Showing papers on "Hamlet (place) published in 2007"

'Hamlet' without Hamlet

Abstract: Preface: Hamlet without Hamlet 1. Modern Hamlet 2. 'Old Mole': the modern Telos and the return to dust 3. Empires of world history 4. Generation and degeneracy 5. Doomsday and domain 6. Hamlet's delay Select bibliography.

Hamlet the Sign: Russian Translations of Hamlet and Literary Canon Formation

Abstract: This work is an attempt to answer one simple question: What is Hamlet? Based on the material of Hamlet translations into Russian, the dissertation scrutinizes the problems of literary canon formati ...

On the Distance between Literary Narratives and Real-Life Narratives

Abstract: It is a truth universally acknowledged that great works of literature have an impact on people's lives. Well known literary characters—Oedipus, Hamlet, Faustus, Don Quixote—acquire iconic or mythic status and their stories, in more or less detail, are revered and recalled often in contexts far beyond the strictly literary. At the level of national literatures, familiar characters and plots are assimilated into a wider cultural consciousness and help define national stereotypes and norms of behaviour. In the English speaking world, Shakespeare's plays or the novels of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, and Trollope, provide imaginative material that reverberates in people's lives every bit as much as do the great historical figures, like Julius Caesar, Elizabeth I, Horatio Nelson, or Winston Churchill. What is striking is how often fictional characters from the literary tradition—like the well-loved Elizabeth Bennett, Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, Pip, Tess of the d'Ubervilles—enter readers' lives at a highly personal level. They become, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, our ‘friends’, and for many readers the lives of these characters become closely entwined with their own. Happy and unhappy incidents in the fictional worlds are held up against similar incidents in the real lives of readers and such readers take inspiration from the courage, ingenuity, or good fortune of their fictional heroines and heroes. Nowhere is it more true that life imitates art.

Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction

Abstract: List of illustrations Preface 1. Introduction: The drama of questions and the mystery of Hamlet Part I. The Women in Black: 2. Playing Hamlet, writing the self 3. 'Is this womanly?' 4. Virile spirits: Sarah Bernhardt and her inheritance Part II. Case Studies: Hamlet, the Actress and the Political Stage: 5. 'I am whom I play': Asta Nielsen 6. 'Why are you looking at me like that?': Zinaida Raikh 7. Behind the arras, through the Wall: Poland 1989 8. Hamlet from the margins: Spain, Turkey, Ireland Part III. Repression and Resurgence: 9. Films and fictions: Hamlet, men's eyes and the ages of woman 10. Women's voices in the cathedral of culture 11. Beyond silence, imagination Index.

The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare's Tragedies

Abstract: Macbeth clutches an imaginary dagger; Hamlet holds up Yorick's skull; Lear enters with Cordelia in his arms. Do these memorable and iconic moments have anything to tell us about the definition of Shakespearean tragedy? Is it in fact helpful to talk about 'Shakespearean tragedy' as a concept, or are there only Shakespearean tragedies? What kind of figure is the tragic hero? Is there always such a figure? What makes some plays more tragic than others? Beginning with a discussion of tragedy before Shakespeare and considering Shakespeare's tragedies chronologically one by one, this 2007 book seeks to investigate such questions in a way that highlights both the distinctiveness and shared concerns of each play within the broad trajectory of Shakespeare's developing exploration of tragic form.

When the Cock Crew: The Imminence of Hamlet

Abstract: From its opening on starlit battlements, “Who's there?”, Hamlet announces itself as an Advent play for a New Year. So it is no surprise that Hamlet studies took a messianic turn at the millennium, when the text's unhinged gates welcomed Derrida to futurity, while apocalyptic critics like Girard read it as a vigil for the end of the world. As Europe's ghost story, however, Hamlet looks back to what belief in “the end of history” would repress: the religious violence encoded in its terrorist call to revenge. Francis Barker's insight that “the only thing Hamlet doesn't escape is its historicity”, is thus enhanced by the shifting outlook as Quartos and Folio adapt to prospects for a religion to come. Shakespeare may have hoped that if “the world's grown honest” then “is Doomsday near”, but in Hamlet was terrified of waking too soon—like the girl from New Place buried alive in Stratford church. So the cock crows three times in this tragedy to warn against betraying the future with false starts. Though “Present...

