Description
Book SynopsisThis book challenges the common-place conception of Hamlet as an introverted figure, estranged from the world around him. It reveals the play as a drama of princely dispossession set in a volatile political context, whose concerns are crucially those of land and empire, inheritance and religion.
Trade Review'… boldly original and richly stimulating book … one of the most rewarding critical accounts of this over-interpreted play to have appeared for some time.' Professor Dr Dieter Mehl
'… 'Hamlet' without Hamlet is a powerful, tremendously erudite, and often brilliantly inventive reckoning of what time has done to our ability to read, and to comprehend, Shakespeare's play.' Shakespeare Quarterly
'De Grazia certainly blows some dust off this most familiar of plays.' Plays International
'Anyone, at any level, interested in how drama engages with models of the mind will benefit from its author's combination of sophisticated and sensitive close-reading with compendious knowledge of the history of ideas and criticism.' New Theatre Quarterly
'This fascinating book is full of genuine insight; its analysis of critical history is salutary and worthwhile.' The Times Literary Supplement
Table of ContentsPreface: Hamlet without Hamlet; 1. Modern Hamlet; 2. 'Old Mole': the modern Telos and the return to dust; 3. Empires of world history; 4. Generation and degeneracy; 5. Doomsday and domain; 6. Hamlet's delay; Select bibliography.
