This edition is the first that treats Hamlet as the work of a philosophical poet concerned with knowing the nature of the world, particularly the human world. Where conventional editions lift the play out of its specific setting and analyze it in the light of the social, cultural, and political circumstances of Elizabethan England, Jan Blits takes the play-s dramatic setting of early Renaissance Denmark as indispensable to understanding its rich meaning. In providing notations and commentary on Hamlet, Blits sets aside the historicist principle or prejudice, pervasive throughout literary studies today.-Blits, by contrast, strives to understand the play entirely on its own terms. He inflicts no literary or philosophic theory-no parochial professional preconceptions-upon the play. Instead, he aims to be fully receptive to what Shakespeare wrote and try to draw out of the play the substance that he deliberately put into it. His treatment of Horatio is particularly stunning in this regard.
