Humanism and Its Discontents: Renaissance and Romantic Culture in Hamlet and Frankenstein

 

Humanism and Its Discontents: Renaissance and Romantic Culture in Hamlet and Frankenstein

Assignment : 205 Cultural studies

Hello learners! The present assignment discuss on Humanism and Its Discontents: Renaissance and Romantic Culture in Hamlet and Frankenstein. 

Table of contents:

Introduction

Renaissance Humanism and the Crisis of Thought in Hamlet

Shakespeare’s Hamlet dramatizes this ideal vividly in the famous lines

The Limits of Reason and the Discontents of Knowledge

Romantic Humanism and the Problem of Creation in Frankenstein

Victor Frankenstein as the Discontented Humanist

The Creature’s Voice and the Romantic Reversal

Comparative Analysis: The Evolution of Humanist Anxiety

Humanism, Religion, and the Question of the Divine

The Individual and the World: Alienation as the Modern Condition

Conclusion

Personal Information:

Name : Mer Jyoti R

Batch : 2024-26

Sem :3

Roll no : 7

Enrollment no : 5108240021

Pepar-205: Cultural Studies

Topic : Humanism and Its Discontents: Renaissance and Romantic Culture in Hamlet and Frankenstein

E-mail I'd : jyotimer2003@gmail.com

Introduction

Both William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1600) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) are literary landmarks born of moments when the Western intellectual tradition was undergoing profound redefinition. Each text embodies the crisis of humanism the philosophical belief in human reason, agency, and moral autonomy that emerged during the Renaissance and reached new expressive forms in the Romantic era.

In Hamlet, humanism appears in its Renaissance form: a celebration of human rationality, moral self-awareness, and the pursuit of truth. Yet, Shakespeare also exposes the darker side of this ideal the paralysis and despair that come when human reason confronts uncertainty and corruption. In Frankenstein, Shelley reimagines humanism through the lens of Romanticism, exposing its hubris and ethical limits. Victor Frankenstein’s pursuit of scientific mastery, modeled on Enlightenment rationalism, becomes a cautionary allegory about the dangers of self-deifying human ambition.

This essay explores how both Hamlet and Frankenstein articulate humanism’s contradictions and discontents, revealing how the ideals of human dignity, knowledge, and creativity can also engender alienation, guilt, and destruction. Through their protagonists Hamlet and Victor Frankenstein Shakespeare and Shelley chart the historical evolution of humanist thought from its Renaissance optimism to its Romantic skepticism.

Renaissance Humanism and the Crisis of Thought in Hamlet

The Humanist Ideal

The Renaissance, spanning roughly the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, marked a rebirth of interest in classical learning, individual inquiry, and human potential. Thinkers such as Erasmus and Pico della Mirandola articulated a vision of man as a rational being capable of moral and intellectual greatness. Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) famously declared that human beings could shape their own destinies a declaration that encapsulates the humanist faith in free will and perfectibility.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet dramatizes this ideal vividly in the famous lines:

 “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties! … the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!” (Hamlet 2.2.303–307)

Here, Hamlet voices the humanist exaltation of man’s rational and moral nature. Yet, the irony of the scene the prince’s melancholy and despair immediately undermines the sentiment. The passage becomes an elegy for a humanist ideal already eroded by doubt. Hamlet recognizes human potential but finds it hollow in the face of mortality and corruption. The Renaissance celebration of man’s greatness gives way to existential disillusionment.

The Limits of Reason and the Discontents of Knowledge

Hamlet’s tragedy lies in his overdeveloped self-consciousness a product of Renaissance rationalism turned inward. His intellectual inquiry into truth and morality immobilizes him. As T. S. Eliot famously observed, Hamlet suffers from an “excess of thought” (Eliot 97). His delay in avenging his father’s murder stems not from cowardice but from an inability to reconcile moral reasoning with emotional impulse.

This paralysis embodies the discontent of humanism: reason, meant to illuminate truth, becomes a source of alienation. Hamlet’s soliloquies especially “To be or not to be” reveal a mind caught between knowledge and inaction, faith and skepticism. In confronting the ambiguity of existence, Hamlet exposes the psychological burden of self-awareness that Renaissance humanism had unleashed.

