'Hamlet' Without Hamlet

by Margreta de Grazia

'Hamlet' without Hamlet sets out to counter the modern tradition of abstracting the character Hamlet from the play. For over two centuries, Hamlet has been valued as the icon of consciousness: but only by ignoring the hard fact of his dispossession. By admitting that premise, this book brings the play to life around man's relation to land, from graves to estate to empire. Key preoccupations are thereby released, including the gendered imperatives of genealogy, and man's elemental affinity to dust. As de Grazia demonstrates from the 400 years of Hamlet's afterlife, such features have disappeared into the vortex of an interiorized Hamlet, but they remain in the language of the play as well as in the earliest accounts of its production. Once reactivated, a very different Hamlet emerges, one whose thoughts and desires are thickly embedded in the worldly, and otherworldly, matters of the play: a Hamlet within Hamlet.

Genres: Shakespeare, Criticism, Nonfiction

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 8, 2007

About the author

Margreta de Grazia received her PhD in English from Princeton with a specialization in Renaissance literature. Her first book Shakespeare Verbatim (Oxford, 1991) traces the emergence of Shakespeare as a modern author from late eighteenth-century editorial imperatives. Her second book, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge, 2007), awarded both the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize and the Elizabeth Dietz Award, demonstrates how the modern tradition of psychologizing Hamlet has effaced both the play's and the protagonist's preoccupation with land and entitlement.

She has also co-edited Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge, 1996) with Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass and both the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2001) and the New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2010) with Stanley Wells. Her interests at present include Shakespeare as an historical and cultural phenomenon, early modern notions of subjectivity and authorship, the production and ownership of early modern texts, and the chronologizing, periodizing, and secularizing of Shakespeare.

She has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation and is presently the Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Professor of the Humanities. In 2005 she received the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching and in 2010, the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring.

(from https://www.english.upenn.edu/People/...)

Reviews

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book.

Forget everything you know about Hamlet. Chances are your ideas have been formed by ideas espoused since the early 1800s. Margreta de Grazia deals with our perceptions of Hamlet then discards them as latter day relics. She is more interested in relics of earlier days, and it shines a fresh albeit antiquarian light on the "Tragicall Historie of Hamlett."

Suddenly man and dust, "generation and degeneracy," "doomsday and domain," the history of Empires and Hamlet's procrastination become important. The modern concerns of Hamlet, his feelings, his pain, his sorrow, his existential crisis, stop being matters for concern. And the return to Shakespearean concerns is enlightening.

If you love Hamlet like I love(d) Hamlet, this book is an essential work. Margreta de Grazia knows her shit; she is a literary scholar of the highest order. I wish I had her acumen.

[D · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the bit about moles and soil

[Alan Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I give the book four stars because after you read it you'll understand the play better than you did before you started it, and you'll enjoy the journey. The book however attempts to erase the numerous intractable problems the play has generated since the Restoration by going back to the time of innocence before the Restoration--a time when these problems didn't exist, when they were not seen, not recognized as problems. I cannot go along with this thesis. It may be that the problem of interpretation we today feel so keenly would have surprised Shakespeare. I doubt that, but I don't deny the possibility. The problem of Hamlet's delay (the biggest interpretive problem of the play) remains a problem of the play however. It is also a problem IN the play and for no less a character than Hamlet himself. De Grazia, to promote her thesis, has to strip the play down to the one issue of thwarted ambition. But she cannot provide any compelling reason why, among all the competing central issues of the play THIS on should get our focus, leaving me to think that her reason is simply that this is the one that if accepted would best advance her reading. I don't buy it.

Nonetheless, the scholarship of this book is among the best I've seen in any extended treatment of Shakespeare. Her narrative of this history of Hamlet interpretation is invaluable, as is her catalog of interpretations for Hamlet's delay. De Grazia is a brilliant scholar. If you are interested in Hamlet, you have to read this book.

[Rhys Pearce · Rating 5 out of 5]

omw to kidnap Harold Bloom and force him to read this