Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a central text in the Western humanist tradition.

Among its remarkable virtues is a presentation of characters that excel at the art of discovering the available means of persuasion—that is to say, characters that are effective rhetors. The most persuasive and eloquent of these characters display remarkable talent with many rhetorical skills: they are excellent judges of situation and audience; they are capable stylists, employing different registers of diction and figures suited to their intent; they advance arguments shaped by all of the Aristotelian proofs, both inartistic (such as appeals to authority, laws, or promises) and artistic (logos [enthymemes & examples], pathos, ethos [demonstrations of good will, wisdom, & moral virtue]). Too, there are many characters that are less excellent rhetors, and to consider their failures allows one to learn quite a bit about how rhetorical efforts can go wrong. Additionally, these characters not infrequently turn their rhetorical talents on themselves, using rhetorical strategies in soliloquies that judge, praise, or deliberate regarding the given character’s own actions.

Among the assumptions shaping how these characters persuade each other and themselves are a number that derive from texts that inform Shakespeare’s presentation of the world of the royal court, perhaps most especially Machiavelli’s The Prince and Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. Note that, while the works of these two Italians are somewhat similar in intent, they are very different in their tone and spirit. Machiavelli’s work is designed to instruct a ruler on the terms of a very pragmatic politics, and suggests that moral virtue is finally irrelevant—or even a hindrance—to political success. Castiglione, on the other hand, offers a text shaped by a sort of Platonic idealism, one that assumes the courtier will be most useful to his prince when he can lead that ruler down the path of the good. In other words, he articulates a vision of political success as inseparable from moral virtue.

Your paper should analyze an argument advanced by any one character in Hamlet. This will require you to focus on one longer speech by that character or (if the argument is presented across several lines of dialogue because it is part of an exchange) on part of one scene. We encourage you to make the passage you select as short as possible: tighter focus lets you go deeper. Your paper’s central claim should address one of the following prompts:

1. In what ways does the speech demonstrate an allegiance to the position described by Castiglione, and a dissatisfaction with that of Machiavelli?
2. In what ways does the speech demonstrate an allegiance to the position described by Machiavelli, and a dissatisfaction with that of Castiglione?
3. [use this option only if your speech is genuinely divided against itself] What aspects of the argument are compatible with Machiavelli’s perspective, and which with that of Castiglione? Which perspective is finally triumphant?

Be certain not to deal with Machiavelli or Castiglione in broad terms. The summary perspectives delineated above are “givens”—part of your task is to be more focused, to narrow the topic down by being more specific. In order to help you do so, we have included, below, selections from Castiglione and Machiavelli. Your paper should frame its argument with one of these selections from Castiglione, and one of these selections from Machiavelli.

You are free to work with whatever passage from Shakespeare strikes you as appropriate to the assignment.

Your paper should follow MLA guidelines for citation and all other matters of formatting, and be at least 1300 words in length (excluding headers, notes, and works-cited information). A hard copy of the paper is due on Monday, 5 December—hand it in to your Rhetoric professor. Also, be sure to post a copy to your e-portfolio, under the Humanities tab. Be sure you have a clearly articulated and narrowly focused central claim, organize your argument’s points in a reasonable fashion, offer evidence for all of your assertions, make clarity the guiding light of your style, and proof carefully for mechanical errors.