Andre Gide wrote: “Has anyone, in explaining Hamlet’s character, made full use of the fact that he has returned from a German university? He brings back to his native country the germs of a foreign philosophy; he has plunged int a metaphysics whose remarkable fruit seems to me ‘To be or not to be.’ I already perceive all of German subjectivism in the celebrated monologue . . . . On his return from Germany, he has lost his will; he ratiocinates. I hold German metaphysics responsible for his irresolutions. From his masters over there, his spirit has taken the key to the territory of abstract speculation, which imposes itself, so speciously, on the territory of action.”
Has Shakespeare prophesied the development from Luther’s Wittenberg to Kant’s Koenigsberg? And is this further evidence that Shakespeare was a Catholic, and a prophetic one at that?
Peter Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. He is the author of numerous books on theology, literature, and culture, including Theopolitan, Defending Constantine, and Baptized Body.
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