Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, Paperback

An acclaimed new interpretation of Shakespeare's Hamlet

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness is a radical new interpretation of the most famous play in the English language. By exploring Shakespeare's engagements with the humanist traditions of early modern England and Europe, Rhodri Lewis reveals a Hamlet unseen for centuries: an innovative, coherent, and exhilaratingly bleak tragedy in which the governing ideologies of Shakespeare's age are scrupulously upended. Recovering a work of far greater magnitude than the tragedy of a young man who cannot make up his mind, Lewis shows that in Hamlet, as in King Lear, Shakespeare confronts his audiences with a universe that received ideas are powerless to illuminate--and where everyone must find their own way through the dark.

Rhodri Lewis is Senior Research Scholar in English at Princeton University. He is the author of Language, Mind, and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke and William Petty on the Order of Nature.