: Hamlet
- 2 Emptying the Human: Othello
- 3 Ironising the Human: The Merchant of Venice
- 4 Historicising the Human, Humanising the Historical: I Henry IV
- Part II How to Live
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Questioning the Human: Hamlet
from Part I - Denaturing Human Nature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Literary Humanism, Wisdom and Modernity
- Part I Denaturing Human Nature
- 1 Questioning the Human: Hamlet
- 2 Emptying the Human: Othello
- 3 Ironising the Human: The Merchant of Venice
- 4 Historicising the Human, Humanising the Historical: I Henry IV
- Part II How to Live
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
At a sometimes critical, sometimes mournful distance from the instinct on which revenge is purportedly based, Hamlet is a conspicuous example of a character standing outside traditions, habits, rituals and supposedly natural human impulses. Rather than acting as sources of identification, human nature and human existence become the site, for Hamlet, of uncertainties and questions. He is exposed to a variety of beliefs and behaviours, each with its own assumptions about what it is to be human, but as a disengaged, disenchanted sceptic he remains at a critical distance from them.
But what does it mean, in the context of Hamlet (1600–1), to hold an engaged or ‘enchanted’ view of life? We need to understand this and the part it plays in Hamlet's own imagination before we can fully understand what it means in this play to be disengaged and disenchanted. In Act IV the deranged Ophelia distributes herbs and flowers, each of them attributed with symbolic meaning:
There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray, love, remember. And there is pansies; that's for thoughts … There's fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for you, and here's some for me. We may call it herb-grace o' Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference. There's a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. They say a made a good end.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Re-Humanising ShakespeareLiterary Humanism Wisdom and Modernity, pp. 33 - 45Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007