"What is a man": Hamlet and the Problematics of Man

"'What is a man': Hamlet and the Problematics of Man." The Poststructuralist tendency toward erasure of agency and decentering of the subject contrasts sharply with the intense emphasis on agency during debates of the Renaissance- Reformation-Counter Reformation period: the era in which Hamlet is located. In contrast to the Aristotelian-Thomist paradigm which answers the question "what is a man" by emphasizing the primacy of reason, the play dramatizes the perplexity of reason-a condition which ultimately signifies a radical rethinking of thought. Selfhood is no longer based on principle on sameness, but on the principle of otherness. One consequence of this shift concerns a reinterpretation of the classical doctrine of hamartia or fault. Ironically, Hamlet the character becomes the instrument by which Hamlet the tragedy bursts the paradigms of hamartia and constancy of identity which Hamlet himself invokes.