Showing papers on "Hamlet (place) published in 1988"

Shakespearian Dimensions@@@Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on 'Hamlet', 'Othello', 'King Lear', 'Macbeth'

Abstract: A.C. Bradley put Shakespeare on the map for generations of readers and students for whom the plays might not otherwise have become \"real\" at all' writes John Bayley in his foreword to this edition of \"Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth\". Approaching the tragedies as drama, wondering about their characters as he might have wondered about people in novels or in life, Bradley is one of the most liberating in the line of distinguished Shakespeare critics. His acute yet undogmatic and almost conversational critical method has - despite fluctuations in fashion - remained enduringly popular and influential. For, as John Bayley observes, these lectures give us a true and exhilarating sense of 'the tragedies joining up with life, with all our lives; leading us into a perspective of possibilities that stretch forward and back in time, and in our total awareness of things.

The psychoanalysis of art: some ends, some means.

Abstract: The psychoanalysis of art has been a lively activity for virtually a century, ever since Freud first likened certain findings of his self-analysis to certain turns of plot in Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. Yet over this time a lack of clarity has persisted with respect to the kind of knowledge applied psychoanalysis achieves and its means of justification. Starting with the observation that clinical and applied psychoanalysis are, in every respect, radically different endeavors, this paper goes on to identify some ends and means of the psychoanalytic study of art and to suggest a few criteria of adequacy for the outcomes of such study.

A Thing of Nothing: The Catastrophic Body in Hamlet

Abstract: IF HAMLET ACTUALLY WRITES DOWN MORAL LESSONS on his tablets as he studies his revenge, many of them surely have to do with how life is lived, and lost, in bodies. Far more even than in Macbeth or Coriolanus, the human body in Hamlet forms human experience, being the medium through which men suffer and act. But the body also deforms human beings and threatens ultimately to reduce them to nothing. The nonbeing lurking at the material center of being announces itself everywhere in the play's corporeal imagery, and occupies Hamlet's mind as he tries to find his way from the regal death that initiates the action to the regal death that concludes it. This essay examines the problem in two parts, using an analysis of the imagery as an approach to the great mystery of the play, Hamlet's quandary about how to act. It suggests that Hamlet cannot adequately respond to the Ghost's commands until he learns to accept physicality, with all its dissolute inconstancy, as the image of mentality. Not until he finds his way out of a despairing contempt for the body can he achieve the wish of his first soliloquy and quietly cease to be.

The Form of "Hamlet"'s Fortunes

Abstract: apart \"our\" texts. First came the de-construction of Lear. As the kingdom(s) divided, refusal to privilege \"our\" Lear the Lear that we have now been taught to see as \"conflated,\" as a combination of the quarto and Folio texts gave way to a privileging sometimes of the quarto Lear, sometimes of the Folio, until, in the 1986 Oxford William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, we have been presented with edited versions of both early printed texts, but no version of the Lear that most readers, most theatergoers, most Shakespeareans know.1 Now it is Hamleť s turn though here the pattern of deconstruction is, thus far, different. Instead of two (or three) Hamlets , we have been given, by the Oxford editors and G. R. Hibbard in his single-volume edition of the play, Hamlet as it appears (more or less) in the Folio. Q2 Hamlet, accepted for so long as the privileged (copy ) text of the play, is found in spellings and other accidentals of the Oxford original-spelling edition, but otherwise has simply disappeared from these editions, echoes of it heard in words and phrases, shards and fragments of it printed in appendices.2

Hamlet's fictions

Abstract: This text emphasizes Hamlet's fantasies and imaginations rather than ethical criteria and the depiction of Hamlet as a revenge play.

Literature and ethics : essays presented to A.E. Malloch

Abstract: Part I examines literary conventions as forms of ethical indecision in studies of Empson, Hamlet, and Elizabethan portraiture. Part II defines the "ethics of the unsaid" as an act of resistance and judgment in the work of Austen, Irigaray, and Chaucer. Part III considers discursive "networks," formally in Boethius, technologically in Joyce, and academically in the policy of modern universities on tenure. This book includes essays by Elaine Bandor, Maggie Berg, David Braybrooke, Abbott Conway, Leslie Duer, Dean Frye, Donald F. Theall, Gary Wihl, and David Williams, and honours A.E. Malloch.

A Japanese New Religion: Rissho Kosei-Kai in a Mountain Hamlet

Abstract: A Japanese New Religion describes the lives of members ora major contemporary Japanese Buddhist movement in the context of its mountain farming hamlet, providing an impressive account of the variety of religious experiences and beliefs that have affected the villagers.

