Jamieson Webster,Simon Critchley
The figure of Hamlet haunts our culture like the ghost haunts Shakespeareâ€™s melancholy Dane. Arguably, no literary work is more familiar to us. Everyone knows at least six words from ,Hamlet,, and most people know many more. Yet the playâ€”Shakespeareâ€™s longestâ€”is more than â€œpassing strange,â€ and it becomes even more complex when considered closely.Â ,Â ,Reading ,Hamlet, alongside other writers, philosophers, and psychoanalystsâ€”Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Melville, and Joyceâ€”Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster go in search of a particularly modern drama that is as much about ourselves as it is a product of Shakespeareâ€™s imagination. They also offer a startling interpretation of the action onstage: it is structured around â€œnothingâ€â€”or, in the enigmatic words of the player queen, â€œit nothing must.â€ ,Â ,From the illusion of theater and the spectacle of statecraft to the psychological interplay of inhibition and emotion, ,Hamlet, discloses the modern paradox of our lives: how thought and action seem to pull against each other, the one annulling the possibility of the other. As a counterweight to Hamletâ€™s melancholy paralysis, Ophelia emerges as the playâ€™s true hero. In her madness, she lives the love of which Hamlet is incapable.,Â ,Avoiding the customary clichÃ©s about the timelessness of the Bard, Critchley and Webster show the timely power of ,Hamlet, to cast light on the intractable dilemmas of human existence in a world that is rotten and out of joint.
Nonfiction,Criticism,Literary Criticism,Philosophy,Psychology,Plays,Theatre,Psychology,Psychoanalysis,Philosophy,Theory,Criticism,Writing,Essays,Literature
Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine