Showing papers on "Hamlet (place) published in 2003"

Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist

Abstract: In this study, Lukas Erne argues that Shakespeare, apart from being a playwright who wrote theatrical texts for the stage, was also a literary dramatist who produced reading texts for the page. The usual distinction that has been set up between Ben Jonson on the one hand, carefully preparing his manuscripts for publication, and Shakespeare the man of the theatre, writing for his actors and audience, indifferent to his plays as literature, is questioned in this book. Examining the evidence from early published playbooks, Erne argues that Shakespeare wrote many of his plays with a readership in mind and that these 'literary' texts would have been abridged for the stage because they were too long for performance. The variant early texts of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and Hamlet are shown to reveal important insights into the different media for which Shakespeare designed his plays.

Scientific literacy as an emergent feature of collective human praxis

Abstract: Hamlet : The time is out of joint; O cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right! Nay, come; let's go together (Hamlet, Act I, scene v, lines 189-191).

Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet

Abstract: HISTORICISM AND THE CULTURAL PRESENT IN SHAKESPEARE STUDIES: SUBJECTIVITY IN EARLY AND LATE MODERNITY HAMLET AND THE TRAGEDY OF THE SUBJECT

Shakespeare and Renaissance politics

Abstract: Shakespeare, like many of his contemporaries, was concerned with the question of the succession and the legitimacy of the monarch. From the early plays through the histories to Hamlet, Shakespeare's work is haunted by the problem of political legitimacy. Shakespeare and Reniassance Politics examines his works as political events and interventions, and explores the literature of the Renaissance and its relation to fundamental political issues.

Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt' s Decision

Abstract: This essay explores the importance of the early modern period for the work of the German jurist Carl Schmitt. It argues that Schmitt' s misreading of Shakespeare and Hobbes can in turn shed light on Schmitt' s own aestheticizing of politics. / Representations 83. Summer 2003 q The Regents of the

Hamlet: Poem Unlimited

Abstract: In the bestselling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom showed us how Shakespeare shaped human consciousness, and addressed the question of authorship in Hamlet. In Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, America's most celebrated critic turns his attention to a reading of the play itself and to Shakespeare's most enigmatic and memorable character. This is Bloom's attempt to uncover the mystery of both Prince Hamlet and the play, how both prince and drama are able to break through the conventions of theatrical mimesis and the representation of character, making us question the very nature of theatrical illusion. Hamlet: Poem Unlimited is a hugely insightful and yet highly accessible exploration of Shakespeare's crowning achievement by a critic who is seen by many as his greatest living champion.

Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet and the Forms of Oblivion

Abstract: In two recent publications, Stephen Greenblatt has explored Hamlet in relation to two medieval practices and their transformation: the Eucharist in the Mass, and the institution of purgatory.1 In the reformed Eucharist of Holy Communion, sacrifice is remembered, not repeated; the bread and wine signify the true presence of the body of Christ rather than becoming that blood and body under the appearances of bread and wine. Even more fundamentally, purgatory is not so much transformed as utterly abolished and abandoned as a “fond thing vainly invented.”2 Rethought and rewritten, and in the case of purgatory abandoned altogether as doctrine and practice, the losses and sea-changes of these central notions everywhere mark the tragedy of Hamlet in Greenblatt’s exhilarating reading. The figure will replace the thing itself; the psychic projection will replace the dogmatic truism; theater will replace religion even as figure, psyche, and theater are all haunted by the stubborn leavings of an outmoded religion, appearing in the form of a histrionic, apparently Catholic, paternal ghost, reminder and remainder of a usurped, truncated, and thoroughly unappeased past. After the Reformation, only a theater can officially be a haunted place. It will bring the unappeased dead back to strut and fret across the stage to call for remembrance from their successors and so console, solace, intercede, and finally exorcise the dead, put them at last to rest. If it conjures and enchants, it will disenchant, too, for it is an imagined space, an acknowledged and therefore thoroughly unsublime fiction. Greenblatt has long been criticized for adopting an overly synchronic approach in the form of criticism he pioneered: New Historicism. Placing two texts, usually a canonical one and a more off-beat, esoteric, and exotic one side by side, Greenblatt has provided fascinating readings of such adjacencies, yet without ever explaining their interrelationship. What are his

