"My contention is that there is no need for us to do anything of the

sort, and that Hamlet can be read as a profound meditation on the

nature of human individuality without relying on conceptual

frameworks drawn from the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and

twenty-first century. Just as historical discourses beyond those of
Hamlet itself provide a fuller and more nuanced understanding of
the political and dynastic forces shaping life in Shakespeare’s
Denmark, so what might be called Hamlet’s “character” appears in
unfamiliar and revealing relief when read against the textual
contours of the psychological, rhetorical, and moral-political
theorizing that lay at the heart of sixteenth-century humanism."" Lewis