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An Anthology of Criticism on Hamlet

GOETHE

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. 1796. Trans. Eric Blackall. New York: Suhrkamp, 1989. Quotation from book 4, chapter 13, pp. 145-6

"'Just to think clearly about this young man, this son of a prince,' Wilhelm went on to say. 'Visualize his position, and observe him when he learns that his father's spirit is abroad. Stand by him when, in that terrible night, the venerable ghost appears before his eyes. He is overcome by intense horror, speaks to the spirit, sees it beckon him, follows, and hears-the terrible accusation of his uncle continues to ring in his ears, with its challenge to seek revenge, and that repeated urgent cry: 'Remember me!' </p. 145> <p. 146>

'And when the ghost has vanished, what do we see standing before us? A young hero thirsting for revenge? A prince by birth, happy to be charged with unseating the usurper of his throne? Not at all! Amazement and sadness descend on this lonely spirit; he becomes bitter at the smiling villains, swears not to forget his departed father, and ends with a heavy sigh: "The time is out of joint; O cursed spite! That ever I was born to set it right!"

'In these words, so I believe, lies the key to Hamlet's whole behavior, and it is clear to me what Shakespeare has set out to portray: a heavy deed placed on a soul which is not adequate to cope with it. And it is in this sense that I find the whole play constructed. An oak tree planted in a precious pot which should only have held delicate flowers. The roots spread out, the vessel is shattered.

'A fine, pure, noble and highly moral person, but devoid of that emotional strength that characterizes a hero, goes to pieces beneath a burden that it can neither support nor cast off. Every obligation is sacred to him, but this one is too heavy. The impossible is demanded of him-not the impossible in any absolute sense, but what is impossible for him. How he twists and turns, trembles, advances and retreats, always being reminded, always reminding himself, and finally almost losing sight of his goal, yet without ever regaining happiness!'"

BRADLEY

Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy. 1904. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1919.

Full text in html file in Project Gutenberg, release date October 30, 2005 [EBook #16966]

" Let us turn now from the 'action' to the central figure in it; and, ignoring the characteristics which distinguish the heroes from one another, let us ask whether they have any common qualities which appear to be essential to the tragic effect." [19]
" His tragic characters are made of the stuff we find within ourselves and within the persons who surround them. But, by an intensification of the life which they share with others, they are raised above them; and the greatest are raised so far that, if we fully realise all that is implied in their words and actions, we become conscious that in real life we have known scarcely any one resembling them. Some, like Hamlet and Cleopatra, have genius. Others, like Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, are built on the grand scale; and desire, passion, or will attains in them a terrible force. In almost all we observe a marked one-sidedness, a predisposition in some particular direction; a total incapacity, in certain circumstances, of resisting the force which draws in this direction; a fatal tendency to identify the whole being with one interest, object, passion, or habit of mind. This, it would seem, is, for Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic trait. It is present in his early heroes, Romeo and Richard II., infatuated men, who otherwise rise comparatively little above the ordinary level. It is a fatal gift, but it carries with it a touch of greatness; and when there is joined to it nobility of mind, or genius, or immense force, we realise the full power and reach of the soul, and the conflict in which it engages acquires that magnitude which stirs not only sympathy and pity, but admiration, terror, and awe." [20]

Disagreeing with Schlegel and Coleridges's view that "Hamlet is the tragedy of reflection" and that "the cause of the hero's delay is irresolution; and the cause of this irresolution is excess of the reflective or speculative habit of mind" [p. 104], Bradley argues:
" Hamlet's irresolution, or his aversion to real action, is, according to the theory, the direct result of 'an almost enormous intellectual activity' in the way of 'a calculating consideration which attempts to exhaust all the relations and possible consequences of a deed.' And this again proceeds from an original one-sidedness of nature, strengthened by habit, and, perhaps, by years of speculative inaction. The theory describes, therefore, a man in certain respects like Coleridge himself, on one side a man of genius, on the other side, the side of will, deplorably weak, always procrastinating and avoiding unpleasant duties, and often reproaching himself in vain; a man, observe, who at any time and in any circumstances would be unequal to the task assigned to Hamlet. And thus, I must maintain, it degrades Hamlet and travesties the play. For Hamlet, according to all the indications in the text, was not naturally or normally such a man, but rather, I venture to affirm, a man who at any other time and in any other circumstances than those presented would have been perfectly equal to his task; and it is, in fact, the very cruelty of his fate that the crisis of his life comes on him at the one moment when he cannot meet it, and when his highest gifts, instead of helping him, conspire to paralyse him. This aspect of the tragedy the theory quite misses; and it does so because it misconceives the cause of that irresolution which, on the whole, it truly describes. For the cause was not directly or mainly an habitual excess [108]of reflectiveness. The direct cause was a state of mind quite abnormal and induced by special circumstances,—a state of profound melancholy. Now, Hamlet's reflectiveness doubtless played a certain part in the production of that melancholy, and was thus one indirect contributory cause of his irresolution. And, again, the melancholy, once established, displayed, as one of its symptoms, an excessive reflection on the required deed. But excess of reflection was not, as the theory makes it, the direct cause of the irresolution at all; nor was it the only indirect cause; and in the Hamlet of the last four Acts it is to be considered rather a symptom of his state than a cause of it." [107-108]

