• Longing to Stay Tied:Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet as a Work of Creative Criticism
• Amy Muse (bio)

I miss you, I miss you, I would give anything to have you back, anything at all.

While Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet (2020) is offered to us as a work of fiction, a historical novel, it might equally be understood and perhaps even more deeply appreciated as a work of creative criticism. She crafts a tale imagining what many readers want to know more intimately: the courtship and marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, the births of their children, the death of their son Hamnet, and the creation soon afterward of the play Hamlet. But O'Farrell rises above a mere filling in the gaps left by the factual record. Her creative re-imaginings of Shakespeare's marriage, his wife's own form of artistry, and both parents' grieving the loss of their child are not just fictional creations but also critical interventions in the way that Shakespeare's life—his wife, marriage, and parenthood—and his art—Hamlet—have been perceived. Like all the best criticism, O'Farrell's creative writing is a form of creative reading that brings us back to a desire for an encounter, a feeling of encounter with the text that was primary.

Hamnet is less about Shakespeare than it is an encounter with Shakespeare, undertaken in a Shakespearean manner—that is, not littered with "thous" and "forsooths," but crafted in Shakespeare's distinctive art of indirection. O'Farrell's novel is also deeply informed by literary criticism; she cites Germaine Greer's Shakespeare's Wife and the studies of James Shapiro among her prized sources. She conducted an enormous amount [End Page 9] of research on falconry, herbology, epidemiology of the Black Plague, and of what one would see and hear and smell in the streets of London in 1600. But none of that is trumpeted in the book; we are not taken out of the story to admire how clever and studious she is. Like Shakespeare did when composing Hamlet, a play that would accelerate not only his career but playwriting itself in its innovations of interiority onstage, O'Farrell writes by way of radical excision, paring away anything that would prevent our complete absorption in her world.

That term, "radical excision," is Stephen Greenblatt's. When Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, Greenblatt argues, he found that he could "immeasurably deepen the effect" of his plays and create an "intense representation of inwardness" if he removed expected details, if he excised "a key explanatory element" or motive, whether of causal plot element or psychological rationale. This technique of radical excision was not used to make "a riddle to be solved" but instead to create a "strategic opacity" that "released an enormous energy" which had heretofore been "at least partially blocked or contained by familiar, reassuring explanations."¹ As a result, in Hamlet Shakespeare was not only able to represent Hamlet's inwardness but also his own, to conjure, as Greenblatt puts it, "the deepest expression of his being."² Greenblatt assumes that this "conceptual breakthrough" of radical excision was not merely technical; in other words, it was not just a new aesthetic strategy, but a personal revelation. Hamnet's death shook Shakespeare so profoundly that it inspired him to fashion a new inner structure of plays that could express his "root perception of existence," his "preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and settled."³ But, we might ask, how could Greenblatt really know this? Is his biography a work of creative criticism, an expression of his own literary critic's desire to discover and share in Shakespeare's root perception of existence? In that case, might we also consider Hamlet its own brand of creative criticism—a work that resees the legend of Amleth as a tale of grief? A tale and a telling that critiques the popular genre of revenge tragedy and its tired conventions by getting under them to see how much revengers are grieving, and slowing down the pace of the play to sit with the revengers and listen to why? Perhaps all innovation...

• 渴望保持联系：玛吉·奥法雷尔的《哈姆内特》是一部创造性批评作品
• 艾米·缪斯 (简介)

我想念你，我想念你，我愿意付出任何代价让你回来，任何事情。

虽然玛吉·奥法雷尔的《哈姆奈特》（2020）作为一部虚构作品、一部历史小说提供给我们，但它同样可以被理解，甚至可能更深入地被视为一部创造性批评的作品。她精心构思了一个故事，想象了许多读者想更深入地了解的内容：威廉·莎士比亚和安妮·海瑟薇的求爱和婚姻、他们孩子的出生、儿子哈姆内特的去世，以及不久之后戏剧《哈姆雷特》的创作。但奥法雷尔的作用不仅仅是填补事实记录留下的空白。她对莎士比亚的婚姻、他妻子自己的艺术形式以及父母双方失去孩子的悲痛进行了创造性的重新想象，这不仅仅是虚构的创作，也是对莎士比亚的生活——他的妻子、婚姻和为人父母——方式的批判性干预。他的艺术—— 《哈姆雷特》 ——已经被人们所认识。像所有最好的批评一样，奥法雷尔的创造性写作是一种创造性阅读的形式，它让我们回到对相遇的渴望，一种与文本相遇的感觉。

《哈姆内特》与其说是关于莎士比亚，不如说是与莎士比亚的一次邂逅，以莎士比亚的方式进行——也就是说，没有散布着“千”和“forsooths”，而是以莎士比亚独特的间接艺术精心打造。奥法雷尔的小说也深受文学批评的影响。她引用了杰梅因·格里尔的《莎士比亚的妻子》和詹姆斯·夏皮罗的研究作为她的珍贵资料。她进行了大量的工作[第9页完]关于猎鹰术、草药学、黑死病流行病学的研究，以及人们在 1600 年伦敦街头所看到、听到和闻到的东西。我们从这个故事中出来并不是为了欣赏她是多么聪明和好学。就像莎士比亚在创作《哈姆雷特》时所做的那样，这部戏剧不仅加速了他的职业生涯，而且在舞台上的内在性创新中剧作本身，奥法雷尔通过彻底的切除来写作，删掉任何会阻止我们完全融入她的世界的东西。

“彻底切除”这个术语是斯蒂芬·格林布拉特提出的。格林布拉特认为，当莎士比亚在写《哈姆雷特》时，他发现，如果他删除了预期的细节，如果他删除了“一个关键的解释元素”或动机，他就可以“无限地加深他的戏剧的效果”，并创造出“内心的强烈表现”。无论是因果情节元素还是心理原理。这种彻底切除的技术并不是用来制造“一个待解之谜”，而是用来制造一种“战略不透明性”，“释放出巨大的能量”，而迄今为止，这种能量“至少部分地被熟悉的、令人放心的解释所阻止或包含”。 ” ¹因此，在《哈姆雷特》中莎士比亚不仅能够代表哈姆雷特的内心，而且能够代表他自己的内心，正如格林布拉特所说，能够召唤出“他存在的最深刻的表达”。²格林布拉特认为，根治性切除的这种“概念突破”不仅仅是技术上的；更是一种技术上的突破。换句话说，这不仅仅是一种新的审美策略，更是一种个人的启示。哈姆内特的死深深地震撼了莎士比亚，激发了他创作一种新的戏剧内部结构，以表达他的“存在的根本感知”，他“对凌乱、损坏和未解决的事物的偏好，而不是整齐排列、制作精良和解决的事物” ”。³但是，我们可能会问，格林布拉特怎么可能真正知道这一点？他的传记是一部创造性批评的作品，是他自己的文学批评家渴望发现和分享莎士比亚对存在的根本感知的表达吗？在这种情况下，我们是否也可以将《哈姆雷特》视为自己的创意批评品牌——一部将阿姆莱斯的传奇重新视为悲伤故事的作品？一个故事和一个讲述，批评流行的复仇悲剧类型及其令人厌倦的惯例，通过深入了解复仇者有多少悲伤，并放慢戏剧的节奏，与复仇者坐在一起，听听为什么？也许所有的创新...