Showing papers on "Hamlet (place) published in 2006"

Shakespeare's Entrails : Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body

Abstract: List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Visceral Knowledge The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida The Inward Man: Hamlet The Body Possessed: King Lear No Barricado for a Belly: The Winter's Tale Bibliography Index

Hamlet : the texts of 1603 and 1623

Abstract: List of illustrations General editors' preface Introduction: - The relationship of this volume to the Arden Hamlet - Policy on commentary notes, textual notes and references - Retention of F readings - Retention of Q1 readings - Policy on Q1 metre and lineation - Policy on punctuation - Summary of our position on the three texts - Stage history of the First Quarto - Checklist of Q1 productions THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK The First Quarto (1603) THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK The First Folio (1623) Abbreviations and references Index

Shakespeare in French Theory : King of Shadows

Abstract: At a time when the relevance of literary theory itself is frequently being questioned, Richard Wilson makes a compelling case for French Theory in Shakespeare Studies. Written in two parts, the first half looks at how French theorists such as Bourdieu, Cixous, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault were themselves shaped by reading Shakespeare; while the second part applies their theories to the plays, highlighting the importance of both for current debates about borders, terrorism, toleration and a multi-cultural Europe. Contrasting French and Anglo-Saxon attitudes, Wilson shows how in France, Shakespeare has been seen not as a man for the monarchy, but a man of the mob. French Theory thus helps us understand why Shakepeare’s plays swing between violence and hope. Highlighting the recent religious turn in theory, Wilson encourages a reading of plays like Hamlet, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelth Night as models for a future peace. Examining both the violent history and promising future of the plays, Shakespeare in French Theory is a timely reminder of the relevance of Shakespeare and the lasting value of French thinking for the democracy to come.

Hamlet's Heirs: Shakespeare and The Politics of a New Millennium

Abstract: Contents General Editor's preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Passing which Torch? The Fetish of the Modern Dismember Me: Shakespeare, Paranoia, and the Noir World Order We Were Never Early Modern The Hamlet Formerly Known as Prince It's the Monarchy, Stupid Operation Enduring Hamlet Conclusion: The Plot Notes Bibliography Index

Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self

Abstract: Bridget Escolme, Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self (London: Routledge, 2005) 'To be, or not to be: that is the question' (Hamlet, 3.1.56.) Who is being asked this question by Hamlet? Is Hamlet simply asking it of himself, thinking aloud, as it were, as he considers the possibility of suicide? Or is he talking to the audience? Or is he talking both to himself and to the audience at the same time? The answer makes a big difference to our reading of both Hamlet the character/performer and of the play as a whole, whether we are director and actor approaching this moment in rehearsal, an audience in the theatre, or readers of one of the written versions of the play. The question of who is being addressed when Shakespeare's characters soliloquise lies at the heart of Bridget Escolme's book, which describes and discusses many actual performances of the three plays on which she primarily focuses: Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet and Richard H. Escolme argues that the mode of direct address is central to both the dramatic structure and the meaning of these plays. This is a good book, which will be of interest both to performers and students of Shakespeare's plays - to the former because Escolme has a sure sense of the place taken by these works in the history of live theatre, particularly in regard to the paradigm shift in the early modern period from 'playing' to 'acting'; and to the latter because Escolme understands what some literary critics have still not yet understood: that these plays were made in the theatre and that their scripts are unlike the texts of poems and novels, in that their words point beyond themselves to realisation in performance. If we try to imagine an actual performance of Hamlet - especially in the intimate, open-air spaces in which the play was first performed - we will suspect that Hamlet's famous question might well be addressed to the audience. Keeping such a possibility in mind as we read the printed text some four hundred years after the play was first created is, however, not easy, since the concept of a communal art, of drama created in open space, has, over these centuries, become quite foreign to most of us. As Tadashi Suzuki wrote in The Way of Acting in 1986, 'the theatre has become a kind of rite performed in a secret room. The sense of public space has been lost, rendering the act of watching a play quite close to the experience of watching a film or reading a novel.' Shakespeare's plays have indeed been read and discussed for so long that, when we read them, their action and dialogue seem to take place in the mind in the same place as the action and dialogue of realist novels. The resulting confusion has had an enormous impact on the literary-critical reception of Shakespeare's and indeed all 'plays' over the years. It becomes all too easy for literary critics to assume a moralising, judgmental detachment from the characters; and so Othello's downfall, for example, is patronisingly described in terms of the alleged problems of (the hubris of) his 'character', whether fifty years ago by F. R. Leavis or one of his followers (New Criticism), or much more recently by, say, Stephen Greenblatt or one of his followers (New Historicism). Some of the most powerful soliloquies in all of Shakespeare are given to Othello's rival Iago. Whether we read these soliloquies as private meditation overheard by an audience or as plotting between Iago and a highly complicit audience makes a big difference to our reception of Othello. Escolme does not fall into this 'graphocentric' trap but, rather, does much to expose the commentators who fear audience address and devalue it as 'showy'. …

