Reviews for Hamlet Without Hamlet

The average rating for Hamlet Without Hamlet based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-01-29 00:00:00 James A. Yates This is an excellent book. Forget everything you know about Hamlet. Chances are your ideas have been formed by ideas espoused since the early 1800s. Margreta de Grazia deals with our perceptions of Hamlet then discards them as latter day relics. She is more interested in relics of earlier days, and it shines a fresh albeit antiquarian light on the "Tragicall Historie of Hamlett." Suddenly man and dust, "generation and degeneracy," "doomsday and domain," the history of Empires and Hamlet's procrastination become important. The modern concerns of Hamlet, his feelings, his pain, his sorrow, his existential crisis, stop being matters for concern. And the return to Shakespearean concerns is enlightening. If you love Hamlet like I love(d) Hamlet, this book is an essential work. Margreta de Grazia knows her shit; she is a literary scholar of the highest order. I wish I had her acumen.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-05-13 00:00:00 Glen Callender I give the book four stars because after you read it you'll understand the play better than you did before you started it, and you'll enjoy the journey. The book however attempts to erase the numerous intractable problems the play has generated since the Restoration by going back to the time of innocence before the Restoration--a time when these problems didn't exist, when they were not seen, not recognized as problems. I cannot go along with this thesis. It may be that the problem of interpretation we today feel so keenly would have surprised Shakespeare. I doubt that, but I don't deny the possibility. The problem of Hamlet's delay (the biggest interpretive problem of the play) remains a problem of the play however. It is also a problem IN the play and for no less a character than Hamlet himself. De Grazia, to promote her thesis, has to strip the play down to the one issue of thwarted ambition. But she cannot provide any compelling reason why, among all the competing central issues of the play THIS on should get our focus, leaving me to think that her reason is simply that this is the one that if accepted would best advance her reading. I don't buy it. Nonetheless, the scholarship of this book is among the best I've seen in any extended treatment of Shakespeare. Her narrative of this history of Hamlet interpretation is invaluable, as is her catalog of interpretations for Hamlet's delay. De Grazia is a brilliant scholar. If you are interested in Hamlet, you have to read this book.