Showing papers on "Hamlet (place) published in 1994"

Hamlet's perfection

Abstract: How does the rash yet serene Hamlet of Act 5 arise from the passive and grief-stricken Hamlet of Act 1? What path leads him from sickened thoughts of birth and incest to the certainty that thoughtfulness itself must be escaped through bold action? The roles of Senecan revenger and patient Christian may seem worlds apart, observes William Kerrigan, but Shakespeare fused them in a character that has fascinated the world for centuries In his new study, Kerrigan celebrates both Hamlet's perfection, the character's creation of new ideals out of an inheritance of disillusionment, "Hamlet"'s perfection, and the play as Shakespeare's greatest tragedy Kerrigan's approach reflects his interests in literary formalism, historical scholarship, intellectual history and psychoanalysis In an overview of the history of "Hamlet" criticism, Kerrigan argues that recent critics have done little or nothing to elucidate the play, and he suggests ways in which the abandoned tradition of "Hamlet" commentary might still inspire fruitful approaches to the play He explores the phrase "good night" in terms of the play's nocturnal preoccupations of grief, melancholy, haunting, crime and death He moves from the division of day and night and good from evil to Hamlet's split apprehension of women and his attempt to "salvage purity from an initial conviction of general debasement" His final chapter treats the "self-revised" Hamlet of the final Act

Hamlet's Too, too solid flesh'

Abstract: From a Lutheran perspective, the sexuality Hamlet complains about in Ophelia and Gertrude more appropriately describes the "concupiscence and self-will" of Hamlet's own self-absorption. In expounding his theology of grace, Luther repeatedly calls this spiritual illness the prudence or wisdom of the flesh. In this context the primary symptom of Hamlet's "too, too solid flesh" is his frustrating, paralyzing desire for perfect knowing and perfect doing, a desire John Donne once calls the "carnality of the understanding." Hamlet's fear of death and his dread ofjudgment, his uneasiness with all "frailty" in men and women, and his stubborn bondage to external, physical, intellectual, and spiritual "goods" are among the other symptoms that Luther associates with this concupiscence. Only at the end, and only then imperfectly, does Hamlet's glutting with death and imperfection, the inevitable rashness and indiscretion of human knowing and doing, begin to reconcile him to accept his own mortality and attest to "a divinity that shapes our ends / Rough-hew them how we will."

Between the Sign and the Gaze

Abstract: A woman turns into a piece of furniture (Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest); a writer of children's books takes photos of naked little girls (Lewis Carroll); Mont Blanc becomes the maternal breast (Shelley); Hamlet mistakes Ophelia for a phallus (Lacan's Hamlet seminar); and mom turns out to have thermonuclear arms (Laurie Anderson's United States). Reviewing the ways in which women have been fantasized in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western culture, Herman Rapaport offers a series of brilliant insights into the concept of the fantasm in modern art.

New Essays on 'Hamlet'

Abstract: The 17 essays in this collection reflect the plurality of discourse on Hamlet that has characterised criticism from the English Renaissance to the present. They examine the play from a variety of perspectives, including Jungian archetypes and sacrificial themes.

‘how infinite in faculties’ : hamlet's confusion of god and man

Abstract: While R. M. Frye helpfully places Hamlet's "looking before and after" soliloquy within the emblematic contexts of prudentia bifrontis and Janus, he glosses over the phrase's problematic relationship to the character of Hamlet and to major issues in the play. Frye says, for example, that the commentary on the emblem of Janus, "He, that concealed things will find,/Must look before him and behind", "accords with Hamlet's tactics of 'looking before and after' ". He praises Hamlet's conscience as one which works well, "points forward and backward in time, and provides guidance to action". He implies more than once that Hamlet knows and embodies "the ideal [which] repres ented a cohesive and effective balance between thought and action". Nowhere in this discussion does Frye acknowledge Hamlet's repeated confu sion between conscience and cowardice, his imprudent conclusion to value "bloody thoughts" or find thinking "nothing worth", his perplexing prefer ence for the Hotspur honor of Fortinbras, equally disdainful of wisdom and of soldiers. Nowhere does Frye mention the ambiguities of syntax, diction and context which could manifest Hamlet's confusion of God and man.3 Theology and iconography both suggest that the Renaissance audience could understand "large discourse" and "looking before and after" as God's creative act and His providential vision rather than man's fallen but self-inflated reason. I want to argue that Hamlet is frustrated in this speech and throughout most of the play precisely because he does not balance thought and action, or understand the proper relationship between his faculties of memory, reason and will and those of his maker.

Sinistral Details: Nabokov, Wilson, and Hamlet in Bend Sinister

Abstract: In 1944 Nabokov told an editor at Doubleday that his new novel—a dark metafictional farce set in an imaginary police state—had required \"a considerable amount of critical and original research in ... Shakespearean lore (mainly Hamlet).\"1 Nabokov alludes to Shakespeare throughout his oeuvre, and especially in his English novels; and he alludes to Hamlet more than to any other play. Yet readers have been unable to explain why Shakespeare and Hamlet are so essential to the design of Bend Sinister, in particular. As D. Barton Johnson wryly remarks, \"the most critical issue raised by the Shakespeare/Hamlet subtext is its raison d'etre.\"2 The crux of the problem is the novel's seventh chapter—in which the hero, Adam Krug, and his intellectual sidekick, Ember, indulge in an extravaganza of allusions to the Bard, parodies of Shakespearean criticism, and travesties of Hamlet. Some critics, unable to find consistent parallels between the play and the novel, have decided that this chapter is merely an amusing but unnecessary digression;3 others, who believe that it is \"more than a joke and more than just an opportunity for

William Shakespeare's Hamlet

Abstract: A stylish reworking of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy, set in the glittering hi-tech universe of contemporary New York. It hinges upon the feud between the moody Prince (Ethan Hawke) and his villainous stepfather Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan).

