“Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.” This is T. S. Eliot in 1920, explaining both his theory of the “objective correlative,” which would make its way into countless high school English lessons, and his conviction that Shakespeare's most celebrated play was “most certainly an artistic failure,” which would not (“Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism [1997]: 84–86). Hamlet, Eliot believed, was a play fatally limited by its inability to account for the feelings of its protagonist: in order to comprehend it in full, he contends, “We should have to understand things Shakespeare did not” (87). Eliot's bravado in this famous essay is astonishing, but he was right in at least one of his points: the emotional register in Hamlet is so vast, and at times stretches so far beyond anything that can simply be understood as plot, that ultimately it defies any singular explanation or overarching logic. It is, therefore, fitting that this new collection on the topic of Hamlet and the emotions does not seek to put forward a single, streamlined argument, but rather to embrace the affective diversity of “Shakespeare's moodiest play” (4), exploring it as variously as possible through its many histories, languages, and afterlives.
The book begins with a prologue from R. S. White, which highlights the varieties of feeling interwoven into the tragedy and the “emotional aura” they produce (xiv), and then follows with a brief introduction from Bríd Phillips and Paul Megna, which outlines the structure of the volume and its commitment to a “variegated,” “not unified” approach (4). The first main section, which focuses on sources, influences, and intertexts, contains essays by Indira Ghose, Michael D. Barbezat, Catherine Belsey, Richard Meek, and Jane Rickard. Here, ancient philosophies of tragedy, religious lore, Elizabethan ghost stories, early modern revenge tragedy, and Ben Jonson's Sejanus are read alongside Shakespeare's play, with the authors illuminating several of the ways in which the playwright was shaped by the cultures of storytelling and knowledge making that permeated sixteenth- and seventeenth-century life. From this section comes an appreciation of Hamlet as deeply embedded within the conventions, beliefs, and practices of its time, even as it stands apart in the extent of its creative and intellectual achievement.
Parts 2 and 3 focus principally on the language and drama of the play itself, with modes of expression, sensation, thinking, and character making coming to the fore. Essays from Dympna Callaghan, Naya Tsentourou, and Bríd Phillips explore the presentation of tears, breath, and sight, while contributions from Jeffrey R. Wilson, Lisa Hopkins, and Bradley J. Irish probe the relationship between Horatio and reason, Claudius and empathy, and dread and freedom. If part 2 concentrates primarily on what the play has to say about emotional behaviors and sensations, and subsequently how it enacts them, part 3 explores how these moments of expression come together to create affectively complex characters that have influenced subsequent thinking about emotional experience beyond Shakespeare's play.
Many of the essays in these middle sections occasionally look to modern performance to extend points of analysis, but the play's ample afterlife becomes the central focus of the final section. Here, essays from Kathryn Prince, Stephen Chinna, Megna, and White consider Hamlet's theatrical, literary, and philosophical legacies by looking at a tourist-friendly production of the play at Helsingor Castle in Denmark; three deconstructed, postmodern adaptations staged with student actors over the past twenty years; the play's existential commitments, as understood by Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, and Stoppard; and two twenty-first-century novels inspired by the tragedy. From this rich and strikingly varied collection of creative offshoots comes the realization that Hamlet truly is a “poem unlimited,” though in a rather different way than either Polonius or Harold Bloom originally meant it.
Taken as a whole, Megna, Phillips, and White's volume illuminates Shakespeare's play from a number of angles, offering a wealth of penetrating insights and rewarding both systematic and more intermittent readers. Though the editors admirably resist the temptation to over-engineer a singular argument, what does emerge very clearly is a sense of how diverse the forms of emotional experience explored in the play are, and how variously they have affected Shakespeare's readers over more than four centuries, Eliot included.
