Metafora e ideologia in Hamlet: il discorso mercantilista

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to analyse the economic imagery in Hamlet as it occurs in the play mainly in the form of similitudes, puns and metaphors. My point is that the economic images reproduce (and reaffirm) the central tenets of a mercantilist discourse along with its ambivalent notion of the market, which wavers between hegemonic, nationalistic attitudes and cosmopolitan and universal ones. This ambiguity plays an important role in underlining Hamlet’s ethical and epistemological deadlock in the role of revenger by tracing it, rather than to the eclipse of the late medieval order (according to Carl Scmitt’s famous thesis), to the contradictions of a modernity in progress to which the mercantilist discourse belongs.