Showing papers on "Hamlet (place) published in 2004"

Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England

Abstract: Dina Ackerman, Ann Blair, Markman Ellis, Joe Farrell, Juliet Fleming, Margreta de Grazia, Joan DeJean, Rachel Doggett, Jim Green, Andrew Honey, Richard Kuhta, Michael Mendle, Barbara Mowat, Cyrus Mulready, Karen Nipps, Dever Powell, Nan Ridehalgh, Don Skemer, Germaine Warkentin, Henry Woudhuysen, Laetitia Yeandle, and Georgianna Ziegler. Peter Blayney, Jessie Ann Owens, and Bill Sherman are everywhere in this piece through their generous sharing of materials and suggestions. No acknowledgment could repay our debt to them. 1 Unless otherwise noted, quotations of Hamlet throughout this essay follow The First Folio of Shakespeare, prep. Charlton Hinman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), a facsimile edition of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), as do quotations from all other plays by Shakespeare. Citations include both Hinman’s through-line numbers and act-scene-line numbers keyed to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Translations of foreign-language quotations are our own. 2 The tragicall historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke by William Shake-speare . . . (London, 1603), sig. D4v; and Margreta de Grazia, “Soliloquies and Wages in the Age of Emergent Consciousness,” Textual Practice 9 (1995): 67–92, esp. 73–74. 3 See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990); and Lina Bolzoni, La Stanza della Memoria: Modelli Letterari e Iconografici nell’Eta della Stampa (Turin: Einaudi, 1995). Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England

Inventing the Child: Culture, Ideology and the Story of the Child

Abstract: Introduction 1. History as Human Relationship 2. Freud, Shakespeare and Hamlet as Children's Literature 3. The Brothers Grimm. the Black Pedagogy and the Roots of Fascist Culture 4. Victorian Imperialsim and the golden Age of Children's Literature 5. Walt Disney, Ideological Transposition and the Child 6. Maurice Sendak and the Detachment Child 7. Conclusion: The Etiology of Consumerism

The poetics of melancholy in early modern England

Abstract: 1. The reinvention of sadness 2. Detachability and the passions in Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender 3. Hamlet and the humors of skepticism 4. John Donne and scholarly melancholy 5. Robert Burton's melancholic England 6. Solitary Milton Epilogue: after Galenism: angelic corporeality in Paradise Lost.

Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self

Abstract: Acknowledgments 1.Actors, Academics, Selves 2. 'Bits and Bitterness': Politics, Performance, "Troilus and Cressida" 3. The Point or the Question: Text, Performance, Hamlet 4. The Theatre and the Presence Chamber: History, Performance, Richard II 5. Performing Human: The SocA--etas Raffaello Sanzio Conclusion Notes Bibliography

The Rise of the Community in Rural China: Village Politics, Cultural Identity and Religious Revival in a Hui Hamlet

