Shakespearean Criticism | Hamlet (Vol. 71) - John Hunt (essay date spring 1988)

John Hunt (essay date spring 1988)

SOURCE: Hunt, John. “A Thing of Nothing: The Catastrophic Body in Hamlet.” Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 1 (spring 1988): 27-44.

[In the following essay, Hunt analyzes Hamlet's corporeal imagery as a means of exploring Hamlet's persistent state of indecision, asserting that before Hamlet can respond to the demands of the Ghost, he must first come to accept his own physicality and overcome his contempt for the body.]

If Hamlet actually writes down moral lessons on his tablets as he studies his revenge, many of them surely have to do with how life is lived, and lost, in bodies. Far more even than in Macbeth or Coriolanus, the human body in Hamlet forms human experience, being the medium through which men suffer and act. But the body also deforms human beings and threatens ultimately to reduce them to nothing. The nonbeing lurking at the material center of being...

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