“The Rotten State of Denmark”: The Discourse of Reason of State in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Abstract

Early modern politics displayed a transition from civil reason to Reason of State. An extensive body on the new political discourse of Reason of State in continental Europe started to emerge, outlining a new grammar for the state, politics, and princes. The latter had undermined the traditional humanist Christian discourse of politics. This paper will address how Shakespeare’s Hamlet debates Reason of State onstage—an issue that has been little dealt with in the early modern scholarship of Shakespeare, or, at best, dismissed as marginalia. The protagonist’s famous delay and his political and philosophical reflections can be read in the light of contemporary political discourses to which Reason of State had become so central. Despite Hamlet’s resistance, the play ends with the triumph of political realism introduced mainly by Giovanni Botero in his oeuvre Ragion di Stato. Hamlet is not the exception in this regard. Reason of State became one of the focal subjects of early modern tragedy as I will be showing in this paper.

Keywords

• reason of state
• civil reason
• politics
• transition
• hamlet