"Hamlet" without Hamlet

Abstract

"Hamlet" without Hamlet, by Margreta de Grazia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 267. Cloth $101.00; paper $41.99. Margreta de Grazia's "Hamlet" without Hamlet rejects two hundred years of psychological readings of the play's hero to ground her interpretation of Hamlet in ground itself, in "the close relationship between human and humus, man and manor," and even Hamlet and hamlet (6). This attention to the land resurrects both the political nature of the play as a dynastic struggle and resurrects the plot, too often ignored since Coleridge in favor of character. Overall, de Grazia's book provides a refreshing view of the tragedy, though this view makes the play less exceptional among its Renaissance fellows and more connected, in the end, to the late medieval tradition of drama. De Grazia begins by summarizing the psychological approaches to the play from Coleridge and Hegel through Lacan and Nicolas Abraham, for all of whom Hamlet is a play of "futurity" (19), ahead of its time in its attention to the mental states of the hero: "Since 1800, he has proven capable of accommodating each new modification of inwardness, including the unconscious and the unconscious that is structured like language" (22). One might note that this connection of Hamlet to "futurity" actually goes back a hundred years earlier, to 1702, when Edward Bysshe applies that label to the "To be or not to be" soliloquy in The Art of English Poetry. Bysshe' s sense of "futurity," however, was supernal, while the numerous romantic and postromantic appropriations of Hamlet that de Grazia coherently surveys make Hamlet of the future by his always conforming to successive modern theories of psychology. To undo these modernizations by showing what the play "could not possibly be after 1800 and as long as Hamlet's interiori ty was taken as the vortical subject" (5), de Grazia then examines the deracination of modern Western man. Hegel's narrative of how the Reformation turned within (not to sacred sites) to find holiness and Marx's narrative of how early modern capitalism converted people into rootless vendors of their own labor make it hard for us to see Hamlet's connections to land. In the play itself, Hamlet is not so disconnected: a series of puns and other pointers that de Grazia unearths keeps the dirt, stage space, and empire over which Hamlet conflicts with the gravedigger, Laertes, and Claudius in our faces: for example, mole and mold (29), moor as an insult for Claudius and as a place (33), hide as a unit of land (35), plot (36-37), groundlings (44), the false etymology of clown as colonus "a tiller of the soil" (44, 132), and even such phrases as Hamlet's "my wit's diseased," the last word sharing "both spelling and pronunciation with diseized: to be illegitimately dispossessed of lands" (157). I could, perhaps pedantically, add to de Grazia' s store of wordplay connecting Hamlet to the land his line on "the skull of a lawyer": "where be his quiddits now, his quillets ... ?" There is a statute from 1597-98, concerning Beynershe (Benhurst) in Berkshire noting that "the sayde Hundred doth consiste onely of five small Villages and thre small Quylletts or Hamletts" (The Statutes of the Realm, 1819, vol. 4, part 2, chap. 25, p. 929). This area is, interestingly, close to the route from London to Stratford. Besides noting the continual puns on land in Hamlet, de Grazia details, in close readings of various passages, "the play's own preoccupation with the process of history, the alternations of state that punctuate world history, as one kingdom gives way to another in what might be called a premodern imperial schema that assumes the eventual fall of all kingdoms and their final subsumption by the apocalyptic kingdom-to-come" (65). That large-scale view of the shape of history in chapter 3 gives way in chapter 4 to Hamlet's concerns with generational turnover and thwarted inheritance. …