Columbia – Shakespeare Seminar: David Hershinow

​Abstract: ​This paper offers a novel reading of Hamlet by showing how Shakespeare’s characterization of the melancholy Dane registers his engagement with (and response to) the early modern reception of Diogenes the Cynic. As a contribution to the scholarly conversation, my interpretation of the play does much more than generate new source study: it articulates a new understanding of how and why a modern philosophical tradition gathers around the character of Hamlet from the 18^th century onward. According to Margreta de Grazia, the tradition that reads Hamlet as modernity’s first “man of thought” finds no foundation in the terms of Shakespeare’s play and instead emerges, right on queue, as a projection of the existential vacuum that is modernity itself. Pace de Grazia, I argue that Shakespeare is engaging a conceptual vocabulary that links his play to Hamlet’s modern philosophical reception, and I show that vocabulary to cohere around early modern interpretations of Diogenes.

​The event will be held in Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive. As always social hour will be from 5-6, dinner 6-7, and the talk 7-8:30. Please reply to the Evite. The cost for dinner, payable by check only, is now $30. To attend dinner, RSVP to Alexander Lash (by Tuesday May 2).