Hamlet, Bullshit, and Wittgenstein

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean different things.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

In Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (2017), Rhodri Lewis had this to say of William Shakespeare’s most discussed character: “He is not concerned with what he says, but the way in which what he says makes him seem to himself and others.” Lewis also describes him as being “mired in bullshit, about himself and the world around him”.

Lewis’s argument is that Shakespeare consciously and designedly, sometime around 1599, created the character of Hamlet as a means of attacking the core of what we have come to call humanist moral philosophy. As an Elizabethan grammar school boy, Shakespeare would have had it impressed upon him, via Cicero, that to know one’s role within the public sphere was concomitant…