SOURCE: “‘Nor th' exterior nor the inward man’: The Problematics of Personal Identity in Hamlet,” in University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 3, Summer, 1999, pp. 711-27.

In the following essay, Levy charts Hamlet's probing of the nature of human identity and argues that the play conceptualizes an alternative to the usual inward/outward polarity.

Hamlet begins with an urgent questioning of identity: ‘Who's there?’ A similar query is soon directed at the Ghost: ‘What art thou that usurp'st this time of night’ (1.1.49). The interrogation is complicated by the very nature of the problem. For identity in this context is not simple but polar. That is, it comprises a totality whose two aspects are public and private or what Claudius terms ‘th'exterior’ and ‘the inward man’ (2.2.4).¹ Therefore, if the question of identity is to be answered at the most fundamental level, the proper relation of the inward and outward...