Hamlet (Vol. 35) | Henri Suhamy (essay date 1983)
Henri Suhamy (essay date 1983)
SOURCE: "The Metaphorical Fallacy," in Cahiers Elisabethains, No. 24, October, 1983, pp. 27-31.
[In the following essay, Suhamy asserts that the disease imagery in Hamlet elicits a variety of interpretations at once, some of which are contradictory and paradoxical.]
The pages written by Caroline Spurgeon on the sickness and corruption imagery in Hamlet remain today perhaps the most famous and striking in a book1 which the evolution of criticism and the necessary controversies that keep our discipline alive have not pulled down from its deserved position in the history of Shakespearian scholarship. Nor have these admirable pages lost anything of their stimulating pointedness. Yet the very attractiveness of Spurgeon's analyses may contain some danger, especially in relation to Hamlet, a play which should protect us from all forms of dogmaticism, for the hero of it is not only...
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