Hamlet (Vol. 44) | Stephen Booth (essay date 1969)
Stephen Booth (essay date 1969)
SOURCE: "On the Value of Hamlet" in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, edited by Norman Rabkin, Columbia University Press, 1969, pp. 137-76.
[In the following essay, Booth reviews the events of Hamlet from the audience's perspective, arguing that the issues which critics have identified as problems with the play are made bearable in performance since the play provides the audience with "the strength and courage . . . to flirt with the frailty of its own understanding."]
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Hamlet as we have it—usually in a conservative conflation of the second quarto and first folio texts—is not really Hamlet. The very fact that the Hamlet we know is an editor-made text has furnished an illusion of firm ground for leaping conclusions that discrepancies between the probable and actual actions, statements, tone, and diction of...
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