FREUD

Freud, Sigmund. “The Material and Sources of Dreams.” The Interpretation of Dreams. 1900. 3rd ed. Trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Macmillan, 1913. [ Bartleby.com, 2010. link ]

"Another of the great creations of tragic poetry, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is founded on the same basis as the Oedipus. But the whole difference in the psychic life of the two widely separated periods of civilisation—the age-long progress of repression in the emotional life of humanity—is made manifest in the changed treatment of the identical material. In Oedipus the basic wish-phantasy of the child is brought to light and realised as it is in the dream; in Hamlet it remains repressed, and we learn of its existence—somewhat as in the case of a neurosis—only by the inhibition which results from it. The fact that it is possible to remain in complete darkness concerning the character of the hero, has curiously shown itself to be consistent with the overpowering effect of the modern drama. The play is based upon Hamlet’s hesitation to accomplish the avenging task which has been assigned to him; the text does not avow the reasons or motives of this hesitation, nor have the numerous attempts at interpretation succeeded in giving them. According to the conception which is still current to-day, and which goes back to Goethe, Hamlet represents the type of man whose prime energy is paralysed by over-development of thought activity. (“Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”) According to others the poet has attempted to portray a morbid, vacillating character who is subject to neurasthenia. The plot of the story, however, teaches us that Hamlet is by no means intended to appear as a person altogether incapable of action. Twice we see him asserting himself actively, once in headlong passion, where he stabs the eavesdropper behind the arras, and on another occasion where he sends the two courtiers to the death which has been intended for himself—doing this deliberately, even craftily, and with all the lack of compunction of a prince of the Renaissance. What is it, then, that restrains him in the accomplishment of the task which his father’s ghost has set before him? Here the explanation offers itself that it is the peculiar nature of this task. Hamlet can do everything but take vengeance upon the man who has put his father out of the way, and has taken his father’s place with his mother—upon the man who shows him the realisation of his repressed childhood wishes. The loathing which ought to drive him to revenge is thus replaced in him by self-reproaches, by conscientious scruples, which represent to him that he himself is no better than the murderer whom he is to punish. I have thus translated into consciousness what had to remain unconscious in the mind of the hero; if some one wishes to call Hamlet a hysteric subject I cannot but recognise it as an inference from my interpretation. The sexual disinclination which Hamlet expresses in conversation with Ophelia, coincides very well with this view—it is the same sexual disinclination which was to take possession of the poet more and more during the next few years of his life, until the climax of it is expressed in Timon of Athens. Of course it can only be the poet’s own psychology with which we are confronted in Hamlet; from a work on Shakespeare by George Brandes (1896), I take the fact that the drama was composed immediately after the death of Shakespeare’s father—that is to say, in the midst of recent mourning for him—during the revival, we may assume, of his childhood emotion towards his father. It is also known that a son of Shakespeare’s, who died early, bore the name of Hamnet (identical with Hamlet). Just as Hamlet treats of the relation of the son to his parents, Macbeth, which appears subsequently, is based upon the theme of childlessness. Just as every neurotic symptom, just as the dream itself, is capable of re-interpretation, and even requires it in order to be perfectly intelligible, so every genuine poetical creation must have proceeded from more than one motive, more than one impulse in the mind of the poet, and must admit of more than one interpretation. I have here attempted to interpret only the most profound group of impulses in the mind of the creative poet. The conception of the Hamlet problem contained in these remarks has been later confirmed in a detailed work based on many new arguments by Dr. Ernest Jones, of Toronto (Canada). The connection of the Hamlet material with the “Mythus von der Geburt des Helden” has also been demonstrated by O. Rank.—“The Oedipus Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: a Study in Motive” (American Journal of Psychology, January 1910, vol. xxi.)."

