The Birth of Consciousness out of Conscience in Giordano Bruno’s Heroic Frenzies and Shakespeare’s Hamlet

This essay historicizes Hamlet’s consciousness, which has so often been read as modern consciousness avant-la-lettre, by considering the link of early modern consciousness to conscience. Through a rereading of Hamlet alongside Protestant treatises on conscience and Giordano Bruno’s Heroic Frenzies, I demonstrate that consciousness in Hamlet is indebted both to medieval conceptions of conscience and to emerging Protestant discourses. I trace the transformation of “conscience” in Post-Reformation England, and its link to consciousness, which is also designated by the word “conscience” prior to 1632, when it receives its first OED entry. Turn-of-the-seventeenth-century Protestant treatises on conscience increasingly define it as self-knowledge instead of knowledge shared with God, exemplifying the growing importance of consciousness within the concept of conscience. Giordano Bruno’s model of a consciousness that is born out of man’s connection to God sensitizes us to its connection to conscience. Thus historicized, Hamlet’s consciousness reveals its indebtedness to its origins in conscience, from which it is never fully divorced, and it is, therefore, distinctly early modern

Art · Conscience · Consciousness · Epistemology · HAMLET (protein complex · Literature · Protestantism · Theology · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

• Conscience in Medieval Philosophy

  Open Access•Timothy C Potts•Conscience in Medieval Philosophy•1980

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• The Heroic Frenzies

  Emanuel Hatzantonis, Grant Bruno et al.•Italica•1966

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