SOME TIME AGO, in an essay that argued for the convergence in Othello of narrative or rhetorical with the contemporary apparatus of judicial power, I began with one of the play's most controversial textual cruxes-the lines in act 3 whose "close dilations" Dr. Johnson tantalizingly suggested might be read as "close delations" ("secret and occult accusations") rather than simply as "dilations" in the current senses of either amplifications or delays.' I argued there that the reasons given by at least one modern editor of the play for excluding the resonance of "secret accusation" from the "close dilations" of the Folio text were indefensible. For they assumed the nonexistence of dilation (or its alternate delation) in the sense of "accusation" in Shakespeare's day, when even the most cursory search of early modern texts yields an embarrassing abundance of uses of the term in exactly this judicial sense, as well as instances of a paranomastic crossing of the two-delation and dilation, that which accuses and that which opens and amplifies.2 I want now to return to this subject anew, in order to consider the implications of reading both Shakespeare and the texts of early modern culture with an awareness of the historical resonance of their terms, not just for the purposes of local interpretation but as a way of perceiving links between the plays and larger contemporary discursive networks. The two contexts I want to set beside Othello and then, in diptych fashion, Hamlet are first the function of the delator or informer as a secret accuser, associated both with spying and with bringing something "hid" before the eye; and second, the language of uncovering, dilating, and opening the "privy" place of woman, in the quasi-pornographic discourse of anatomy and early modern gynecology that seeks to bring a hidden or secret place to light.

Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying, and the "Secret Place" of Woman

This thesis investigates how the size, structure and function of the family
presented in Shakespeare’s plays relates to an early modern understanding of the
importance and function of the family. By examining domestic manuals, pamphlets,
treatises and diaries from the early modern period, I establish what was considered
normative domestic behaviour at the time and analyse Shakespeare's plays through these
contemporary attitudes, specifically their treatment of privacy, household structure and
medical beliefs surrounding reproduction and gynaecology.

This thesis seeks to focus on the way in which people’s positions in the family
change over time, from infancy to adulthood, and how these relationships are
represented in Shakespeare’s plays. Beginning with marriage, where the family is first
formed; I examine Othello and Macbeth, and show how the marriages in these plays,
while tragic, are cherished and valued. Succession was integral to the legacy and
sustainability of a family, which is the topic of the next chapter, in which I explore the
notions of how children are conceived and raised in Richard III and The Winter’s Tale.
The transition from childhood into adulthood was fraught with change in both housing
and legal circumstances, and this struggle in adolescence is clearly depicted in Romeo
and Juliet, which comprises the third chapter. Aside from the familial relationships of
husband and wife and parent and child, the most influential relationships were those of
siblings, which I investigate in a number of plays in the fourth chapter. Finally, I focus
on the traditional and complicated nuclear families in The Merry Wives of Windsor,
Hamlet and Coriolanus, and analyse how the family is highlighted and valued in each of
these plays. The thesis concludes that throughout Shakespeare’s work, the family is
privileged over war, nobility and absolute patriarchal control, emphasising that it is vital
to understanding and analysing Shakespeare’s plays.

Domestic relations in Shakespeare

This chapter deals with the China/West dilemma of Hongkongers through the study of theatre translations of Hamlet in Hong Kong, with a particular focus on Richard Ho’s 1979 version. The preliminary proposition is that the resulting Hongkongness is a unique adaptation of a cultural Britain to a cultural China, whereby the cultural includes the historical but shies away from the political, economic or geographical adaptation.

