One of the benefits of this blog, aside from feeding the author's inflated sense of self, is to provide a place to save Hamlet references for future use. (I have no idea what that occasion might be.) Consider it, then, an annotated bibliography. This post, the first in long while, fits squarely within that descriptor.
The latest book on my reading list was The James Bond Dossier by Kingsley Amis. I discovered it while reading a book on the early James Bond films that I had discovered in a vintage book store. (Apply the adjective to either noun.) Amis's Dossier is an extended essay reflecting on the Ian Fleming canon. To this diehard James Bond fan, it really was quite a delightful read! Never did I suspect that its path would cross with this blog.
Appendix B to the Dossier is entitled "Literature and Escape." It opens with a paragraph-long discussion of the overriding subject of this ongoing project. Amis was spot on with his thoughts on Bond, and he was spot on with his thoughts on Hamlet! I reprint his comments here, for both the reader's enjoyment and the author's retention.
All literature is escapist. Everyone at one time or another must have wanted not merely to play but to be Hamlet. This, I suppose, is the most likely explanation for Hamlet's preeminence in so many people's minds, in defiance of its many claims to be judged the weakest of Shakespeare's tragedies. I agree that, on consideration, Hamlet's the sort of man only a monster of egotism could want to be, but we all have our monstrous moments and they rarely bring us any permanent harm. I agree too that there's very much more in Hamlet than we can get out of it just by identifying with its hero, but nobody, as far as I know, has cut himself off from that very much more by identifying now and again, or even a good bit of the time.
Here's to the monsters among us!
Amis, Kingsley. The James Bond Dossier. New York: New American Library, 1965. Quotation taken from page 137.