Abstract: The rise of "localism" has been a defining feature of the post-socialist state. Whether from regime collapse or through the introduction of reforms, as the tentacles of the post-socialist states retreated from intimate involvement in daily socio-economic life, the way has been opened for new groups at the local level to assert ownership and control of material resources and social capital. In some parts of the former USSR, the rise of the local led to violent upheavals. While China was mostly spared this, it has still seen a proliferation of new interest blocs at the local level. The new decision-making freedoms of the reform era have opened up a reservoir of organizational creativity as rural communities search for the tools and mechanisms needed to articulate and defend their interests in the market economy. Increasingly free of Maoist-style conformism and ideological limitations on cultural expression, local communities have gradually begun to mobilize their distinctive social and cultural capital. Evidence of this can be seen in the ways community identities are being rebuilt around clan, lineage and religious affiliations and the effect this has on patterns of community governance. In many parts of China lineage associations have been revived and ancestral halls rebuilt.1 Nowhere is this process of growing community assertiveness more visible than in the recent experiences of many of China's ethnic minorities. These groups have access to unique forms of cultural capital that can be mobilized in the service of community-building and interest formation. The distinctive and creative ways in which ethnic minority peoples have responded to the transformation of rural China highlight the shifting boundaries of local identity and the potential for new bases of authority. Based on a case study of a Hui hamlet in southwest China, where extensive fieldwork was conducted in 2002-3, this paper demonstrates how one such community reinvented itself through Islam. The case study offers insights into the ways in which rural Chinese communities are struggling to rebuild identity, safeguard interests, defend rights and create opportunities for social and economic development. It is a story of cultural inventiveness, ethnic assertiveness, kinship conflicts, rural politics and local-state relations. While the study centres on a Hui Chinese community, it more broadly exemplifies how rural communities are able to assert themselves within the economic, political and cultural space created by the diminished presence of the state. The Balong Hui, Islam and Development Balong is a hamlet of 90 households in the administrative village of Landu in Shangri-la County.2 Landu is an ethnically complex administrative village of fifteen dispersed hamlets (zirancun) variously inhabited by seven distinct ethnic groups: Naxi, Han, Yi, Miao, Bai, Hui and Tibetan. Balong sits between a Yi hamlet above and a Naxi hamlet below. The Hui residents of Balong and of the neighbouring hamlet of Shiba are the only Hui farming communities in the northwest corner of Yunnan.3 Hui was a term given to all people of Muslim descent in China until the Communist takeover, when Muslim groups such as the Uygur and Kazakh were given "official" ethnic minority status.4 The new government grouped together all other Chinese Muslims and their descendants as the Hui, regardless of whether they actively practised their religion.5 The Hui in Balong are descendants of Muslims from Shaanxi Province and have lived in northwest Yunnan for little more than 100 years. They arrived in Yunnan after fleeing the repression that followed the mid-nineteenth century Muslim rebellions. Only a few handfuls of families made it to the Landu area, where a high altitude, a harsh environment and intermarriage resulted in the adoption of many of the economic and cultural practices of the dominant ethnic groups of the region. Today the hamlet's population is approximately 500. …

Shakespeare's tragedies

Abstract: Introduction. Part I: Criticism 1592-1904: Part II: Twentieth-Century Criticism: 1. Genre. Overview. 2. Dollimore, King Lear and Essential Humanism. Cavell, Coriolanus and Interpretations of Politics. Character. Overview. 3. Holland, The Resources of Characterisation in Othello. Leverena, The Woman in Hamlet: An Interpersonal View. Language. Overview. 4. Kermode, Anthony and Cleopatra. Evans, Imperfect Speakers. Gender and Sexuality. Overview. 5. Kahn, The Daughter's Seduction in Titus Andronicus. Newman, Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello. History and Politics. Overview. 6. Kastan, Macbeth and the Name of King. Wilson, Is this a holiday? Shakespeare's Roman Carnival. Texts. Overview. 7. Warren, Quarto and Folio King Lear. Marcus, Bad Taste and Bad Hamlet. Performance. Overview. 8. Cox, Titus Andronicus. Loehlin, Baz Luhrmann's Millenial Shakespeare. Bibliography. Index.

Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales: “I am Welsh, you know”: the nation in Henry V

Abstract: The Tudor era has long been associated with the rise of nationalism in England, yet nationalist writing in this period often involved the denigration and outright denial of Englishness. Philip Schwyzer argues that the ancient, insular, and imperial nation imagined in the works of writers such as Shakespeare and Spenser was not England but Britain. Disclaiming their Anglo-Saxon ancestry, the English sought their origins in a nostalgic vision of British antiquity. Focusing on texts including The Faerie Queene, English and Welsh antiquarian works, The Mirror for Magistrates, Henry V, and King Lear, Schwyzer charts the genesis, development, and disintegration of British nationalism in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. An important contribution to the expanding scholarship on early modern Britishness, this is the first study of its kind to give detailed attention to Welsh texts and traditions, arguing that Welsh sources crucially influenced the development of English literature and identity.

