The Experience of Authority:Hamletand the Political Aesthetics of Majesty

Abstract

In Hamlet the crisis of political authority that famously rots Denmark is registered as an aesthetic crisis—a crisis of perception, feeling, and experience. This essay recovers this broken regime of feeling under the tradition of “majesty,” which in the period described the conventional set of affective and sensible experiences one was supposed to have in the presence of a sovereign prince. Whereas other contemporary plays such as Richard II often dispelled majesty as theatrical illusion, this essay argues that Hamlet takes majesty seriously but redescribes its enchantments to fit a new, post-Reformation decorum of sensibility characterized by dissensus. Here feelings of majesty most indicate sovereignty’s divine authority when, paradoxically, they fail, unable (precisely as exceptional feelings of exceptional authority) to command common agreement. This essay thus counters readings that overemphasize the epistemic nature of Hamlet’s crisis and resituates its aesthetic modernism at the intersection of phenomenology and political theology. [E.G.]