Specters of Horatio

Abstract

Throughout Hamlet , Horatio is a figure privileged to interpret, and this privilege emerges in the doubled-edged spectrality of his social position. The justness of his interpretive authority ultimately depends on a class position that does not appear to be a class position at all. Social class in Hamlet consequently is not a pre-existing structure that becomes unearthed and located in the empirical truth of economic fact. Instead, class is a never-ending, unstable process of making social distinctions characteristic of the emergent public sphere of the seventeenth century. Social class in the play always deconstructs itself.