From Misisil Cave to Eliva Hamlet: rediscovering the Pleistocene in interior West New Britain. In A Pacific Odyssey: Archaeology and Anthropology in the Western Pacific. Papers in Honour of Jim Specht

Abstract: The potential for archaeological evidence of Pleistocene activity to exist in West New Britain was first realized by Jim Specht. More recent work in Specht's research region of Yombon reveals intriguing archaeological data which demonstrate the organized utilization of rainforest resources as early as 35,500 years ago. The early colonists of the Bismarck Archipelago were versatile hunter-gatherers able to move beyond the coastal island fringes of Melanesia and harness important economic and lithic resources deep within the lowland rainforests.

To give or not to give? That is the question.

Abstract: While Hamlet experienced “suffering caused by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…,” many modern day scientists have similar feelings when asked to give and share published data and materials with other members of our community. Herein, we argue that being on the side of the fence that

The Uses of This World: Thinking Spaces in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cary and Jonson.

Abstract: Introduction (I) Thinking Space for Hamlet Introduction (II) 'What's Hecuba to him...': Imitative Space and myths of Belonging in Hamlet Chapter One Enclosing 'infinite riches in a little room'. The question of cultural marginality in The Jew of Malta Chapter Two 'Here is my Space'. The Politics of Appropriation in Antony and Cleopatra Chapter Three Erotic Sovereignty: Crises of Desire and Faith in The Winter's Tale and Henry VIII Chapter Four The Hateful Cuckoo. Elizabeth Cary's Tragedie of Mariam, a Renaissance drama of Dispossession Chapter Five Urban Dystopia: the Colonising of Venice in Volpone Chapter Six 'With your ungoverned haste'. The passing of Time and Empires in The Alchemist

Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales: Bale's books and Aske's abbeys: nostalgia and the aesthetics of nationhood

Abstract: Introduction: Remembering Britain 1. Spenser's spark: British blood and British nationalism in the Tudor era 2. Bale's books and Aske's abbeys: nostalgia and the aesthetics of nationhood 3. 'Awake, lovely Wales': national identity and cultural memory 4. Ghosts of a nation: A Mirror for Magistrates and the poetry of spectral complaint 5. 'I am Welsh, you know': the nation in Henry V 6. 'Is this the promised end?': James I, King Lear, and the strange death of Tudor Britain Bibliography.

Shakespeare and Scotland

Abstract: Acknowledgements Notes on contributors Introduction - Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy 1. "Stands Scotland where it did?" Shakespeare on the march - David Baker 2. Wrapped in the strong arms of the Union: Shakespeare and King James - Neil Rhodes 3. The place of Scots in the Scottish play: 'Macbeth' and the politics of language - Christopher Highley 4. 'Macbeth' and the rhetoric of political forms - Elizabeth Fowler 5. 'Hamlet's country matters: The 'Scottish play' within the play - Andrew Hadfield 6. How Scottish was the Scottish play? 'Macbeth's national identity in the eighteenth century - Rebecca Rogers 7. The Bard: Ossian, Burns, and the shaping of Shakespeare - Robert Crawford 8. "Not fit to tie his brogues": Shakespeare and Scott - Lidia Garbin 9. Shakespeare goes to Scotland: A brief history of Scottish editions - Andrew Murphy 10. Citz Scotland where it did?: Shakespeare in production at the Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, 1970-1974 - Adrienne Scullion 11. Local 'Macbeth'/Global Shakespeare: Scotland's screen destiny - Mark Thornton Burnett

The Ghost of Anyone's Father

Abstract: This article analyzes the complexities of the basic mental operation of conceptual integration, especially double-scope conceptual integration, as revealed in texts by Shakespeare, especially Hamlet and King Henry the Sixth, part one, most notably the speech by Lord Talbot addressed to "Thou Antic Death."

