Steiner's reading of Shakespeare's prince as the dramatic self-portrait of the dawning consciousness-soul age, the doubter suspended between thought and deed.
Hamlet and the Consciousness Soul in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of Shakespeare's prince as the dramatic self-portrait of the dawning consciousness-soul epoch. In his 1922 Dornach lecture cycle The Mysteries of the Drama of Human Evolution (GA 210), Steiner places Hamlet at the fifteenth-century turning point between the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean periods, the historical threshold where the consciousness soul began to awaken. Schooled at Wittenberg in the new intellectualism yet still able to perceive his father's ghost, Hamlet stands suspended between thought and deed, between spiritual vision and the pale cast of analytic thinking. He is, for Steiner, a pupil of Faust, the soul caught at the exact moment when older clairvoyant certainty fades and the modern self-aware ego has not yet found its footing. The doubting prince embodies the birth-pang of self-conscious cognition.
Hamlet and the Consciousness Soul names the link Rudolf Steiner drew between Shakespeare's hesitating prince and the awakening of the consciousness soul, the soul-member that begins to dawn in the fifteenth century. Hamlet, schooled at Wittenberg yet visited by a ghost, lives the rift between intellect and spirit that defines this epoch. He acts as the stage-image of a humanity learning to think alone.
In Steiner's Own Words
Consider the whole character of Hamlet and combine this with the fact that he studied in Wittenberg where he could easily have heard a professor such as Faust. Consider the manner in which he is given his task. His father's ghost appears to him. He is in contact with the real spiritual world. He is really within it. But he has studied in Wittenberg where he was such a good student that he has come to regard the human brain as a book.
What it Means Today
The literary critic Harold Bloom built his late masterwork, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Riverhead Books, 1998), on a claim that runs strikingly parallel to Steiner's. For Bloom, Hamlet is the moment Western literature discovers self-overhearing inwardness: the prince listens to himself think, revises himself in the act of speaking, and so becomes the first fully modern consciousness on a stage. Bloom reads this as the literary birth of human interiority. Steiner, lecturing in Dornach a lifetime earlier in 1922, read the same hesitation as the spiritual birth of the consciousness soul, the soul-member that learns to stand alone in thought after the older clairvoyant vision has faded. Both men locate something epochal in one doubting Dane. Where Bloom sees the invention of the human personality, Steiner sees the inner organ of self-aware cognition coming awake at the fifteenth-century threshold between the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean ages.
Thalira synthesis: Hamlet's famous paralysis is not a flaw of temperament but the labour-pain of a new faculty, the consciousness soul learning, for the first time and without a guide, to convert spiritual perception into earthly deed.
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