Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine Book

The figure of Hamlet haunts our culture like the Ghost haunts him. Arguably, no literary work is more familiar to us than Shakespeare's tragedy. Everyone knows at least six words from the play, often people know many more. Yet, the play—Shakespeare's longest—is more than "passing strange" and becomes more and more unfamiliar when considered closely.
Reading the drama alongside other writers, philosophers and psychoanalysts—Schmitt, Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Melville, and Joyce—the authors go in search of a particularly modern drama that is as much about ourselves as Shakespeare's imagination. They also offer a startling interpretation of the action on stage: it is structured around "nothing"—or in the enigmatic words of the player queen "it nothing must."

From the illusion of theatre and the spectacle of statecraft to the psychological theater of inhibition and emotion, the drama 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 clichés about the timelessness of the Bard, Simon Critchley and Jamieson 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.