Old king, new king, eclipsed sons, and abandoned altars in Hamlet

Abstract: In Hamlet, Shakespeare's wordplay creates patterns of doubling, splitting, loss, and replacement that mimic the situations of not only the dramatic characters, but also the changing English church of the Reformation period. Puns provide verbal cues to remind the audience of the curtailing of old Roman rites, especially communion, burial practices, sanctuary, and prayer. They also draw attention to replacements of material furnishings of the church by the numerous allusions to tables, the arras, and the royal bed, all of which serve as reminders of the replacement of altars by reformers. Old religious practices have been secularized and adapted for the stage, but the wordplay attests to an ambivalence about the shifts in rites and to anxiety about iconoclastic change.

"Hamlet, Part Eight, The Revenge" or, Sampling Shakespeare in a Postmodern World

Abstract: Hamlet is a prime source for allusions and references, or to use postmodern terms, paratexts, or samplings in recent films. Perhaps no other of Shakespeare's plays has been ransacked for lines, scenes, plot devices, or oblique but telling references as often or as completely in films of the last two decades as Hamlet. In these films, of which Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Gildernstern Are Dead is perhaps the fullest example, the text of Hamlet becomes a kind of "raw material" that both has meaning in itself and also derives meaning from its rearticulation within a new form. This essay examines the effect of such borrowings from Hamlet and argues that Hamlet can become a problematic literary icon, which disrupts through the contrasts it establishes.

Hamlet And Narcissus

Abstract: In this book the author argues that the action of Hamlet, particularly its most puzzling and paradoxical element, Hamlet's delay, can best be understood in terms of Heinz Kohut's concept of narcissism.

"To Be or Inter-Be": Almereyda's End-of-Millennium Hamlet1

Abstract: The most recent film version of Hamlet, by independent American director Michael Mmereyda (Nadja, 1994; Trance, 1998), locates the tragedy of the Prince of Dennark in New York City in the year 2000. Elsinore court is turned into a multimedia corporation, and we are given a very realistic cinematic representation of a postmodern world saturated with video technology. As Almereyda himself has noted, "There's hardly a single scene without a camera, a photograph, a TV monitor or electronic recording device of some kind" (Hamlet Headquarters). The film uses the play's essential motif of Hamlet's quest-his search for proof of his uncle's crime, for moral transparency, for true mutuality, for a definitive answer to the question of existence-in order to address an end-of-millennium anxiety regarding the collapse of human relationships and the growth of personal alienation in a media-driven world of hi-tech communications. Apart from attention, Hamlet's multiple searches entail clarity of mind and a capacity for discerning. At the beginning of the play (and the film), Hamlet tells his mother that he "knows not seems" (1.2.76). But Almereyda's film makes it very clear, on the contrary, that he is very well aware of "seems": this Hamlet is a would-be filmmaker, a young man obsessed with video images. He suffers from a sort of screen addiction. Wherever he goes he carries a portable video unit, a digital camera, and a palm monitor. Technological reproduction devices seem to be natural extensions of his body. How, under such circumstances, can he possibly know "where truth is hid" (2.2.158)? How can he discover the meaning of life in a situation like this, where life has become a matter of negotiation between essence and simulation; where reality and facade, being and performing, have blurred into one; and where human relationships have become a disembodied dial-up network? These are the issues that are central to Almereyda's film. The director introduces Hamlet by having him deliver part of the "What a piece of work is a man" speech. In Shakespeare, the speech comes in the second scene of Act 2. By rearranging the text in this way, Almereyda contrives to tell us, from the outset, something essential about the psychological and emotional state of his protagonist: that is, he is a young man afflicted by sadness, confusion, and frustration. Moreover, the speech-originally part of a conversation between Hamlet and his fellow students from Wittenberg-becomes here a sort of technological soliloquy. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern disappear. They are replaced by Hamlet's digital replication, and as a result, Hamlet's desire to open his heart to his old friends becomes solipsistic meditation. What we see is a virtual Hamlet talking to the real one-the flesh-and-blood Hamlet-from the screen of a portable video unit. Almost immediately, therefore, we have a glimpse of what Almereyda regards as the most problematic and paradoxical outcomes of a mass media and technological society. The problem, in this opening scene, is loneliness. Not only does Hamlet feel lonely, he is lonely. The paradox, on the other hand, lies in the fact that we have a virtual man, made up of pixels, voicing his skepticism about the human condition, about man, and the "quintessence of dust." A monitor man lecturing us on matters of conscience and spirit. To be sure, this paradox is a direct by-product of our hi-tech end-of-millennium society, one in which, as Jim Collins puts it, "television is often seen as the 'quintessence' of postmodern culture" (Storey 176). Above all, Almereyda's Hamlet is an alienated young man.2 Melancholy and introversion are the consequences of a technological addiction that estranges him from other human beings, and blurs the borders between reality and .simulacra. Notwithstanding the recent family crisis-and the uncanny, disturbing revelations of the Ghost-he looks as though he lost his mirth well before his father's death. …

