Showing papers on "Hamlet (place) published in 1996"

Hamlet and His Problems

Abstract: FEW critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution—of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare's—which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play. 1

Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon

Abstract: Revenge has long been central to European culture. From Homer to Nietzsche, St Paul to Sylvia Plath, numerous major authors have been fascinated by its emotional intensity, and by the questions which it raises about violence, sexuality, death, and the nature of justice. In this exceptionally learned and lively book, John Kerrigan explores the literature of vengeance from Greek tragedy to postmodernism, ranging through material in several languages, as well as through opera, painting, and film, while opening new perspectives on such famailiar English works as Hamlet, Clarissa, and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. By means of broad historical analysis, but also through subtle attention to the fabric of individual texts, Kerrigan shows how evolving attitudes to retribution have shaped and reconstituted tragedy in the West, and elucidates the remarkable capacity of his ancient theme to generate innovative works of art. Although Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon is a literary study, it makes fresh and ambitious use of ideas from anthropology, social theory, and moral philosophy. As a result it will be of interest to students in a variety of disciplines, as well as to the general reader.

From Hinton to Hamlet: Building Bridges between Young Adult Literature and the Classics

Abstract: Demonstrates how YA literature can be used in the English classroom and across the curriculum.

Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden

Abstract: This is a major study of the relation between poetry and politcs in sixteenth and seventeenth century English literature, focusing in particular on the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, and Dryden. Howard Erskine-Hill argues that the major tradition of political allusion is not, as has often been argued, that of the political allegory of Dryden's Absalom and Architophel, and other overtly political poems, but rather a more shifting and less systematic practice, often involving equivocal or multiple reference. Drawing on the revisionist trend in recent historiography, and taking issue with recent New Historicist criticism, the book offers new and thought-provoking readings of familiar texts. For example, Shakespeare's Histories, far from endorsing a conservative Tudor myth, are shown to examine and reject divine-right kingship in favour of a political vision of what the succession crisis of the 1590s required. A forgotten political aspect of Hamlet is restored and an anti-Cromwellian strain is identified in Milton's Paradise Lost. Again and again, Professor Erskine-Hill is able to show how some of the most powerful works of the period, works which in the past have been read for their aesthetic achievement and generalized wisdom, in fact contain a political component crucial to our understanding of the poem.

Tsvetaeva's Orphic journeys in the worlds of the word

Abstract: The emergence of Orpheus Eurydice Hamlet the anti-poet and Ophelia the sibyl "Poets" Orpheus-Rilke "New Year's" conclusion.

Hamlet : by William Shakespeare : screenplay, introduction, and film diary

Abstract: This volume features Kenneth Branagh's screenplay of Shakespeare's Hamlet and includes Branagh's film diary of the production.

The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke and the Pronouns of Address: Q1 (1603) versus Q2 (1604/5)

Abstract: This paper originated in a double interest in you and thou, the pronouns of address in Early Modern English. On the one hand, it was born out of a desire to test if those Shakespearean plays which have been preserved in two or more early texts could cast any light on the uses of the pronouns of address. This could be, precisely, the case of Hamlet, which survives in three early texts: the Quarto of 1603, the Quarto of 1604/5 and the First Folio of 1623. On the other hand, this paper grew from a dissatisfaction with the way in which theories on the Early Modern English pronouns of address have been used to explain the use of you and thou in Shakespeare’s plays.

