"Hamlet" Without Hamlet (review)

There is no figure in Shakespeare's canon more explored, expounded upon, analyzed, psychoanalyzed, deconstructed, reconstructed, appropriated, situated, and expropriated than Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. As Margreta de Grazia points out toward the end of her new book, "Hamlet" Without Hamlet, Hamlet and his state of mind have proven to be the Mount Everest of criticism: "Answers to the question of Hamlet's delay keep piling up. . . . Our most sophisticated literary critics are still contributing answers to the question . . . as if no reading were valid unless it could speak to the issue" (170). While de Grazia certainly will speak to the issue, she does not seek to provide a new answer so much as to resurrect an old one: an answer that she impeccably demonstrates has been there all along and furthermore needs none of the ingenious conceptual byproducts of post-Enlightenment modernity to make itself more than evident, if we will only read the play.

Throughout the course of this by turns commonsensical and surprising book, we come to realize that not only have we not seen the forest for one big tree, but we have forgotten that all trees grow, and are rooted inescapably, in land. In meticulous detail, de Grazia shows how "the language of the play itself upholds the attachment of persons to land, human to humus. Flesh and earth repeatedly coalesce through overlaps of sound and sense, as they do in the name of the first man . . . adamah, the Hebrew word for clay" (3). Even the prince's name is a ligament in this logic: "Hamme, as the earliest dictionaries establish, derives from the Germanic word for home. A hamlet is a cluster of homes: a kingdom in miniature" (6).

Consequently, the introduction quickly clarifies the book's wonderfully improbable title, by asking us what the play would look like if we read it without Hamlet, "icon of consciousness" (i) fastened, Alien-like, onto our collective heads. De Grazia floodlights how we have come to view the play and reminds us that there is more to Hamlet than the prince himself. Chapter 1, "Modern Hamlet," takes on the construction of the play as harbinger of "the beginning of the modern age" (7). yet Shakespeare's audiences were not interested in Hamlet's "interiority" (18); rather, "the pleasure Hamlet gave derived not from that he had within . . . but from what he had put on: his 'antic disposition' " (8). In fact, the play was popular, she argues, for its special effects, its "zany repertoire" (8) of physical antics: "His hyperactivity would have linked him more with the roustabout clown of medieval folk tradition than with the introspective consciousness acclaimed by the modern period" (8–9).

After the reopening of the theaters in 1660, the play was considered by most "tediously outmoded: 'the old playe began to disgust this refined age,' " as John Evelyn noted after a 1661 performance (9); de Grazia writes, "Hamlet, timeworn on arrival, was regarded after the Restoration and well into the eighteenth century as antiquated, old, barbarous, and gothic" (9). The emergence of neoclassicism divided work into the categories of "ancient" and "modern," with Shakespeare firmly placed in the former for "hopelessly violat[ing] the neo-classical dramatic unities of action, time, and place" (11). By the early eighteenth century, the debate over various kinds of drama had crystallized into a division between, for instance, the "relative merits of Electra and Hamlet," which Nicholas Rowe noted " 'was founded upon much the same Tale' " (11). This analogy became a virtual frame for the debates over classical, neoclassical, and emerging drama that could be fresh precisely because it violated Horatian decorum. "By the time of Coleridge's lectures in 1811 . . . Hamlet does eclipse the plot" (12); with his " 'ratiocinative meditativeness,' Hamlet is plot-resistant" (13).

It would take nearly another century (and the emergence of speculative German philosophies of mind) to completely uproot Hamlet from Shakespeare's time and graft him into the more porous soil of modernity, where he could...