Shakespeare - Early, Late or Posthumanist: The Case of Hamlet

Reading Shakespeare’s work and its early modern context through current trends in theory and late modern culture is illuminating both from a historical and theoretical point of view. It is Shakespeare’s ambivalent relationship to humanism, which makes his threshold position helpful in critically evaluating our contemporary, arguably ‘posthumanist’, location. The contemporary erosion of borderlines between the ‘human’ and the ‘nonhuman’, mainly due to technocultural change, can be seen to have interesting prefigurations in Shakespeare’s work and early modern culture more generally. This is particularly true of Hamlet, when placed alongside new readings in animal studies, ecocriticsm, early modern science studies and posthumanist theory.