Concerning the Weary Legs of Wyatt Earp: The Classic Western According to Shakespeare

Abstract: "Shakespeare, huh? He musta been from Texas." John Wayne, in The Dark Command (1940, Republic Pictures) "People talk about classic Westerns. The classic thing has always been the space, the emptiness. The lines are drawn for us. All we have to do is insert the figures, men in dusty boots, certain faces. Figures in open space have always been what film is all about. American film. This is the situation. People in a wilderness, a wild and barren space. The space is the desert, the movie screen, the strip of film, however you see it. What are the people doing here? This is their existence. They're here to work out their existence. This space, this emptiness is what they have to confront." Don DeLillo, The Names1 "Shakespeare? In Tombstone?" The astonishment from gunslinger and gambler Doc Holliday within John Ford's My Darling Clementine probably anticipates moviegoers' reactions. But notwithstanding its curious borrowings from Hamlet, Ford's 1946 rendition of the Wyatt Earp legend has been seen as "the perfect example of the classic Western" (Lovell 169). Historically, performances from Shakespeare would have been common enough in Tombstone, as they were throughout the mining towns of the West.2 What's surprising is less Shakespeare in the Tombstone of 1882 than Shakespeare in the Hollywood of 1946, by which time the cultural division between the two sorts of "classics" was all but complete, with low-art moviemaking split off from high-art Shakespeare.3 The scene that opens The Arizonian (1935, RKO; directed by Charles Vidor) projects a twentieth-century "highbrow/ lowbrow" hierarchy back onto the nineteenth-century frontier: Hamlet so bores the audience of miners that they shoot the ghost of Hamlet's father off the stage. Hamlet also bores the Clanton gang in My Darling Clementine, but the reaction from the other gunfighters-and from the film itself-is rather more complex. Ford's film uses Shakespeare's words in a thoroughly contradictory way to further an almost exclusively visual argument. We will come around to this, and to the way that this transformation away from dialogue toward what Hamlet would call "dumb show" may help to get at the core of Ford's elusive cinematic genius. But it is probably helpful first to recall the outline of the film's rather predictable story. On the harsh desert outside of Tombstone, Arizona, Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) meets Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan) and turns down his offer to buy the cattle the four Earp brothers are herding west. That evening, the three eldest brothers ride back from the "wide-awake, wide-open town" to find eighteen-year-old James Earp murdered and the cattle rustled. Wyatt accepts the job as Tombstone's marshal and, through a barroom confrontation, reaches an accommodation with Doc Holliday (Victor Mature) that leaves Doc in charge of the gambling. Arriving by stagecoach is Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs), a genteel Boston beauty, Holliday's abandoned fiancee and nurse from his days as a practicing doctor. She incites distant admiration from Wyatt and quick jealousy from Chihuahua (Linda Darnell), the saloon singer who calls herself, with reason, "Doc's girl." Clementine cannot persuade the apparently tubercular Doc to return east with her and makes plans to return alone. Wyatt spots Chihuahua wearing the silver pendant stolen from James Earp at his murder. She claims it to have been a present from Doc, but, when confronted by him, admits it was a gift from one of Clanton's four sons, Billy-who shoots her at the moment of her confession and is himself mortally wounded as he gallops from town. Pursuing Billy, Virgil Earp arrives at the Clanton ranch, where he is shot in the back by Old Man Clanton. Meanwhile, Doc returns to his surgical skills to operate on Chihuahua. Later that evening, Virgil's body is dumped onto the main street by the Clantons, and Chihuahua dies of her wounds. At sunup, Doc joins the two surviving Earps for a showdown with the four surviving Clantons at the O. …

Reconstructing Class in Faulkner's Late Novels: 'The Hamlet' and the Discovery of Capital