Moreover, Hamlet’s Denmark mirrors a decaying moral order where the humanist ideals of truth and justice have been supplanted by political deceit. The court’s corruption, epitomized by Claudius, reveals the impotence of intellectual virtue in a world driven by power. The disjunction between idealism and reality reflects the early modern crisis of faith in reason a tension that will resurface in Romanticism’s critique of Enlightenment rationality.

Romantic Humanism and the Problem of Creation in Frankenstein

The Enlightenment Legacy and the Romantic Rebellion

By the time Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, humanism had evolved through the Enlightenment into a faith in scientific progress and rational mastery. Thinkers like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton celebrated empirical knowledge as the path to human perfection and dominion over nature. Yet, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a Romantic reaction against this mechanistic worldview. The Romantics defended imagination, emotion, and the sublime qualities that resisted quantification and control.

Frankenstein emerges precisely at this crossroads between Enlightenment and Romantic thought. Victor Frankenstein embodies the Enlightenment’s drive for discovery and domination, while the novel’s Gothic and emotional dimensions reveal Shelley’s Romantic skepticism toward such ambitions. As Anne Mellor notes, Frankenstein “is both a product and a critique of the Enlightenment project of controlling nature through science” (Mellor 38).

Victor Frankenstein as the Discontented Humanist

Victor’s quest “to pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation” (Shelley 33) reflects the humanist belief in human potential and autonomy. Like a Renaissance artist or scientist Leonardo da Vinci or Paracelsus he seeks to transcend natural limits. Yet his experiment reveals the dark underside of humanism: the transformation of creative power into destructive arrogance.

Shelley reconfigures the humanist ideal of man as creator into a Gothic tragedy of alienation. Victor’s attempt to imitate divine creation parodies Pico’s notion of man’s godlike freedom. But unlike Renaissance humanists, Shelley’s vision is deeply ambivalent. The more Victor asserts control over nature, the more he loses his humanity. His “Promethean ambition” isolates him from family, love, and ethical responsibility.

In creating life, Victor transgresses the moral boundaries that define human identity. His creature, rejected and unloved, becomes both his double and his punishment a living embodiment of humanism’s failure to recognize the ethical limits of knowledge. Shelley’s novel thus exposes the moral and emotional consequences of intellectual hubris. The Romantic imagination, while valuing creativity, insists that knowledge without empathy leads to dehumanization.

The Creature’s Voice and the Romantic Reversal

The creature’s eloquence complicates the moral dynamic of Frankenstein. Through his narrative, Shelley humanizes the so-called “monster,” giving voice to the voiceless. His self-education reading Paradise Lost, The Sorrows of Werther, and Plutarch’s Lives is itself a form of humanist learning. Yet, unlike Victor, the creature’s intellectual awakening produces moral consciousness and a yearning for companionship. His tragedy lies not in ignorance but in social exclusion.

In this inversion, Shelley critiques the Enlightenment’s privileging of intellect over emotion. The creature, though physically deformed, possesses the moral sensibility that Victor lacks. His plaintive declaration “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend” (Shelley 84) exposes society’s failure to recognize the humanity of the Other. Romantic humanism, for Shelley, must include compassion and relational ethics, not merely rational mastery.

Thus, Frankenstein dramatizes humanism’s discontents through both creator and creation: the hubris of intellect and the suffering of exclusion. Shelley transforms the Renaissance celebration of human potential into a Romantic meditation on responsibility, empathy, and the limits of reason.

Comparative Analysis: The Evolution of Humanist Anxiety

Knowledge, Power, and Responsibility

Both Hamlet and Frankenstein pivot on the crisis of knowledge what it means to know, and what moral responsibility accompanies that knowledge. Hamlet’s quest for truth and Victor’s quest for creation both arise from a humanist desire for understanding, yet both culminate in tragedy. Hamlet’s knowledge leads to paralysis; Victor’s to destruction.

