Hamlet, strategist

Abstract

It has come to our attention that Hamlet, in his meanderings along the road to revenge, shows a remarkable ineptitude in those matters of military and political strategy which would have been central to the concretion of his objectives in the play. Nevertheless, it is evident that a military-skilled prince would have been entirely unsuited to Shakespeare's presumable intentions for the play: the character of the Dane is much richer dramatically precisely because he cannot, he will not, and he does not know how. Whether because he thinks too much, or because he thinks too well; perhaps, simply, because he thinks too much out of turn, Hamlet manages to distance himself from whom would otherwise have been a mere instrument of revenge. In this work, we shall attempt to view the tactics employed by the Prince through the eyes of the founding father of modern strategy theory, General Sun Tzu. While it is obvious that Shakespeare himself could not have possibly known the actual <i>Art of War</i> by the Chinese general -introduced to Western culture by Joseph Amiot only in 1782-, this treatise is simply, and genially, an exploration into the philosophical intricacies of the nature of man in competition: which was certainly not foreign to the remarkable military minds of the West.