Politics and Genre in "Hamlet" is a historicist study constituting a significant departure from the New Historicist or 'cultural' approach to Shakespeare. It examines the question of genre in relation to identity, time and power in the play against the backdrop of the Renaissance in Europe. It looks at identity as a typically Renaissance phenomenon: a theatrical construct alternating between theMachiavellian and Castiglionesque. The 'new' political time is analyzed in the terms of an uneasy interval which, having arrived imperceptibly, somehow qualifies inescapably as history. Power, of which rhetoric is seen to perform a crucial function in Hamlet, is considered against a Foucauldian perspective of mobile power relations. State power on stage is, according tothis study, as much a mysterious ubiquity as an atopia. Pivotal to Politics and Genre in "Hamlet" is what is viewed here as the cause of Hamlet's 'delay'. This is taken as generic and phenomenological, hinging on an intrinsic divergence between the atelic and recessive neoplatonic protagonist and the covert Aristotelian teleologies of the court at Elsinore. The discussion also takes in the existential, Picoesque concept of freedom tosupport the argument that Hamlet's is a genre in transition. One of the special achievements of Politics and Genre in "Hamlet" is that its focus on many of the classic issues of Shakespeare's play enables it to keep the dramatic process constantly in view.