Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness

The Hamlet that emerges from the pages of Rhodri Lewis's absorbing book is a play written by an intellectual writer, a dramatist attentive to dialectic and inspired by moral philosophy, especially by Cicero.Shakespeare's learnedness, Lewis demonstrates, in turn shapes the world of Hamlet's knowledge as a cognitive and dramatic resource for the play's action and language.With daring erudition, Lewis uncovers deep layers of the play's classicism produced by Hamlet's humanist liberal arts learning.He reveals how Shakespeare's rhetorical, dialectical, and philosophical techniques of argumentation and invention shape Hamlet as a cerebral character and how they determine his interaction with other characters around him on stage.As Lewis sets out to analyze "the qualities of Hamlet's mind and disposition" ( 11) and "the nature of the parts that he seeks to play" (11), in his ambitious book, he makes these directions the epicentre of his criticism aimed at reconstructing the intellectual universe of Hamlet's learning.The "kinetic flair" (17) of expression and thought, which Lewis ascribes to Hamlet, can equally be ascribed to the flare and force of his own critical discourse.Lewis's erudition shines on every page of this book illuminating numerous connections between the classical ideas about ethics, selfhood, emotion, power, art, eloquence, memory, the form of dramatic poetry, and the literary and historical contexts within which that form was created.In explaining how these individual elements work in this tragedy, which Lewis describes as an "architectonic whole" (8), he begins by exploring the performance of selfhood on stage, as it emerges from the play's engagement with Cicero's De officiis ("On duties").De officiis was a key classical text used in the grammar school for inculcating ideas about moral philosophy, and a work that shaped the humanist interpretation of moral philosophy, from which Shakespeare got the ideas that Hamlet deliberates.Lewis proceeds with critical sensibility to unpack a wide range of references and ideas, demonstrating the play's distinctive dramatization of the balance and tension between "the human condition" (41) and the dramatic art's "refusal" (41) to acknowledge the reality of that condition

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