Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man by Eric P. Levy (review)

REVIEWS 305 ventional writings, thus necessitating a retrospective compilation. Though Newstock mixes praise with criticism in his introduction, he makes a convincing case that Burke was one of the most profoundly influential Shakespeare critics of the last century. Burke’s texts might be a bit over-cherished here (Newstock puts in footnotes passages which Burke crossed out in his notes), but there is undeniably a strange freshness to Burke’s idiosyncratic voice. And if Burke ushered in a variety of forms of cultural studies in Shakespeare significantly avant la lettre, it should not be surprising to find that his texts can retain their currency. There is clearly a generational gap in familiarity with Burke’s work. This volume is mainly aimed at a younger generation who are less familiar with Burke’s overtly rhetorical and admirably charming style, a mode more similar to Coleridge or Auden than anything a modern graduate student would be accustomed to reading. Flitting casually between a use of prosopopeia in which a character from a play is made to speak to a rigorous formalist reading, Burke also takes moments to liken, for example, rhetoric to advertising, and art to commerce. Deeply invested in the ambiguities and potentialities of rhetoric, Burke is particularly drawn to those loci classici of performative language, Mark Antony’s speech over the dead Caesar and Ulysses’s speech on degree. To some, such fascination (if not fixation) would seem to typify a formalist stance which has outlived its moment. But Burke mixes such purely formal concerns with connections which seem very current, such as the resonance between jealousy and enclosure. While some of his insights now seem dated, as when he deflates the novelistic character readings of Bradley, others can be seen proleptically to anticipate much of the changes that would later take place in the transition from Formalism to a Marxist Cultural Studies, and this book arrives when a renewed concern for the aesthetics so dear to Burke is taking hold. It is difficult to come away from this volume without the feeling that one has already read these readings before, since they have been so influential in the thinking and trajectory of Shakespeare criticism for generations. Kenneth Burke, like Old Hamlet, seems to retain the ability to influence the plot of Shakespeare criticism. More aided than hindered by his marginal status, this volume is a testament to his restive voice. MICHAEL SAENGER, English, Southwestern University Eric P. Levy, Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press 2008) 256 pp. We tend to see ourselves in reflection when we encounter Hamlet. Goethe saw a “soul unfit.” Dr. Johnson praised Hamlet’s “variety.” T. S. Eliot called it an “aesthetic failure.” Freud found in Hamlet an Oedipal complex. Marxists find class struggle; nihilists find in Hamlet a fellow nihilist. Eric Levy finds the play to be a work of epistemological philosophy that transcends all previous philosophies of mind and inaugurates a new age of “rethinking.” What is “rethinking ,” to Levy? It is “the relation between thoughts and the intrinsic dynamics of thinking” (16, Levy’s emphasis). The “dynamics” involve a real human mind contending with various philosophies, or systems of thought. Levy’s project, in one of his more striking formulations, is “to investigate how Hamlet REVIEWS 306 functions as an organ of thought which supersedes the preconceptions informing its own operation” (24, Levy’s emphasis). Restating Levy’s goal: Hamlet is the first representation in literature of a person thinking, influenced by many systems of thought, finding limitations in all of them, and emerging with a completely original way of thinking. The play depicts a world in which characters ’ thought and behavior are narrowly circumscribed, until Hamlet begins “rethinking” and thereby brings about the ruin of the entire state. Levy’s Hamlet is not a tragedy at all but a triumph, the triumph of a hero who finally starts thinking; for Levy, the play depicts a movement from the rotten (deceptive appearances and uniformity of thought) to the virtuous (complexity, perplexity of thought). In his rethinking, Hamlet demonstrates the inadequacy of many medieval and Renaissance systems of thought; specifically, the Humanist tradition (exemplified here by Aristotle and...