Showing papers on "Hamlet (place) published in 1995"

Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England

Abstract: Combining the resources of new historicism, feminism and postmodern textual analysis, this book reveals how contemporary pressures left their mark on three Shakespeare plays written at the end of Elizabeth's reign. The language of "Troilus and Cressida", "Hamlet" and "Twelfth Night" echoes the events and anxieties of the time: "Troilus" reflects the rebellion of the Earl of Essex and the failure of the courtly, chivalric style; "Hamlet" resonates with the danger of the bubonic plague and the difficult succession history of James I; and "Twelfth Night" is imbued with nostalgia for an earlier period of Elizabeth's rule, when her control over religious and erotic affairs seemed more secure.

Falconer to the little eyases: a new date and commercial agenda for the 'little eyases' passage in Hamlet

Abstract: Les implications commerciale et politique de la reecriture d'un passage d'Hamlet («The humour of children» devenu «the little eyases»): comment cette nouvelle interpretation fut l'illustration du conflit entre theâtre public et theâtre prive

The First Quarto of Hamlet: Reforming Widow Gertred

Abstract: CRITICS WHO COMPARE THE FIRST QUARTO'S GERTRED WITH GERTRARD of the Second Quarto and Gertrude of the Folio have for the most part found Gertred more "sympathetic."' Once informed that her new husband is a murderer, she commits herself unequivocally to Hamlet's cause, promising to keep up connubial appearances only to deceive Claudius. Rather than another variation on the Shakespearean category "woman with divided loyalties," like KingJohn's Blanche, Antony and Cleopatra's Octavia, or Hamlet's Gertrard/Gertrude, Gertred is now all mother. Moreover, throughout the play she has been pious, reserved, passive, unexceptional; who would not have his widow so? Although the First Quarto does not resolve questions about Gertred's sexual behavior or erase the story's inherent misogyny, it does present a queen who differs so significantly from her counterparts that she impresses critics as the site of greatest difference between the variant texts.2 Of the three texts, Q1, first discovered in the 1820s, is the most enigmatic, retaining its notorious distinction as the best known of the "bad" quartos, even as that term is challenged.3 To adumbrate the most problematic features of Q1: signs of proofreading are few and many passages are

Shakespeare and Gender: A History

Abstract: Over the past 20 years, feminist criticism has done more than any other form of literary criticism in bringing significant changes in how Shakespeare's works are read and studied. What is more, feminist criticism has changed the way English departments hire faculty, how the literary canon is conceived, how classes are taught and what gets published in journals. This anthology charts some of the major developments and accomplishments in Shakespearian gender studies over the last two decades. It includes readings in individual essays of "Much Ado About Nothing", "The Rape of Lucrece", "Hamlet", "Henry VI", "Othello", "The Tempest", "Richard III", "The Taming of the Shrew", "The Merchant of Venice" and "Twelfth Night".

Shakespearean Authority in the Classic Detective Story

Abstract: PERHAPS THE MOST PROLIFIC OF THE SEVERAL SCHOLARS WHO have written detective fiction is J.I.M. Stewart, who produced forty-four classic detective stories under the pseudonym "Michael Innes." The second of these, Hamlet, Revenge!, recounts what happens when a lord chancellor of England is murdered while playing Polonius in an aristocrats' amateur production of Hamlet. According to Stewart's autobiography, long after he became a reader at Christ Church he learned that Sir Walter W. Greg "had read Hamlet, Revenge! again and again, submitting it to 'the same kind of scrutiny he gave to the variants in the first quarto of King Lear'."' Even allowing for hyperbole, I am intrigued by the question of why a mere mystery novel, what Stewart himself calls "purely recreational reading,"2 so engaged a great scholar, a scholar who codified rules that governed the editing of Shakespeare texts for decades. Of course, the reasons behind one editor's fascination with one murder mystery are unknowable, depending as they well may on a peculiar conjunction of desires and anxieties. I can, however, propose some reasons for any Shakespeare scholar to ponder classic detective stories in relation to Shakespeare.3 Elsewhere I have dis-

Elizabethan theatre as textual community: words as essence, action, and historicization in Hamlet

Abstract: In recent years the study of Renaissance theatre has become an ideological battleground. After so many years of debating the language and themes of Shakespeare's plays, many scholars have begun to examine the social patterns of the world which produced these plays. This emphasis on the patterns and influences which comprise a complex culture has provided many enlightening looks at Shakespeare's world—a world which we desire to reconstruct in order to better understand these plays. However, one troubling factor of this method of criticism (usually associated with the New Historicism) is the gap it leaves between the medieval Christian world which came before it and the Renaissance secular culture of which the theatre was a prominent part. Is there a way to understand the textual composition of the theatre as a continuation of the medieval history which preceded it? More specifically, is there a justification for studying theatre as part of a literary history in particular? The problem of literacy has long concerned scholars of late antiquity and the middle ages. They argue the statistics and the definitions of literacy, especially when considering the transitions between oral and written cultures. Clanchy and Gellrich, among others, have integrated into this study the concept of the book and its central place in the culture of the middle ages. The precise definitions of concepts such as book, work, and text have been questioned, thus creating a problem in understanding what it means to say that Christianity was a "religion of the book". A pioneering study which has allowed for ways to talk about these issues was done by Brian Stock in The Implications of Literacy (1983) and in his more recent Listening for the Text (1990). In these two books, Stock develops the idea of "textual communities", which he defines as "...microsocieties organized around the common understanding of a script" and more specifically as "....group[s] that [arise] somewhere in the interstices between the imposition of the written word and the articulation of a certain type of social organization." Stock's model allows for these groups to be regarded as interpretive communities, but also as social entities. Any group which comes together in order to engage in the process of interpretation around a text, be it written or spoken, may develop into a textual community. The members of this community gradually form a shared understanding of the text through a communal experience. As a result, these communities often combine

