Stay, Illusion!
The Hamlet Doctrine
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The figure of Hamlet haunts our culture like the ghost haunts Shakespeare’s melancholy Dane. Arguably, no literary work is more familiar to us. Everyone knows at least six words from Hamlet, and most people know many more. Yet the play—Shakespeare’s longest—is more than “passing strange,” and it becomes even more complex when considered closely.
Reading Hamlet alongside other writers, philosophers, and psychoanalysts—Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Melville, and Joyce—Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster go in search of a particularly modern drama that is as much about ourselves as it is a product of Shakespeare’s imagination. They also offer a startling interpretation of the action onstage: it is structured around “nothing”—or, in the enigmatic words of the player queen, “it nothing must.”
From the illusion of theater and the spectacle of statecraft to the psychological interplay of inhibition and emotion, Hamlet discloses the modern paradox of our lives: how thought and action seem to pull against each other, the one annulling the possibility of the other. As a counterweight to Hamlet’s melancholy paralysis, Ophelia emerges as the play’s true hero. In her madness, she lives the love of which Hamlet is incapable.
Avoiding the customary clichés about the timelessness of the Bard, Critchley and Webster show the timely power of Hamlet to cast light on the intractable dilemmas of human existence in a world that is rotten and out of joint.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this insightful interpretation, philosopher Critchley (The Faith of the Faithless) and psychoanalyst Webster (The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis) offer their take on Hamlet, using as touchstones the work of analysts such as Freud and Jacques Lacan, philosophers like Walter Benjamin and Nietzsche, and writers such as James Joyce, all of whom have written about the play. The authors discuss Hamlet's bizarre obsession with his mother, his inability to kill Claudius, as well as the oppression caused by the near-constant spying on others, among other topics. Of the theories presented to explain Hamlet's failure to avenge his father, the most interesting is Hegel's suggestion that with his experience with death, he becomes disgusted with humanity, and no longer cares to engage in the world except in an absurd, punning way; "the wrong man" for the job, he dies as a result of his own hesitation and external circumstance. Ophelia's situation is also explored; used by Hamlet, Polonius, Laertes, and Claudius and Gertrude as bait, "her desire explodes onto the stage" in her madness scene and in the description of her death. Whether singing of flowers and their reproductive cycles, or appearing in a pool "mermaid-like" and with a voice "heavy with drink,' " Ophelia finally expresses the sexuality restrained and ignored by others. The authors' passion for the play and its questions are clearly evident.
