Margreta de Grazia's “Hamlet” without Hamlet contains a wealth of fascinating readings in the development of its thesis that interpretation of the play has suffered from a post-Romantic fixation on character, which has diverted attention from what would have been obvious to earlier audiences: the play is fundamentally about the Prince's political disappointment. The Hamlet world's distemper, she argues, stems mostly from the way the generational/political life cycle has been upset, and Hamlet himself, cowed by the authority of the crown and unable to voice what amount to treasonous thoughts, resorts to Vicelike antics to express, indirectly but powerfully, his frustration at being denied his expected patrimony. A trend of criticism like psychoanalysis, then, has been far too clever by half in diagnosing Hamlet, whose problem is much more mundane and much less mysterious than most of us have thought since the late eighteenth century; Jacques Lacan, for example, like many of us obsessed with Hamlet's supposed inwardness, missed the point: “Hamlet is indeed driven by what he lacks, but the signifiers activated around that loss are quite materially specific” (156).

This specificity she refers to here centers on the idea of land, which concept she explores with wonderful ingenuity and subtlety, using it to tie together many of the play's disparate strands. The notion of conflict over land can help explain how the play's preoccupation with death relates to the theme of playmaking, including the seemingly intrusive allusions to the rivalry between the adult and boys’ companies; the human/humus nexus, the identity of self with earth, makes the struggle for territory the operative impulse in the Prince as in everyone else, and the stage, like the grave, is merely another piece of territory. Such analysis does much to enrich our sense of the dynamics between Hamlet and his interlocutors: Hamlet is in competition with both the players and the grave maker for the predominant place on the stage, and his resentment at Claudius is at one with his vexed relationship with the “old mole,” the dead-but-not-dead-enough and blamably intestate Hamlet Senior, in that both fathers conspire to prolong Hamlet's son-hood—an uncomfortable holding pattern for anyone, much less an eager king in waiting. The book, despite the author's disclaimer that she attempts not to resituate the play in its 1600 context (5), is quite successful in reorienting our focus back toward the values of Shakespeare's time; we can too easily forget how large the idea of inheritance loomed in that world (and indeed in the playwright himself) and, consequently, how painful being a son, “deracinated” and “disentitled,” would have been. And along the way de Grazia employs an effective array of diverse tactics, drawing on word quibbles (mole/mould, 29), comparisons between the three versions of the text (Laertes’ “old man's sawe” from Q1, 114), and speculations on staging (Hamlet's leap into Ophelia's grave, around which chap. 5, “Doomsday and Domain,” is built). Consistently she is both inventive and persuasive with such moves, writing authoritatively even though, especially in the case of stage history, she must imaginatively fill the gaps in our knowledge.

For all its praiseworthy qualities, however, the book remains somewhat questionable in its overall sense of purpose. Every era creates its own Hamlet as a reflection of itself: while certainly we benefit from de Grazia's well-written and learned telling of this story, it is one we know. Moreover, the relevant part of this story, the endless conversation over Hamlet's interiority, seems not in very urgent need of de Grazia's corrective. Her attack on post-Romantic character criticism seems to set up a straw man; how this book breaks ranks in any salient way from the directives of the New Historicism, now entrenched for more than twenty-five years, is hard to see. Considering the prevalence of our Foucaultian interests in subjectivity, haven’t we spilled a great deal of ink for many years now demolishing character study rather thoroughly? And one wonders if the roads de Grazia takes us down might actually lead back to the view of Hamlet from which she would save us. Let us agree with her that Hamlet, unique among Renaissance English revengers in feeling no ties to an absent loved one, has a problem amounting to nothing more than lost political hopes; even in an elective monarchy he should have been king, she says, and his having been passed over is nigh unbearable. Why then hold his tongue and thereafter make a clown of himself? Simply because he fears the crime of treason and/or holds the kingship in such esteem? If so concerned with his patrimony, why didn’t he try to do something about it during the election? And even if he couldn’t have resisted the election of Claudius—aberration though it is in the ordinary coucrse of things—wouldn’t we expect such a politically minded Prince to construe himself the legitimate king and act accordingly in some respect? He is loved by the people, some of whom have even seen the Ghost and know something is rotten in Denmark; why does Hamlet's instinctive urge to compete for dominion never translate itself into any sort of political resistance? In short, if Hamlet is de Grazia's political animal, his torpor is very strange—and that has us asking, once more, what sort of man this Prince is. If the struggle for real estate absorbs his entire being, what about his character relegates him to so passive, impotent, and absurd an engagement (or rather disengagement) in that struggle?

“Hamlet” without Hamlet is truly impressive in its offerings of brilliant insights into the play. But part of its achievement might be unintended: opening new areas of inquiry into the psychology of the play's central character.