Hamlets Gewissen

Abstract

Abstract From the point of view of temporality, Shakespeare’s tragedy of Hamlet falls into two parts. The first sequence, leading from the ghost’s appearance to the Mousetrap, stages – in its manifold soliloquies and monologues slowly and painfully exploring the protagonist’s conscience – Hamlet’s inexorable inner search for truth so as to be able to legitimize his ‘sovereign’ right to act. This is what is read as a programmatic ‘interiorisation’ of structural violence. The second sequence, leading from Hamlet’s authorisation to act to his unfortunate and untimely death, pursues the contingent asynchronicities between the right to take revenge and the continuous (ironical) denial of an appropriate situation for its necessary perpetration. This is in turn seen as a showcased ‘precarity’ of revenge. Both sequences show a marked dependency on a new, linear conceptualization of time: in both sequentially accepting and denying the right to revenge, they aesthetically negotiate the observable early modern shift in temporality from a cyclical ‘guarantee’ of a return to the invariable (and in this sense atemporal) ‘same’, to open and at times self-contradictory linear processes of being bent on the production/realization of results and, hence, of (personally) having to ‘find out’ and act.