Showing papers on "Hamlet (place) published in 1976"

Modern Shakespeare Offshoots

Abstract: Shakespeare's plays have never had a larger audience than they do in our time. This wide viewing is complemented by modern scholarship, which has verified and elucidated the plays' texts. Nevertheless, Shakespeare's plays continue to be revised. In order to find out how and why he has been rewritten, Ruby Cohn examines modern dramatic offshoots in English, French, and German.Surveying drama intended for the serious theater, the author discusses modern versions of Shakespeare's plays, especially "Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear," and "The Tempest." Although the focus is always on drama, contrast is supplied by fiction stemming from "Hamlet" and essays inspired by "King Lear." The book concludes with an assessment of the influence of Shakespeare on the creative work of Shaw, Brecht, and Beckett.Originally published in 1976.The 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.

The Artist as Scientist: Psychiatric Diagnosis in Shakespeare's Tragedies

Abstract: SHAKESPEARE was fascinated with the idea of madness. In fact, most Elizabethans were. Elizabethan drama began with a play about insanity— The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo Is Mad Again . For the Elizabethan, a trip to the theatre was a movie, a television documentary, a Broadway musical, and a visit to a zoo or amusement park, all in one. Shakespeare was showman enough to capitalize on his audience's taste for the varied and bizarre. Each of his four major tragedies is a sensitive exploration of psychopathology. Hamlet portrays manic-depressive illness in Hamlet and schizoaffective disorder in Ophelia. Macbeth shows both major characters suffering from ambition that leads to crime and the punishment of depression. Lear has a mild organic brain syndrome that develops under stress into a reactive psychosis, while Gloucester becomes depressed and Edgar feigns classic schizophrenia as Poor Tom. Othello develops a suspiciousness bordering on paranoia, while Iago's delight

Hamlet's Enemy: Madness and Myth in Hamlet

Abstract: Written with simplicity and clarity, this book deals with important issues and relates them to problems of psychiatric and psychoanalytic insights. With a few exceptions, Lidz has wisely chosen not to contend with the huge body of existing Hamlet criticism and discussion. Hamlet, he declares, directly challenges the psychiatrist's professional acumen. Is Hamlet mad or feigning madness? Are the "symptoms" a manifestation of something else? Lidz, as others have before him, sees Hamlet's ills as stemming from loss and melancholia. The book differs little from previous conceptions of Hamlet the man and of his dynamics and problems. It does not use the extraordinary ambiguity of everything about this play to see deeper, to look afresh. It also carries the long-existing and deep veins of misogyny revealed in the interpretations of the characters of Queen Gertrude and Ophelia. Psychoanalysts have been quick to brand Gertrude a sensuous, incestuous adulteress. Lidz goes

Gade, Olivier, Richardson: Visual Strategy in Hamlet Adaptation

Abstract: Hamlet is a play which admits no easy translation into the medium of film. Much discussed "epic" qualities, particularly the emphatic and rapid shifting of locale and time frame - so often cited as one of the most "cinematic" of Shakespeare's techniques1 - simply do not operate to any great extent in the play. In fact, the emphasis on locale remains considerably less important here than in most other Shakespearean plays. The play exudes an aura of claustrophobia, as recent film directors have well noted. The convention of the unlocalized stage, which in the Roman plays, the histories, and the other tragedies seems to underline a sense of human action played against a macrocosmic backdrop, here seems to invert itself, to stress the essential sameness of all locality where the philosophical underpinnings of human action, not its Protean texture, are given form. Most of the action in Hamlet takes place within doors. Whether at the home of Polonius or somewhere in the palace, the locales seem largely undistinguishable. On the stage, we see Hamlet freed of this physical prison only in the encounter with Fortinbras' army, and perhaps in the graveyard scene. That we hear of his battle with the pirates and his cruel trick on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is significant, for the spoken descriptions intrude into Elsinore as single moments of decisive action starkly contrasting with the confusion and complexity that beset Hamlet within its confines. The frequency in the play of such scenes reported rather than represented adds to the atmosphere of enclosure characteristic of Hamlet. Of course, a number of other significant moments are recounted: the Ghost narrates the circumstances of his murder (l.v), a Messenger describes Laertes' arousal of the people (IV,v), Gertrude tells of Ophelia's death (IV.vii). That scenes of narration occur so frequently in the play makes for an interesting problem in film adaptation. Since Shakespeare seems to have intended many of these scenes narrated after the fact to counterpoint the action seen on stage, their visualization in a filmed Hamlet may run counter to the purpose for their composition, thereby compromising in some measure the film's fidelity to its source. The demands of the dilemma seem to have escaped few adaptors of the play, many evolving unique strategies to solve the problem. Certainly a fully cinematic Hamlet must come to terms with these and other un-filmic tendencies, and somehow accommodate them to the demands of effective film-making. In this essay I will examine visual technique in three Hamlet films, hopefully illustrating the wide range of strategies employed in transposing this least apt Shakespearean work to the screen. The Art-Film version of 1 920, for example, takes outrageous liberties with the text, and figures in this discussion for precisely that reason. The director, Sven Gade. virtually explodes the traditional Shakespearean Hamlet and thereby vividly underscores the resistance of the source play to cinematic adaptation. A sense of fidelity to Shakespeare is nowhere evident in the Gade film, but as film the work is excellent. Granted that this Hamlet is a silent and necessarily suffers from the absence of the poetry (not to mention spoken dialogue), but even so the Gade version makes evident the central reality of Hamlet adaptation: cinematic effectiveness demands the sacrifice of some traditional, even sacrosanct, Shakespearean values. The versions of Laurence Olivier (1948) and Tony Richardson (1969) attest in quite different ways to the validity of the principle. While Gade immersed his action in its political ramifications, both British directors move to extract Hamlet from the hurly-burly of public intercourse, focusing tightly on the hero as individual consciousness, largely straining out those Shakespearean touches which distinguish Hamlet as Renaissance man of action and aspirant to royal power. Visually, however, the versions of Olivier and Richardson differ greatly. …

