Abstract
This chapter focuses on Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The soliloquies of Prince Hamlet represent the maximum linguistic expression of a singular mind in English letters. The prince’s inner reasoning suits the decision trees so familiar to Ramus (and so often used by game theorists). Present and future predicaments, coordinative and otherwise, plague the prince. In adopting and adapting Erasmus’s technique of copiousness, the playwright captures the extensive structure of the prince’s discourse, and with it, the convolutions of his mind. That mind reveals a Ramist understanding of the animating force of holy conscience. Edward de Vere was effectively expressing the pain of nostalgia. Oxford’s Ramism converges with personal experience in Prince Hamlet. No similar convergence supports the Stratfordian case.
These sorts of action against each another necessarily take place between friends, enemies or people who are neither.
—Aristotle, Poetics (53b15–17)
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- 1.
De Vere’s paternal grandmother was Elizabeth Trussell (1496–1527).
- 2.
That library, reports Richard Wilson in Secret Shakespeare (2004), “is supposed to have been a room where Shakespeare studied” (112).
- 3.
This reference concerns Jones’s Hamlet and Oedipus (1910).
- 4.
Notwithstanding this remark, Craig (386) identifies one definitely and one probably technical use of the term “proposition” in Shakespeare’s canon. The former usage occurs in As You Like It: “It is as easy to count atomies” (3.2.225), Celia complains to Rosalind, “as to resolve the/propositions of a lover” (3.2.225–56). The latter usage occurs in Troilus and Cressida: “The ample proposition that hope makes/In all designs begun on earth below” (1.3.3–4), mourns Agamemnon, “Fails in the promis’d largeness” (1.3.5).
- 5.
Indeed, on one occasion in Shakespeare’s plays, in The Comedy of Errors, the seemingly true is known to be false, and this fallacy is named as such: “What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?” (2.2.175), asks Antipholus of Syracuse in an aside. “Until I know this sure uncertainty” (2.2.176), he determines, “I’ll entertain the offered fallacy” (2.2.177).
- 6.
Shakespeare’s use of enthymeme is rare. Other examples occur in Coriolanus (“Wouldst thou have laughed had I come coffined home,/That weep’st to see me triumph?” [2.1.149–50]) and Troilus and Cressida (“The amity that wisdom knits not, folly may easily untie” [2.3.90]). Shakespeare’s acceptance of the device, like Ramus’s, is grudging.
- 7.
Of course, the sum of these probabilities \( \left(\sum \limits_{i=1}^n{\mathrm{q}}_{\mathrm{i}}\right) \) equals 1.
- 8.
Oxford leased the Blackfriars theater for his troupes in 1596.
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Wainwright, M. (2018). Oxford, Ramus, and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark . In: The Rational Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95258-1_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95258-1_9
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