In Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, Rhodri Lewis argues that Shakespeare's most famous play should be understood as a violent repudiation of practically every tenet of Renaissance humanism. Aristotle, Cicero, Boethius, Erasmus, and many others, Lewis contends, are permitted to haunt the words spoken in Shakespeare's Denmark only so that the ghosts of these thinkers can finally be laid to rest once and for all. Hamlet himself is presented as a bricolage of this intellectual hall of fame, whose befuddled articulations of conventional wisdoms work precisely to lay bare the toxic nonsensicality and ultimate futility of the mainstream of sixteenth-century intelligence. The author of Hamlet is, then, for Lewis, a “boldly contrarian” affirmer of dramatic poetry's ability to subvert “the fictions and artifices through which humankind seeks to make sense of itself,” fictions that attempt to conceal a humanity that is inherently bestial, selfish, clueless, and anti-humanist (303). It is an original take on what must be the most written-about play in literary critical history, and the result is an erudite yet absorbing book that is as refreshingly unwilling to patronize the possibilities of Shakespeare's learning as it is willing to uphold the status of his creative genius.
Books entirely devoted to Hamlet have become something of their own mini-genre. The most famous are probably Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory (2001) and Margreta de Grazia's Hamlet without Hamlet (2007). It is the latter book that Lewis chooses to pit his own against, titling his introduction “Hamlet within Hamlet.” Like de Grazia, Lewis wishes to strip away from Hamlet criticism the ahistorical sentimentality that began with the Romantics; but unlike her, he does not believe such a move necessitates any marginalization of the play's protagonist: “Hamlet can be read as a profound meditation on the nature of human individuality without relying on conceptual frameworks drawn from the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries” (5–6). Lewis’s methodology is a seemingly orthodox historicist one, but it is exercised on a play which he implies has not been historicized enough, or, at least, not historicized in the right way. Whereas de Grazia's contextual markers were political and dynastic ones, Lewis’s are the familiar territory of the intellectual historian: “the textual contours of the psychological, rhetorical, and moral-political theorizing that lay at the heart of sixteenth-century humanism” (6). The acuity and intricacy with which Lewis navigates these textual contours sometimes means that questions of theatricality and dramaturgy have to be put on the back burner, but, throughout, Lewis manages to successfully bring into collision historical rigor with critical insight.
Lewis organizes the main body of the book into two parts: “Chapters 1 and 2 lay the foundations on which chapters 3 to 5 build” (10). In chapter 1 he locates Hamlet within the discursive legacy of Cicero's De officiis. Cicero's connection between self-knowledge and acting—in which he states how human beings should, through true knowledge of their own selves, pick the most appropriate roles, just as actors do—is made paradigmatic of humanist moral-philosophical thinking on identity, and its variations are traced through figures as disparate as Hobbes, Montaigne, Sidney, and Tacitus. The latter three of these figures afford Lewis the opportunity to imply how the philosophical content he is explaining might have influenced Shakespeare directly, and moments from Hamlet permeate throughout the chapter to provide glimpses of what is to come in more detail later on.
Chapter 2 is the book's longest, and the premise here initially jars with what has come before. Here, Lewis assesses how Hamlet utilizes “the vocabulary and assumptions of hunting, fowling, falconry, and fishing” (43). Even if the chapter is slow to reveal its place within the book's broader argumentative framework, the journey through it is wonderfully absorbing. Lewis zooms in to seemingly unremarkable aspects of Hamlet’s language (“couple,” “catch,” “unkennel”) and unpacks them in meticulous detail to show how they are part of a semantic field which pervades the play's psychological world. His point is that Shakespeare's Denmark is appetitive, cynegetic, and the antithesis of Cicero's moral-political vision.
Hostile accounts of Hamlet's character are nothing new (see, for instance, L. C. Knights’ 1961 An Approach to Hamlet, with which Lewis’ book has much in common), but the final three chapters of Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness present what must be the most rigorous and sustained attack to date. Using as a structuring principle Francis Bacon's division of human understanding into memory, imagination, and reason, Lewis subtitles these chapters “Hamlet as Historian,” “Hamlet as Poet,” and “Hamlet as Philosopher,” only to demonstrate systematically how Hamlet is a laughably mediocre version of all three: he remembers the past as he wants to, with disregard for historical truth; his taste in poetry is outdated, and his own efforts are nonsensical; his private reflectiveness is no more than a collection of regurgitated maxims. This may sound overly provocative, contrarian even, and perhaps it is, but it is also convincing. As with the rest of the book, Lewis’ exegesis here is underpinned by a wealth of textual surroundings, and it succeeds most when it offers illuminating examples of where in the intellectual-historical canon Shakespeare might have found some inspiration. Although at times the reader might feel that Lewis’ attack on Hamlet is also an attack on Hamlet, the exact opposite is in fact true: Hamlet, Lewis wants to suggest, is designedly mediocre, because Shakespeare's target is “not just Hamlet,” but also Cicero, Boethius, and “the conventions of humanism in the philosophical and religious round” (302–3). One might ask Lewis what happens to those audiences of Hamlet who do not share in Shakespeare's supposed learning, but it is a question, like others that might arise, that is ultimately eclipsed by Lewis's compelling vision of the play's dark world.