The Power and Rights of the Crown in Hamlet and King Lear: ‘The King—The King's to Blame’

Abstract: Much drama written before and after the accession of James I comments on and analyses the issue of hereditary monarchical succession. A comparative analysis of the political comments, themes, and images made throughout Hamlet and King Lear shows how central such concerns were to Shakespeare's dramatic imagination, and how abruptly the political universe changed in England after Elizabeth's death. Hamlet shows a corrupt, beleaguered, and vulnerable nation which can be seen as a representation of the worst elements of England and Scotland combined. The plot can be read as a variation on the foundational republican story of the rape of Lucrece and the banishment of the Tarquins, and the play engages with monarchomach ideas expressed in a treatise such as Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, although the play provides no straightforward answer to the questions that it poses. King Lear also shows the consequences of an undesirable succession, but concentrates on what needs to be corrected rather than whether the monarch can be removed. The play can be seen in a tradition of 'mirror for princes' literature, advising and correcting a monarch - or those who were in a position to do this. In contrast, Hamlet suggests that the impending Stuart succession may be a disaster of such magnitude that some might turn to assassination to cure England's woes

What's hecuba to him...? reflections on poetry and politics in Tacitus' dialogue on orators

Abstract: The quotation in the title comes from one of Hamlet's famous soliloquies (‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I…’); it expresses his reaction to the fact that the Player reciting Aeneas' tale of the sack of Troy has broken down in tears as he describes the fate of this classical mater dolorosa: Is it not monstrous that this Player here,But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,Could force his soul so to his whole conceit,That from her working, all his visage wann'd,Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect,A broken voice, and his whole function suitingWith forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!For Hecuba!What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,That he should weep for her?

Shakespeare and Violence

Abstract: List of illustrations Preface 1. Introduction: 'Exterminate all the brutes' 2. Shakespeare's culture of violence 3. Shakespeare and the display of violence 4. Plays and movies: Richard III and Romeo and Juliet 5. Shakespeare on war: King John to Henry V 6. Violence, Renaissance tragedy, and Hamlet 7. The central tragedies and violence 8. Roman violence and power games 9. Violence and the late plays 10. Afterword Index.

"To Hear and See the Matter": Communicating Technology in Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000)

Abstract: This essay argues that Michael Almereyda's film of Hamlet (2000) is a distinctively postmodernist cinematic statement that charts the ways in which the act of filmmaking allows a release from the pressures of global capitalism at the same moment as it creates a space for the articulation of a coherent subjectivity.

Aspects of Subjectivity: Society and Individuality from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare and Milton

Abstract: This book focuses on representative literary works that illustrate turns in the history of individuality and subjectivity and the changes in ones relations with community and society. In conjunction with The Wanderer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Everyman, The Faerie Queene, Hamlet and Paradise Lost, Low considers pertinent historical beliefs, attitudes, and practices including: the experience of loneliness and exile; the development of sacramental confession from communal reconciliation to personal absolution from sin; the abolition of Purgatory and the traditional Christian solidarity with the ancestral dead; the role of conscience in the development of self; and the rise in Shakespeare and Milton of a typically modern sense of autonomous individuality and subjectivity.

Shakespeare in art

Abstract: The rediscovery of Shakespeare's work in the eighteenth century was a key factor in launching the Romantic movement. At the height of the Shakespeare craze of the early nineteenth century a handful of plays--"Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear and "Romeo and Juliet--created the mindset of a generation, affecting every artist, writer, composer and politician in Europe. "Shakespeare in Art tells the remarkable story of how one of many Elizabethan dramatists, for centuries virtually unknown outside England, became a truly European author, inspiring German nationalist thinkers, French dramatists, Italian opera composers, Russian novelists and painters everywhere. "Shakespeare in Art looks especially at the many painters who made Shakespeare's extremes of passion, has evocations of nature, his spirit world and his eternally familiar characters the subjects of their own work. The paintings and drawings range from depictions of famous actors in role by Hogarth and Zoffany; tragic visions by Fuseli and Blake; brooding character studies of Hamlet, the Romantic role model, by Delacroix; to vivid evocations of natural scenery by the Pre-Raphaelites. Also explored is the influence of Shakespeare on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, theatre, music and printmaking. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Western culture.