WINSTANLEY

Winstanley, Lilian. "Hamlet" and the Scottish Succession. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1921.

Conlusions chapter

One thing seems, at any rate, absolutely certain, that Shakespeare is using a large element of contemporary history in Hamlet.

It appears to me that in the total construction of the play, the literary source is comparatively unimportant, and the historical source exceedingly important.

All the things that give us the essence of the Shakespearean drama are really historical; the secret murder, the use of poison, the voice of accusation heard in the night, the graphic representation reproducing the murder, the crucial character of Hamlet himself with his hesitancy and his reluctance to punish—the centre of the whole—the character of Claudius and his attitude towards Hamlet, the murder of Polonius, the character of Polonius, Hamlet's relation to the Players, the treatment of the Play which brings Hamlet's own neck into jeopardy, the love-story of Ophelia, the casket motive, the madness motive, the rivalry between Hamlet and Laertes, the way in which they are pitted against each other so that both may be destroyed, the grave-digger's scene, the fight in the grave, the entrance of Fortinbras—for all these no analogues can be found in the saga source (either Saxo or Belleforest), and very minute and close analogues can be found in the contemporary history of most immediate interest.

The Essex conspiracy and the Scottish succession were the questions of burning interest at the time, any audience would be certain to feel their appeal and Shakespeare himself, as I have shown, had a double reason for a strong personal interest.

These events involved the fate of his dramatic company which was compromised by its connection with the Essex conspiracy and involved the fate of the man who was certainly his patron and possibly his dearest friend— Southampton— and who was even then in danger of death. Shakespeare desired to write about these subjects, and he did write about them, only he called them something else.

We have good reasons for believing that this method was fairly often followed.

(1) The authorities continually suspected the players of introducing political motives into their plays.

(2) Dr Haywarde was accused of having turned Henry IV into a contemporary parallel.

(3) Shakespeare's company were accused of having done the same thing in Richard II; Shakespeare's own play.

(4) Shakespeare himself has shown us in Hamlet's treatment of the Gonzago play both how it could be done, and how dangerous it was to do it.

It seems to me that Shakespeare selected the Amleth saga in almost precisely the spirit in which Hamlet selected the Gonzago story. The Amleth story was sufficiently well-known to be excellent as a disguise, it was sufficiently remote to place no restrictions upon his handling, he was free to modify it as much as he chose, and he did modify it till there was hardly any of the original left.

[...]
Let us summarise briefly the way in which we have found political history to be used as material in the case of Hamlet.

(1) At the period when Hamlet was written, the two great subjects of universal interest were the question of the Scottish succession and the fate of the Essex conspirators; moreover, these two subjects were so intimately connected that they formed but one in the popular mind and, therefore, in treating them as one, Shakespeare would be simply working to a unity already existing in the minds of his audience. The fate of Essex and the fate of James have been blent in one destiny, and Shakespeare sees that, by blending them in one play, he can make a really magnificent drama.

(2) Shakespeare himself is particularly and passionately interested in both these subjects, not only as every patriotic Englishman must be interested in the fate of his country, but because the fate of his dramatic company has been involved in that of the Essex conspirators and because his best beloved friend is even then in danger of death.

(3) This theme, as it stands, cannot be treated under actual names, partly because it will only become dramatic if concentrated, and partly because the censorship will intervene if real names are employed.

(4) Shakespeare evades both difficulties by choosing as a disguise, the story of Hamlet; this enables him to concentrate the history and so turn it into magnificent dramatic material and it enables him, also, to evade the censorship.

(5) The process results in what might be termed a "doubling of parts," so that one dramatic figure serves for two or more historic personages.

(6) Hamlet is mainly James I, but these are certainly large elements in his character and story taken from Essex, and probably some from Southampton. It is only the "melancholy" Essex of the last fatal years who could thus be combined with the more sombre James, and even so the character has been found by many eminent critics to be not psychologically consistent, and by almost all critics to be particularly difficult to interpret as a unity.

(7) Claudius, in the murder portion of the story, represents the elder Bothwell, in his relations to Hamlet the younger Bothwell; his attitude towards Laertes, and Hamlet is that of Robert Cecil towards Raleigh and Essex. His character is largely that of the elder Bothwell as drawn by Buchanan, but with added elements of subtlety and treachery. Here again, the blending of the two subjects works into a unity.

(8) Polonius, in most of the relations of his life, is a minute and careful study of Burleigh, but his end is the dramatic end of Rizzio. Here again, the two subjects are blent into a unity.

