The Dead Hamlets

The immortal hero of The Mona Lisa Sacrifice turns from art history to a literary mystery. “A fun, and whip-smart, read.” —National Post Something is rotten in the court of the faerie queen. A deadly spirit is killing off the faerie, and it has mysterious ties to Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet. The only one who can stop it is the immortal Cross, a charming rogue who also happens to be a drunk, a thief, and an angel killer. He is no friend of the faerie since they stole his daughter and made her one of their own. When it appears she may be the next victim of the haunting, though, he must race against time to save her. He encounters an eccentric and deadly cast of characters along the way: the real Witches of Macbeth, the undead playwright/demon hunter Christopher Marlowe, an eerie Alice from the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books, a deranged and magical scholar—and a very supernatural William Shakespeare. When Cross discovers a startling secret about the origins of Hamlet itself, he finds himself trapped in a ghost story even he may not be able to escape alive. “The Dead Hamlets resembles something written by Neil Gaiman with its somewhat mystical imagery, and at other times it reads as a full-blown work of bizarro fiction.” —The Examiner

Originally published: London: Albion Village, 1975.

Originally published: New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Arguably, no literary work is more familiar to us than Shakespeare's most famous tragedy. Everyone can quote at least six words from the play; often people know many more. In this riveting and thought-provoking re-examination, philosopher Simon Critchley and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster explore Hamlet's continued relevance for a modern world no less troubled by existential anxieties than Elizabethan London. Reading the drama alongside writers, philosophers and psychoanalysts-Schmitt, Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Melville, and Joyce-the authors delve into the politics of the era, the play's relationship to religion, the exigencies of desire and the incapacity to love. It is an intellectual investigation that leads to a startling conclusion: Hamlet is a play about nothing in which Ophelia emerges as the true hero. From the illusion of theatre and the spectacle of statecraft to the psychological theatre of inhibition and emotion, what Hamlet makes manifest is the modern paradox of our lives: where we know, we cannot act. The Hamlet Doctrine is a passionate encounter with a great work of literature that continues to speak to us across centuries.

This book assembles a team of leading literary scholars and philosophers to probe philosophical questions that assert themselves in Shakespeare's Hamlet, including issues about subjectivity, knowledge, sex, grief, and self-theatricalization.

Setting out to explain his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father, Stephen Greenblatt provides an account of the rise and fall of purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution - as well as a new reading of the power of Hamlet.

This work defines the dramatic rationale of the Hamlet soliloquies in their dramatic contexts, thereby clarifying the tragic idea that organizes the play.

In the tale of Hamlet, Horatio is recorded as a loyal friend, but what if he were more? What if he filled Hamlet’s heart and dreams? And Hamlet filled his? This modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, told through Horatio’s eyes is much more than a tragedy. Antique Roman is also a love story about how the handsome and dashing Prince of Denmark finds himself drawn to the quiet, introverted Horatio while at university in Wittenberg. Slowly but surely, Hamlet helps the guarded Horatio see his own true value and shows him how love can bring light to life. But all too soon for the lovers, Hamlet receives word that his father, the King, has died, and he is to return to Elsinore in Denmark to comfort the grieving Queen. Horatio soon follows to support Hamlet, but finds the royal court mired in intrigue. It appears the late King’s death may not have been of natural causes, the Queen has already remarried her late husband’s brother who has taken the throne, and there have been reports of sightings of the dead King’s ghost. Told mostly in modern English, this novel also weaves in lines from Shakespeare’s original play, thus offering readers an easy-to-understand version of the Bard’s Hamlet that still captures its flavour and mastery. It also opens up intriguing possibilities about what was the real story behind the play.