Literary character before Shakespeare is relatively unchanging; women and men are represented as aging and dying, but not as changing because their relationship to themselves, rather than to the gods or God, has changed. In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they reconceive themselves. Sometimes this comes about because they overhear themselves talking, whether to themselves or to others. Self -overhearing is their royal road to individuation, and no other writer, before or since Shakespeare, has accomplished so well the virtual miracle of creating utterly different yet self-consistent voices for his more than one hundred major characters and many hundreds of highly distinctive minor personages.   (xvii)

That [Hamlet's "eerily transcendental and sublime" mood in Act 5] returns us to where the matured Hamlet always takes us, to the process of self-revision, to change by self-overhearing and then by the will to change. Shakespeare's term for our "self" is "selfsame," and Hamlet, whatever its first version was like, is very much the drama in which the tragic protagonist revises his sense of the selfsame. Not self-fashioning but self-revision; for Foucault the self is fashioned, but for Shakespeare it is given, subject to subsequent mutabilities. The great topos, or commonplace, in Shakespeare is change: his prime villains, from Richard III on to lago, Edmund, and Macbeth, all suffer astonishing changes before their careers are ended. The Ur-Hamlet never will be found, because it is embedded in the palimpsest of the final Hamlet. Mockery, of others and of himself, is one of Hamlet's crucial modes, and he so mocks vengeance as to make it impossible for us to distinguish revenge tragedy from satire. Hamlet comes to understand that his grief and his comic genius are at odds, until both are subdued at sea. He is neither funny nor melancholy in Act V: the readiness or willingness is all. Shakespeare, disarming moral criticism, thus absolves Hamlet of the final slaughter. The deaths of Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius, and Hamlet himself are all caused by Claudius's "shuffling," unlike the deaths of Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern. Those earlier deaths can be attributed to Hamlet's murderous theatricality, to his peculiar blend of the roles of comedian and avenger. But even Claudius is not slain as an act of vengeance -- only as the final entropy of the plotted shuffling.   (411)