Hamlet (Shakespeare Made in Canada)

Preface by Paul Gross

"Hamlet is bottomless, deep beyond our capacity to compass, navigating the most guarded mysteries of our lives." --Paul Gross

Shakespeare's longest and perhaps most influential play probes the darkest reaches of human life: despair, powerlessness, uncertainty, and mortality, as well as the larger political issues of corruption, iniquity, and treason. Daniel Fischlin's groundbreaking introduction explores not just the workings of the play itself but also how the spectral presence of Hamlet in Canada speaks to ineffable questions of political identity, uncertainty, and longing for right actions.

From productions of Hamlet at Stratford to Robert LePage's Elsineur and Yves Sioui Durand/Jean-Frederic Messier's Hamlet-le-Malecite, Hamlet seems to be a ghost haunting the Canadian collectivity, as undead as the ghost of Hamlet's father. As Fischlin observes, the struggle to read the world--a spectral world capable of ghosts and hauntings but also a material world of corruption and evil--makes Hamlet's effort to take a righteous course of action profoundly tragic.