Looking for HamletA mysterious, melancholic, brooding Hamlet has gripped and fascinated four hundred years' of readers, trying to "find" and know him as he searches for and avenges his father's name. Setting itself apart from the usual discussions about Hamlet, Hunt here demonstrates that Hamlet is much more than we take him to be. Much more than the sum of his parts--more than just tragic, sexy youth and more than just vain cruelty--Hamlet is a reflection of our own aspirations and neuroses. Looking for Hamlet investigates our many searches for Hamlet, from their origins in Danish mythology through the complex problems of early printed texts, through the centuries of shifting interpretations of the young prince to our own time when Hamlet is more compelling and perplexing than ever before. Hunt presents Hamlet as a sort of missing person, the idealized being inside oneself. This search for the missing Hamlet, Hunt argues, reveals a present absence readers pursue as a means of finding and identifying ourselves. |
From inside the book
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... turn of the twenty - first century , Hamlet is second only to Romeo and Juliet on the silver screen . Virtually every actor - women as well as men - who has aspired to greatness has played the young man in black . Hamlet opened one ...
... turn of the seventeenth century . Next , in a consideration of the great fifth act , I attempt to show why Hamlet the play is such a pivotal work : the fact that it relocates reality from outside the human mind to within it , taking us ...
... turns his attentions to his mother , berating her in much harsher terms than Saxo's Amleth does . Hamblet calls her “ a vile , wanton adulteress " who nightly embraces " the traitorous villainous tyrant that murdered my father . " " Is ...
... turns out , the bread had been made of wheat cropped from a field where the skeletons of fallen soldiers were found ... turn eaten by men . In 4.3 , responding to Claudius's " Now , Hamlet , where's Polonius ? " Hamlet offers up a ...
... turn of the seventeenth century . At the same time , differences between this work and Shakespeare's play are also telling . Fortinbras , into whose hands Denmark is commended in Shakespeare's play , doesn't appear at the end of the ...
Contents
13 | |
Two The Three Hamlets | 31 |
Relocating Reality in Hamlet | 71 |
Four Dead Son Hamlet | 85 |
Five Contrarians at the Gate | 93 |
A Brief History of Grief | 105 |
Hamlet and Melancholy | 115 |
Eight Hamlet among the Moderns | 129 |
Nine Postmodern Hamlet | 165 |
Ten Looking for Hamlet | 199 |
Bibliographic Essay | 209 |
Index | 223 |