“The siege of wat’ry Neptune”. Una prospettiva novecentesca su origine e limiti dell’ordine nel dramma elisabettiano

The article consists in a critical reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and other Elizabethan plays in view of Carl Schmitt’s essay Hamlet oder Hekuba. First, I consider the essay in the framework of the philosophical current of play and seriousness understood also as, respectively, free poetical invention and inescapable historical reality. Thus, a spatial and elemental metaphorical pattern is gained that is typical of the theory of order developed by Carl Schmitt in the 1950s. This theory, as it appears in Hamlet oder Hekuba, provides an original key to understanding the political meaning of similar metaphorical patterns in political Elizabethan drama – tempests, shores, rivers, riverbanks, etc. – as it mirrors the ambiguous role of exception in those plays, where it is both origin and limit of political orders.