On the Relationship between Multifunctionality and Hamlet Activities as a Rural Institution

Abstract: The relationship between multifunctionality and the roles of rural communities has not been discussed fully although the connection between the two is an essential issue in the rural policy arena. Pursuing this issue, this paper considers that multifunctional hamlet activities are generated as institutional joint products within the hamlet. Also evaluated is the connection between multifunctional activities and institutional hamlet conditions under the Japanese direct payment program for less favored areas. Results of conceptual considerations and empirical evaluations reveal that specific multifunctional hamlet activities depend on hamlet conditions; those on the least favorable level tend to perform land preservation activities while those under the most favorable conditions tend to undertake recreational activity. Hamlets participating in forming landscape fall in the middle. Thus, firstly, institutional jointness is not constant but variable depending on hamlet conditions. Consequently, programs to enhance multifunctionality should respect hamlet conditions that represent different levels of institutional jointness of multifunctional activity rather than treat multifunctionality as a single concept. Secondly, for diversification, it would be effective to organize hamlet activities based on an open and wider human network rather than the traditional closed one in rural communities.

Eating Air, Feeling Smells: "Hamlet's" Theory of Performance

Abstract: In and Act Ophelia ih of Hamlet, to watch just The before Mousetrap, he sits that down play with for which Claudius, he has Gertrude, written sixteen lines, Hamlet says what may very well be the oddest of the many odd things that he says throughout the play: \"I eat the air, promise-crammed\" (3.2.92-93). 1 He later claims that he could eat a crocodile to express the depth of his feelings for the dead Ophelia, so his culinary tastes are clearly varied, but \"I eat the air, promise-crammed,\" part retort, part selfdefinition, takes us to the heart of the play's interaction or transaction with its audience. In his talk of eating air, Hamlet suggests that the corporate body whose members appear to be but \"mutes\" in relation to the staged action may be as busy as the actor playing him. They may be feeding, as he does, \"of the chameleon's dish\" (3.2.92); that is, sitting down to the same table as those creatures who can change color upon command, actors, and taking in, across the course of the performance, the invisible matter that circulates between them, breath. Hamlet's odd statement would thus function as a metonym for the play's theory of performance, one that takes it beyond both mimesis and catharsis. That this play offers its own theory of performance cannot be doubted. As Annabel Patterson oted some fifteen years ago, \"this play contains more information, simply speaking, on the business of play-production than any other in Shakespeare's canon, and . . . this material is already theoretical

The Tragedians of the City? Q1 Hamlet and the Settlements of the 1590s

Abstract: The title page to the William Shakespeare's 1603 quarto edition of Hamlet (Q1) advertises that the play has been "acted in the Cittie of London." Scholars have long thought that City playing was forbidden around 1594, however; Shakespeare's Hamlet debuted in 1600/01. Therefore, Q1's "Cittie of London" has traditionally been read as a title page topos. Rather than conclude that the phrase cannot mean what it says, however, we might recognize that Hamlet—either Shakespeare's play or the earlier Chamberlain's Men's play of the same name—might well have appeared within the City walls, at Cross Keys Inn in Gracechurch Street or elsewhere. Furthermore, a City performance of Hamlet would represent a larger phenomenon: City playing evidently continued, despite repeated attempts to suppress it in the mid-1590s. To explore this possibility, this essay first examines contemporary dramatic title pages that advertise City performances, pursues the precise coordinates of the "Cittie of London" in early modern English usage, and finally challenges the position that City playing must have ceased in the mid-1590s.

