Hamlet: New Critical Essays (review)

Edited by Arthur Kinney, this recent addition to Routledge's Shakespeare Criticism series includes ten original essays written by British and American scholars and grouped under three headings: "Tudor-Stuart Hamlet," "Subsequent Hamlets," and "Hamlet after Theory." In his valuable introductory essay, Kinney pores through the wealth of sources, productions, and critical assessments of the play dating from the beginning of the seventeenth century. He includes a useful section on cultural contexts, in which he reappraises Elizabethan treatises on melancholy, revenge, and the nature of ghosts in relation to Hamlet's famous delay. Kinney's most original contribution, however, is his survey of the performance history of the play. Rather than limit his discussion to portrayals of Hamlet by legendary British actors such as Richard Burbage and David Garrick, Kinney surveys the international dramatizations of the play over the centuries, including productions in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Prague, Salzburg, Paris, and New York.

Kinney also offers a thorough review of critical approaches to Hamlet. While his discussion of deconstruction is limited to Howard Felperin's dated, if foundational, analysis of the play, Kinney's assessment of psychoanalytic criticism on Hamlet ranges well beyond traditional Freudian accounts of the prince's melancholy and includes a survey of interpretations of Hamlet's character from the perspective of Jung's theory of the anima, the developmental psychology of R. D. Laing and D. W. Winnicott, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Kinney usefully summarizes modern feminist discussions of Gertrude's and Ophelia's relationship to patriarchy, focusing on influential essays by Carolyn Heilbrun, Rebecca Smith, and Carol Thomas Neely. Some readers will miss a more detailed evaluation of political and economic criticism of the play, but Kinney does offer an interesting account of new-historicist and cultural-materialist assessments of Polonius's character. In general, Kinney's introduction is admirable not only for its comprehensiveness but also for its even-handed treatment of disparate critical methodologies.

The first three essays under the heading "Tudor-Stuart Hamlet" are the weakest of the volume. In "Shakespeare at Work: The Invention of the Ghost," E. Pearlman examines Shakespeare's departure from convention in constructing a Ghost who lacks the supernatural trappings of ghosts found in earlier revenge tragedies. Little here adds significantly to the well-established accounts of the Ghost in works by Eleanor Prosser, Roland Frye, and, more recently, Stephen Greenblatt.¹ Pearlman's essay is followed by R. A. Foakes's "Hamlet's Neglect of Revenge." Foakes argues that Hamlet's delay is caused by his awareness of a tension between "a quasi-Senecan desire for revenge, and a Christian inhibition against taking life" (91). This is a compelling, if not entirely original, thesis, but Foakes does not provide enough evidence to make it convincing. When Foakes suggests, for example, that the Ghost's description of "Murder most foul" provides a "Christian qualification of his [Old Hamlet's] Senecan call for revenge" (89), he assumes that Hamlet would read the lines as he does and would see this comment and others as references to biblical injunctions against revenge. In the next essay, "The Dyer's Infected Hand: The Sonnets and the Text of Hamlet," Philip Edwards traces an analogy between the composition and emendations of the sonnets and Hamlet. According to Edwards, "The texts of Hamlet reveal a measuring and a remeasuring of the old revenge story, just as the text of the sonnets measures and remeasures the old betrayal story. It is in this activity of constantly changing the perspective while the object remains the same that I find the closest link between the sonnets and Hamlet" (108). Given such a generalized basis for comparison, one wonders what justifies a pairing of the sonnets and Hamlet specifically, rather than a pairing of the sonnets and other revised plays (KingLear comes to mind) in which Shakespeare's principals change their "perspective" on the objects that exercise their imaginations.

The second segment of the volume, entitled "Subsequent Hamlets," includes provocative...