Avenger Without a Cause: Hamlet in Hong Kong

Hamlet; Shakespeare; fathers and sons; fathers and daughters; King Hamlet; Laertes; Polonius; Fortinbras; paternal authority; filial duty; paternity; Ophelia; Cordelia; King Lear

The Dilemma of Shakespearean Sonship: An Analysis of Paternal Models of Authority and Filial Duty in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Shakespeare and the domestic is a dauntingly capacious rubric for a short review essay, and Geraldo U. de Sousa's At Home in Shakespeare's Tragedies and Frederic B. Tromly's Fathers and Sons in Shakespeare: The Debt Never Promised have little in common other than a place within that category. De Sousa's book takes as its topic the material space of the home and, more specifically, the "dramatic function of dwelling places in the tragedies" (3), arguing that "Shakespeare represents domestic space as a web of tragic relations" (9). Tromly, on the other hand, focuses more narrowly on common patterns in the relationships between fathers and sons in Shakespeare's plays, without singling out a specific genre (although, notably, there are no comedies included in his study). Both of these monographs have been preceded by several decades of historicist and feminist literary scholarship crossing what were once traditional disciplinary boundaries between literary studies, history, sociology, and anthropology to creatively explore literary texts as sites of knowledge on the politics and bonds of marriage, family, and the household. Both make contributions to this interdisciplinary pursuit, although neither breaks new ground. Of studies that fall under the rubric of Shakespeare and the Domestic, articles and books on marital bonds, customs, and hierarchies are by far the most numerous, too numerous to review here in full. Among the most significant studies of marriage from the past thirty years that deserve mention, however, are Linda Fitz's 1980 " 'What Says the Married Woman': Marriage Theory and Feminism in the English Renaissance"; Carol Neely's 1989 Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays; Mary Beth Rose's 1988 The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama and her more recent "The Heroics of Marriage in Renaissance Tragedy" (1998); B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol's 2003 Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage; and Loreen L. Giese's recent contribution, Courtship, Marriage Customs, and Shakespeare's Comedies (2006). Laurie Shannon's "Nature's Bias: Renaissance Homonormativity and Elizabethan Comic Likeness" (2000) also needs to be mentioned, as it offers a crucial corrective to the heterocentric view most modern critics have taken to affective bonds, marriage, and the cultural work of Shakespearean comedy, the genre most often associated with the triangulated nexus of sexual love, romance, and family. Other important queerings of Shakespeare include Mario DiGangi's "Queering the Shakespearean Family" (1996); Julie Crawford's "The Homoerotics of Shakespeare's Elizabethan Comedies" (2006); and Valerie Traub's work, such as "The Homoerotics of Shakespearean Comedy" (1992), "The (In) Significance of 'Lesbian' Desire in Early Modern England" (1992), and Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (1992). As DiGangi points out, however, "Shakespeare's contemporaries often present a fuller picture [than Shakespeare] of the early modern household and the same sex relations enabled by its particular functioning and composition" (270). Catherine Belsey's 1999 Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture is a curious example as a monograph with overt political intentions "to historicize and thus denaturalize family values" (xiv) but which nevertheless maintains heteronormative assumptions and elides any discussion of homoerotic and homosocial ties in the early modern household. It also focuses solely on the nuclear family of husband, wife, parents, and siblings, although an important distinction between the early modern family and the modern family was the presence in the early modern family of "non-kin inmates, sojourners, boarders or lodgers ... as well as indentured apprentices and resident servants" (Stone 26-27). In the introduction to her edited collection, Domestic Arrangements in Early Modern England (2002) (which includes two essays on plays by Shakespeare), Kari Boyd McBride gives attention to the extended nature of the early modern family, particularly to female servants. …

Shakespeare and the Domestic: Geraldo U. de Sousa's At Home in Shakespeare's Tragedies and Frederic B. Tromly's Fathers and Sons in Shakespeare: The Debt Never Promised

Avi Erlich finds that "Hamlet" deals not with repressed patricidal impulses but with a complex search, partially unconscious, for a strong father Much more than he wants to have killed his father, Hamlet wants his father back and seeks a strong man with whom to identify The playwright presents one ambivalent father figure after another, each an imitation or parody of the seemingly titanic king Polonius, Osrick, Yorick, Old Fortinbras, Priam, Achilles, Horatio--these are a few versions ofthe father who bequeathed to his son his own ambivalenceOriginally published in 1978The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905

Avi Erlich

Papers

Hamlet's Absent Father