When Hamlet claims that Denmark is a “prison,” he offers one of the most famous epigrams in the play: “For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” In one, wistful line, Shakespeare thus anticipates the turn to subjectivity in philosophy (Descartes’s magisterial cogito) and all of modern psychology: what truly matters is how you think (and increasingly ‘feel’) about your situation.
It is a peerles kinsman