The Theatre of Revenge: The Intrusion of Hamlet’s Shadow Between Drama and History

Hamlet is a troubling piece. In this essay the reasons of internal ambiguity are analyzed through the conceptual prism of revenge. Moving from the well-known dispute between T.S. Eliot and C. Schmitt, the Author proposes an anti-canonical reading of the themes of the tragedy by reconstituting its socio-legal context. The aim is to bring to the surface legal elements which would be combined with the political facts already described by Schmitt in order to aid and amplify the validity of his argumentative approach. The historical transition from a documentary culture to a revenge culture, that marked the English imaginative world in Renaissance and post-Renaissance time, allows the interpreter to explain the excess not contained by Hamlet’s plot not only with the figures of the taboo of the Queen and the taboo of the Avenger (outlined by Schmitt in his work Hamlet or Hecuba), but also with a new and yet unexplored taboo of justice.