Philosophical Context: The Renaissance & Reformation
Introduction
The intellectual world of the Middle Ages had been, for all its internal complexity, organized around a few stable certainties: God created and governed the universe; human beings occupied a fixed place in a divinely ordered hierarchy; knowledge came from revelation and from the ancient authorities (above all Aristotle and the Church Fathers) who had interpreted it; and the Church was the institution through which salvation, truth, and meaning were mediated. None of these certainties disappears overnight. But by the time writes Hamlet at the turn of the seventeenth century, every one of them is under serious pressure; the play registers that pressure in almost every scene.
The readings in this unit come from thinkers who are creating that pressure, or responding to it, or both. What connects them is not a single argument but a shared atmosphere of intellectual daring and anxiety — the exhilaration of discovering that the world is not what you were told it was, mixed with the vertigo of realizing that the old certainties are not going to be replaced by new ones anytime soon.
The Human Position
What is a human being, and where do we stand in the order of things?
The medieval answer was clear: human beings occupied a specific rung on the Great Chain of Being — above animals, below angels, beneath God. Your place was given, not chosen. Your task was not to reinvent yourself but to fulfill the role assigned to you by your Creator.
’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man” (1486) shatters this. In ’s retelling of the creation story, God has run out of fixed natures to assign, so he gives Adam something unprecedented: the freedom to become whatever he chooses. “We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own,” God says, “in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgment and decision.” The human being is the one creature in the universe without a predetermined essence. You can descend to the level of beasts or ascend to the level of angels — the choice is yours.
We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgment and decision.
This is an extraordinary claim, and it reverberates through the entire Renaissance. It underwrites the period’s celebration of individual genius (, , himself), its fascination with self-fashioning and performance, and its darker preoccupation with the dangers of unchecked ambition. Stephen Greenblatt’s excerpt from The Swerve traces a related thread: the recovery of the ancient Roman poet Lucretius, whose materialist vision of a universe of atoms in motion — with no divine architect, no fixed human nature, no afterlife — provided a philosophical framework for the Renaissance embrace of human freedom and worldly pleasure.
Connection to Hamlet: Hamlet’s famous speech — “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties” — is a direct echo of ’s oration. But Hamlet cannot sustain ’s optimism. The speech collapses into “and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” The Renaissance opens the possibility that human beings are magnificent, self-creating beings; Hamlet asks what happens when that magnificent being is paralyzed by the very capacities — thought, self-awareness, moral sensitivity — that were supposed to make him great.
Knowledge and Its Limits
How do we know what we know, and how far can knowledge take us?
The medieval world trusted inherited authority. If Aristotle said that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, then that was the truth; your job was to understand Aristotle, not to drop things from towers and see what happened. The Renaissance revolutionizes this. proposes that the earth orbits the sun — not because any authority told him so, but because the mathematics worked better that way. trains a telescope on the moon and sees that it is rough, cratered, and imperfect — not the smooth, crystalline sphere that Aristotelian cosmology demanded. sits by a fire and decides to doubt everything he has ever been told, stripping away every received opinion until he arrives at the one thing he cannot doubt: that he, the doubter, exists. Cogito ergo sum.
What connects these thinkers is a radical insistence on firsthand evidence and individual reasoning over inherited authority. ’s rebuke to the Aristotelians — “come either with arguments or demonstrations, and bring us no more texts and authorities, for our disputes are about the sensible world, and not one of paper” — captures the spirit of the revolution. Adam Gopnik’s essay on draws out the deeper implication: ’s insight about inertial systems means that “fast and slow, large and small, up and down are all relative conditions.” The absolutes are dissolving.
But this revolution in knowledge creates its own anxieties. If the old authorities are wrong about the heavens, what else are they wrong about? ’ method of radical doubt produces a foundation — cogito ergo sum — but only by first demolishing everything else. The Renaissance gives birth to modern science, but it also gives birth to modern uncertainty.
Connection to Hamlet: No play in the English language is more obsessed with the problem of knowledge. Hamlet cannot trust what he has been told — by the ghost, by Claudius, by anyone. He devises an empirical test (the play-within-the-play) to verify the ghost’s claims, behaving like a Renaissance scientist: observation over inherited testimony. But even after the test apparently succeeds, certainty remains elusive. The play dramatizes the Renaissance’s new relationship to knowledge: you can no longer trust what you have been told, but the truth you discover for yourself may be more than you can bear.
The Individual and Authority
What is the relationship between the person and the structures that govern them?
In 1521, stood before the assembled powers of the Holy Roman Empire at the Diet of Worms and reportedly declared: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Whether or not he said exactly those words, the gesture they represent is the defining one of the Reformation: an individual conscience in open defiance of institutional authority. ’s argument was that the Church had corrupted the faith, and that every believer had the right — indeed the obligation — to read Scripture for themselves and to follow their own understanding of God’s word, even if that understanding contradicted the Pope, the bishops, and a thousand years of tradition.
’s confrontation with the Inquisition tells a parallel story from the domain of science. Here too an individual who has seen the truth for himself is compelled by institutional authority to deny what he knows. recants — but (as the legend has it) mutters under his breath: “Eppur si muove.” And yet it moves. The truth doesn’t care whether the institution acknowledges it.
Greenblatt’s excerpt from Will in the World gives this theme a different inflection. The passage describes the young witnessing the elaborate entertainments at Kenilworth in 1575, when the Earl of Leicester staged spectacles for Queen Elizabeth. What Greenblatt depicts is the tension between the individual artist and the structures of power that enable and constrain artistic expression — a tension would negotiate for his entire career. The artisans performing their Hock Tuesday play need the queen’s approval to continue their tradition. Art and authority are entangled.
Connection to Hamlet: The play is set in a court — a structure of authority — and its protagonist is both a product of that structure and in revolt against it. Hamlet’s struggle is precisely about what it means to follow your own conscience when every institution around you is compromised. Claudius controls the court, Polonius controls the flow of information, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are agents of surveillance. Hamlet is, in a sense, a one-man Reformation: an individual who insists on seeing the truth for himself, at whatever cost. But the play is not naive about the consequences of that insistence. Following your conscience may be heroic, but it can also lead to paralysis, cruelty, and catastrophe.
Looking Back, Looking Forward
From the Medieval world: The contrast is stark. Where the medieval thinkers preach submission to divine mystery (The Cloud of Unknowing) and the soul’s dependence on God (), the Renaissance thinkers emphasize human agency, empirical inquiry, and the right of the individual to challenge received authority. ’s God wants human beings to be free. ’s God has written the book of nature in mathematics and expects us to read it. ’s God speaks directly to the individual conscience, not through institutional mediators.
Toward the Baroque: But notice the cracks. The Renaissance celebrates human freedom, but it also produces Hamlet — a character destroyed by his own capacity for thought. It celebrates empirical knowledge, but is silenced by the Inquisition. It celebrates individual conscience, but ’s Reformation tears Europe apart in wars of religion that will kill millions. The Baroque period inherits all of this — the grandeur and the wreckage — and tries to make sense of it in a world that has become immeasurably larger, more violent, and more uncertain. , writing in the next generation, will take ’s free, self-creating human being and place him between two infinities, trembling.