(9) The play has two sources: the Amleth saga and contemporary history, of which the latter is by far the more important. The intense vibrating, passionate interest of the play is probably due to the fact that the subject was, of all possible subjects, the one most near to the poet and his audience, its eminently artistic form is due to the fact that the poet has moulded his material as much as he pleased, and that his guiding principle has always been the artistic and dramatic effect.

If the account given above of Hamlet be really correct, then the play is mythology rather than psychology, or, perhaps, it would be fairer to define it as mythology on its way towards psychology. For a variety of reasons this seems to me inherently plausible. To interpret Shakespeare almost exactly as if he were nineteenth-century psychology is surely to thrust him out of his place in the order of development. The psychology of the sixteenth century cannot exactly resemble ours, and must have some points of difference. Why not this resemblance to mythology?

In the second place, as even such a thorough-going psychologist as Mr Bradley admits, some, at any rate, of Shakespeare's plays do produce very much the effect of ancient mythology. It seems to me that this effect is characteristic of a good many: that Shakespeare's Hamlet, his Lear, his Prospero, can hold their own even beside Achilles and Priam, Œdipus, Arthur, and Merlin. They are as universal and as romantic.

[...]
Shakespeare has taken from the story of James I all that was most tragic and most pathetic, and from his character all that was most enigmatic, most attractive, and most interesting. He has taken from the story of James the Orestes-like central theme: the theme of the man whose father has been murdered, and whose mother has married the murderer. Shakespeare has also taken from James the central traits of Hamlet's character; the hatred of bloodshed, the irresolution, the philosophic mind, the fear of action, the hesitation to punish which is half weakness and half generosity.

Only in Shakespeare the interest is concentrated as it is not in the history. In the history it was the elder Bothwell who murdered James's father and the younger Bothwell who held James in a kind of duresse vile, and threatened his life. By the simple expedient of combining in one the parts of the two Bothwells, Shakespeare gains dramatic unity and an enormous concentration of interest. The tragic motive of the father's murder is now brought into the closest possible relation with the tragic motive of the son's hesitancy and irresolution, and the two together make a drama of the most powerful and moving kind. What the story gains is what the stage so emphatically demands: compression and unity.

But this is not enough!

The tale of James I is not finished and not complete; nothing is rounded off. But the tragedy can be completed by uniting with it the tragedy of Essex, which, as we have said, is already one theme with it in the minds of the audience. By uniting the tragedy of Essex, Shakespeare gains a whole group more of most dramatic and interesting themes: the longing for seclusion and study, the desire to retire from Court, yet remaining obediently at the express wish and desire of the Queen, even the suit of "inky blackness" is reminiscent of the mourning of Essex as the populace had last seen him at his trial and execution. The feeling of profound melancholy, the longing for death, resembles that of Essex in his later years, so does the rivalry with Laertes, the sense of fatality and doom, it is in the terrible death which befell Essex that we have the clue to Hamlet's shrinking from disfigurement and defilement after death.

It is from this source that we get the generosity and kindness of Hamlet's relation to the players, his tampering with the play and the ill influence this has on his own fate. It is because of this that we have the lack of ambition and the dying voice given to Fortinbras; these resemblances are pointed by giving us in the death-scene a quotation from the dying words of Essex. It is from this source, doubtless, that we have the element of the courtier and the soldier, the winning charm of personality which we are told have been prominent in Hamlet, for the last thing Fortinbras says of him is that he must have "the soldier's music and the rites of war."

[...]
Nevertheless, it does seem possible that Hamlet may have, in addition to its purely artistic motive, a political motive also: that motive being simply the endeavour to excite as much sympathy as possible for the Essex conspirators, and for the Scottish succession, since it really was the accession of James which set Southampton free from the Tower, and restored Shakespeare's company once more to the favour of a monarch; also it is more than probable that Shakespeare thought the Scottish succession would deliver , the whole country from subservience to Spain.

In so far as Hamlet is James I, it seems to me that Shakespeare means to excite in us the desire to withdraw Hamlet, from the Denmark which cannot appreciate him, and to give him a wider and a finer sphere. We know that James himself welcomed with all his heart his release from Scotland with its many restrictions, its many perils, and its necessity for endless subterfuges, and welcomed the greater freedom of the English throne.

