You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Will Stockton University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2011, xxvi+182pp., paper $22.50, ISBN: 978-0816666072, cloth $67.50, ISBN: 978-0816674596
In this excellent and provocative book, Will Stockton presents a challenge to the tone, structure, method, and periodization of the paradigm-shift-with-case-studies model of historicist scholarship that has prevailed for the last two decades in early modern literary studies. Adopting an authorial voice that is engaging and without contrivance, and reveling in every pun that the subject matter allows, Stockton works through a series of innovative theoretical moves to make psychoanalysis a subtle, nondeterministic mode for the analysis of literary texts and their encompassing cultures.
Five chapters on authors and works, both canonical and obscure, follow a dense introduction that importantly and necessarily establishes the study's psychoanalytic bona fides and validates the use of psychoanalytic models for critical investigation. Stockton begins with an odd reading of a famous moment in Hamlet, the hero's unkempt appearance to Ophelia, including “stockings fouled,” which “testifies readily enough to the fact that Hamlet has been traumatized by his encounter with his father's ghost” (p. ix). But for whose benefit is this testimony? It could be only for someone who knows about the ghost but not about the antic disposition, which is, no one. If the testimony is meant for the play's audience, then we must assume that Hamlet's disheveled appearance is not a deliberate subterfuge and that the antic disposition has broken down into actual madness. If Hamlet has deliberately soiled his stockings (with his own feces or some other creature's) for the sake of verisimilar madness, then his own anal psychology