Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet
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Abstract
There is a tradition of reading Hamlet against the tradition of reading Hamlet : just as actors in the role have attempted to shake off the overbearing weight of other Hamlets, so too have commentators attempted to unsettle received notions of the play. The most conspicuous recent example of this effort is Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor’s third edition of the Arden Hamlet (2006), which prints separately the 1603 Quarto, the 1604–5 Quarto, and the 1623 Folio editions, refuting the possibility of a clear and authoritative text (yet, enigmatically, giving pride of place to the Second Quarto by publishing the other two editions as a supplement). In ‘‘Hamlet’’ without Hamlet, Margreta de Grazia also sets out to upend the ‘‘establishment’’ Hamlet. Her new study identifies what she calls a blind spot in the history of literary criticism: for the past two centuries, critics have interpreted Hamlet without properly attending to Hamlet. The character of Hamlet has drawn so much attention as, variously, the exemplar, paragon, and progenitor of modern consciousness, that he has been abstracted from the play in which he is found. In discussing Hamlet without Hamlet, de Grazia would reverse this trend; her intention is not to expunge Hamlet from the discussion of the eponymous play but rather to expose the contours of the Hamlet that has emerged in the critical tradition—affiliated with inwardness, interiority, even modernity itself—and to offer a reading of the prince and his play that this tradition has made hitherto unavailable. This elegant and passionate book, which builds off several essays previously published by de Grazia, offers a rebuke to modish presentist approaches: by negotiating carefully between historical and formalist readings of the play, de Grazia helps us to