Chapter Ten -- Shakespearean Due Process: Detection, Delay, and the Death Penalty in Hamlet

Abstract 

This chapter concerns the course of justice in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, specifically the problem of Hamlet’s delay. I suggest that the debate about Hamlet’s delay in literary criticism (whether it makes the play a success or a failure) can be extrapolated to a comparable debate about delays in executing death penalty sentences in modern society (whether they make our criminal justice system a success or a failure). As I argue, Hamlet’s delay is a dramatization of due process in criminal justice proceedings. In both Hamlet and modern society, there is a significant gap of time between the sentence and the execution of capital punishment because those responsible for the administration of justice (on both an individual and an institutional level) feel a deep ambivalence about performing the very act they are punishing, namely homicide. This ambivalence manifests in an often extensive, occasionally absurd, and explicitly theatrical public performance of the justice system’s inability to act. This performance, in turn, engenders a polarized response from the public audience that observes the dramatization of due process: the idealists who demand absolute justice express frustration while the realists who value procedural justice express appreciation for the delays in executing a sentence of capital punishment. I locate this logic in a reading that parallels the plot of Hamlet with the stages of capital punishment cases, from a criminal investigation to a trial to a lengthy appeals process to a public execution.

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