Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness by Rhodri Lewis (review)

Rhodri Lewis suggests that Hamlet is unable to call up any feelings of remembrance for his father, without which any subsequent act of vengeance is impossible. Hamlet's problem is not that he does not feel what he thinks he should (a desire for vengeance), but that he does not feel what he believes he does (remembrance and filial love). In Lewis's hands, Hamlet's mourning and remembrance are superficial acts put on by a Hamlet who is the consummate "bullshit artist" (279). Hamlet hides his inability to draw up the requisite "condign intensity" (284) of filial devotion by play-acting the mournful son, at once historicizing, poeticizing, and philosophizing. Hamlet cannot face his own "ambivalence" (150) toward his father, the "condign emptiness within" (211).

The main theoretical beams Lewis employs to hold up his argument are Cicero (De officiis) and Pierre de la Primaudaye, though largely by showing Hamlet (if not Hamlet) and Shakespeare to be antagonistic to their vision of "sixteenth-century humanism" (6). Lewis then deploys Boethius (De consolatione philosophiae), Harry G. Frankfurt, and Longinus to regain some philosophical footing, but by book's end is cornered into fighting off charges of "nihilism" (309) as opposed to a mere "vision of darkness." Oddly, if a vision of darkness has been exposed, it is one grasped by none of the characters in the play, nor any spectators or even critics at perhaps any moment between the sixteenth century and the twentieth. It was grasped by Shakespeare, and now, "a little over a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, the time of Hamlet has come" (314). The time, indeed, for what? In this particularly aggressive and Manichean reading of the play, Lewis seems ready to take on all comers, with only Shakespeare in his corner.

In the topographical structure of the book Lewis characterizes Hamlet as "huntsman" (chapter 2), "historian" (chapter 3), "poet" (chapter 4), and "philosopher" (chapter 5). As huntsman, Hamlet takes up some grammar school lessons expounded by Cicero. Cicero called for hunting "in careful moderation" (98) since "a hunter … might be exceptionally skilful in his art, but he cannot thereby efface either his animal nature or what this represents" (91); only through oratory (language) can humans hope to civilize themselves. Thus Hamlet's endless pontification is him donning a "persona" in line with Ciceronian civic virtue, which he believes is an attempt (albeit one that ultimately fails) to overcome barbaric impulses. Yet to Lewis, Hamlet's personae are not the beginnings of truth or discovery. On the contrary, "personae … are the work of artifice, expedience, and stunted vision … [which] obscure reality" (110). Hamlet errs by seeing value of any kind in the demented humanism of Cicero.

As historian, Lewis argues, Hamlet's memory is not inaccurate or incapable, but rather bereft; Hamlet is faking (through several Ciceronian personae) feelings of loss and remorse. Thus he is a lousy historian: "his father's likeness does not occupy a clearly identified place within his memory," without which Hamlet "can do no more than play at the role of the revenger" (153). In public, Hamlet despises himself for not avenging; but this is cover for the greater crime of not remembering. As a poet-playwright, Hamlet does not fare much better. Lewis provides an interesting discussion of the pamphlet controversy between Robert Greene and Will Kemp over who is entitled to write a play: a learned university man (like Hamlet), or a player/actor (like Shakespeare). Though Shakespeare managed to dodge the pamphlet wars of his day, Lewis details the tension in the play between Hamlet and the players he welcomes to Elsinore, in the end siding with the players: "Only a university trained humanist [like Hamlet], infused with a sense of his own cultural entitlement, could get the business of drama and dramatic poetry so radically wrong" (195).

But the gloves really come off in the following chapter. One already senses Hamlet is a doomed philosopher...