Review of Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature.(Book review)

Publication: Early Modern Literary Studies

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Matthew Steggle

Hannibal Hamlin. Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 302pp. ISBN 5218 3270 5.

L. E. Semler

University of Sydney

liam.semler@arts.usyd.edu.au

Semler, L. E."Review of Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature." Early Modern Literary Studies 12.1 (May, 2006) 11.1-9 .

Anyone who has played the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" will know its deliciously demonstrable premise that practically every actor in the western filmic tradition may be "linked" to Bacon in very short order via a method of mentally stepping through co-actors in shared movies. It is astonishing that almost all actors may be so linked in under ten steps, many in just a couple, but even more astonishing that only one or two actors have so far managed to elude entirely such a matrix (possessing the enviable "Infinite Bacon Number"). What all this says about western culture is anybody's guess, but consider what a short step it is from Bacon to Hamlet - and that's by name alone, without recourse to Hamlet's "nasty sty" or the theory of an earlier Bacon writing the works of Shakespeare. One can imagine "Six Degrees of Prince Hamlet" in which players demonstrate how literary scholars of early modernity either cite Hamlet directly in published work or cite a colleague who elsewhere cites Hamlet, or cite a colleague who elsewhere cites a colleague who ... etcetera. Indeed, the tenor of our discipline is so predictable in this regard that we could probably rename the game "Two Degrees of Prince Hamlet", but usually we'd not have to go that far because sooner or later, if not in this publication then in our next, we will...

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