Citation:
Wilson, Jeffrey R. “'It Started Like a Guilty Thing': The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics.” CounterPunch (2015).
Abstract:
King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.