Abstract
What happens in Shakespeare with money and poverty, with the poor laws and the beginning of credit, happens also with the self and the reflection on the self and its actions. The mechanism of combustion that representation undergoes permeates the questions of knowledge, of our partaking in humanity: the self with its reflections in the deeds, in consciousness, in the perception of time; value and its reflections in the affects, in human relations, the constitution of one’s life in wealth or in poverty; the act and its rays in the imagination, again in consciousness, its shadows in guilt, its more or less adequate knowledge; the substance and its shadows; money and the beginning of an ontology of debt and credit.
The play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.
Hamlet, 2.2.600–601
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Notes
Karl Marx, The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, in Karl Marx-Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), pp. 25–109.
See Florio’s edition of Montaigne’s Essays (London: J. M. Dent, 2012), p. 2, 12: “The heart and life of a mighty and triumphant emperor, is but the breakfast of a seely little worm.” I cannot touch on the important relation between Shakespeare and Montaigne here.
For more on this relation, see Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning behind the Plays (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).
See also Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
Lars Engle, “Shame and Reflection in Montaigne and Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare Survey 63: Shakespeare’s English Histories and Their Afterlives, ed. by P. Holland (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 249–61;
Peter Mack, Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010);
Serena Jourdan, The sparrow and the Flea: The Sense of Providence in Shakespeare and Montaigne (Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1983);
Tetsuo Anzai, Shakespeare and Montaigne Reconsidered (Tokyo: Renaissance Institute, Sophia University, 1986);
Sir W. Bailey, Shakespeare and Montaigne: (Manchester: Herald and Walker, 1895);
Robert Ellrodt, “Self-Consistency in Montaigne and Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare and the Mediterranean, Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress (Valencia, Spain: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 135–51;
Robert Ellrodt, Montaigne et Shakespeare: l’emergence de la conscience moderne (Paris: José Corti, 2011);
Susanne Tuerck, Shakespeare und Montaigne: Ein Beitrag zur Hamlet-Frage (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1930);
John Mackinnon Robertson, Montaigne and Shakespeare (London: A. and C. Black, 1909 [1897]);
Jonathan Bate, “Montaigne and Shakespeare,” radio essay, BBC, January 19, 2011;
George Coffin Taylor, Shakspere’s Debt to Montaigne (Cambridge: Literary Licensing, 1925);
Alice Harmon, “How Great was Shakespeare’s Debt to Montaigne?,” PMLA 57 (1942): pp. 988–1008;
Elizabeth Robbins Hooker, “The Relation of Shakespeare to Montaigne,” PMLA 17 (1902): pp. 312–66.
I changed the translation slightly. For the Verso edition see Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998), p. 194.
The pages continue with the reading of Richard II. I leave out of my analysis the historical plays; for the reading of the concept of time in them, I refer to the beautiful book of Paola Pugliatti, Shakespeare, the Historian (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
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© 2013 Margherita Pascucci
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Pascucci, M. (2013). This Is I, Hamlet the Dane. In: Philosophical Readings of Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324580_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324580_3
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