Taking Up the Past: Hamlet and Time

Abstract: In twentieth century drama, the act of waiting has become almost a genre in itself. Beckett's Godot, Sartre's No Exit, and thendramatic progeny ask an audience to focus on the process of duration as the consciousness perceives it. Although the theatrical tempo of Shakespeare's play would never be mistaken for that of Beckett's, Hamlet makes a similar demand. In Hamlet, however, duration as a distinct issue must be extracted from a network of questions about time that occur regularly in the critical tradition concerning both Hamlet and the Shakespearean canon at large. A criticism aware of Shakespeare's stage practice has accustomed us to balance the demands of theatrical tempo with the demands of plausible chronology. We expect an acceleration to events and agree to overlook minor inconsistencies. We are accustomed as well to Shakespeare's assessment of human life within a Renaissance value system, where time is a measure of growth or decay in the individual or society as in Troilus and Cressida and Richard II. But when the action imitated is the act of hesitation, we are not concerned with time as a way of keeping track of events but with the consciousness as a repository of duration. Hesitation increases the duration of an act, focussing attention not on the rearrangement of the world achieved by an action, but on the action as a movement through time.

Chance and the Text of Experience: Freud, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare's Hamlet (review)

Abstract: The present selection consists of eight papers and amonumental bibliography of works by and on Ingarden, which takes up over a quarter of the book. McCormick endeavors to convince us that he has put together a balanced representation of Ingarden's crucial works, but he has simply gathered scattered papers that have become available in translation since 1961. In addition to the one already cited, these include: "On Philosophical Aesthetics," "Phenomenological Aesthetics: An Attempt at Defining Its Range," "A Marginal Commentary on Aristotie's Poetics," "Psychologism and Psychology in Literary Scholarship," "Artistic and Aesthetic Value," "Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Object," and "The Physicalistic Theory of Language and the Work of Literature." Nor has McCormick paid much attention to the detail of editorial responsibilities. The paper on psychologism is preceded by the translator's (John Fizer's) useful introduction, but such material should either have been incorporated into the editor's general introduction or each paper given a similar separate introduction for consistency's sake. Moreover, in this book obviously aimed at readers with no German, Fizer is allowed to quote in German some crucial sentences from Ingarden's The Literary Work of Art, which he refers to as Das Literarische Kunstwerk and claims, against McCormick's testimony to the contrary, that it is not yet available in English. Ingarden's own texts have not been checked for similar inconsistencies and Husserl's work is sometimes re-

Hamlet's Choice: Hamlet, a Reformation Allegory

Abstract: Basing her conclusions of research into apocalyptic and Mariological imagery in Hamlet, Hoff offers a comphrensive solution to Hamelet's personal problems. The study includes an examination of the textual history and various biblical translations and word comparisons. The guide aims to convince through historical analysis that standard readings of "Hamlet" have missed a theological superstructure running throughout the play.

Performance as popular criticism : theatrical texts of Hamlet, 1676-1804

Abstract: DEDICATION ......................................... L . ........................................... EPIGRAPH xmrn~tfmro~ ....................................... "THE HOOF OF THE CRITICAL ELEPHANT": SHAKESPEARE IN THE LATE SEVENTEENTH AND THE EIGHTEEbiTH CENTURIES ........................... h FIVE THEATRICAL TEXTS OF , HAMLET, 1676-1804 A. Description of Textr ............ ,........,. 4 d' B. C d l a t l m of Text& .......................... STAGE VERSUS PAGE: HAMLET, THE ACTORS, AND THE CRITICS: ............ A. Hamlet in the Theatre: A Sumnary B. Hamlet: The Scholarly V i e w ......'............ CONCLUSION .................*.................,.... NOTES ............................................. LIST OF WORKS T CITED T report me and my cauro &right s (Ba~lmtbV.ii.>

“How now Horatio, you tremble and look pale”: Verbal Cues and the Supernatural in Shakespeare's Tragedies

Abstract: Barnardo' line “How now Horatio, you tremble and look pale,” delivered just after the ghost's exit in Act I, scene i of Hamlet, is at once a description of Horatio and a thematic statement about the effect of tragedy. By the end of the play, this phrase has come to signify the way amazing, horrifying, and profoundly tragic events affect the spectators: Hamlet addresses the “mutes or audience” to the “act” he, Laertes, Claudius and Gertrude have just performed as “you that look pale, and tremble at this chance” (V, ii, 334). When a character describes another in this way, the utterance constitutes a verbal cue: it tells the audience what is happening on the stage, or how the other characters are reacting to past or present events. A verbal cue can be thought of as a spoken stage direction, to use Raymond Williams' term, one which serves as a signal both to the actors and to the audience. Shakespeare repeatedly resorted to verbal cues in representing the ghosts, witches, and other supernatural visitations that figure prominently in Hamlet, Macbeth, and less prominently, in Richard III and Julius Caesar. Regardless of how they are represented on the stage, supernatural characters are essentially imaginative projections, who exist as much through the speeches and described reactions of others as through what they themselves say and do. Verbal cues thus serve as part of the characterization process; they help to define these creatures in terms of their effects on others. And as a theatrical strategy, the cues employ language to summon up visions in the mind of the spectator, creating images that no stagecraft, however spectacular, could equal.