Abstract: A significant conceptual shift takes place between Faulkner's 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom! and The Hamlet that in 1940 inaugurates the Snopes trilogy, a shift represented in part by the marked preeminence of class as a category through which Faulkner increasingly interprets American social relations. If, as Eric Sundquist has suggested, the question of race takes on a central position in Faulkner's vision in the 1930s, The Hamlet, which suspends that question in favor of a critical study of class identities, arguably represents a new narrative phase in Faulkner's thematics.(1) The chronology of Faulkner's conceptual realignment, however, is more extensive than the four-year interlude between novels would suggest. To begin with, Faulkner first formulated the idea for the Snopes novel not four, but fourteen years earlier, in 1926: Father Abraham, the notably awkward prototype for The Hamlet's wild pony episode, would first be revised into "Spotted Horses," a short story, in 1931 before finding its last and most successful incarnation as the concluding section of the late novel. Though unfinished, and sometimes painfully crude, Father Abraham anticipates in microcosm Flem Snopes' entire entrepreneurial career, a narrative it would take Faulkner the length of the Snopes trilogy to record: as it recalls an instance of Flem's early profiteering, it has already imagined Flem's rise to the presidency of the Bank of Jefferson, a development Faulkner didn't fully bring to pass until much later in The Mansion, the last of the Snopes novels, written in 1959. The figure of class transcendence which Flem represents in the late novels, in any case, was not a new one, and as Father Abraham reveals, even its most powerful incarnation as Absalom's Thomas Sutpen was not the first: "He is a living example of the astonishing byblows of man's utopian dreams actually functioning," Faulkner writes in Father Abraham. "In this case the dream is Democracy."(2) Faulkner thus defines the premise of the figure later at the center of the Snopes trilogy, a figure that would appear in the course of Faulkner's career once as Sutpen's fatally innocent class avenger before resurfacing ultimately as Flem's ruthless capitalist. It's perhaps not surprising, then, given Faulkner's constantly shifting but consistently recurring representatives of class mobility, that in The Hamlet, which moves chronologically from Absalom's Civil War period to the early twentieth century, the vestiges of that earlier world are not only immediately evident but still potent. The Hamlet opens on a scene that casually though uncannily recalls the final scene of Absalom, and that recapitulates to a great extent the narrative of Thomas Sutpen's life. The novel begins by describing "a tremendous pre-Civil War plantation, the ruins of which--the gutted shell of an enormous house with its fallen stables and slave quarters and overgrown gardens and brick terraces and promenades--were still known as the Old Frenchman's place" and which "had long since reverted to the cane-and-cypress jungle from which their first master had hewed them."(3) The similarities between the Old Frenchman's place and Sutpen's Hundred are striking, and although as the scene unfolds the plantations become distinct, the circumstances of their creation remain virtually identical. Like Sutpen, it is a foreigner who "wrested from the jungle and tamed as a monument" the plantation for the sake of a dynastic line, yet whose patronym "those who came after him in battered wagons and on muleback" "could not even read" (p. 4). "His dream and his pride," like Sutpen's, fail to produce a dynastic posterity, his legacy enduring only in local folktales and in the ruined house "which his heirs-at-large had been pulling down and chopping up . . . for thirty years now for firewood" (p. 3). The Old Frenchman's place even rehearses the immolated fate of Sutpen's Hundred, except it is an immolation drawn out slowly and less conspicuously over time. …

Shakespeare Translation as Cultural Exchange

Abstract: In August 1994 the Guardian’ s drama critic concluded his review of Peter Zadek’s production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Edinburgh Festival by claiming that its value to him lay in its not being in English: ‘Shakespeare in a foreign tongue’, he wrote, ‘becomes an analogue to the original that gives the director new freedom’, and ‘it will be hard’, after this, ‘to go back to traditional productions’. While it could be argued that Michael Billington, in journalistic haste, is confusing the strength of a ‘startling, radical, Brechtian’ production with the alienation effect of a foreign language, this was not so with Clement Scott, the formidable Daily Telegraph reviewer, when nearly a hundred years ago he praised Sarah Bernhardt in his book on Some Notable Hamlets of the Present Time (1900). Amazingly he manages to go into raptures over Madame Bernhardt's performance without once commenting on her gender; but he is explicit about the language of this Hamlet: 'With the French version of the immortal text I was charmed. It conveyed Shakespeare's idea in a nutshell' (p. 51). Both then and now, it seems, drama reviewers can be Sentimental Travellers: 'They order this matter better in France' . . . or in Germany . . . or Japan. But I wonder, when it comes to thinking about the implications of Billington's and Scott's proclaimed positions, if academic critics are such travellers? And, how seriously do we think about those implications? I wonder, that is, whether to the immensely fertile body of current Shakespeare studies, the study of translations might not be a stepchild — 'an interesting and harmless occupation for researchers abroad', as the editors of the recently published and excellently thought-provoking collection of essays on European Shakespeares put it, lamenting the lack of reciprocity between their discipline and English and American Shakespeare studies.

