It is far from clear that anybody in Shakespeare's time or later experienced a catharsis of emotion as the result of seeing HAMLET performed live on stage -- or as the result of seeing the play performed on television or on videotape, or as a result of listening to the stage being performed on an audiotape, or as a result of reading the play.
Nevertheless, HAMLET has evidently caught something in all the people who have written. So what exactly about this play catches if not the consciences at least the attention of certain people?
However, Critchley and Webster say, "To be clear, we do not see any aspects of ourselves or each other in Hamlet" (page 90). Perhaps this is true, but their disclaimer here leaves me wondering how they came to devote enough time and attention to studying Hamlet that they were able to write a book about him.
Moreover, Critchley and Webster, say that Freud's "self-analysis turns on Freud's identification with the figure of Hamlet" (page 110; also see pages 104-105, 112).
But their various comments quoted here bring me to the short fragment attributed to Gorgias that the authors quote:
"Tragedy, by means of legends and emotions, creates a deception in which the deceiver is more honest than the non-deceiver and the deceived is wiser than the non-deceived" (Quoted on page 16).
This quote may obliquely describe certain aspects of Aeschylus's ORESTEIA and Sophocles's OEDIPUS THE KING. But the authors use it as a touchstone for discussing aspects of Shakespeare's HAMLET. They work with this quote throughout their book. Moreover, they claim that "Socrates [a character in Plato's dialogues] targets Gorgias implicitly in the REPUBLIC and explicitly in the dialogue [by Plato] that bears his name" (page 16).
DIGRESSION: During his long lifetime, Gorgias of Leontini served as an ambassador from
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