Hamlet’s Moment
Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23775475 |
|---|---|
| Authors | András Kiséry (0009-0007-4457-0784, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Publication date | 2016-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Hamlet's Moment (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198746201.001.0001 |
| OpenAlex | W4255527995 |
| ISBN | 9780198746201 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
Hamlet’s Moment reveals how plays written in the first decade of the seventeenth century were shaped by forms of professional political knowledge and the social promises such knowledge held. This argument presupposes that there was such a thing as a political profession, however loosely understood: that there was a career path associated with political employment that was assumed to be a means to social advancement, and that there was a recognizable body of knowledge and mode of thinking defining it. To illustrate this, the first half of the book focuses on Hamlet and its reflection on the conditions of political employment, the education and intellectual work required for advancement in political careers, and the characteristics of a politic style, arguing that in Shakespeare’s play, drama turns from open, military conflict to diplomacy and court policy, and from the public contestation of power to the technologies of government. The second half of the book turns to plays that follow in the wake of Shakespeare’s path-breaking tragedy. Plays written by Ben Jonson, John Marston, George Chapman and others invited the public to imagine what it meant to have a political career. In doing so, they transformed political knowledge into a more broadly useful type of cultural capital, something even people without political agency could deploy in conversation and use. The book suggests that the demand for this social asset was a driving force behind the burgeoning public discussion of the seventeeth century, and thus, behind the rise of the modern public sphere.
Aesthetics · Art · Drama · HAMLET (protein complex) · Literature · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Public sphere · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Law
| Citations per year | 0.67 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2017 - 2025 (9) |
| Highly cited | No |