LogFAQs > #912906560

Much of the play is about acting and theatre, and this speech is key:

Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not seems.
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play.
But I have that within which passeth show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

All around him are actors, himself included, but whereas others are putting on a show of grief, Hamlet expresses that what he's doing is performative, but it's a performance that fails to express the extent of his real grief. The inky cloak is a signifier that he's already rejected, but cannot yet imagine an alternative. As with his antic disposition later, Hamlet is trying to find the right performance. His soliloquys are attempts to speak his role into existence, even as they fail to translate into action.

Hamlet represents a new subjectivity in a rapidly changing England with contradictory values as it shifts from feudalism towards capitalism. Private property, trade, and merchant capital are changing the structure of English society. People are becoming of the idea that they are of their own making rather than products of their place and society. Then, of course, there's the Reformation. Religion was central to people's concept of the world, so the very idea that a previous conception can be outlawed based on who's on the throne is a traumatic shift. More specifically, Protenstantism takes the public ritual out of religion, and destroys the idea that these rituals have a magic function - that you manipulate the world through the manipulation of symbols. The theatre can be seen as compensatory for this loss, like a modern church, hence why Puritans feared it. People congregate at the theatre to participate in a public ritual, to watch life performed in a way that's predictable (in the way that it's the same plot beats every time), and which suggests the possibility of resolution. We watch plays and movies to sublimate our anxieties and watch them resolved by symbols on a stage or a screen. Hamlet, caught between the rigid hierarchy of the old world and the emerging future of self-determination, hopes that by acting as the avenging son, he will become the avenging son, and the social order will be reasserted.
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