Hamlet and the vision of darkness
By: Rhodri Lewis
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 365
ISBN-13: 9780691166841
Description: "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"--Dust jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 325-354) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : Hamlet within Hamlet; title: Hamlet, Humanism, and Performing the Self; title: Humanism, Self-Knowledge, and Public Living; title: Moral Dislocation and the Unsettled Self; title: Hamlet, Hunting and the Nature of Things; title: Establishing the Hunt; title: Pursuit; title: Commerce of Cunning; title: Transforming Saxo Grammaticus; title: Faking It : Huntsmen, Hypocrites, and Seeming Virtue; title: Hamlet as Historian; title: Rights of Memory and the History of the Danes; title: The Dozy Arithmetic of Memory; title: Memory, Reason, and the Eyes of the Mind; title: Remember Me; title: Memory, Recollection, and the ars memoriae; title: Metaphor and Misrepresentation; title: A Slave to What Memory?; title: Hamlet as Poet; title: A Passionate Speech; title: The Mirror Up to Nature; title: Foul Imaginations; title: Play-within-a-Play; title: Very Like a Poet; title: Hamlet as Philosopher; title: The Good, the Bad and the Boethian; title: More Things in Heaven and Earth; title: Being, Nothingness, and Inconsequentiality; title: Dull Revenge; title: Rough-Hewn Providence; title: Conclusion : Shakespearean Tragedy and the Death of Humanism.