American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Though Nietzsche thought awareness of the truth, not the inability to act, was the root of Hamlet’s insanity, the radicals seemed uneasy about Hamlet’s psychic paralysis, because it confirmed their concerns about the ineffectual intellectual. They worried about irrelevance as they sensed a gulf between their knowledge of social and economic problems and their ability to transform their knowledge into intelligent action. “We are all Hamlets,” Randolph Bourne confessed to a friend, indicating the uneasy kinship he and his friends felt with Shakespeare’s character.64 Van Wyck Brooks agreed that his generation, burdened by the feeling of “internal anarchism,” was turning into a “race of Hamlets.”