In Shakespeare’s Renaissance world, the danger lies in thinking too much reason estranged from moral action. In Shelley’s Romantic world, the danger lies in knowing too much science divorced from empathy. Thus, Hamlet’s discontent emerges from inward doubt; Victor’s from outward overreach. Both figures suffer from a form of epistemological alienation the separation of intellect from feeling, and reason from humanity.

Humanism, Religion, and the Question of the Divine

Both texts also interrogate the relationship between humanism and the divine. In Hamlet, Christian theology and Renaissance skepticism coexist uneasily. Hamlet’s fear of the afterlife (“the dread of something after death”) exposes the limits of reason in metaphysical matters (Hamlet 3.1.79–80). The Renaissance aspiration to know is bounded by the mystery of divine will.

In Frankenstein, the tension shifts from divine mystery to human usurpation of divine power. Victor’s creation of life without God symbolizes modernity’s rebellion against theological limits. His punishment psychological torment and social ruin restores the moral equilibrium that humanism had disturbed. Shelley’s critique thus extends beyond science to the entire Enlightenment faith in human self-sufficiency. As Baldick observes, “Frankenstein is the myth of modern man as the victim of his own Promethean aspirations” (Baldick 44).

Both works suggest that humanism’s discontent arises when humanity seeks autonomy without humility when the pursuit of knowledge forgets the necessity of moral restraint.

The Individual and the World: Alienation as the Modern Condition

Hamlet and Victor Frankenstein are both alienated figures intellectuals estranged from society and from themselves. Each embodies the modern self torn between thought and action, reason and emotion. Their alienation marks the transition from Renaissance self-confidence to Romantic self-consciousness.

Hamlet’s isolation is philosophical: his intellect isolates him in a corrupt world. Victor’s isolation is self-imposed: his scientific obsession severs him from emotional bonds. Yet both reflect the same historical evolution the transformation of the autonomous Renaissance individual into the divided, modern subject of Romanticism.

Their suffering anticipates the existential modernism of later centuries. In both, we witness the failure of humanism to reconcile knowledge with meaning, intellect with love, self with the world.

Conclusion

From Shakespeare’s Renaissance stage to Shelley’s Romantic laboratory, Hamlet and Frankenstein chart the trajectory of Western humanism from its idealistic beginnings to its self-critical aftermath. In Hamlet, the humanist faith in reason and virtue collapses into introspection and doubt. In Frankenstein, the humanist drive for mastery culminates in alienation and destruction. Together, these works reveal that the very qualities that define humanity curiosity, creativity, self-awareness are also the sources of its tragedy.

For both Shakespeare and Shelley, humanism’s discontents arise not from the pursuit of knowledge itself but from the failure to integrate reason with morality, intellect with empathy, power with responsibility. The Renaissance celebrated man as “the measure of all things”; Romanticism warned that such a measure could become monstrous if detached from compassion.

In the end, Hamlet’s melancholy and Frankenstein’s remorse converge in a shared insight: that human greatness is inseparable from human fallibility. Their protagonists embody the paradox of humanism its elevation of human dignity and its exposure of human limits. In their tragedies, we discern the continuing question that defines modern thought: what does it mean to be human in a world of both boundless reason and infinite uncertainty?

Work cited:

In Frankenstein’s Shadow - Chris Baldick - Oxford University Press, global.oup.com/academic/product/in-frankensteins-shadow-9780198122494. Accessed 26 Oct. 2025.

“Hamlet and His Problems.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 July 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_and_His_Problems. Accessed 26 Oct. 2025.

Mellor, Anne K. “Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters.” Routledge & CRC Press, Taylor & Francis, 13 Dec. 1989, www.routledge.com/Mary-Shelley-Her-Life-Her-Fiction-Her-Monsters/Mellor/p/book/9780415901475. Accessed 26 Oct. 2025.

Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola Oration on the Dignity of Man, www.andallthat.co.uk/uploads/2/3/8/9/2389220/pico_-_oration_on_the_dignity_of_man.pdf. Accessed 26 Oct. 2025.

Shakespeare, William, and William Shakespeare. “Hamlet the Arden Edition of Th.” AbeBooks, Arden, 1 Jan. 1982, www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/hamlet/author/shakespeare-william-jenkins-harold/. Accessed 26 Oct. 2025. 

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