Shakespeare's unique status has made critics reluctant to acknowledge the extent to which some of his plays are the outcome of adaptation. In Shakespeare's Stage Traffic Janet Clare re-situates Shakespeare's dramaturgy within the flourishing and competitive theatrical trade of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. She demonstrates how Shakespeare worked with materials which had already entered the dramatic tradition, and how, in the spirit of Renaissance theory, he moulded and converted them to his own use. The book challenges the critical stance that views the Shakespeare canon as essentially self-contained, moves beyond the limitations of generic studies and argues for a more conjoined critical study of early modern plays. Each chapter focuses on specific plays and examines the networks of influence, exchange and competition which characterised stage traffic between playwrights, including Marlowe, Jonson and Fletcher. Overall, the book addresses multiple perspectives relating to authorship and text, performance and reception.

https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/renref/article/download/26550/19688

Shakespeare's Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre

The suspense that invests the elusive Ghost in Act 1 of Hamlet is unprecedented on the early modern English stage, where Senecan ghosts are commonly bloodthirsty but not eerie. Recent work has pointed to a purgatorial source for the Ghost, but this ascription ignores the long vernacular tradition, often at odds with clerical orthodoxy, of popular fireside stories or “winter’s tales.” Folk specters from the Middle Ages onward were corporeal, earthy, and dangerous; of uncertain origin, they presented themselves as bodies cast up by the sepulcher to revisit the night. Their stories stress the uncanny, investing them with an unearthly horror. Paradoxically, these ghouls may also be wistful, soliciting attention and regretting the loss of irrecoverable human warmth. At the same time, they long for rest. Like Old Hamlet, such figures often return to report their own undetected murders or to urge survivors to put right injustices perpetrated against their heirs. In addition, the walking dead offered the living a mirror where they were invited to see their own inevitable future. Hamlet’s encounter with the revenant who shares his name constitutes his first confrontation with his own mortality, the issue that will continue to haunt him and the imagery of the tragedy.

Shakespeare's Sad Tale for Winter: Hamlet and the Tradition of Fireside Ghost Stories

"A gross and barbarous composition": Melancholy, National Character, and the Critical Reception of Hamlet in the Eighteenth Century

During the long eighteenth century, discussions of theatrical performance increasingly focused on the actor’s body and its expressive potential to perform emotion. Hamlet —in particular, the prince’s initial meeting with his father’s Ghost—became synonymous with the passion of terror. Horace Walpole appropriates this encounter from Shakespeare’s play, this essay argues, and uses it as a template for terror in his Castle of Otranto . The novel employs the natural language that governs visible, theatrical bodies and familiar episodes from performance to heighten the private experience of the solitary reader.

Hamlet and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto

Through Jacques Derrida’s extended discussion in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International , Shakespeare’s Hamlet has
	 become “an exemplary text for thinking together about the current state of the world” (Royle). This article concerns Shakespeare’s Hamlet alongside Milton’s Paradise Lost as texts central to writing the “literary history of the International.” Whereas Derrida and Marx placed Hamlet at the center of their influential international visions, this article argues that the role of republicanism in forging international solidarity from the seventeenth-century onwards suggests that any literary history of the International ought also to include that key republican touchstone, Milton’s Paradise Lost. Against current critical consensus, however, it also argues that Paradise Lost ’s republican internationalism developed through Milton’s own reading of Hamlet , and that
	 Shakespeare himself may have been Milton’s “old mole.”

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Paul S. Conklin

Papers

A History of 'Hamlet' Criticism, 1601-1821