Hamlet

Fold on Fold

Josipovici Gabriel

William Shakespeare's Hamlet is probably the best-known and most commented upon work of literature in Western culture. The paradox is that it is at once utterly familiar and strangely elusive-very like our own selves, argues Gabriel Josipovici in this stimulating and original study. Moreover, our desire to master this elusiveness, to "pluck the heart out of its mystery", as Hamlet himself says, precisely mirrors what is going on in the play; and what Shakespeare's play demonstrates is that to conceive human character (and works of art) in this way is profoundly misguided. Rather than rushing to conclusions or setting out a theory of what Hamlet is "about", therefore, we should read and watch patiently and openly, allowing the play to unfold before us in its own time and trying to see each moment in the context of the whole. Josipovici's valuable book is thus an exercise in analysis which puts the physical experience of watching and reading at the heart of the critical process-at once a practical introduction to a great and much-loved play and a sophisticated intervention in some of the key questions of theory and aesthetics of our time.

About the Author

Gabriel Josipovici is a novelist, literary theorist, critic and scholar. He was Professor of English at the University of Sussex, and Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford, and is now research professor in the Graduate School of Humanities, Sussex. He has published three non-fiction titles with Yale, "The Book of God", "Touch and On Trust".

Reviews

"Gabriel Josipovici's study of Hamlet displays many ofthe keynotes of his previous books: elegance, clarity, economy of language, intellectual finesse. In an era of ever more specialist Shakespearean studies he sets out to see the play steadily and see it whole, and indeed, moving through it scene by scene, to see it as if for the first time, and to hear it without the intervening static of four hundred years of critical theory and counter-theory. His book is refreshingly free of agendas and angles, offering in their stead an intense alertness to the text" – Charles Nicholl

"With agility and clarity, Josipovici wends his way through every scene of the play to give us a commentary much enlarged and enriched by a modernist canon and sensibility" – Margreta de Grazia, author of "Hamlet Without Hamlet"

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