Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine
It is rashness that we need in reading Shakespeare. Taking these words from Virginia Woolf as their license, the husband-wife team of Critchley and Webster advance a daring commentary on the Bard’s Hamlet. With help from other rash thinkers—­including Carl Schmidt, Hegel, Freud, and Nietzsche—also outside of the fraternity of literary critics, this philosopher-psychologist pair pry from Shakespeare’s play insights into politics, religion, and psychology. From Schmidt, for example, the authors steal a key for decoding a dangerous political message. (Did James I—like the troubled prince of Denmark—have a guilty mother and a murdered father?) With a nod to Hegel, the literary explorers glimpse in Hamlet’s wild exchanges with Guildenstern and Rosencrantz the hint of dialectical philosophy. Borrowing from Freud, the bold exegetes learn why Ophelia pays the price when Hamlet crosses from mourning into melancholia. And readers reckless enough to join Nietzsche in Dionysian dance will recognize in Hamlet the reason that only illusion can precipitate decisive action. A spirited literary foray by audacious interlopers. --Bryce Christensen