The Best Book About Hamlet

I wonder if this is the best book about Hamlet, ever:

Pennington, Michael, Hamlet: A User’s Guide

(Limelight edition 1996) ISBN 0-87910-083-4

I have to be modest here because I haven’t read that-all many books about Hamlet. But it’s hard to imagine any single book more dense with suggestion, more bountiful in offering devices for coming to grips with the play.

Shouldn’t be a surprise, really. Pennington is an actor, and Shakespeare is first of all a man of the theatre—i.e., long before he is a literary person, or a sage. Actors (or at least, directors of actors) have to face individual decisions, front to back, that force them to make sense out of the play.

Pennington is perhaps best known to the world as Moff Jerjerrod, second in command to Darth Vader in Star Wars. But by his own account, he is a seasoned Shakespearean who saw his first Hamlet (Olivier, in the movies) when he was 13 (in 1956) and has carried on a more or less continual conversation with the playwright ever since. In the book, he indulges in a few war stories, but the bulk of the manuscript is a scene-by-scene commentary on how you might play it, supplemented by a brisk summary character guide and an elegant, brief summary of what he calls the “state of play” in Hamlet interpretation. Here is a sample, from his discussion of Act I, Scene iii, our first meeting with Polonius in the company of his children, Laertes and Ophelia:

Evidently, some bleak interpretative choices are arising: this happy family may or may not be what it seems. The first two scenes of the play are carried more or less by narrative, and the character decisions within them are provisional, even reversible: but a firm choice about Polonius’ world is needed for this scene to be playable at all, and it will form a junction from which much flows. What Polonius is reveals much about Claudius’s court and affects the balance of sympathies between Hamlet and himself—and therefore the quality of the play’s comedy, and his nature as a father deeply affects Ophelia’s decline into madness as well as the character of his son’s rebellion. (48)

This is surely wonderful stuff for an actor or director, but I haven’t been on stage since the ninth grade, and it seems to me just as helpful for anyone trying to understand the play in performance—or, not least, to explore the mind of the playwright, and to appreciate his greatness. An Amazon search tells me he has done other “User’s Guides”—Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night. If they are anything like this one, I can only wish he had done 30 more.