Abstract
Abstract: This article examines the vocabulary of likeness and replication in Shakespeare’s disease-ridden Denmark, which aligns with early modern theories of contagion from Paracelsus and Girolamo Fracastoro. Here the play’s preoccupation with incest assumes a new cast; incest—an excess of natural affinity for one’s like—is the disease of both the body and the body politic. Shakespeare reveals that likeness is not only the method of contagion but also its source: a perpetual desire for similarity and the status quo. Consequently, Hamlet’s values of individual difference and distinction contrast with the play’s closed, endogamous systems of power and privilege.