Hamlet : a peça e o livro

Abstract

It is the purpose of this article to reconsider the terms on which a centrally canonical play like Hamlet can be read today as a book, as a text to be encountered on the page for a reading experience that can hardly be unaware of Hamlet's place in the history of literature. The present study thus takes part in the tendency, manifest in a number of publications in recent years, to reassess the page / stage duality in Shakespeare studies – following and querying the critical hegemony enjoyed by stage-oriented criticism in the past few decades. Further, it argues on behalf of the insights to be derived from approaches to Shakespeare, such as those supported by textual scholarship, whose rescue from a reputation of arcaneness has in recent years been initiated, prompting a renewed sense of how intrinsic such approaches are to any critical design with a bearing on texts. As a parallel concern, the article highlights the divergent forms of attention which Shakespeare (and Hamlet) have obtained respectively inside and outside the academic world, focusing on the perplexities aroused by the highly various discourses thus generated, and discussing prominent aspects of their institutional and cultural histories.