Hamlet and Habit: The Renaissance Problem of Programmable Life

AbstractQuestions of “habit” and “custom” recur throughout William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as they do elsewhere in early modern culture, in theological, legal and moral philosophical debate as well as in popular literature of improvement. In this article, I will argue that the Second Quarto edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1604) is a crucial text in the early modern writing on habit, as it holds up commonplace notions of habitual learning and habitual corruption for scrutiny in ways that test Puritan and humanist educational ideas of habit available in the period, and that link ideas of personal habit with national custom and international imitation. Habit will remain troublesome in the history of modern thought; by playing off against each other different ideas of habit current at the time, Hamlet anticipates enduring problems of programmable life.