Hamlet's Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium

In Hamlet's Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium, Linda Charnes engagingly employs Shakespeare's Hamlet and Henriad as starting points and paradigms for the discussion of political events and cultural preoccupations of contemporary Western culture, from the 1990s through the turn of the millennium and including the continuing war on terror begun and supported by the United States and Great Britain. In the process she analyzes both the texts and cinematic interpretations of these plays, the contemporary films L. A. Story, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and Blade Runner, the genre of film noir, Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," and more. However, while she considers both highbrow and lowbrow materials, hers is no whimsical exercise, but a rigorous, theoretically-based mining of the assumptions and anxieties underlining life in the Western world today.

According to Charnes, "The essays here concentrate on the legacies bequeathed to Shakespeare's two most famous, and culturally durable, royal sons: the princes Hal and Hamlet. Both have highly vexed relations to monarchy in particular and to paternalism in general; but each has bequeathed to us a drastically different model of the social and psychological politics of succession" (8). Considered in the light of this day and age, "the two princes epitomize the debate — as fraught in our own day as in Shakespeare's — about the duties, dangers, and burdens of inheriting, and spin-doctoring, legacies" (8).

In chapters memorably entitled "The Hamlet Formerly Known as Prince," "It's the Monarchy, Stupid," and "Operation Enduring Hamlet," Charnes troubles the categories of literary criticism and the notion of modernity. She looks into the collective psyche of the United States — an ostensible democracy which still seems to yearn for a monarch, and whose citizens seem unwilling (Hamlet- and Hal-like) to take responsibility for the actions of their government. She also examines the enduring potency of the symbol of the monarchy in modern England, and diagnoses the "cynical idealism" of the ultimate modern prince-avenger: George W. Bush, whose preemptive revenge "closely resembles totalitarianism" (111).

Hamlet's Heirs is part of Routledge's Accents on Shakespeare collection, edited by Terence Hawkes — an extension of the New Accents series, which has "helped to establish 'theory' as a fundamental and continuing feature of the study of literature at the undergraduate level" (ii). According to the publisher, the Accents on Shakespeare collection aims to supply "short, powerful 'cutting edge' accounts of and comments on new developments" in Shakespeare studies, and to "either 'apply' theory, or broaden and adapt it in order to connect with concrete teaching concerns" (ii). Hamlet's Heirs is definitely a short and powerful book which deals with new developments in both Shakespeare studies and the modern world at large: however, while it is an intriguing read for a mature scholar and a good challenge for a graduate student, it is too complex for use on the undergraduate level. It may be intended as part of the "second tier" of the Accents series: as the publisher indicates, "In addition to affordable, 'adoptable' titles aimed at modular undergraduate courses, it will include a number of research-based books. Spirited and committed, these second-tier volumes advocate radical change rather than stolidly reinforcing the status quo" (ii). According to Hawkes, "These volumes will . . . offer a platform for the work of the liveliest younger scholars and teachers at their most outspoken and provocative. Committed and contentious, they will be reporting from the forefront of current critical activity and will have something new to say" (ix). In this case, Charnes is quite successful: Hamlet's Heirs brilliantly questions and challenges pervasive assumptions and business as usual in the arenas of both literary theory and contemporary politics.