Dickens and Hamlet

Abstract: ‘If any one of Shakespeare’s plays was known by an individual during the Victorian era that play was Hamlet. ‘1 Valerie L. Gager’s claim about the popularity of Hamlet is perhaps difficult to substantiate, but there is no doubt that, of all Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet was the play to which Dickens most often alluded.2 At first sight Dickens’s interest in Hamlet may seem surprising. Dickens, or Mr Popular Sentiment as Trollope infamously called him, was accused of vulgarity and intellectual deficiency from his own day onwards. G. H. Lewes perhaps put the charges most bluntly, maintaining that there was not ‘a single thoughtful remark’ in the whole Dickens canon, and that Dickens ‘never was and never would have been a student’.3 Hamlet, on the other hand, became synonymous with the tortured, alienated intellectual at the play’s centre — a man superbly endowed with intelligent thoughts, but a little short on action. During the nineteenth century, when so many artists and thinkers felt themselves to be, in Isobel Armstrong’s term, ‘secondary’, Hamlet metamorphosed from a flawed Prince to the archetypal hero as artist and thinker.4 Dickens’s fascination with Hamlet, however, was not born of this hero-worship.

Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

Abstract: Part I. Philosophy 1. Climacus at the APA 2. Philosophy of Mind 3. Faith and Probability 4. Having Lessing on One's Side 5. Spirit and the Idea of the Self as a Reflexive Relation 6. Basic Despair 7. A Question of Continuity 8. The 'What' in the 'How' Part II. Connections and Confrontations 9. Commitment and Paradox 10. Humour and the Irascible Soul 11. Proximity and Apartness 12. Levelling and Einebnung 13. Solitary Souls and Infinite Help 14. Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark Revisited 15. Two Ways of Coming Back to Reality: Kierkegaard and Lukacs 16. Nietzsche/Kierkegaard: Prospects for Dialogue? 17. Decisively Disconnected.

“And therefore as a stranger give it welcome”: Courtesy and Thinking

Abstract: This essay uses Hamlet’s and his companions’ first encounter with the Ghost as a model for thinking, and traces its implications for allegorical thinking, chiefly in The Faerie Queene VI, through Heidegger’s work on thinking. As in Spenserian Courtesy, thinking in Heidegger does not seize the object or dive into its center: it moves into nearness with the otherness of the stranger. The model of the unknown to which thought is directed is not the physical object, like a tool, the union of matter with form: the model of the unknown to which thought is directed is a person. The first claim of this essay about The Faerie Queene is that Spenser is not primarily a narrative poet but a poet whose concern is to drink. Spenser thinks in subtle, allusive, indirect, and intuitive ways about problems too complex to be dealt with in the isolating, linear fashion with which human problems are usually met. The second claim of the essay, therefore, is that for Spenser thinking is an encounter with the strange to which co...

A Performer's Notes on Parody.

Abstract: If you cross a nerdy Jewish woman with an aspiration to portray the melancholy Prince of Denmark, you get a journey that begins and ends in Parody. This performative essay is an investigation of Parody as a tool of the outsider looking in, and chronicles the movement towards a full-length production of Hamlet from a female Jewish performance artist whose intital foray into Shakespeare's masterpiece takes the form of a bathing-suit competition, and whose use of parodic methods inches her closer to the fulfillment of this classic role.