Shakespeare and the Idea of the Modern

Abstract: In an essay of admirable historicizing rigor, Margreta de Grazia states that "no work in the English literary canon has been so closely identified with the beginnings of the modern age as Hamlet."1 De Grazia cites Harold Bloom as the most recent example of this identifica tion.2 She could just as easily have cited William Kerrigan, who is no less convinced of the importance o? Hamlets romantic origins. "Shakespeare's revenge tragedy," Kerrigan writes, "was present at the birth of Romantic individualism, at the early tests of the doctrine of organic unity, at the discovery of the oedipus complex, at the center of the mythy shenanigans in Joyce's Ulysses."3 Does this mean that the modern era begins in 1600 when William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet? Yes and no. 'Vfes, because that is indeed when Hamlet first made its way from Shakespeare's brain to the page and thence to the stage. No, because the play was much too ahead of its time to be appreciated as, well, modern. Instead it had to rely on all the standard gags of Elizabethan revenge tragedy: murder, madness, the obligatory ghost, and plenty of violence. No doubt there were many who resented the upstart playwright's popularity and therefore preferred to point to this rather "primitive" or "old-fashioned" element in his theater. It would take Shakespeare some time to shake this reputation for Saxon savagery. Two hundred years, in fact. As both Kerrigan and de Grazia agree, before the romantics Shakespeare wasn't the child of modernity that he is today. But here their agreement ends. Whereas Kerrigan embraces Shakespeare's modernity, de Grazia resists it. More precisely, whereas Kerrigan's Hamlet begins positively and definitively with the romantics, de Grazia's begins well before that, indeed, before Hamlet was even writ ten, in the "dark ages" of medieval ritual culture.

Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency: Not to Be

Abstract: Building on current scholarly interest in the religious dimensions of the play, this study shows how Shakespeare uses Hamlet to comment on the Calvinistic Protestantism predominant around 1600. By considering the play's inner workings against the religious ideas of its time, John Curran explores how Shakespeare portrays in this work a completely deterministic universe in the Calvinist mode, and, Curran argues, exposes the disturbing aspects of Calvinism. By rendering a Catholic Prince Hamlet caught in a Protestant world which consistently denies him his aspirations for a noble life, Shakespeare is able in this play, his most theologically engaged, to delineate the differences between the two belief systems, but also to demonstrate the consequences of replacing the old religion so completely with the new.

How to read a Shakespeare play

Abstract: List of Illustrations. 1. How to Read a Shakespeare Play. 2. A Midsummer Night's Dream. 3. Romeo and Juliet. 4. Henry the Fourth, Part I. 5. Hamlet. 6. King Lear. 7. The Tempest. 8. Epilogue. Further Reading. Index

Resisting the Revolution: Heiner Müller's Hamlet/Machine at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin, March 1990

Abstract: Heiner Muller directed Shakespeare's Hamlet together with his own The Hamletmachine as Hamlet/Machine in March 1990 at the Deutsches Theater, East Berlin. This article investigates the production's conception, its rehearsal and its execution against the backdrop of the fall of the Wall. Midler, a playwright whose dramaturgies actively resist reductive interpretation, sought to put Hamlet/Machine beyond the reach of an allegorical reading. Strategies in acting, staging and design were adopted to frustrate the ease with which Hamlet could have merely illustrated the historical changes taking place outside the theatre. On the other hand, Muller was also making theatre for his fellow GDR citizens and had to take account of their experiences, too. His political theatre relied on the combination of contradictory signs in performance that would activate the audience, forcing a confrontation with the material on stage on its own terms. Such an aspiration was, almost inevitably, revealed as utopian but was in Muller's view the only way for the theatre to challenge its immediate historical context.

Now, Gods, Stand Up For Bastards: The 1603 "Good Quarto" Hamlet

Abstract: This essay examines the relationship between the 1603 Q1 Bad Quarto Hamlet and the two authoritative Hamlet versions (1604-5 Q2 Second Quarto and the 1623 F1 First Folio). The analysis focuses on Shakespeare’s use of complex patterns of composition in the structural framework of corresponding passages, and the movement of parallel phrases between equivalent rhetorical systems that bridge the variant texts. Based on a consistent and systematic pattern of alteration occurring between the variants, the essay challenges the theories of memorial reconstruction and abridgment, and further attributes the alterations to authorial revision.