In so far as Hamlet is Essex, the political motive is to stress his own unwillingness for the life of courts and of ambition, his noble unsuspiciousness and the generous, but misplaced confidence which led him to his doom; his instability of character is shown, his rashness, his passionateness, but through it all his nobility and the pathos of his fate. Hamlet in death is singularly anxious as Essex was anxious that his memory shall be cleared, and the circumstances are admitted to be strange and doubtful.

Now, if the method of construction be the one explained above, we can hardly expect to find a psychologic unity in Hamlet, and I submit that, as a matter of fact, we do not.

[...]
The final conclusion I arrive at is that it is not advisable to think our study of Shakespeare's plays complete without careful reference to the history of his own time.

SMIRNOV

Smirnov, A. A. Shakespeare: A Marxist Interpretation. Trans. Sonia Volochova. New York: The Critic's Group, 1936.

Patrick Chura explains that Smirnov sees Hamlet as ‘a play set during the "epoch of primary accumulation" (Smirnov 64) and depicting the "rise of the bourgeoisie" (ibid. 64) while predicting the "gigantic moral cataclysm of its downfall" (ibid. 64) as outlined in The Communist Manifesto, in which a humanistic Hamlet's 'worldly sorrow' stems from his disgust with the "practical philistinism of the bourgeoisie" (ibid. 66).’
‘Predictably, the official Soviet view of Laertes' rebellion, given by Smirnov, interprets the rebellion through the lens of class struggle and portrays Laertes as a representative of a militaristic feudal aristocracy. "When Laertes learns of his father's death, " Smirnov argues, "he behaves like a feudal lord, bursting into the palace with armed men to demand an answer from the king" (63). In Chekhov's production, however, the scene is infused with a "bright red" that seems clearly to enhance the suggestion not of a haughty aristocracy, but of an angry proletariat revolution; and the reporting of the scene is handled by Judelevičius with a deftness necessitated by the quite apparent anti-Bolshevik implications’

Source: Patrick Chura, “Hamlet and the Failure of Soviet Authority in Lithuania”, Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences 46.6 (2000) <http://www.lituanus.org/2000/00_4_02.htm>

WILLIAMS

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. 1977

In Marxism and Literature (1977), Raymond Williams ‘developed a dymanic model of ideology that many students of literature and culture have found very useful. Williams suggests that we see every text (or other cultural practice) as the site in which three phases of ideological development can be traced. These phases he calls dominant, residual and emergent (1977: 121-8)’ (Pope, 109)
- dominant: ‘those aspects of the text which express the socially privileged and central ways of seeing and saying of its age: the dominant discourse in the present’
- residual: ‘those ways of seeing and saying that were once central and dominant but have now been superseded and are only evident as vestiges: these were often the dominant discourse of the past’
-emergent: ‘perceived as precursors of new ways of saying and seeing: these may become dominant discourses of the future’ (Pope 109)
‘In short, every text can be grasped as a site where the discourses of the past, present and future meet and contend. We might see Hamlet, for instance, as a play where residual feudal models of society are challenged by emergent forms of individualism, with both set against the dominant contemporary model of the nation-state (Pope, 110)
Works do not simply reflect or represent a single fixed ideology, but refract ideologies (plural) as part of the continuing process of struggle (Pope, 110)

Source: Pope, Rob. The English Studies Book. Routledge, 1998.

COHEN

Cohen, Walter. Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Walter Cohen discusses Hamlet in his “Chapter 6: Aristocratic Failure: Satiric Comedy and the Forms of Serious Drama”, and stresses that Shakespeare showed a ‘critical commitment throughout his career to aristocratic rule in general and monarchical power in general’ and that ‘ his tragic period is the climatic dramatic representation of the failings of absolutism’ (306), ‘the failure of the aristocracy to adapt to social and political change’ (282).
Julius Caesar and Hamlet ‘portray the heroic defeat of the finest representatives of the aristocracy by those members of their class who embody the more typical and despicable features of power’ (306).
‘Yet neither these plays nor Troilus and Cressida, the last of Elizabethan tragedies, offers a consistent perspective on the social or ideological significance of such struggles’ (306-307).
‘In Hamlet . . . Hamlet’s inwardness is a matter of conscience, a rejection of the external and hollow rites of the Danish court’ (307)
[Horatio’s report of Hamlet’s story to the world] fails to capture the depth of Hamlet’s experience, a depth available only to the audience. Yet even to the audience, and even to those members of it who could see in Hamlet’s identification with Wittenberg a synthesis of Renaissance and Reformation [T. Metscher 1977] ... the precise ideological significance of Hamlet remains somewhat obscure.]
‘After 1603 . . . Shakespeare shifts focus subtly but crucially. Most of his protagonists in the plays ... are victims, if not always of the rise of capitalism, then at least of some dimensions of bourgeois ideology’ (307).
Whereas national history [in Shakespeare’s history plays] ‘pits feudalism against absolutism’, tragedy [pits] ‘absolutism against capitalism’

feudalism vs. absolutism : a struggle within the same aristocratic class, and ‘its outcome, from the point of view of that class, was not necessarily tragic’

absolutism vs. capitalism involves an antagonism between two classes (308)