Hamlet as Emblem: The Ars Memoria and the Culture of the Play

Abstract: Ci Remember me," demands the ghost of King Hamlet just before he disappears into the pre-dawn light (1591)1 Because this demand comes at the very end of his exchange with his flabbergasted son, the words "remember me" make a prominent imprint on Prince Hamlet's mind2 Alone after the ghost's disappearance, the Prince ponders the ghost's command in his ensuing soliloquy: "Remember thee?/ Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat/ In this distracted globe" (1595-97) Here "globe" has three senses First, on the most personal level, Hamlet means that memory is a distinct component of his own mind Within the distracted globe of his mind, there is a place, a seat, a locus for memory Second, the word "globe" suggests that memory is a crit ical component of the world of the play, the larger social and cultural context in which Prince Hamlet finds himself This mnemonic landscape has received relatively little critical attention, perhaps because of the tremendous pull which the solitary and self-reflective protagonist provides to readers and viewers of the play Part of my goal in this essay will be to show that memory is a critical component of the culture of Hamlet's Denmark and, by extension, Shakespeare's England Third, the word "globe," together with the reference to holding a "seat," is clearly a reference to the actual playing

When did Hamlet become modern

Abstract: It depends on what you mean by modern. Timeworn on arrival around 1600, it was after the Restoration and well into the eighteenth century deemed antiquated, old, barbarous and gothic. When termed modern, it was because (like any work in the vernacular) it was not written in ancient Greek or Latin. In this sense, Shakespeare in knowing "small Latin and less Greek' was about as modern as a literate man could be. But Hamlet's particular claim to modernity began when an analogy was discovered between Hamlet and Orestes; both ancient and modern sons had a father killed and a mother stained. Yet as the representative modern drama, Hamlet still had no modern qualities: it was better or worse than its ancient counterpart (stronger on character, weaker on plot), but no different. It had first to be seen as romantic – that is, in the unclassical tradition of the medieval romance languages and poetic forms. Not until it broke those ties with a bygone past could it properly be called modern. This is what Hamlet or ra...

Tragedy and political authority

Abstract: Shakespeare's tragedies are usually remembered for the central characters for whom they are named. However, the fact that all of their heroes are what in the period were termed 'princes', occupying the power centres of their realms, means that these narratives of usurpation and death are also anatomies of political crises. In setting out contexts for his tales of woe or wonder Shakespeare reveals himself to have been as curious about the make-up of courts and kingdoms as he was about the psychology of individuals. The sufferings of great men and women in Shakespearean tragedy derive from conflicts, the analysis of which inevitably entails a consideration of 'the properties of government' – its characteristics and its proprieties. In 1589, at about the time Shakespeare was beginning to write, George Puttenham observed that ‘poets . . . were the first lawmakers to the people, and the first politicians, devising all expedient means for th’establishment of commonwealth’. Although in his tragedies Shakespeare may concentrate far more on rulers than on the ruled, ‘commonwealth’ interests are inevitably invoked by the fact that any act on the part of a king is de facto what, in Hamlet, Claudius terms ‘sovereign process’ (4.3.65).