The Truth Is out There in Elsinore: Mulder and Scully as Hamlet and Horatio

Abstract: Hamlet has become a special favorite in the ten years closing the twentieth century. Within a few years of each other, popular film stars Kenneth Branagh (1996) and Mel Gibson ( 1990) opted to perform in major film productions of the play, and in 2000 Ethan Hawke took a turn in an especially noirish version. Eric Mallin and Linda Charnes note that the 1990s have also brought us film "paratexts" of Hamlet-"stories that transform or fundamentally reconceive Shakespearean concerns" (Mallin 128). Mallin looks at Last Action Hem (1993), and Charnes at LA. Story (1991; 11-16), as two significant examples of such paratexts adapting the mythos of Shakespeare's Hamlet to late twentiethcentury concerns. Although not citing any specific examples other than Last Action Hero, Mallin also points out, "there are many paratextual Hamlets in Hollywood" (128). One important paratext that should be included is Chris Carter's The X-Files. The relationship between Hamlet and The X-Files only struck me within the past few years. I was inwardly grumbling one Sunday evening that I was much too brain-weary to be reading Hamlet to prepare for a Tuesday evening class, when I could be relaxing by watching The X-Files. I unexpectedly found myself thinking that much of what I considered pleasurably challenging about The X-Files could be found in Hamlet: mysterious, dark, confusing settings; characters and circumstances begging for illumination; irruptions of the supernatural and preoccupation with madness, disease, and infection; a brooding, sardonic hero driven to find order and truth in a confusingly chaotic, dangerous world; mordant humor; and a bulwark against despair in the humor, loyalty, and integrity of friends. I was particularly struck by how two of the catch phrases connected with the program clearly connected with the play I was reading: "the truth is out there" and "trust no one." My students seized on comparisons between the play and the television series in class discussions. One pointed out that another catch phrase, "all lies lead to the truth," snapped into her mind when she considered that the final conspiracy to kill Hamlet ultimately not only went astray to kill the perpetrators, as well as an unintended victim (Gertrude), but in doing so also exposed the plot itself, Claudius's earlier crimes, and most likely Hamlet's sins. These class discussions piqued my interest to study more deeply how the mythos of Shakespeare's Hamlet informs The X-Files, as well as how and why The X-Files reworks that myth. Simon Irvine and Natasha Beattie see The X-Files as resulting from social and philosophical conditions "peculiar to the present historical moment": "I want to believe," "The truth is out there," and "Trust no one." These statements are catch cries that concisely capture the Zeitgeist. The end of this century is privy to the hyper-acceleration, deconstruction and re-imagining of the social, the cultural, and (he political, which is a state of play bound to television. ("Conspiracy Theory") This description may very well describe the spirit of the last decade of the twentieth century, but it also recalls the Zeitgeist of the era in which Hamlet was created and revenge tragedy flourished. Severe competition between Anglicans and Puritans for the imprimatur of divine truth; anxiety over finding a stabilizing replacement for Elizabeth; consequent fears about Jesuit conspiracies; terror of either becoming the prey of witchcraft or of being accused of practicing witchcraft; shifts in power and money to merchant classes; and awareness of the popular media's (plays, pamphlets, sermons) power to shape perceptions of truth as well as morality also suggest a "Zeitgeist" of "deconstruction and re-imagining of the social, the cultural, and the political."1 Thus, describing The X-Files as just embodying a Zeitgeist "peculiar" to the time period in which it was created is much too limiting. More accurately, the television series draws on a mythos of Western culture also shaped by anxieties about loss of faith in benevolent higher powers (spiritual and political), in human relations, and in one's own integrity-traits bespeaking a stable, beneficent reality. …