The Hamlet as Mediator

Abstract: Our focus on "the customary social unit that mediates relations between household .. and community in Mesoamerican Indian and rural society" (Mulhare 1996:93) leads to a rich conceptual space. A mediator is expected to do more than carry clear messages from one party to another. A mediator must somehow shape the connection, transform the message, and enhance or buffer the force of the exchange. And mediation itself is complex, especially because it varies with the relative power of the (minimally three) parties involved. These aspects of mediation raise interesting questions about small rural social forms and their relations to their contexts. This article explores some of those questions by describing hamlets in Zinacantin, Chiapas (Mexico) over recent decades and comparing them with similar social units in Chinese peasant communities during earlier periods. In both places hamlets have been important mediators between households and the larger community through which households are connected to the state. The goals here are to identify characteristics of hamlets that signal their mediating role, and to explore the conditions under which these characteristics change. In abstract terms, the hamlet of concern is territorially delimited and has a population between several dozen and about 200 households. It has two characteristics that are central to its role as a mediating social form. First, the hamlet is socially incomplete. That is, the social and public life of its residents extends beyond its boundaries in important ways. For example, marriage partners may be sought from outside the hamlet, and/or public roles taken by hamlet residents may be played out in a larger sociopolitical unit. In Mesoamerica this often means that religious offices (cargos) are served at the municipio (township) level, not in the hamlet. It means much the same thing in the world described by fat dictionaries, where a hamlet is defined as "a group of houses or a small village, esp. one without a church" (Brown 1993). Thus, the incompleteness of social and public life in hamlets is a distinctive characteristic of their social form. Given current ideas about the incompleteness of most aspects of life as we see them, I should emphasize that I mean to characterize hamlets relative to other social forms, not in an absolute way (Cancian 1992:205-08). For example, in Mesoamerica, the municipio is a more complete social form than the hamlet. Second, the hamlet's public life is not formally organized, and the hamlet is not fully articulated with the larger unit of which it is a part. This often means t) that its most powerful leaders are called traditional from the point of view of the encompassing state, and/or 2) that relations with the outside world are mediated through residents who are of low status and powerless within the hamlet. Political life in the hamlet is only loosely and/or informally connected with the larger system--in the Mesoamerican case with officials at the municipio level and beyond. This kind of hamlet virtually disappeared from Zinacantin between the 1960s and the 1980s. At the beginning of the period Zinacantin's hamlets closely resembled the idealized one just characterized. By the end, they were much more socially complete, formally organized, and closely articulated with the world outside them. Independence based on distance from the municipio's political and religious center and detachment from higher levels of government was replaced by full formal status in a local system organized by local officials and subject to rules dictated from above. Seen from the local and from the household point of view, the hamlet no longer mediated relations with the world outside. In many ways it became a local outpost of that world. To document this transition in Zinacantin I will 1) give a brief overview of the earlier form of hamlets and of the changes and their proximate causes; 2) review in detail the recent history of formal roles in one hamlet; and 3) summarize a survey of similar transitions in all the other hamlets of the municipio. …