Hamlet's Northern Lineage: Masculinity, Climate, and the Mechanician in Early Modern Britain

Abstract: passes show, / These but the trappings and the suits of woe.\"1 In the play, Hamlet needs to justify his dull behavior before an unsympathetic audience. In critical commentaries, scholars have accepted this fact and gone on to search for what was \"within,\" even as others have protested that the search was hollow.2 In the essay that follows, I propose that we would be better served by focusing on the way Hamlet's rhetoric of justification evolves over the course of the play. As early modern observers would have done, I am inclined to ground this inquiry in regional and lineal terms. I will suggest that, as Hamlet unfolds, the prince aligns himself with the active voyagers of the frozen north by engaging with his environment and redefining himself in exoteric, or outward terms. How, I want to ask, do Hamlet's northern predecessors real and fictional inform the play's innovative apologia for early modern man? Of course the context for such questioning is both humoral and geographical. To an extent rarely remarked, we have tended to nationalize gender in this period even though early modern observers paid more attention to what Mary Floyd-Wilson has termed \"geohumoralism,\"3 the classical notion that habitat shapes human being. Writers such as Jean Bodin and Levinus Lemnius drew on Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen in order to elaborate this zonal vision.4 In the hands of these commentators,

Shakespeare in the worlds of communism and socialism

Abstract: List of Illustrations Acknowledgments A Note on Slavic Transliteration Introduction: When Worlds Collide: Shakespeare and Communisms IRENA R. MAKARYK and JOSEPH G. PRICE PART ONE: SHAKESPEARE IN FLUX: 1917 TO THE 1930s Performance and Ideology: Shakespeare in 1920s Ukraine IRENA R. MAKARYK Shakespeare and the Working Man: Communist Applications during Nationalist Periods in Latvia LAURA RAIDONIS BATES Shakespeare as a Founding Father of Socialist Realism: The Soviet Affair with Shakespeare ARKADY OSTROVSKY A Five-Year Plan for The Taming of the Shrew lAURENCE SENELICK The Forest of Arden in Stalin's Russia: Shakespeare's Comedies in the Soviet Theatre of the Thirties ALEXEY BARTOSHEVITCH PART TWO: WORLD WAR, COLD WAR, AND THE GREAT DIVIDE Wartime Hamlet IRENA R. MAKARYK 'Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all': New Documentation on the Okhlopkov Hamlet LAURENCE SENELICK Shakespeare and the Berlin Wall WERNER HABICHT In Search of a Socialist Shakespeare: Hamlet on East German Stages LAWRENCE GUNTNER Shakespeare the Politicizer: Two Notable Stagings in East Germany MAIK HAMBURGER PART THREE: NATIONAL AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY Translations of Politics / Politics of Translation: Czech Experience MARTIN HILSKY Krystyna Skuszanka's Shakespeare of Political Allusions and Metaphors in Communist Poland KRYSTYNA KUJAWINB SKA COURTNEY War, Lechery, and Goulash Communism: Troilus and Cressida in Socialist Hungary ZOLTAN MARKUS The Chinese Vision of Shakespeare (from 1950 to 1990): Marxism and Socialism XIAO YANG ZHANG From Maoism to (Post) Modernism: Hamlet in Communist China SHUHUA WANG PART FOUR: THEORIZING MARXIST SHAKESPEARES Caliban/Cannibal/Carnival: Cuban Articulations of Shakespeare's The Tempest MARIA CLARA VERSIANI GALERY Ideology and Performance in East German Versions of Shakespeare ROBERT WEIMANN Marx Manque: A Brief History of Marxist Shakespeare Criticism in North America, ca. 1980-ca. 2000 349 SHARON O'DAIR Contributors Index Index of Shakespearean Plays

Hugh O'neill As ‘Hamlet-plus’

Abstract: Critical approaches to Friel's work have often pointed out his indebtedness to current trends in European and American literary theory as demonstrated in plays such as Philadelphia, Here I Come!, T...

