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Reviewed by:
  • Hamlet without Hamlet
  • Dympna Callaghan
Margreta de Grazia . Hamlet without Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xii + 268 pp. index. illus. bibl. $34.99. ISBN: 978–0–521–69036–2.

That Hamlet has distinctively modern psychological problems has become a cliché since Ernest Jones's path-breaking essay on Hamlet and the Oedipus complex in 1910. Long before this, however, the critical consensus had been reached [End Page 1467] that Hamlet, more than any other character in the annals of world literature represents a model of human subjectivity that had, when Shakespeare wrote the play, not yet been instantiated by the Enlightenment and its aftermath. Despite the recent critical barbs directed at the ostensibly bardolatrist contention that Hamlet plumbs the depths of human experience, it remains the case that, especially in comparison to other stage avengers, Shakespeare's representation of the Prince of Denmark was an unprecedented achievement in the dramatic representation of a recognizably modern and life-like human identity. As Stephen Greenblatt puts it, "By the turn of the century Shakespeare was poised to make an epochal breakthrough. He had perfected the means to represent inwardness" (Will in the World, 299).

In an important sense, Margreta de Grazia has no quarrel with this. What she questions instead is how the dominant approach to Hamlet came to be as it is. Hamlet Without Hamlet turns all previous critical verities on their heads, not by proffering yet another interpretation of the prince and his problems but by suggesting that he has been the mistaken focus of analysis all along.

The dilemma of Hamlet as de Grazia frames it is neither delay, insanity, incest, nor misogyny, to name a few of the possible problems the play has been thought to import, but the critical decision — which she traces back to the eighteenth century — to focus on the person Hamlet rather than Hamlet the play. I use the word person advisedly since, as de Grazia demonstrates, criticism has focused entirely on the Hamlet who is not the play, in a fashion that far exceeds the discursive limits of dramatic characterization. "It was not sharper vision that brought Hamlet's complex interiority into focus. Rather, it was a blind spot. In order for Hamlet to appear modern, the premise of the play had to drop out of sight. The premise is this: at his father's death, just at the point when an only son in a patrilineal system stands to inherit, Hamlet is dispossessed" (1). Far from being beleaguered by psychological problems, then, Hamlet is beset by profoundly political ones: the loss of his title to land, to the kingdom of Denmark. In keeping her sights firmly set on this issue, de Grazia produces a truly remarkable and profoundly original reading of the play, addressing the complex landscape that emerges beyond the myopic focus on the inner life of the prince.

This is rigorous rehistoricization of the play in which all elements hitherto read as an index of Hamlet's subjectivity are understood in materialist terms of Hamlet's failure to inherit the throne. So for example, Gertrude's remarriage is less important as an instrument of psychological damage than as what sets the seal on Hamlet's disinheritance. Similarly, Hamlet's delay and putative madness are representations of the behaviors of stock theatrical images of privation — the clown, madman, vice, and devil — rather than images of psychological disorder. In fact, de Grazia demonstrates there is a specific moment (again in the eighteenth century) when critics decide that Hamlet's insanity is real rather than feigned. What de Grazia succeeds in uncovering by shifting her focus from the prince to the play is a vast conceptual territory of all that Hamlet "could not possibly be after 1800 and as long as Hamlet's interiority was taken as the vortical subject of the play" (5): [End Page 1468] a territory literally, since it is comprised principally of "the centrality of land" (43), and one whose status as a timeless tragedy has overshadowed its historical specificity, namely that of England's own succession crisis.

This book offers a dazzling interpretation of the play that deftly reprises the history of Hamlet criticism, especially...

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