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MURDER MOST FOUL: HAMLET THROUGH THE AGES. By David Bevington. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011; pp. xiv + 236.
Murder Most Foul offers an accessible overview of the history of Hamlet-that is, of the play, the character, and the text-beginning with a chapter on the prehistory of the story Shakespeare took up and ending with a chapter called "Postmodern Hamlet" that surveys trends in performance and criticism from the 1980s to the present. There is a lot of ground to cover in between these two chapters, and David Bevington-who is among the most respected senior Shakespeareans in the world- covers it gracefully, synthesizing and presenting a great deal of information along the way in clear, jargon-free prose. After the opening chapter-which discusses the tale of Hamlet's precursor Amleth as it appears in Saxo Grammaticus's late-twelfth- to early thirteenth-century Gesta Danarum and then in other pre-Shakespearean versions-the book is divided into two chapters on Hamlet's late-Elizabethan contexts, and four chapters on its subsequent re-appropriation in, respectively, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the nineteenth century, the period 1900 to 1980, and the postmodern present.
Bevington's survey of reinvented Hamlets runs from Restoration-era performances premised upon an idea of Shakespeare as a natural genius in need of neo-classical refinement, through the Romantic era's emphasis upon Hamlet as a figure of brooding, melancholy inaction, to the modern-dress and Oedipal Hamlets of the mid-twentieth century, and right up through the enormous variety of Hamlet allusions and adaptations in our own contemporary moment. Along the way, the book also touches upon the history of editorial practice-beginning with eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare prepared by Nicholas Rowe, Alexander...