![]() ![]() The only sticking point is the suspicion that if the history of Hamlet criticism sheds so much light on those who wrote it, then those who wrote it might not always have put themselves in a position from which to offer revealing criticism of the play.īy contrast, Margreta de Grazia insists that we start again. One might regret the narrowness of Bevington’s focus (not least because Murder Most Foul ranges some way beyond the confines of the Anglosphere), but it would be hard to dissent from the tenor of his judgement. can be seen as a kind of paradigm for the cultural history of the English-speaking world”. Analogously, David Bevington estimates that “the staging, criticism and editing of Hamlet . . . On this reckoning, Hamlet criticism is a literary Rorschach test in which pretty much anything goes-one in which critics project their own theories, preoccupations, or neuroses, or in which they vie to offer perceptions of the play that are calculated to display their creative virtuosity, or in which they seek to confirm their methodological or ideological fraternity. As Harry Levin put it in the late 1950s, Polonius’s response to “Hamlet’s ink-blot test-his agreement that the cloud resembles now a weasel, then a camel, now again a whale-succinctly foreshadows the process of interpreting the play” evinced by its modern students. Hamlet has played host to an unusually diverse, though only seldom antipodal, range of interpretations. At the same time, there has been little or no consensus as to how this enigma should be decoded. Hamlet emerged as an epoch-making figure, an enigma through whom Shakespeare dramatized the struggle of the modern subject to find a path through the suffocating thickets of moral, personal, and political existence. ![]() Shaftesbury may have laid the egg, but it took the Romantic sensibility for it to hatch. ![]() To any student of the play, Kerrigan’s view is familiar and widely confirmed. Schlegel, and their English epigone, Coleridge. Which is to say that as an object of critical attention, Hamlet only comes to life with the tragedy of thought, thwarted self-realisation, and philosophical yearning imagined by Goethe, A.W. William Kerrigan identifies a slightly later starting point for modern Hamlet criticism: “it all begins with the Romantic Germans”. Just as directors have felt compelled to cut-and sometimes to rearrange-in order to stage Hamlet successfully, so scholars and critics have neglected those aspects of the play that have threatened to hinder their interpretations of its central character. ![]() Within this, the emphasis is placed squarely on Hamlet the morally and philosophically significant character at the expense of Hamlet the ambiguous and frequently bewildering work of drama. But a disconcerting fact remains: Shaftesbury was the first, or one of the first, to delineate an approach to Hamlet that has held the field since the second half of the eighteenth century. Faced with such comments, one might respond that Shaftesbury was a woefully bad reader of vernacular literature, and that his over-fastidious tastes are precisely the sort of thing that Shakespeare enjoyed turning on its head. It may properly be said of this Play, if I mistake not, that it has only One Character or principal Part”. Hamlet was particularly noteworthy in this respect, and was to be viewed as “almost one continu’d Moral: a Series of deep Reflections, drawn from one Mouth, upon the Subject of one single Accident and Calamity, naturally fitted to move Horrour and Compassion. And yet Shakespeare was not to be dismissed out of hand: “the Justness of his Moral, the Aptness of many of his Descriptions, and the plain and natural Turn of several of his Characters” meant that he could help to nurture the self-examination and self-discourse on which Shaftesbury believed moral knowledge must be based. Surveying the development of English drama from the vantage of the early 1700s, he lamented Shakespeare’s “natural Rudeness, his unpolish’d Stile, his antiquated Phrase and Wit, his want of Method and Coherence, and his Deficiency in almost all the Graces and Ornaments of this kind of Writing”. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, was no fan of Shakespeare. ![]()
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