Hamlet and Protestant Aural Theater

Abstract: Over the past half-century many Shakespeareans have argued that either Protestantism or Catholicism informs the general Christian ethos of Hamlet. John Dover Wilson, Raymond Waddington, and Roland Mushat Frye are among the many who find in King Claudius a Lutheran who, though longing to repent of his fratricide, harbors a trapped, "limed soul" (3.3.68) and whose inability to pray, to use Martin Luther's words, "clearly manifest[s] that the endeavor and effect of free will are simply nothing" (135). Peter S. Milward finds "something Lutheran in [Hamlet's] brooding emphasis on the corruption of human nature" (161), and Charles Cannon stresses the play's Calvinism, saying that the "the problems of the theater dealt with" in Hamlet "lead Shakespeare [...] toward the possibility of predestination" (203). More recently, Anthony Low has argued that the play stages the Protestant dismissal of the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, and in Hamlet in Purgatory Stephen Greenblatt echoes Low's claim. Still, in a 2001 Commonweal review of Greenblatt's influential book, Edward Oakes approvingly quotes a Jesuit friend's comment on Hamlet: "What a Catholic play that was!" (29). My purpose here is not to argue that Hamlet is a Catholic or a Protestant play. Agreeing with David Daniell, I believe that Shakespeare's plays declare their author's allegiance to neither faith to the exclusion of the other (2). Thus, I will not assert that Hamlet's oblique instruction to Guildenstern, "Hide fox, and all after" (4.2.30-31), is a cryptic reference to John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, (1) or that Horatio's description of "post-haste and romage in the land" signals Denmark's energetic papalism (1.1.107). I will, however, argue the influence of what Daniell calls Shakespeare's "Protestant inheritance" on Hamlet. Both the play and its eponymous hero seem specifically constructed to record and display views on theater's potential for good or for evil, ideas expressed in much English Protestant discourse near the time of the play's creation. Elsewhere I have argued that Shakespeare's exploration of those ideas at the brink of the seventeenth century inspired him to construct his greatest tragedy as an unusual "anti-play" (63). Here I will demonstrate that Hamlet's paradoxical anti-theatrical drama may also be described as "aural theater." I As Daniell has cogently maintained, Shakespeare's Protestant inheritance can logically be inferred from the fact that, "in his fifty-two years, Shakespeare lived in a nation that was officially, aggressively, and massively Protestant." Quoting Peter Lake, Daniell writes that, though some late-sixteenth century Catholics "met in barns and private households, the godly inherited the public space of the parish church," in which the "altar was now a communion table" and "the rood loft with its doom images" and" images of saints had been removed. The liturgy was in English, not Latin; the mass had been replaced with a communion service. No trace of the cult of the saints or the notion of Purgatory [...] was left in either the service book or the outward ceremonial face of the Church" (2). Many of the views expressed by the most popular pastors of the age--among them Thomas Playfere, Stephen Egerton, John Field, and Lancelot Andrewes, whose London parish contained "the Fortune and Red Bull theatres" and whose services were "eagerly attended" by some players (Story xv)--showed the influence of John Calvin's theology. In Shakespeare's lifetime, moreover, 142 editions of The Geneva Bible were printed; this, Daniell notes, "ha[d] to do with demand" (6). Whatever Shakespeare's personal beliefs or private instruction may have been, it is inarguable that his environment recurrently exposed him to Protestant strains of thought, and it thus is not surprising that echoes of Protestant moral views should be found in his greatest tragedy. The particular aspect of Protestant thought that I want to trace in Hamlet is one Jonas Barish has famously called the "anti-theatrical prejudice. …

Infinite Jest: The Comedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Abstract: This cartoon (illustration 15) appeared in the London Evening Standard on 16 March 2001. It is, I suppose, instantly recognizable as a reference to Hamlet : we know this from the man's costume, the fact that he is holding a skull, and the caption, which is clearly a parody of 'To be or not to be' ( Hamlet 3.1.56). If someone were to come across this cartoon in the archives of the Evening Standard in say fifty or one hundred years' time, it would still be obvious that it is a reference to Hamlet . What would by then need annotation is the immediate context of the cartoon: one would need to explain that the figure represents Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at the time, and that the cartoon was published during a period when there was widespread speculation that he would call a General Election on 3 May. One would need to explain further that the object he is holding is the skull of a sheep and that the reason why he was being indecisive about the date was the epidemic of foot and mouth disease which was sweeping the country during the Spring of 2001: apart from the extent to which the election might have been seen as an unnecessary distraction at a time of national crisis, there was the practical consideration that the movements of both politicians and voters would be restricted. On the other hand, postponing the election would send a negative message to potential business investors and tourists.

“No endlesse moniment”: artificial memory and memorial artifact in early modern England

Abstract: Hamlet’s innocuous expression of nostalgia elicits a startled – perhaps a startlingly startled – response. We better understand Horatio’s surprise: he has, after all, himself just come from seeing Hamlet’s father unexpectedly on the battlements of Elsinore and is alarmed to find Hamlet seeing him elsewhere. But Hamlet is, it turns out, not seeing him elsewhere but nowhere, attending in memory to his father’s flickering, ghostly image. What should perhaps startle us is Hamlet’s easy comprehension of Horatio’s surprised ‘Where?’ For Hamlet, the ‘mind’s eye,’ memory, works precisely like ordinary vision. It takes place in a where, and confronts its objects as visual. Horatio’s memory of sight is in an exterior, physical space; it is public, shared with Marcellus and Bernardo. In Hamlet’s case, the sight of memory takes place within the private space of thought, here treated in metaphor as involving sight and space.