Description: Provides a sustained and challenging exploration of Hamlet's 'To Be or Not to Be', the most celebrated and least understood speech in the English language
Brief description: Douglas Bruster is Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, USA. He is the author of Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare; Quoting Shakespeare; Shakespeare and the Question of Culture; and, with Robert Weimann, Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre.
Review Quotes:
""Douglas Bruster's To Be or Not to Be should delight and instruct anyone who has ever read, seen, or struggled with the central speech of Hamlet...Bruster has done a remarkable job building bridges over notoriously choppy waters, and this book is highly recommended." - Peter G. Platt, Studies in English Literature, Spring 2008" --Peter G. Platt
"[In this] innovative new series... Series editors Simon Palfry and Ewan Fernie have rejected the notion of business as usual in order to pursue a distinctive strategy that aims to put "cutting-edge scholarship" in front of a broad audience. Shakespeare Now! with its insistent appeal to the contemporary- this is fresh Shakespeare for readers turned off by the prospect of dry-as-dust scholarship-aims to reach a general audience... The book commences with an intriguing conceit: Bruster imagines a Shakespeare museum with rooms for different plays. In this fantasized museum, there is an "entire gallery devoted" to Hamlet's famous soliloquy (1). What this gallery offers is a chronological sequence of overlapping performances beginning with the earliest and continuing up to the present. An oral palimpsest is created, as more and more speakers add their voices to the mixture- this idea neatly captures the enormous multiplicity of Hamlets that have come into being, but it also manages to maintain the singularity of the text, despite the differences in presentation (not only embodied performance, but gramophone, film, and video) and even language" --Shakespeare Quarterly