In his previous book, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (2017), Peter Lake was concerned with Elizabethans’ thoughts on issues such as monarchial legitimacy, succession, tyranny, and resistance. Hamlet's Choice expands upon some of the material Lake addressed earlier, though with a decidedly more literary focus and a self-professed desire to reveal how “from the emotional and intellectual energies . . . released [by Shakespeare's plays] . . . proceeds their continuing hold over modern audiences” (191).

Two plays that were given only brief attention in How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage, Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, are Lake's focus in Hamlet's Choice. Meditating on the relationship between revenge, resistance, and religion in post-Reformation England, Titus and Hamlet, Lake argues, process some of the era's most complex and controversial concerns. Viewing Hamlet as Shakespeare's effort to rewrite Titus, Lake shows how the two plays deal with similar issues, albeit in strikingly different settings. He expertly unpacks these revenge tragedies in order to demonstrate how they compelled audiences to take a position on the religious and political debates they staged. Both plays, Lake contends, complicate and challenge the audience's expectations for a revenge tragedy, Titus through its examination of religious persecution and violence, and Hamlet in its focus on providence and predestination. Lake's examination of these topics combined with his explanation of Shakespeare's engagement with the history play, murder pamphlets, and conversion narratives in Titus and Hamlet results in a complex and fresh analysis of these two plays and, in the vein of new historicist criticism, art's ability to negotiate “real life” problems.

Part one focuses on Titus, which, Lake persuasively argues over the course of three chapters, stages a number of pressing Elizabethan concerns. Dramatizing the succession crisis that results from the death of a ruler and leads to uncertainty over the state's future, Titus spoke to a late-sixteenth-century audience who would have been anxious about their country's prospects in light of its aging, heirless queen. As Titus works through difficult questions about types of monarchies (elective versus hereditary), it simultaneously asks whether and when resistance to a tyrannical ruler is acceptable and gestures toward post-Reformation tensions between Catholicism and Protestantism. Lake suggests that Titus may have been read by some audience members as implying that the Andronici's bad treatment at the hands of the play's tyrants, Saturninus, Tamora, and Aaron, was similar to Catholics’ condition under Elizabeth's Protestant government. Titus does not clearly side with either Catholics or Protestants, however, Lake asserts. Rather, from a violent dialectical relationship between the Andronici's over-literal legalism and the atheistic and tyrannical rule of the trio in power emerges a third position. This synthesis, Lake argues, was not a via media version of Christianity. Instead, attempting to “transcend the theological and confessional differences that were dividing contemporary Christians” (68), Titus dramatizes a complex interaction between atheism, paganism, and proto-Christianity, embodied by Aaron and Tamora's baby, who is saved through the joint efforts of the Moor's instinctual desire to defend his offspring and Lucius's “popish” conscience. As Titus's lone surviving son is elected to lead Rome at the play's close, Titus ultimately suggests that resistance to tyranny can result in the reestablishment of the state under a new and potentially beneficent ruler, who has emerged from the violent clash of opposing forces.

Part two demonstrates how Hamlet engages with concerns Shakespeare explored earlier in Titus, in particular questions of succession and tyranny, though Hamlet focuses more squarely on the tension between providence and free will—a point made especially clear in Lake's contrast between the final bloody battles in Titus and Hamlet. In the five chapters that comprise part two, Lake argues that as a mix of revenge tragedy, history play, murder pamphlet, and conversion narrative, Hamlet shows its central character to be in the midst of a spiritual crisis whereby he is torn between honor (atheism) and conscience (Christianity). Though Hamlet's spiritual crisis is resolved, as Lake compellingly argues, upon his return from his adventure at sea when his former (atheistic) doubt is replaced by his unwavering belief in (Christian) providence, the prince's conversion cannot easily be identified as either Catholic or Protestant. Rather, it should, Lake underscores, be viewed as a contest between politics and religion, or material profits in this life and salvation in the next. And, like in Titus, the conclusion to be drawn about religion in Hamlet, Lake argues, is not one of compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism, but rather “a decidedly and distinctively post-Reformation style of Christianity,” one that is “a self-consciously dialectical product of the clash between pagan and Christian values” (184).

That neither Titus nor Hamlet definitively answers political and religious questions they raise, Lake proposes, explains the plays’ ability to engage diverse audiences in the early modern era and in the twenty-first century as well. This last point was inspired, as Lake confesses in the opening pages of Hamlet's Choice, by a somewhat tense interaction he once had with some theater practitioners, who viewed his exclusive focus on the past during a lecture as indicative of his irrelevance to the present. While it may have been the subtext for this book, explaining how the plays speak to audiences now is not the explicit focus of Hamlet's Choice. Yet, we might see Lake's compelling close readings of the plays and his foregrounding them as opposed to the historical record as the result of this intention. While some readers might desire more historical context to illuminate the claims Lake makes about Titus and Hamlet, his literary exegesis is undoubtedly compelling and engaging, and it will certainly appeal to literary scholars, historians, and those theater practitioners Lake had in mind as he set out to write Hamlet's Choice.