"To be or not to be" in "The Belly of the Whale": a reading of Joseph Campbell's "Modern Hero" hypothesis in Hamlet on Film

Abstract: The composite hero of the monomyth is a personage of exceptional gifts. Frequently he is honored [sic] by society, frequently unrecognized [sic] or disdained. He and/or the world in which he finds himself suffers from a symbolical deficiency. (Campbell 37) In creative or dramatic terms, Joseph Campbell's "monomyth" conceptualizes the heroic prominence of the protagonist in a given fiction. Although most of Campbell's research is based on theological mythologies, his concepts are steeped in twentieth-century psychoanalytical theories (4-19). Campbell focuses on the initiatory paradigms of universal myths and formulates the hero's rite of passage into three major stages: "separation [departure]-initiation [action]-return [reflection]" (Campbell 30). Campbell's book on the subject, The Hem with a Thousand Faces, has consciously been appropriated by the writer and film-critic Christopher Vogler who applies Campbell's theories, "The Adventure of the Hero," to protagonists of several modern films ranging from Pulp Fiction to Star Wars. Similarly the tragedy of Hamlet focuses on an exceptionally gifted central character who, once the "symbolic deficiency" of his world has been identified, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" (1.5.90),1 vows to purge his world from that "deficiency," "time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right" ( 1.5.196-97). By aspiring to guide his society to safety (Campbell 391), Hamlet qualifies as a mono-mythical hero since he too desires to "set [his world] right." In Hamlet, heroic intentions are often embedded in soliloquies. Soliloquies, claims Mary Maher, are the hallmark of Hamlet's persona (Modem Hamlets xi, xv-xvi); indeed the role of Hamlet is often defined by and depends upon his soliloquies for completion. 'To be or not to be" is unique of all of Hamlet's soliloquies: on stage it is "an overheard soliloquy" (Charney 123; Orange 62,65) but on screen it is a pivotal point in the hero's journey. In his celebrated paper, "The Meaning of Hamlet's Soliloquy," Irving Richards ascertains that Hamlet's "To be or not to be" is "the crux of the drama, the point at which Hamlet takes the audience into his confidence and reveals the secret of his complex soul" (745). Conversely, Maher argues, audiences of screened Hamlet intimately connect with him and feel obliged to identify with his dilemmas ("Hamlet's BBC" 426). Therefore, "To be or not to be" remains central to Hamlet's character textually, theatrically, and cinematically. The textual positioning of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" was thoroughly assessed by Lewis Mott in 1904 (26-32). One hundred years on, I would like to examine the positioning and setting of the soliloquy in recent Hamlet films. I will examine four Hamlet films, Laurence Olivier ( 1948), Franco Zeffirelli (1990), Kenneth Branagh (1996), plus Michael Almereyda (2000), and apply Campbell's hypothesis as demonstrated in "The Adventure of the Hero" to ascertain the position of "To be or not to be" in the protagonist's journey in each of these films. The placement of "To be or not to be" within the hero's rite of passage framework set out by Campbell depends on its positioning within the individual film's structure, which can easily alter from one step of the hero's journey to another, indeed from one stage to another. I will demonstrate that, regardless of each film's mise en scene, "To be or not to be" is placed in the Separation/Departure stage of the hero's journey, which takes place inside "The Belly of the Whale" in three of the above mentioned Hamlet films, Olivier, Zeffirelli, and Almereyda, (whereas Branagh's soliloquy takes place in the Initiation stage). "The Belly of the Whale," according to Campbell, is a metamorphic step when "The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, [where he] goes inward to be born again" (90-92); it is a nightmarish sentiment with ancient resonance; it is the last moment of decision-making before the hero has to take action. …

Embodiment and environment in early modern drama and performance

Abstract: Hamlet's Northern Lineage: Masculinity, Climate, and the Mechanician in Early Modern Britain, by Daryl W. Palmer "Divided in soyle": Plantation and Degeneracy in The Tempest and The Sea Voyage, by Jean Feerick "Euery soyle to mee is naturall": Figuring Denization in William Haughton's English-men for My Money, by Alan Stewart The Actor's Inhibition: Early Modern Acting and the Rhetoric of Restraint, by Paul Menzer Understanding in the Elizabethan Theaters, by William N. West Eating Air, Feeling Smells: Hamlet's Theory of Performance, by Carolyn Sale All Swell That End Swell: Dropsy, Phantom Pregnancy, and the Sound of Deconception in All's Well That Ends Well, by Jonathan Gil Harris The Devil's in the Archive: Doctor Faustus and Ovidean Physics, by Kristen Poole.