Life, crown, and queen: gertrude and the theme of sovereignty

Abstract: IN a short preliminary paper' I sought to establish the presence in Hamlet of the traditional symbol of the Cup of Sovereignty. Briefly the argument was this: when Hamlet speaks of the 'dram of evil' that obscures a man's virtues (I. iv. 36-8), he is constructing a metaphor for the cup Claudius drinks out of to celebrate his marriage, and giving this vessel connotations which, on the moral plane, resemble those found in the several poisons used in the play: moral corruption is as inherent in that cup as physical infection is in Lucianus', Laertes', or Claudius' poisons. The significance placed on this cup seems out of all proportion to its apparent function in the play, until we stop looking for a realistic explanation and recall that the cup was a symbol for the transmission of Sovereignty in Celtic tales: when the queen handed a vessel or otherwise offered drink to the hero she was granting him her sexual favours and/or sovereignty over her territory. No reader of Hamlet can fail to notice the analogy with Claudius' cup in I. iv which symbolizes both his sexual union with Gertrude and his accession to the Danish throne. The argument, then, claims a traditional, non-realistic reading for this aspect of the play. The present article seeks to delve further into the mythological status of Gertrude and, beyond this, to explore the role, and the fate, of myth in Hamlet. To forestall misunderstandings it will be expedient to state here that this article does not make any pronouncements on woman, her social status, her 'archetypal' nature, or her numinous qualities. The point is worth some emphasis, if only because the border between fact and fiction is often made to look so elusive nowadays. That 'Goddess' which has caught many a receptive imagination since the 1980s is none of my concern here; my goal is to explore Renaissance changes in the application of a traditional literary metaphor. Nothing is said about 'woman', much is claimed about a literary device.

T. S. Eliot and the Use of Memory

Abstract: The "use of memory" in Grover Smith's chapters on tradition in Eliot's poetry refers to a dual function: the poet's awareness of a multiple cultural past and the transformation of its heritage into new and original art. This book makes major contributions, turning up diverse places and neglected thematic resources used by Eliot -- such as Poe's atmosphere of the charnel, the critically evolving personality of Hamlet, and so forth.

Dramaturgy of the Acting Version of the First Quarto of Hamlet

Abstract: Among its most striking differences we could point out the following. It is a much shorter version, 2,220 lines, just over half as long as the Second Quarto (the longest textual version) or any modern critical edition. Variation in dialogue ranges from passages of total similitude, paraphrases, to fragments unique to the First Quarto (about 130 lines), together with a number of transpositions and echoes. Some characters bear different names, for instance, Corambis for Polonius, Montano for Reynaldo1, or Rossencraft and Gilderstone for Rosencrantz2 and Guilderstern. There are important structural differences, especially at two points where the line of action is markedly altered: 1) the soliloquy “ To be, or not to be” and the subsequent nunnery episode occur immediatly after Corambis plans to “ loose” his daughter to Hamlet3, and 2) after Ofelia has become mad, Horatio informs the queen of Hamlet’s return in a scene which is unique to the First Quarto. And finally, characterizations are different, especially the queen who in the closet scene unambiguously denies any complicity with the murder of Hamlet’s father and vows to assist his son in his revenge.

The ‘Bad’ Quarto of Romeo and Juliet

Abstract: The view that the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet (1597) is a memorial reconstruction of Shakespeare’s play, published by the printer, John Danter, without the authority of its owners, is still the current orthodoxy. It has had the sanction ( mutatis mutandis ) of such distinguished scholars as E. K. Chambers and W. W. Greg and it is endorsed widely in modern scholarship, by Brian Gibbons, for instance, in the Arden edition (1980), and in the Oxford Complete Works edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (1986). One of the most recent endorsements comes in a detailed study, supported by computer analysis, of the so-called ‘bad’ quartos by Kathleen Irace. The most detailed account of how such a text might have come into being is to be found in H. R. Hoppe’s The Bad Quarto of Romeo and Juliet, A Bibliographical and Textual Study, and this account is the foundation on which modern orthodoxy is largely based. Similar assumptions about other so-called ‘bad’ quartos have recently come under scrutiny, notably the recent stylometric study by Thomas Merriam and Robert Matthews of the ‘bad’ quartos of 2 and 3 Henry VI and the doubts expressed about the origins of the first quarto of Hamlet by some of the contributors to the collection of essays, The Hamlet First Published . It seems worthwhile, therefore, to re-examine the Romeo and Juliet first quarto to see how secure the foundations of the orthodox view are.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Abstract: This is a survey of Hamlet as a play and its afterlife as a cultural phenomenon, from its pre-Shakespear ean origins to its presence in the latest novel or film '

