(1975). The Fall of Man. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child: Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 589-646.

Hamlet Father and Son

The fall of man.

This thesis provides a detailed consideration of the family in Shakespeare’s canon and the engagement therewith in three South African novels: Hill of Fools (1976) by R. L. Peteni, My Son’s Story (1990) by Nadine Gordimer, and Disgrace (1999) by J. M. Coetzee. The study is divided into an introduction, three chapters each addressing one of the South African novels and its relationship with a Shakespeare text or texts, and a conclusion. The introductory chapter provides an analysis of the two strands of criticism in which the thesis is situated – studies of the family in Shakespeare and studies of appropriations of Shakespeare – and discusses the ways in which these two strands may be combined through a detailed discussion of the presence of power dynamics in the relationship between parent and child in all of the texts considered. The three chapters each contextualise the South African text and provide detailed discussions of the family dynamics within the relevant texts, with particular reference to questions of authority and autonomy. The focus in each chapter is determined by the nature of the intertextual relationship between the South African novel and the Shakespearean text being discussed. Thus, the first chapter, “The Dissolution of Familial Structures in Hill of Fools” considers power dynamics in the family as an inherent part of the Romeo and Juliet genre, of which William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is but a part. Similarly, the impact of a sociopolitical identity, and the secrecy it necessitates, is the focus of the second chapter, “Fathers, Sons and Legacy in My Son’s Story” as is the role of Shakespeare and literature within South Africa. These concerns are connected to the novel’s use of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, King Lear, and Hamlet. In the third chapter, “Reclaiming Agency through the Daughter in Disgrace and The Tempest”, I expand on Laurence Wright’s argument that Disgrace is an engagement with The Tempest and consider ways in which the altered power dynamic between father and daughter results in the reconciliation of the father figure with society. The thesis thus addresses the tension between parental bonds and parental bondage.

The family in Shakespeare's plays : a study of South African revisions

Fathers are central to the drama of Shakespeare's time: they are revered, even sacred, yet they are also flawed human beings who feature as obstacles in plays of all genres. In Problem Fathers in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama, Tom MacFaul examines how fathers are paradoxical and almost anomalous characters on the English Renaissance stage. Starting as figures of confident authority in early Elizabethan drama, their scope for action becomes gradually more restricted, until by late Jacobean drama they have accepted the limitations of their power. MacFaul argues that this process points towards a crisis of patriarchal authority in wider contemporary culture. While Shakespeare's plays provide a key insight into these shifts, this book explores the dramatic culture of the period more widely to present the ways in which Shakespeare's work differed from that of his contemporaries while both sharing and informing their artistic and ideological preoccupations.

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Problem Fathers in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama

Two essential considerations for anyone interested in the basics of seventeenth-century Spanish drama are: 1) the canon, including canon formation, and 2) the kinds of drama that comprise the unwieldy and unruly creature Lope called the Comedia Nueva. I speak of canons, in the plural, because there are several. Suppose we center the discussion on Lope and Tirso, in order to make it manageable. First, then, we might speak of the Lopean or Tirsian canon. Second, we might expand our horizon to deal with the canon of the Comedia as a whole. Within both the canon of an individual writer and of the Comedia as a whole, we would need to deal with several subdivisions: the select, critical, accessible, and potential canons. Third, we might expand our focus to consider the canons of European drama ofthat time, of all time, of world drama, of European literature and world literature, and so forth. It is thus no simple matter to situate adequately any given title, for the canons within which it might be classified and ranked are limited only by one's knowledge of literature. The potential canon would include all extant texts in any of the categories mentioned above. The accessible canon would center around those works that have received the recognition of a critical edition or have appeared in anthologies. The select canon is comprised of those works that have found their way onto reading lists and syllabi, while the critical canon tends to mediate between the accessible and select varieties, with

The Spanish Comedia: On Canons and Kinds

'What is my nation?' wondered the Irishman, Captain Macmorris, before the walls of Harfleur; and Henry V is among other things the story of national identity, the fusing of English, Irish, Scots, and Welsh into British. To this theme is assimilated the personal identity of the English (or Anglo-Welsh) leader, Henry. Henry V is dated with certainty to 1599, a year or so before Hamlet. The later play takes much further the sketch of nationhood and identity presented in Henry V. What had been a set of literals, the overt presence of four peoples, takes on in Hamlet a largely metaphorical status. Everything in Hamlet, whatever its physical reality, is in the end subsumed into Hamlet. Events have meaning as they bear upon the consciousness at the centre of the play. And for Hamlet, the drama of his consciousness unfolds through areas of national definition. The geography of Europe becomes, in the end, countries of the mind.

Hamlet Father and Son

Citations

The fall of man.

The family in Shakespeare's plays : a study of South African revisions

Problem Fathers in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama

The Spanish Comedia: On Canons and Kinds

Hamlet: Nationhood and Identity