Shakespeare’s great tragedy still challenges us today, partly because it retains the force of a modern, “living” text, one that cannot be exhausted by historical understanding. Western readers still live and think within the moral space created by this drama, without being able fully to resolve the ethical conflicts that the play’s hero so keenly feels. Hamlet’s confrontation with questions of responsibility, suicide, and absurdity continue to haunt us. His failed moral struggle is heroic in a new sense that makes him a foundational figure of Western modernity. This lecture and discussion are designed to invite the audience into the text of Hamlet in order to trace its fateful departure from traditional concepts of the individual and society, and to see how it opened a path to new ways of thinking and feeling that characterize the post-Romantic age.