To Be and Not to Be

by James L. Calderwood

To Be and Not to Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet

222 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1983

About the author

James L. Calderwood was Professor of English and Associate Dean of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. His publications include 'Shakespearean Metadrama' (Minneapolis, 1971); 'Metadrama in Shakespeare's Henriad' (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979); 'To Be And Not To Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet' (New York, 1983); 'If It Were Done: Macbeth and Tragic Action' (Amherst, 1986); 'Shakespeare and the Denial of Death' (Amherst, 1988); and 'The Properties of Othello' (Amherst, 1989).

Reviews

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had this one in my garage from some library booksale. As is obvious from the subtitle, this is a very academic study, and what's worse, one from the 1980's, quoting everyone from Bergson, Wittgenstein and Ryle to Saussure, Jakobsen, Derrida, and of course James Joyce. Nevertheless, it was a bit better than I expected. The author uses linguistic analysis as a means of explaining some of the more obscure questions one might ask about the play, such as why Claudius isn't called Claudius and why Claudio is named at all, why father and son are both called Hamlet when they have different names in the sources, and why the King is killed twice at the end. The first two parts aren't bad, the third part just repeats the same arguments with more jargon (especially the metaphor/paradigm vs. metonymy/syntagma opposition). The basic idea is that the play is about Hamlet becoming an individual self rather than being defined as a "son" or a revenger.