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5 SCRIPTed 1 (2008)

handle is hein.journals/scripted5 and id is 1 raw text is: Volume 5, Issue 1, April 2008 Lex Personalitatis & Technology-driven Law Joseph A. Cannataci Before we consider the character of Hamlet I should like to digress briefly on a number of topics. First of all, the modern concept of 'personality was completely unknown in the sixteenth century. The Greeks had no such concept, and no word for it, in scholastic Latin, personalitas, a word unknown in Classical Latin, meant simply the quality of being a man as distinct from being an animal. During the eighteenth century the word personality came to mean the sum of the characteristics of an individual, and in the nineteenth century it became a reified abstraction with depths, force, and, eventually, the host of problems, difficulties, and aberrations, which you, who have these little things somewhere inside you, now know very well. Any psychologist can tell you all about them. You may say, Oh, but Elizabethans had them, even if they didn't mention them! I can assure you that they belong to the world of words, not to the world of things, and that Elizabethans were just as innocent of them as they were of Newton's law of attraction, which was once applied to almost every conceivable subject by eighteenth-century intellectuals. The theories you entertain will pass too, unless the human mind stagnates and everybody believes what he is told. What our ancestors had instead of personalities, which are, after all ghosts, were characters and immortal souls A Medievalist looks at Hamlet D. W. Robertson Jr 1980 Professor in Law, Director, Centre for Law, Information & Converging Technologies, University of Central Lancashire.