The Promethean Apparatus: Michael Almereyda's Hamlet as Cinematic Allegory

Abstract: Shakespeare's cinematic renaissance ended on a high note in the twentieth century with John Madden's Shakespeare in Love ( 1998) achieving seven Academy Awards at the 1999 Oscars. What Hollywood seemed at last to acknowledge at this event is the approach toward Shakespearean appropriation by filmmakers across the globe that has become marked by, in Kenneth Branagh's words, "a clearer cinematic logic" (Burnett and Wray 173). Emergent cinematic technology-from CGI to DVD-promoted exciting developments in the film industry. Baz Luhrmann's MTV-saturated William Shakespeare's Romeo + ju liet ( 1996) kick-started a trend in Shakespearean cinema that is expressed most recently by the digitally composed The King is Alive (dir. Kristian Levring, 2002) and Rave Macbeth (dir. Klaus Knoesel, 2001). Both these films in particular serve as examples of what cinema has to offer Shakespearean appropriation throughout the following century. As the first film of the new millennium to adapt a Bardic text, Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000) signals this discursive and technological abundance as cinematically as possible. Denmark here is a New York corporation, ostensibly involved in film production. Hamlet, played by Ethan Hawke, is constructed as a filmmaker obsessed with observing his environs and forefathers through a camera lens. The production's preoccupation with an entirely fragmented and appositely filmic milieu underscores an emphatically postmodern approach to Shakespeare's most filmed of plays in the same moment as constructing cinema as what I would call a "Promethean apparatus."1 Translating as "he-who-sees-before," Prometheus is the mythic figure of innovation who stole fire from Zeus to enable mankind to see for the first time.2 In deploying fire and suggestibly Promethean themes of foresight and cinematic innovation, Almereyda's film appears to rework cinema as a Promethean apparatus in terms of a visually organized dichotomy of presence and absence. Shakespeare's "presence" in this aesthetic reconfiguration is a vital index in reassembling concepts of temporality at the current moment. I read Almereyda's production as allegorically enlivening cinema in these contexts in a number of ways. First, the tools and techniques of film production that are showcased here display those elements of cinematic apparatus that are available to the consumer for individual use. second, I would argue that Almereyda takes as his point of departure the cultural debate toward the end of the twentieth century that both queried and welcomed a "purely cinematic" Shakespeare. Third, as cinema enters its second century, the production vocalizes the anxieties attendant to cinematic potential. Indeed, the relative boom of film technologies leading up to our current historical juncture emphasizes the importance of cinema as a regenerator of ideologies, artistic developments, and global mindscapes. Fourth, I contend that Hamlet alludes to cinema's inception at the end of the nineteenth century, and queries whether this inception was simply the manifestation of cinematic realizations already prevalent in premodern society, that is, the preoccupations with perception, presence, and absence in such discourses as Plato's cave simile in his fourth century B.C. text The Republic, that underline modern technologies as the culmination of explicitly Promethean concerns (Plato 255-65). Gaby Wood, in her cogent study of artificiality in Edison's Eve of 2002, made a similar connection when she described the birth of cinema as a "Promethean, or Pygmalionesque, event" (Wood 168). In the application of recent film theories to this production, moreover, Shakespeare's play unfolds before a cinematic audience in illuminating, highly relative ways. For example, Christian Metz's theory of cinema as a signifier of the Lacanian Imaginary finds a parallel here with the ghost of Hamlet's father. In Metz's words, "the imaginary, by definition, combines within it a certain presence and a certain absence" (Metz 248-49). …