Renaissance Forum: Volume 7, Winter 2004: Martin Bainton

John Lee. 2000. Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' and the Controversies of Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 266 pp. ISBN 0-19-818504-9. Ł50.

Hamlet is so often identified with the birth of modern man, the subject, and/or the dramatic 'character' that it would seem to be a suitable text to use in a discussion of the way that selfhood has been defined in literary studies. As its title suggests, John Lee's book explores the various ways in which the self, and by extension interiority and subjectivity, are configured in Shakespeare criticism. It is also a sophisticated expression of discontent with the critical methodologies of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism.
Both New Historicists and Cultural Materialists are charged with failing to match the ambition of their theory with their critical practice. New Historicists, writes Lee, depend for their impact on a misrepresentation both of their enemies (i.e. 'old' historicism, supposedly represented by E.M.W. Tillyard) and their friends (specifically Foucault). Cultural Materialists, meanwhile, are charged with a disabling moral earnestness along with an over-reliance on outdated (i.e. pre-revisionist) historicism leading to a crudely insensitive periodization of early modern history. Lee also regards Cultural Materialism's rejection of aesthetic criteria in the selection of texts for study to be a blunder in terms of 'selling' their methodology to readers who, at root, get into this business of literary criticism out of a love of literature.
But Lee's concern is not restricted to the criticism of our own time. The book also serves as a useful account of English pre-Romantic Shakespeare criticism, particularly the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century neo-classical tradition. The neo-classical writers, even when they lauded Shakespeare, found it necessary to castigate (or defend) Shakespeare for the mystifying inconsistency of the Prince: dissatisfaction with this became identified as the central 'problem' about Hamlet.
Where Lee diverts from traditional narratives is in his demotion of the lectures of Coleridge, usually seen as a breakthrough point in Shakespeare studies, in favour of William Hazlitt. Both, Lee argues, have been misunderstood – at least in their responses to Prince Hamlet; Coleridge merely continues eighteenth-century critical tradition, while Hazlitt's work on the play is held by Lee to be a sophisticated precursor of a constructivist and literary theory of personality.
The 'problem' with Prince Hamlet's selfhood, critics have argued, is that modern notions of 'self', 'character' and 'personality' have no meaning in Shakespeare's England. Generations of critics have tried to fill in the 'gaps' in his character, and argued furiously with each other over Shakespeare's meaning (or lack of meaning). Taking a (necessarily) eclectic approach to Hamlet criticism, Lee finds amid the chaos and controversy that a consensus can be detected around A.P. Rossiter's modest-sounding suggestion that there is 'something very "personal" or "subjective" in the play'. Ultimately, Lee suggests, the only 'problem' with the play is the fact that generations of critics have sought to 'fix' – or deny – the selfhood of its central character in a certain place according to their pre-defined critical agendas. For Lee, the interiority of Prince Hamlet should be defended against critical methodologies which see the 'self' (as we understand it), as having no relevance to pre-1660 discourse.
Lee wishes to turn the critical exchange from being a 'controversy' to being a debate; one of his criticisms of Cultural Materialists, with which many will agree, is their apparent inflexibility. The fervid 'controversialism' of the last thirty years has arguably created more heat than light: Lee goes some way to suggesting an alternative methodology which is in love with the fluid complexity of literary texts – represented by our Protean Danish Prince – rather than with its own ingenuity.
In the third part of the book, Lee aims to construct a new methodological framework which incorporates the personal construct theory of the psychologist George Kelly, who saw man as 'a form of movement'. He arrives at a version of critical methodology which is a compelling synthesis of psychology, moral philosophy and eclectic, reflexive literary criticism. The resulting approach emphasises the Protean aspects of the self and Prince Hamlet specifically: 'Hamlet is a play not of being, but of becoming'.
Lee repeatedly makes a link between the apparent inconsistency of the Prince and the alarming instability of human interiority which Montaigne identified in his semi-autobiographical Essaies. Lee suggests that Hamlet's dramatisation of this instability, along with the psychology of humours and the shape-shifting Proteus with which Shakespeare was fascinated, gives the lie to the New Historicists' assertion that the 'self' was an inaccessible concept to Shakespeare because the modern vocabulary of 'self' (personality, character, selfhood etc.) did not exist in his time.
As with most critics who place themselves as consciously as this within the critical debate, Lee is more concerned with offering a framework for interpreting Hamlet than with offering a comprehensive analysis of the play itself. That said, the insights he brings to the play's elaborate psychodrama in the closing section of the book are both memorable and persuasive; and Lee's aim is clearly to point us in interesting future directions rather than merely filling Prince Hamlet's 'gaps' with his own prejudices – with himself. Generous and ambitious, Lee's book is ultimately a major contribution to both Hamlet criticism and literary-critical methodology.

MARTIN BAINTON
THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL