"Hamlet" and the passion of knowledge

This essay explores the ways Hamlet dramatizes early modern epistemophilia, a drive towards knowledge that is infused with passion and triggered by desire. Hamlet’s desire to know “what lies inside” picks up rhetorical, scientific and philosophical threads of knowledge to see whether they are able to dissect, along with the deep recesses of the body, the density of language and of time. I submit that Hamlet’s quest for knowledge finds its sense and its urgency in The Ghost’s poisonous story in 1.5 where the biblical Fall is said to be beyond salvation and yet imposed upon as the foundational scene of action, is submitted as the locus where Hamlet’s quest for knowledge finds its sense and urgency. The whole play is in fact reread as a striking revisitation of that Fall, . In fact, I propose to read the whole play as a striking revisitation of that Fall, which stages and re-enacts – a re-enactment of the trauma of Protestant modernity that partakes in the early modern interrogation of the Scriptures. What the essay highlights however is the ways the search of knowledge is prompted by desire. , an impressive cultural venture whose political and religious implications the play masterfully foregrounds. Through a close reading of selected passages the loci of such desire are retraced as Hamlet’s lines of questioning – of the body, of Time, of memory techniques and of their encroachment upon oblivion – are shown to ultimately converge into one, all-encompassing interrogation of knowledge.