Contents: This book contains four items by Levin on Hamlet: "An Explication of the Player's Speech," first published in The Kenyon Review, XII, 2 (Spring, 1950); "The Tragic Ethos" (a review of Peter Alexander's Hamlet: Father and Son), first published in Shakespeare Quarterly, VII, 1 (Winter, 1956); "The Antic Disposition," first published in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, XCIV (1958); and the Alexander Lectures, delivered at the University of Toronto on March 18, 19, and 20, 1958. The most substantial portion of the book (107 of 178 pages) is "The Question of Hamlet" (the general title of the Alexander Lectures, and the same as the title of the book). "The Question of Hamlet" has four parts: "Presuppositions," "Interrogation," "Doubt," and "Irony." Levin's rambling style makes it difficult to identify a thesis or plan, but the following passage, from "Interrogation," seems to hint at some sort of outline for the whole of "The Question of Hamlet": What is more revealing, the word 'question' occurs in Hamlet no less than seventeen times, much more frequently than in any of Shakespeare's other plays. Recalling that it comes as the final word in Hamlet's most famous line, we may well regard it as the key-word of the play. Many other words contribute to the general atmosphere of uncertainty, as we shall soon have occasion to recall. Furthermore, besides direct inquiry, there are other modes of questioning, notably doubt and irony, which we shall be considering in due sequence. Each of these three devices is a figure of speech and simultaneously a figure of thought, to take them as they are categorized by Quintilian. This overlapping classification is useful, if it helps us to understand how. words adapt their structure to ideas, how the very process of cogitation can be dramatized. (20) Evaluation: If you're expecting a lot of insight into the use of figures of speech in Hamlet, forget it. The figures of speech serve only as springboards for Levin's musings about questions, doubts, and ironies in the play. And he doesn't always stick with those topics. Following is a typical paragraph, in which Levin starts with a bit of narration, then veers into sweeping generalizations, historical allusions, and philosophical speculations. Hamlet is understandably anxious to identify this ambiguous figure with the late King, his father, and consequently to trust it. But Horatio's doubt cannot be dismissed so easily. It is already present as an alternative at the moment of recognition:I cannot figure out why the falsity of the Ghost would undermine "the very foundations of the universe."Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,And from that moment Hamlet is constantly glancing upward and downward, balancing every decision and making every move in full view of a perspective which now extends, as in the medieval mysteries, from the celestial to the infernal sphere. 'Heaven and earth!' was his exclamation in the First Soliloquy (I.ii.142). The Second widens his frame of reference: Bottom Line: Sometimes really interesting, but never really clear. |