William Shakespeare – Hamlet

• Theme: Existential hesitation, ethical delay, interiorized power, and the shattered self.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

In Hamlet, Shakespeare does not merely stage revenge or melancholy—he dramatizes the moment in Western history when truth retreats into the self, and the self becomes a political battlefield. Hamlet is not just a man facing a ghost; he is a subject haunted by power—its rituals, its inheritances, its secrets.

Foucault’s account of ancient ethics—as techne tou biou, or the technique of life—offers a revealing lens for understanding Hamlet’s paralysis. The prince's failure to act is not indecision per se, but a struggle over the technologies of self-formation. The ancient model Foucault traces in The Care of the Self—where ethics is a practice, not a command—is corrupted in Elsinore: a court of performance, surveillance, and deception.

Here, action is no longer guided by aretē (virtue as practiced excellence), but by an apparatus of discursive coercion and political masks. Hamlet, aware of this, retreats into the space of language and irony. “Words, words, words”—he does not speak to know, but to hollow out meaning itself. Foucault’s insight that truth is produced within regimes of power echoes here: Hamlet’s madness becomes a tactic, a gesture of resistance, a deliberate dismantling of sovereign discourse.

The ghost, meanwhile, is the embodiment of what Foucault calls “the return of the repressed genealogy.” He is not merely a father; he is a rupture in the fabric of time—summoning Hamlet into the confession of history, into the burden of acting on a past not fully his. The ghost’s call is a demand for justice, but it is also a summons into the subjectivation of guilt.

The prince’s dilemma—“to be or not to be”—is not philosophical in the abstract; it is an ethical interrogation of how to live when every act is already ensnared in webs of power. Even suicide is not an escape—it is regulated by Christian doctrine, forbidden by law, haunted by theological surveillance. Foucault’s notion that subjectivity is shaped by norms of sexuality, confession, and punishment is embedded in this very speech.

Hamlet does not seek revenge; he investigates what revenge means under the conditions of disciplinary society—a society already observing, cataloging, scripting. His final act, the fatal duel, is not a resolution but a collapse of the self into the machinery of sovereign death—where bodies fall and the play ends not with redemption, but with silence and foreign takeover.

Thus, Hamlet is not only a tragedy; it is a theatre of epistemic discontinuity—where the modern self, burdened by knowledge and fractured by performance, must choose between authenticity and madness, action and observation, speaking and disappearing.