Volume 9, Number 6 · October 12, 1967
Reading Shakespeare's Mind
By Frank Kermode
Hamlet and Revenge
by Eleanor Prosser
Stanford, 287 pp., $7.50
Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearian Tragedy
by Northrop Frye
University of Toronto, 121 pp., $4.95
The one obvious thing about Hamlet is that nobody could possibly say what it means; but people who think they have stumbled on something in it that everybody else has overlooked do not notice this. Although the graduate schools now go in for all manner of metacritical precautions, it is still a common enough ambition to find and follow the clue which will show that quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, that trinity of squares, have been wrong all the time. For instance, it can be argued that we shall be nearer a true understanding of Hamlet if we get close to what an Elizabethan audience might have thought it said, and the result of the research is almost certain to be a conviction that everybody since then, everywhere and practically always, has been getting it wrong; which is the conviction that prompted the inquiry in the first place.
Review, 2728 words
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