Shakespeare's Sweet Leaves: Mourning, Pleasure, and the Triumph of Thought in the Renaissance Love Lyric

Abstract: Particularly as the Reformation permeated England, the efficacy of the individual mind was widely assumed. When Hamlet remarks, "For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," a forerunner of Satan's affirmation, "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n," he voices neither a daring nor an original idea.4 But to represent the power or joy of thinking in a love poem is a different matter. The lion's share of love lyrics from the English Renaissance, like their continental prototypes and counterparts, represent thought of the beloved as tormenting or dangerous,-)despite any

Some Necessary Questions of the Play: A Stage-Centered Analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet

Abstract: This book examines Hamlet's use of real space and time as elements of narration, Hamlet's use of wit and soliloquy, and the expectation that the audience brings to the theatre.

La trace d'un crime si vieux : UNE ETUDE DU MEUrTRE DU PERE

Abstract: The murder of the father, together with incest, is one of the two unconscious components of the oedipus complex. When discovering the structure, sigmund freud associated it at once with two literary texts : sophocles' oedipus tyrannus and william shakespeare's hamlet. He later gave a literary from to the murder of the father in his last book, his " historical novel " caffed the man moses and the monotheistic religion. Each of these three texts has a mythical substratum : the murder of the the father was already there in the grecian myth of oedipus, the danish myth of hamlet and the freudian myth of the origins, the myth of the murder of ther father of the horde. The trace of such an old crime constitutes an attempt to describe and to analyse the murder of the father around that triple origin, the mythical, the literary and the psycoanalitriple origin, the mythical, the literary and the psycoanalithe concept is first taken up by the complementary definitions of human sciences. It is then described in its historical men -tal, religious, political and artistical manifestations at the three times when oedipus tyrannus, hamlet and the man moses were written. Its is at last spotted, described and commented on in each of the three texts. It is then analysed in the spirit of a con35stant comparison between the scientific definitions achieved and the literary expressions. The result of the processes is a better knowing of an important concept of contemporay reflection. Together with an approach of the thinking of sophocles, shakespeare and freud about that issue, the study also proposes a reading of three fundamental

Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1993-94

Abstract: The Royal Shakespeare Company's season in Stratford-upon-Avon began with a six-week run of two productions. Richard III, directed by Sam Mendes with Simon Russell Beale as Gloucester, was staged at The Other Place in the summer of 1992 and returned after a London run to play at the Swan, while Adrian Noble's Hamlet, with Kenneth Branagh, transferred from the Barbican to Stratford to play opposite it in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. This unusual arrangement provided strong bankers for the beginning of the season, as both productions drew excellent houses. Hamlet and Richard III closed on 1 May, to be replaced after a short break with the first new productions of the 1993-94 season: Murder in the Cathedral at the Swan and King Lear in the main house. The rest of the season in the main house consisted of three other Shakespeare productions: The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, and Love's Labor's Lost. Julius Caesar, Ghosts, and an adaptation of Moby Dick were given at The Other Place. The Swan repertoire consisted of Eliot's play, together with Goldoni's The Venetian Twins, Wycherley's The Country Wife, and a new play, Elgar's Rondo, by David Pownall. Many regarded these choices as a failure to make good use of the Swan, for with the exception of The Country Wife, the season included no play from the repertoire for which the theater was designed. Richard III was substantially a revival of the 1992 production, restaged to accommodate it to the Swan's thrust stage and three-sided auditorium. Simon Russell Beale, absent from the role in London because of a back injury, returned to it in Stratford. (The production was reviewed by Robert Smallwood in Shakespeare Quarterly 44 [1993]: 358-62). Hamlet was Adrian Noble's first production of the play for the RSC and marked Kenneth Branagh's return to the company for the first time since 1985. This was Branagh's third professional appearance in the title role: he played Hamlet under Derek Jacobi's direction for the Renaissance Theatre Company in 1988 and codirected a radio production of the "complete" text in 1992. The work of Noble and Branagh guaranteed the new production attention, making it for good or ill a piece of "star" actor's and director's Shakespeare and a theatrical gossip columnist's version of the return of the prodigal. The Renaissance Theatre Company, founded by Branagh and David Parfitt in 1986, owes its existence in some measure to impatience with the ways of the RSC. Branagh's acknowledgment that he had consulted the Prince of Wales (subsequently Renaissance's patron) when preparing to play Henry V in 1984 was seized on now by reviewers anxious to connect the heir of Windsor with the Prince of Denmark. "Alas, poor Charles. I know him. . . " was the headline for a notice in the Observer in which Michael Coveney claimed that the performance "could also be read as a defense of the Prince of Wales, an unofficial but carefully planned promotion of the dilemma of the modern monarchy" (20 December 1993). In the event, it turned out to be an impressive production with several fine performances and much more of an ensemble piece than might have been expected. The time was around 1900, the place a relaxed constitutional monarchy in Scandinavia. Bob Crowley's designs were elegant, simple, and rich-looking. The first court scene showed a white-suited Claudius, played by John Shrapnel, presiding genially, glass in hand, over an informal gathering. Hamlet, more funereally dressed than the