The Life Between the Lines
A new independent edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet takes a strong stand in a scholarly gap but doesn’t close the book on this most studied of plays.
Review by Raquel Sequeira
A new edition of Hamlet? Why? I was curious when I learned about this publication, especially as it comes not from Arden or Folger, but from an individual scholar. Dr. Gideon Rappaport’s critical text of Shakespeare’s most criticized work is really many projects in one. Part scholarly argument, part dramaturgy, and part (a relatively small part) edited playtext. Yet all these different genres—contained in one thick, hardback folio–serve Rappaport’s overriding mission: to restore the true Hamlet to readers, performers, and audiences.
The preface and introduction articulate a case against misreadings of Hamlet—and, in many ways, the entire book reads like a legal argument. Rappaport unabashedly claims one and only one right reading of the text (an “essential meaning”), and his hermeneutic is akin to what law scholars call “original public meaning originalism.” That is, the right way to interpret this text is to figure out how its original audience would have interpreted it. Accordingly, Rappaport wants to disperse our Freudian fog to reveal the true clarity of the play and its title character. None of this nonsense about Hamlet’s indecisiveness or inaccessible interiority. Elizabethan audiences, he argues, would have had no doubt that Hamlet is fundamentally a Christian morality play.
There is something refreshing about the straightforwardness of this reading. So much of Hamlet criticism feels like intentional obfuscation, as if we’re afraid that if we get it, we’ve gotten it wrong (to paraphrase Feynman on quantum mechanics). And it is certain that most modern productions of Hamlet do not take religion seriously enough. You simply can’t read Shakespeare without the Bible. But Rappaport wants to go farther, to give us a unifying spiritual arc as the key to understanding the play from the inside out. The climax of the play (we’re too far gone for spoiler alerts, right?) is Act 3, Scene 3, when Hamlet decides not to seize the opportunity of killing his uncle, Claudius, while the latter is praying. Hamlet’s reasoning is that if he kills Claudius in the middle of a pious act, Claudius’s soul will go straight to heaven, and Hamlet’s revenge will be hollow. It’s a dark moment, laden with dramatic irony and tragic hubris. In seeking Claudius’s damnation rather than his just punishment, Hamlet oversteps the bounds of his Christian duty (communicated by the ghost of his father) into the poison of pride, the arch-vice. The rest of the play depicts Hamlet’s chastening under the hand of divine providence to teach him true humility and faith before the end.
Rappaport’s work of synthesizing a Christian reading of Hamlet is a crucial contribution to the play’s canon.
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.
Raquel Sequeira is a teacher, graduate student in the History and Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, Notre Dame), and Shakespeare director/dramaturg. She received her bachelor’s in biochemistry from Yale in 2021 and currently lives in the DC area.
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Edited and Annotated by Gideon Rappaport was pubished by One Mind Good Press on December 4, 2023. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
