Showing papers on "Hamlet (place) published in 1971"

Hamlet and Soviet Humanism

Abstract: The “thaw” slips farther back into History. Displaced from our attention by the renewed obscurantism, those heady days are seldom studied any more. This is unfortunate. For, it seems to me, it is particularly now, as a counter to the broadening repression, that we should gather and preserve the achievements of that hopeful decade. It is in this vein that I want to go back to the period and recall a dramatic and brilliant expression of the liberal, “thaw” spirit, as well as a splendid contribution to the rich gallery of Russian Aesopian polemics: Soviet Shakespeare criticism and, especially, the revival of sound and insightful commentaries on Hamlet by Soviet critics and playwrights.

The Conflict in Hamlet

Abstract: N our over-riding concern, as literary critics, with the drama and the poetry of the early part of the seventeenth century, we often lose sight of the fact that neither the drama nor the poetry was the staple reading diet of the average "middleclass" Elizabethan. A glance at Louis B. Wright's MiddleClass Culture in Elizabethan England is revealing. We see that what, in particular, concerned such an individual were tracts devoted in some way or other to self-improvement. Such a concern involved the promulgation and dispensing of a host of essays dealing with the numerous ethical problems social mobility produces. Above all, religious writings dealt not so much with theological cruxes as with problems of everyday morality. In an article devoted to religious writings, Wright notes:

Origins of Mythology

Abstract: Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time . By Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend. Pp. xiv + 505. (Macmillan: London, November 1970.) 84s.

Hamlet and the Shape of Revenge

Abstract: IKE iiiost tragcdics, l>crliips Iikc cvcry tragcdy. Hmrr/ct is a play about tlic h i t s iiiiposccl t i p i tlic iiiortal will, a play ahout tlic L various rcstrictioiis that flcsli is licir to. I’olonius spcaks to Ophclia ofttic “tctlicr” with which I Iaiitlct walks aiitl tlic iiiirgc is a uscful onc to kccy in i i h d for it siiggcsts both that tlic priiicc docs liavc a dcgrcc of frectloin a i d that ultiiiiatcly lic is bouiid. Lqcrtcs cautions Opliclia in a similar inaniicr aiid dcvclops iiiorc cxplicitly tlic litnits 011 I-Iamlet’s frccdoni. Tlie princc’s “will is not his own,” Laertcs says,

Nietzsche and Spengler on Hamlet: An Elaboration and Synthesis

Abstract: wronged and traumatized son he is justified in considering it in this light, for it hinders him from making such decisions and taking such actions as are expected of him or imposed upon him by the milieu in which he exists as character or personality, the stage and setting of his temporal being. Most critics who have found in Hamlet's reflective powers the primal cause of his inaction and indecision have agreed with him that this is weakness or imbalance, and here we must acknowledge the persisting influence of the theory of tragic flaw. Not only is something rotten in Denmark, but something must be "wrong" with Hamlet. The view of Hamlet as a tragedy of reflection has, of course, many variations. Schlegel found the Prince lost in "labyrinths of thought" and Coleridge emphasized the imbalance of "an almost enormous intellectual activity and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it." Commentators have always tended to see themselves in Hamlet, and it has been especially remarked that Coleridge saw in him much of his own reflective and vacillating temperament; but it should in addition be ob-