South of Elsinore: Actions that a Man Might Play

Abstract

To play Hamlet is to be promised choice. Yet, as thirty years of Hamlet video games demonstrate, such freedom evaporates in practice, shaped by gameplay's own unpredictable structures of constraint. The relations that Hamlet considers under the sign of `play'---genre, the ludic, and relations of power---have become central to how we use Shakespeare, posing questions of the relationship between interpretive freedom and the vast structures of capital, knowledge, and privilege that limit and shape such freedoms. What might it mean to think of the play of reading and of interpretation not as wholly unconstrained but rather as akin to other types of play in their tension between freedom and rule?