The Bernhardt Hamlet: Culture and Context

Abstract: Critics regarded Sarah Bernhardt's interpretation of Hamlet in 1899 as the revelation of Shakespeare's tragedy in France. The Bernhardt Hamlet is the first to investigate that production and to explain its context and its impact upon the cultural life of the time. Bernhardt's most significant innovation was her rejection of romantic sensibility in favor of the revenge tradition. In assuming a male role, she remained within the theatrical tradition of travesti that came to full fruition in the nineteenth century. Classically trained, the 54-year-old Bernhardt refashioned the Hamlet inheritance with insight, vigor, and originality.

"Each Word Made True and Good": Narrativity in Hamlet

Abstract: A_NY PLAY THAT CONCLUDES with a plea on the part of the dyfiing protagonist to recount the story of his final vicissitudes is one which, whatever other themes it might address, calls attention to its own underlying concern with the vindicatory powers of murative. Although there are a number of Shakespearean tragedies that culminate in exhortations of this sort, the instance that will perhaps most readily spring to mind is that of Hamlet, the hero of which dies after enjoining his friend Horatio to ''Absent thee from felicity awhile, I And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain I To tell my stoty. '' 1 The question that arises in this work as in others with comparahle endings is whether the story-telling impulse asserts itself only at the conclusion of the play, when the hero is obliged to confront the im.age of himself that will be transmitted to posterity, or whether-as Stephen Greenblatt has argued is the case with Othello -it might not in some degree be a determinant of events within the drama itself. My own view is that Hamlet is as deeply interested in the implications of story-telling as it is by now

The complete works of William Shakespeare : the Shakespeare Head Press edition

Abstract: William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is acknowledged as the greatest dramatist of all time. He excels in plot, poetry and wit, and his talent encompasses the great tragedies of Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and Macbeth as well as the moving history plays and the comedies such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew and As You Like It with their magical combination of humour, ribaldry and tenderness. This volume is a reprint of the Shakespeare Head Press edition, and it presents all the plays in chronological order in which they were written. It also includes Shakespeare's Sonnets, as well as his longer poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

The 1994 Shanghai International Shakespeare Festival

Abstract: These two productions show how potent a metaphor the play can still make with those "unlike things"-a contemporary company and a contemporary audience. The challenge for directors and actors will be to create convincingly a Hamlet that restores the supernatural and dynastic elements to contemporary performance. It is perhaps too easy to blame television for domesticating the outer mystery and for reducing a time of breaking of nations to brief summaries between commercials. If, as Yeats would have it, history is spiraling into antithesis, then television can be only a pale reflex of that inexorability. Theater can be more, however, and it remains for the script of Hamlet to show us how.

Adlai Stevenson: Hamlet in New York

Abstract: Harry Truman was only one of many observers who likened Adlai Stevenson to Hamlet. “Those who make the comparison,” as Richard Goodwin explains, “do so as a metaphor of irresolution. Hamlet is the story of a man who tries to understand and reach for certainty before he strikes.” The origins of the analogy lay no doubt in Stevenson’s seemingly timid and certainly unsuccessful bids for the presidency in 1952 and 1956. He seemed so much more intelligent, erudite, witty, imaginative, and stylish. than his Republican rival, Dwight Eisenhower, altogether the superior candidate, and yet on both occasions the popular war-hero trounced him. It was as if the one-term governor of Illinois liked the smell of success, but was unwilling to do what was required to achieve it. Other episodes contributed to this image, especially his decision in 1956 to forfeit the right of selecting his vice-presidential running partner to the floor of the Democratic Convention. Critics felt such incidents demonstrated his indecisiveness and lack of judgement.1