Hamlet and Habit: The Renaissance Problem of Programmable Life

Questions of “habit” and “custom” recur throughout William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as they do elsewhere in early modern culture, in theological, legal and moral philosophical debate as well as in popular literature of improvement. In this article, I will argue that the Second Quarto edition of Shakesp...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inModern philology Vol. 118; no. 1; pp. 25 - 47
Main Author Pfannebecker, Mareile
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Chicago The University of Chicago Press 01.08.2020
University of Chicago, acting through its Press
Subjects
Drama
Habits
Morality
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)
Social life & customs
Theater criticism
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Summary:Questions of “habit” and “custom” recur throughout William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as they do elsewhere in early modern culture, in theological, legal and moral philosophical debate as well as in popular literature of improvement. In this article, I will argue that the Second Quarto edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1604) is a crucial text in the early modern writing on habit, as it holds up commonplace notions of habitual learning and habitual corruption for scrutiny in ways that test Puritan and humanist educational ideas of habit available in the period, and that link ideas of personal habit with national custom and international imitation. Habit will remain troublesome in the history of modern thought; by playing off against each other different ideas of habit current at the time, Hamlet anticipates enduring problems of programmable life.
ISSN:0026-8232
1545-6951
DOI:10.1086/709441