The Firework-Maker's Daughter

Abstract: What Lila wants to be more than anything else in the world is ...a Firework-Maker! But firework-making is not just about being able to make Crackle-Dragons and Golden Sneezes. There is also one special secret: every Firework-Maker must make a perilous journey to face the terrifying Fire-Fiend! Not knowing that she needs special protection to survive the Fire-Fiend's flames, Lila sets off alone. Her friends, Chulak and Hamlet - the King's white elephant - race after her. But can they possibly reach her in time?

Hamlet and "A Matter Tender and Dangerous"

Abstract: I OFFER THIS ESSAY AS A CONTRIBUTION TO A DISCERNIBLE MOVEMENT in Shakespeare studies which is once again raising the question of the relation of the plays to early modern religious discourse. For a long time this relationship was addressed in the context of biographical criticism, with the texts being read as cryptic testimonials to Shakespeare's Catholicism, his royalist Anglicanism, his agnosticism, his hostility to Puritanism, and so on. In the new assessment of Shakespeare's work and religion, biographical concerns have been displaced by a focus on the texts as part of a broad cultural order and on the great variety of contemporary discourses that nourish the plays and the dramatic conflicts they represent. The interpretive process is complicated by the issue of censorship, a force difficult to assess but undeniable, and, in the case of Hamlet, by the existence of three different texts with their vast number of variants. Religious discourse is integral to Hamlet, but Shakespeare's representation of religion in the play is oblique and inconsistent, and critics have come to many different conclusions about Hamlet's religious content. The play's inconsistent representation of religion is interesting in itself, and I would argue that to a certain extent the forces producing this instability and the role of religion in the play's ideological drama are accessible to historicist criticism. We can, for example, illuminate the representation of religion in the play by viewing it in relation to Hamlet's subjectivity, which is a principal site of ideological contention. We can also engage with specific religious discourses in the text, among them Roman Catholicism, neo-Stoicism, and Protestantism, and with Shakespeare's representation of their historical and institutional affiliations. To classify Stoicism as a religious discourse is arguable, but it clearly functions as an important constituent in the contemporary synthesis of humanism and Christianity. Considering Stoicism within a religious context illuminates Hamlet's involvement with comprehensive ideological systems and helps to prepare the way for an analysis of his subjective transformation at the end of the play. The language and theology of Roman Catholicism emerge most clearly in Hamlet in the prince's encounter with his father's spirit, where the Christian and specifically purgatorial context that Shakespeare creates for the Ghost is rather surprising. The play contrasts sharply in this respect with The Spanish Tragedy, where the ghost of Don Andrea inhabits a classical underworld derived from the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid, a strategy that allows Kyd to avoid the ideological pitfalls of representing a Christian afterlife. The spirit of old Hamlet explicitly identifies his situation beyond the grave, speaking of the "sulph'rous and tormenting flames" to which he must render himself, and of the "certain term" of penance he must endure until "the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away"

Faust, Germany, and Unification

Abstract: "Deutschland ist Hamlet," as the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath had it in a classicalage of dividedness, the decades of romantic Angst prior to the outbreak of the revolution in March of 1848: neither a state nor a nation, Germany seemed unable to come to grips with the crimes of the past, haunted by medieval ghosts, while cultivating a precious inaction, and surrendering sovereignty to others. A trenchant image indeed, surely capturing the troubled incapacity of the early nineteenth century, the obsessive side of the sleeping-capped deutscher Michel (Germany's representative caricature, the corollary to Uncle Sam), although, for all of its critical intentions, the image is still embedded in the same provincialism and interiority against which it protests. For it identifies Germany as the site of an excessive reflection that hinders political decision. In contrast to Hamlet who acts too little, Faust acts too much: it is Faust, from the sixteenth-century chapbook to Mann's Faustus after the Second World War who traces the vicissitudes of action --"Im Anfang war die Tat" ("In the beginning was the Act") [1237]'--and it is he who is more commonly taken as the allegory of the nation. But which Faust and where? Is it the scholar despairing at the limits of knowledge, opting for the deed through the pact with the devil, or is it the beatific promise of grace as the culmination of the encyclopedic collection of culture: or if Faust, as Germany, is divided from the start-"Zwei Seelen wohnen ach in meiner Brust" ("Two souls, alas! reside within my breast") [1112]-how does unification transpire? Divided Faust, divided Germany? If no figure is more German than Faust, no trope is more German than division, and no border more replete with literary significance than the one between the two parts of the tragedy: the young Faust and the old, die kleine Welt and die grosse Welt, the narrowness of old Germany and the epic sweep of the classical world. How are the two linked? The formal welding of the two disparate parts of the representative national epic may tell us something about the culture of German unification. Consider that moment closely: while the dramatic

A Tragédia "sob o signo

Abstract: This essay is a reflection about the relations between melancholy and greek tragedy model seen as a space of triumphal joyness once touched by christian instances.We study melancholic affection of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.