Diseased Beauty in Tony Richardson's Hamlet

Abstract: Hamlet begins his tragedy in the agony of disillusionment. He sees that a satyr has usurped Jove's domain. His mother, once a consort to a demi-god, has become - to his thinking - an incestuous weakling. The court at Elsinore, formerly a paradise, is now ... an unweeded garden That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely.1 (1.2.135-37) Hamlet's initial characterizations of Elsinore are not those of an indignant hypocrite who considers himself unaffected by the corruption in others. "I am too much in the sun," he tells Claudius. The spiteful pun suggests that Hamlet already sees himself as the victim of the "sun's" powers to corrupt. It affects him as it affects the carcass of a dead dog. in which it breeds maggots (2.2.181-82). Hamlet knows he is a son of Adam; he feels the legacy of Cain with more disgust than Claudius can summon (3.3.36-38). He is aware that his flesh and spirit are indelibly "sallied." The progression of Hamlet's tragedy is the intensification of his perception of corruption. He eventually sees that every act. every moral decision, reveals another metastasis of Elsinore's disease. This is Hamlet's agon, the tragedy's mimetic substance, in which the audience must take part if the work's powers are to be felt. Shakespeare, writing for an audience quite sensitive to verbal imagery. depended on the metaphor of decay, especially of cancer secretly at work on flowers or their buds, to create for the playgoer Hamlet's privileged and tormented insight.2 The filmmaker cannot ignore this metaphor, if he or she wishes to capture some of the spirit of Shakespeare's original. The "translation" of the images of corrupt beauty in Shakespeare's play to the film medium is perilous. The greatest danger is that the filmmaker will destroy the tragic ironies in Hamlet's perception of disease. If the director chooses to show us an Elsinore in which corruption is all too obvious, where, for example, Claudius is a leering lecher, or where the decor looks as if it had been coated with the same bituminous slime that Welles spread over the walls of Macbeth's Inverness, then Hamlet's perceptions of disease will appear no more acute than those of a child. Audiences would be denied a tragically sensitive Dane tormented by visions of truth imperceptible to others. Or, if the filmmaker shows a beautiful Elsinore and leaves the job of communicating Hamlet's perceptions of disease to Shakespeare's verse, then a contemporary audience, one that trusts images more than words, is likely to view Hamlet as simply mad and thus fail to experience his justifiable urge to take arms against all ills, to act as physician to Elsinore's disease. If not confronted with visual evidence of Elsinore's corruption, the contemporary film audience might not understand why Hamlet is driven to be cruel in order to be kind; they might not receive the full power of the irony in Claudius' prescription: Diseases desperate grown By desperate appliance are relieved. Or not at all. (4.3.9-11) Somehow the filmmaker must find visual means to mix beauty and disease so that they are indistinguishable. Audiences, despite Claudius' crime, must see that Elsinore is still beautiful: they must also see that it is being eaten from within by the most horrible of cancers. They must experience, with Hamlet, the tragic ironies of his fate: that, to defend beauty, he must destroy it. and in doing so, destroy himself. Almost every shot in Tony Richardson's Hamlet is designed to express metaphorically Elsinore's diseased beauty.3 His means do not draw attention to themselves. Their quietness causes a trompe l'oeil effect, as if the viewer were able, by shifting his or her eyes ever so slightly, to see, first, an unblemished beauty, and then, the cancers at work in all their horror. This intimate, detailed style is highly filmic. Richardson, his cast, and crew were not content merely to record the stage version of Hamlet that Richardson had recently directed. …

Hamlet as Observer and Consciousness

Abstract: Why should Shakespeare re-write the tragedy of Brutus and call it The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark? The more we compare the two plays the more likely it seems that he felt dissatisfied with his first mature tragedy, and that he went over the same ground again because he recognised, too late, that he had not made the most of it. Advancing from Brutus to Hamlet he must have pondered many of the fundamental questions of tragedy — not least, I think, the tragic hero’s relations with the audience.

'The Reach and Wit of the Inventor' Swift's Tale of a Tub and Hamlet

Abstract: Swift's solemn declaration that A Tale of a Tub is a completely original literary form, 'that through the whole book he has not borrowed one single Hint from any Writer in the World' (13),' invites the reader's attention not only to individual allusions but to generic parody. Swift's tale-teller, obsessed with literary fashion and morbidly self-conscious about the conventions he is making fun of, attempts to undermine the forms he borrows; his satire of epistles dedicatory, subtitles, digressions, prefaces, and allegories becomes an almost frantic attempt to dissociate himself both from the standards of the ancients and from the degenerate parodies which modem writers have made of the old forms. The tale-teller, like Burton's Democritus Junior; feels inundated by the mass of material pouring off the printing-press; its very copiousness goads him into a counter-offensive, a desperate attempt to assert his individuality in a society which, he feels, is ignoring him and threatening to drown him out. His hype...

Hamlet without the Prince

Abstract: This book is a very important addition to research resources on London and its immediate region. It has particular merits in the way it goes behind many conventional wisdoms, replacing them with nuanced and grounded accounts of London as a whole and of six localities within it. The review is critical of the book on two levels, however. It underestimates the importance and the pervasive effects of real estate markets in shaping the city. At a more fundamental level, the authors are taken to task for an approach which masks crucial underlying social processes. An alternative reading is sketched.