Hamlet needs to know. So does Hamlet's audience. Is he a coward? Hamlet's problem represents one of countless occasions in Shakespeare's plays in which their characters’ fortunes are bound up with their acts of interpretation. We could take up the words of the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and describe these characters’ ‘experience of the world’ as ‘hermeneutical’. In turn, Shakespeare's characters and the worlds they occupy compel interpretations. Our experience of them is hermeneutical.

Describing his dramas this way brings Shakespeare close to the spirit of our time. We share with him, it seems, the assumption that to be human is to be an interpreter who seeks understanding, but does not always arrive at it. Understanding is at once the mode of being ‘of human life itself’ and ‘always interpretation’. So wrote Gadamer, whose groundbreaking work in the later twentieth century continues to demarcate the field of modern philosophical hermeneutics and whose influence is felt across the humanities today. Gadamer's insistence (alongside his teacher Martin Heidegger) that interpretation is basic to being – hermeneutics’ ‘so-called ontological turn’ away from method – echoes through present-day conceptions of selfhood. It seems a given, at least in the historical and cultural context out of which I write, that the modern self is what I call an ‘interpreting self’. Otherwise put, we are always striving to know from within a ‘hermeneutical situation’, that is, ‘a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision’. The entirety of our living embodies a tension. We are ‘opened’ toward knowing, yet inevitably delimited by our ‘finitude and historicity’.