The Gnomic Self

Counsel and Subjectivity in Shakespearean Drama

Abstract

This essay discusses the links between counsel and subjectivity in the context of early modern English drama, with particular reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of the gnomic self, which he recovers from the ancient philosophical tradition, it asks what kind of subjectivity emerges from situations of counsel in which remembered knowledge, in the form of sententiae, is supposed to act as a transformative force in the subject of advice