Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine

The figure of Hamlet haunts our culture like the ghost haunts Shakespeare€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 play€"Shakespeare€s longest€"is more than €œpassing strange,€ and it becomes even more complex when considered closely. 
 
Reading Hamlet alongside other writers, philosophers, and psychoanalysts€"Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Melville, and Joyce€"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 Shakespeare€s imagination. They also offer a startling interpretation of the action onstage: it is structured around €œnothing€€"or, in the enigmatic words of the player queen, €œit nothing must.€
 
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 Hamlet€s melancholy paralysis, Ophelia emerges as the play€s true hero. In her madness, she lives the love of which Hamlet is incapable.
 
Avoiding the customary clich©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.