Shakespeare, Class, and Scotland, PA

Abstract: Adapting Shakespeare for film has become in recent years a precarious balancing act. On the one hand, filmmakers seem to be invoking Shakespeare to add gravitas to what might otherwise be just another generic exercise-teenage violence in Tim Blake Nelson's Othello-based O (2001), for instance, or teenage dating in Gil Junger's Taming of the Shrew-based Ten Things I Hate about You (1999), to name two. On the other hand, the weightiness of Shakespeare as a legitmizing agent can also sink a picture. As Kenneth Branagh remarked following the 2000 release of his last Shakespeare adaptation. Love's Labor's Lost, "You have to fight for the audience every time. As a friend once told me, you need only throw a stick 12 feet anywhere in the Western world to find dozens of people who think Shakespeare is turgid and boring and meaningless. [...] Mel Gibson, as brilliant as he was in Hamlet, didn't bring his Lethal Weapon audience with him."1 One might say, however, that the problem with the jangling musical Branagh produced in Love's Labor's Lost was that it did not bring Branagh's Hamlet audience with him. Indeed, the problem of audience has affected the marketing of a number of Shakespeare adaptations, and Branagh's Love's Labor's Lost was notable in avoiding any mention of Shakespeare in its taglines and video covers (only announcing itself as "a new spin on the old song and dance").2 Ironically, it was Love's Labor's Last's failure to reach an audience that effectively ended Branagh's plans for another Shakespeare adaptation-a "futuristic Macbeth." When director and screenwriter Billy Morrissette adapted Macbeth a year later as Scotland, PA, he did so conscientious of the pitfalls of Shakespearean cinema, and approached the production with an ambivalence characteristic of Shakespeare films in the past decade: "I'm very faithful to the play, for the most part, in this movie," he remarks, though elsewhere he acknowledges cutting anything that seemed "too Shakespearean."3 The official on-line site for Scotland, PA glosses such bifurcations as part of the cultural divide within cinematic Shakespeare: Some critics and educators seem to think that Shakespeare's social purpose is to morally or culturally shape and uplift the public, that is, to act as a kind of social bra. This is the Shakespeare of the social elite, a Shakespeare that was most apparent in Olivier's Henry V and, more recently, in Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night and Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Directors such as Michael Almereyda (Hamlet), Baz Luhrmann (William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet), and Richard Loncrain (Richard III) have approached the plays with what some critics consider less respectful attitudes but which none-the-less still entail fascination with the play and a desire to bring fresh perspectives to the original texts. Billy Morrissette's Scotland, PA is of this type.4 This statement, cursory and unproblematized as it is (Luhrmann has in fact probably received the lion's share of critical acclaim, while Nunn and Huffman have sparked few studies of any sort), speaks to the slipperiness of audience-targeting strategies.5 Scotland, PA is of the "type," the site suggests, that eschews elitism, that harbors a healthy disrespect, that "nonetheless" is "fresh" rather than nineteen-forties (leaping over times to Olivier's Henry). It is of the type, one might say, that is rebellious without fault, a discursive strategy actually embraced in the play Macbeth itself. All of this is to say that Shakespeare on film has become a contested site for reading not only the exaggeration or elision of Shakespeare as a cultural marker, but as a representation of class divisions as well.6 If Nunn and Hoffman (and presumably Branagh, Taymor, et al.) are currying the elite (apparently an intellectual and political elite, those who wish to shape and "uplift" the public), who remains to swell the ranks of the "less-respectful" underclasses? Morrissette's own suggestion is telling: [. …

