A review of Stay Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine: by Jamieson Webster. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2013. 269 pp.

In his initial lecture on Greek tragedy given at the New School for Social Research in 2011,†¹ Simon Critchley quotes Bernard Williams (1993) as saying “To make the ancients speak, we must feed them with our own blood. When the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves. They tell us about us” (pp. 19‒20). In Stay Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine, husband Critchley and wife Jamieson Webster implicitly ask of Shakespeare what Williams asked of the Greek tragedians: What might Hamlet tell us about us? In turning to Hamlet, what might we see reflected of our sensibilities? Given that their account leans heavily on psychoanalytic understandings of Hamlet, what might Hamlet tell psychoanalysts about themselves?

Critchley and Webster, a philosopher and an analyst respectively, are well-regarded teachers of continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. In their book, which they describe as “the late-flowering fruit of a shared obsession” (p. 3), they take up these questions by examining a number of “outsider” readings of Hamlet by important figures in Western philosophy, namely, Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Hegel, Freud,

Joyce, and Lacan, situating these authors in dialogue with each other and using their works to engage closely with the text of the play. According to Critchley and Webster, one quality common to each of these accounts is a kind of “rashness”—a willingness to push the text in speculative directions. Stay Illusion! situates itself in this tradition, with chapters of the book succeeding each other as a series of associatively linked chapters rather than as a sustained argument. This is appealing as well as vexing; although it stimulates the attention, and keeps you curious about where the book is heading, it also makes it difficult to hold on to the many insights the book