Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness - Hardcover

Lewis, Rhodri

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691166846 ISBN 13: 9780691166841

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2018

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness is a radical new interpretation of the most famous play in the English language. By exploring Shakespeare's engagements with the humanist traditions of early modern England and Europe, Rhodri Lewis reveals a Hamlet unseen for centuries: an innovative, coherent, and exhilaratingly bleak tragedy in which the governing ideologies of Shakespeare's age are scrupulously upended.

This book establishes that life in Elsinore is measured not by virtue but by the deceptions and grim brutality of the hunt. It also shows that Shakespeare most vividly represents this reality in the character of Hamlet: his habits of thought and speech depend on the cultures of pretence that he affects to disdain, ensuring his alienation from both himself and the world around him.

Lewis recovers a work of far greater magnitude than the tragedy of a young man who cannot make up his mind. He shows that in Hamlet, as in King Lear, Shakespeare confronts his audiences with a universe that received ideas are powerless to illuminate―and where everyone must find their own way through the dark.

A major contribution to Shakespeare studies, this book is required reading for all students of early modern literature, drama, culture, and history.

About this title

About the Author

Rhodri Lewis is professor of English Literature and a fellow of St Hugh's College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke and William Petty on the Order of Nature.

From the Back Cover

"This spectacular book teaches us to read Hamlet as a searing critique of the humanist verities that Shakespeare and his audience had mastered at school—principles and practices that had guided generations. Rhodri Lewis's reading of Hamlet revises both our intellectual and our literary histories of late Renaissance England."--Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

"Rhodri Lewis provides us with a brilliantly revisionary account of Shakespeare's Hamlet--the character, the play, and the place of both in modern culture. Lewis’s Hamlet is an individual reflecting on his own emerging individuality, and Lewis excavates (through meticulous and often arresting scholarship) the philosophical, social, and imaginative origins and history of that individual. This is a book not just for Shakespeareans but for anyone concerned with how literature teaches us both how to be and not to be."--Seth Lerer, University of California, San Diego

"An absorbing and provocative book with a timely and important argument."--Raphael Lyne, University of Cambridge

"Rhodri Lewis comprehensively resituates Hamlet within the discursive parameters of late sixteenth-century humanism while making a significant contribution to recent reassessments of humanism's unintended consequences. Particularly noteworthy and arresting is his account of the many ways Hamlet stages, only to dismantle, received Roman ideals about persona, ‘character,’ and identity in public as well as private life."--Lynn Enterline, Vanderbilt University

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691166846
• ISBN 13: 9780691166841
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 392