Millennial Stages: Essays and Reviews 2001-2005

Abstract: Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part One. Positions and Polemics -- No Time for Comedy -- The New Relevance -- Does Theatre Matter? -- Maiming the Messenger -- The Rebirth of Political Theatre: The God of Hell -- Democracy -- When Dramaturgs Ruled the Earth -- Red and Blue States of Mind: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee -- Terrorism -- Part Two. Plays and Productions -- Varieties of Histrionic Experience: Medea -- The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui -- Mind Over Material: The Invention of Love -- Mnemonic -- The Jew Who Buried Hitler: The Producers -- The Harrowing of Hell: In the Penal Colony -- Hamlet -- and Hamlet -- Angels in Afghanistan: Homebody/Kabul -- Goat Song: The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? -- Comedy Is Harder: Private Lives -- The Underpants -- Prescient Plays: Far Away -- A Number -- Creations: Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night -- Take Me Out -- Our Lady of 121st Street -- Dysfunctional Families, Dysgenic Dynasties: Salome -- Gypsy -- Long Day's Journey into Night -- Smelly Orthodoxies: A Bad Friend -- I Am My Own Wife -- Shotover's Apocalypse: Omnium Gatherum -- Anna in the Tropics -- Palace and Garden: Maria Stuart -- House and Garden -- The Political Power of Puns: Caroline, or Change -- The Beard of Avon -- A King and Two Queens: King Lear -- Valhalla -- Homeboy Godot: Topdog/ Underdog -- Fortune's Fool -- Pyrotechnics and Ice: Jumpers -- Frozen -- The Past Revisited: The Frogs -- After the Fall -- In the Jungle: Rose Rage -- Hedda Gabler -- Impersonations: Monty Python's Spamalot -- Orson's Shadow -- Julius Caesar -- Prosecution Plays: Doubt -- Romance -- The Last Days of Judas Iscariot -- The Pillowman -- Thom Pain (Based on Nothing) -- The Light in the Piazza -- Theatre of the Mushy Tushy: Le dernier caravanserail (Odyssees) -- Lear's Lendings: King Lear -- Part Three. People and Places

Articulating Skeletons: Hamlet, Hoffman, and the Anatomical Graveyard

Abstract: I came upon a dried cadaver [...] which had been partially burned and roasted over a fire of straw and then bound to a stake. Consequently, the bones were entirely bare and held together only by the ligaments so that merely the origins and insertions of the muscles had been preserved. [...] Observing the body to be dry and nowhere moist or rotten, I took advantage of this unexpected but welcome opportunity and, with the help of Gemma, I climbed the stake and pulled the femur away from the hipbone. [...] After I had surreptitiously brought the legs and arms home in successive trips — leaving the head and trunk behind — I allowed myself to be shut out of the city in the evening so that I might obtain the thorax, which was held securely by a chain. So great was my desire to possess those bones that in the middle of the night, alone and in the midst of all those corpses, I climbed the stake with considerable effort and did not hesitate to snatch away that which I so desired. When I had pulled down the bones I carried them some distance away and concealed them until the following day, when I was able to fetch them home bit by bit through another gate of the city.1

“Big Willie Style” Staging Hip-Hop Shakespeare and Being Down with the Bard

Abstract: In 1990 Malcolm McLaren, best known as the founder and manger of the Sex Pistols, developed “The World Famous Supreme Team,” a group of American hip-hop and dance performers for his CD Round the Outside! Round the Outside! Among those gathered was MC Hamlet, a “Dancin’ Black Indian Poet” whose name played on then- popular MC Hammer’s, as well as the Shakespeare play. MC Hamlet rapped a track entitled “II Be or Not II Be,” which played on the famous soliloquy. The first verse of the song began: To be or not to be that is the question Is it more noble of mind this decision To die and lie still for life’s ills and torture The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Much more important than winning is trying Life should be more than just living and dying Dare I bare arms against troubles I see Opposing—to end them—to die—to sleep.1

The Al-Hamlet Summit : a political arabesque

Abstract: The room is set up like a conference hall somewhere in the Arab world, or perhaps like the legislative assembly of a small modern state. There are desks with push-button microphones and headsets. Behind, there is a screen, as if someone planned to give a Powerpoint presentation. But the names on the desks are the familiar characters from "Hamlet". The setting of Sulayman Al Bassam's powerful, disturbing version of the "Hamlet" story is a modern Middle-Eastern state whose old king has just died, to be replaced by his brother, a ruthless, westernised dictator who has married the old king's wife to legitimise his rule, and calls his regime a "new democracy".

An Analysis of Hamlet's "To be,or not to be"

Abstract: Some experts think Hamlet's soliloquy "To be,or not to be..." shows Hamlet was thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of committing suicide. Analyzing the soliloquy itself and the whole play,this essay will prove this famous soliloquy was discussing the matter of life and death.