Of all the characters in William Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet stands alone as the icon of the scholar self, the epitome of the humanist dialectic between knowledge and self-knowledge, individual aspiration and social harmony. In modern terms, ‘to be or not to be’ has entered the language as the aphorism of the existential intellectual, and Hamlet persists as the bookish icon of the restless mind. Yet, in terms of Shakespeare’s play, this iconic Hamlet is a retroactive construction because, early on in the play, he denounces all that humanism prized — the book, the academy, and the past. As the book enables Hamlet to move between the worlds of public drama and private tragedy, it becomes his most powerful weapon against the conscience and consciousness of his being.