There’s a reason Rappaport needs the entire text of the play to support his argument: every character is a foil for Hamlet’s spiritual journey, every speech embodies patterns repeated throughout the play. It’s an impressive close-reading—and a legalistic one. Wrong and right in Rappaport’s Hamlet are black and white, as are “passion” and “reason.” But I’m not convinced that this is sound “originalism.” Even if contemporary audiences would have agreed on an overall moral message, theological disputes were absolutely vitriolic in Shakespeare’s time; surely not everyone would have agreed about the metaphysics of ghosts, kingship, revenge… can the Wittenberg reference to Protestantism really be so easily dismissed? And as to passion and reason, can’t they—don’t they always—commingle, especially in faith? Rappaport’s readings of the aching speeches that begin, “O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,” and, “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” are cold. As I made my way through this text of the play, I found myself constantly fighting to regain something that was being lost. I think it was poetry.

One of Rappaport’s “canons of interpretation” is that we must take every character at his or her word, as the playwright himself hints to us with Hamlet’s line, “The players cannot keep council; they’ll tell all” (3.2). Rappaport cites this line and this interpretive principle again and again to reject any mystification of Hamlet’s mind, heart, or motives. But it occurred to me that Hamlet is not a player (actor); he’s a character. (Moreover, Hamlet is here referring to an actor not playing a part but speaking a prologue, going beyond the job of an actor and the world of the play.) Rappaport assumes that all the characters are reliable witnesses to their inner lives without poetic interpretation; but what if the characters–through the actors–are living their lives onstage? What if their words are not just informative but affective, changing the speaker in the act of speaking? I believe Hamlet gives us another interpretive principle earlier in the play: “I have that within which passeth show” (1.2).

Rappaport’s work of synthesizing a Christian reading of Hamlet is a crucial contribution to the play’s canon. I am personally grateful for many newly-illumined lines and a conviction to unlearn some of my learned helplessness about the play. The far-ranging intertextual scholarship is also of great value and makes this edition a worthwhile dramaturgical resource. That said, I would have liked even more contemporary religious sources, given how much hangs on that context, and to explore how theological questions, not just answers, enrich this play. As to the other projects going on in this edition, some of the dramaturgy was overbearing (Rappaport is insistent on verse emphasis throughout) or obvious (I think most readers get the irony of Polonius’s verbose discourse on brevity). Rappaport’s conviction that there’s only one right reading of the play seemed to imply that there’s only one right performance. But where’s the fun in that? Performance is a different kind of argument.