Shakespeare's Hamlet emerged at a moment of social transition between Catholic England and Protestant England. The accidents and entailments of this particular culture emerge in the text through images, metaphors, polysemy, ideational conceits, as well as in unique forms of linguistic expression and dramatic signification. Reading the theological disputes, architecture, discursive encryption, and public performances of the day as another form of historical and expressive text, and informing that reading with the latest theories in post-Whig English history, this dissertation uses the information so-gathered to perform a close re-reading of Hamlet and explore the way a cognitive primitive—the schema INSIDE/OUTSIDE—is expressed multiply in the text in a polysemic web of signification. It is suggested that Hamlet emerged not only at the turning point between Catholic England and Protestant England, but at the strongly figured turning point between the homo religiosus of Medieval Europe and the modern European subject. This transition is marked by a split between a private and a public self correlated with the creation of a secular, social culture in Western European cordoned off from the increasingly complex and pluralistic religious culture.
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