‘Awareness of the shattering force of the new economic and social relations could easily have caused Shakespeare to retreat to a relatively uncritical defense of absolutism. ... But the confrontation with bourgeois ideology instead led him to recognize that the standard justifications of absolutism were equally ideological [Eagleton Criticism and Ideology p. 96] (308)

UBERSFELD

Ubersfeld, Anne. Reading Theatre. [trans. Lire le théâtre 1 (Editions Belin, 1996)] Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

[Greimas's actantial model applied to Hamlet]

" b/ Another possibility is the presence of two shifted schemes, as in *Hamlet*:

S = the Father ------> Sj = Hamlet

O = the Father <-------------Op = Claudius

the mother the mother

(murder of Claudius) Polonius (the Father)

_______________________|

Sj = Laërtes

O = the Father <-------------Op = Hamlet

the Sister

(murder of Hamlet)

The reversibility of the action here prepares for the defeat and death of Laërtes and Hamlet, both combatants in a lost cause; the structure here calls for the integration of a new element, the young King Fortinbras, who is not caught up in the problematics of the death of the father, or more precisely, not disarmed by that death."

SMITH

Smith, Rebeca. 1980. "A Heart Cleft in Twain: the Dilemma of Shakespeare's Gertrude". The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 194-210. Reprinted in Ed. Martin Coyle. Hamlet: New Casebooks. Macmillan, 1992. 80-93.

In her essay, Smith questions the interpretation of Gertrude as a stereotype of the temptress figure, as a deceitful and lascivious woman, which is the view created by the male characters in the tragedy. Smith proposes instead that we examine Gertrude's own words and actions. The view now is that of another female stereotype: a subordinate, dependent, obedient, soft and unimaginative woman. She is marginalized by her situation between two "mighty opposites" (her son and her husband). Smith traces the development of the hero's mother through the sources of the tragedy.

SHOWALTER

Showalter, Elaine. 1985. "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism". Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. London: Routledge. Reprinted in: Ed. Martin Coyle. Hamlet: New Casebooks. Macmillan, 1992. Reprinted in: S. L. Wofford, ed. William Shakespeare: Hamlet. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford/St Martin's Press, 1994. 220-40.

BOOTH

Booth, Stephen 1969. “On the Value of Hamlet.” Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama. Ed. N. Rabkin. New York and London: Columbia University Press. 137-176. Rpt. in Hamlet, New Casebooks, ed. Martin Coyle, 1992.

LITVIN

Litvin, Margaret. Hamlet's Arab Journey. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Princeton

Liberals, nationalists, and Islamists have enlisted Hamlet for their causes. Directors and playwrights have invited him into their work. Preachers, polemicists, filmmakers, novelists, poets, memoirists - no matter how public or private the message, Arab writers have drafted and redrafted Hamlet to help them express it (2).

The Arab Hamlet's "multilayered history helps suggest a new analytical frame for scholarship on literary reception and appropriation: a frame that breaks out of the binary categories (influencer/ influence, colonizer/colonized, and more recently, Arabs7West) that have shaped the study of postcolonial literatures (2).

Hamlet's reception history contravenes the postcolonial model. As we will see, British models were important but not decisive. Certainly there were British schools with required English classes; schoolchildren read abridgments (such as Charles and May Lamb's tales from Shakespeare) in both English and Arabic. But the earliest Arabic Shakespeare adaptations, written by Syro-Lebanese immigrants who knew French better than English, reflected mainly French Neoclasscial theater conventions and the tastes of Cairo's emerging middle class. at every moment, the geopolitical configuration helped determine which cultural models seemed most attractive. There were Italian acting styles, French and British traveling productions, Arab and international literary criticism, and, still later, American and Soviet productions and films. Arab students who pursued advanced degrees abroad (in Paris, Rome, London, Moscow, Sofia, Berlin, Prague, and Budapest or in various American cities) also returned with books and ideas (7-8).