| This dissertation takes as its starting point Ophelia's characterization of Hamlet as "the courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword." This division of Hamlet into three distinct roles provides the basis for a cultural analysis of Renaissance self-fashioning with Shakespeare's play as its central text. The first mode of self-fashioning involves the "courtier's eye," a synecdoche that suggests a personality shaped by images, consisting of pleasing display and performance. The courtier's complex otium involves a difficult balance of self-promotion and deference. Much of his energy is expressed in the many forms of love: reverence for the prince, masculine friendship, and courtly love. His performances, however, are conducted with a keen awareness of human sinfulness and mortality. In the second mode, represented by the "scholar's tongue," the self is shaped by the paternal word. Hamlet shows us several scholars, and various father figures are responsible for strong words imposed upon their pliable personalities. In the third mode, represented by the "soldier's sword," the self seeks to demonstrate its magnanimity through chivalrous action.;The project is divided into three parts, each of which examines the development of these modes of self-fashioning in Elizabethan England. The first part analyzes Castiglione's Courtier, which presents in its artful discourse the main outline of the three modes, their pleasures and their pitfalls. The second part examines the Elizabethan text of courtesy as an attempt to adapt the aristocratic ideology of Castiglione to the historical exigencies of the Elizabethan elite, both the ambitious and the privileged. Some of the relevant texts include treatises by Erasmus, Elyot, and Ascham; the "advice to a son" genre employed by Elizabethan courtier-fathers; and the expression of disillusionment and satire of Marston and his contemporaries. The last part, prepared for by brief investigations of Troilus and Cressida and The Spanish Tragedy, is a reading of Hamlet as a thoroughgoing criticism of "courtier, soldier, scholar." Through the symmetrical failings of Hamlet's "brothers" (Laertes, Fortinbras, and Horatio) and his "fathers" (Claudius, the Ghost, and Polonius) and in the vehement disillusionment and restless criticism of the prince himself, Hamlet anatomizes the "fault lines" in the constructs of self-fashioning. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.). |
