Hamlet in Plettenberg
Hamlet in Plettenberg
Carl Schmitt and the Intrusion of the Time
Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba (1956) has been claimed as a major contribution to Shakespearean analysis and political and cultural thought. Chapter 8 gives a fuller view of what Schmitt was aiming at and why, giving more attention than has hitherto been accorded to his predicament in post-war Germany. For Schmitt, Hamlet was a primal image of the condition of the post-war world and of his own place, or rather displacement, in it. As a portrayal of the ‘unhappy Stuart’ James I, Schmitt’s Hamlet also stands for ‘the schism that has determined the fate of Europe’. This schism extends to the ‘torn’ Germany of 1848, Europe in 1918 and ‘the whole Western world’, as Schmitt claimed in 1956. Hamlet symbolizes the larger eschatological scheme of Schmittian history and Schmitt’s own role in Germany’s recent past—as he himself saw it—trying to prevent the worst but failing.
Keywords: Hamlet, Carl Schmitt, Lilian Winstanley, political theology, James I
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