Re-humanising Shakespeare

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction: Literary Humanism, Wisdom and Modernity Part I Denaturing Human Nature 1 Questioning the Human: Hamlet 2 Emptying the Human: Othello 3 Ironising the Human: The Merchant of Venice 4 Historicising the Human, Humanising the Historical: I Henry IV Part II How to Live 5 Ethics: Macbeth 6 Only Human: Coriolanus 7 Humility: Love's Labour's Lost 8 Love: As You Like It 9 Hope: The Winter's Tale Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index.

William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words

Abstract: In William Faulkner, Richard Godden traces how the novelist's late fiction echoes the economic and racial traumas of the South's delayed modernization in the mid-twentieth century. As the New Deal rapidly accelerated the long-term shift from tenant farming to modern agriculture, many African Americans were driven from the land and forced to migrate north. At the same time, white landowners exchanged dependency on black labor for dependency on northern capital. Combining powerful close readings of The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, and A Fable with an examination of southern economic history from the 1930s to the 1950s, Godden shows how the novels' literary complexities--from their narrative structures down to their smallest verbal emphases--reflect and refract the period's economic complexities. By demonstrating the interrelation of literary forms and economic systems, the book describes, in effect, the poetics of an economy.

Ophelia's "Old Lauds": Madness and Hagiography in Hamlet

Abstract: RECENT scholarship on Hamlet has established the degree to which this play raises questions about early modern religion. Of course, the presence of a ghost seemingly straight out of purgatory has always put the play's theological cards on the table, as it were, but scholars such as Ramie Targoff, Heather Hirschfeld, Stephen Greenblatt, John Freeman, Jennifer Rust and others have further explored the ways in which the play echoes and queries a range of contemporary theological debates.1 A survey of this body of modern Hamlet scholarship, however, reveals that critics have attached the play's religious questions almost exclusively to the character of Hamlet. Admittedly, Hamlet gives voice to many of the most suggestively theological utterances of the play, as when he alludes to the Diet of Worms or fearfully imagines the "undiscover'd country" awaiting us all after death.2 And yet Shakespeare does not limit himself to using Hamlet's character when he probes religious questions, for as I will argue here, Ophelia's ravings also display a complex awareness of England's medieval Catholic past.3 Her descent into grief and madness is marked by a surge of allusions to medieval Catholic forms of piety: St. James, St. Charity, "old lauds," pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, and other pre-Reformation religious folklore. Despite modern contentions to the contrary, Ophelia's network of religious allusions does not conflict with the sexualized nature of her madness.4 The critical tendency is to see her erotomania as somehow necessarily excluding or disabling religious allusions, a view epitomized in editorial responses to the "snatches of old lauds" that Ophelia sings at her death (4.7.176). The word "lauds" appears only in the second Quarto (the Folio reads "old tunes"), and as Harold Jenkins, editor of the Arden, notes, some editors have objected to the idea of Ophelia as singing hymns of praise "as incompatible with her earlier love-songs."5 The assumption here seems to be that since mad Ophelia has been manifestly thinking about sex, she cannot therefore also be thinking about religion. Such reasoning, however, mistakenly imposes a modern understanding of sex and religion as separate categories onto an early modern worldview that saw them as profoundly connected.6 From an early modern Protestant viewpoint, Ophelia's mingling of eroticism and Catholicism makes sense: it comes as no surprise that a woman who slides into a debased (i.e., eroticized) madness should simultaneously give voice to a debased (i.e., Catholic) series of religious utterances.7 Ophelia's allusions to both medieval Catholicism and to sexual activity may allow such a derogatory reading, but this is not the interpretation to which the play seems most wedded. While Ophelia's religious references are sometimes contradictory and cannot be assembled into a coherent, stable whole (she is mad, after all), most of them raise resonant questions about the position of women in England's religious past and thus about the relationship between sexuality and sanctity. Furthermore, they seem charged with nostalgia, and since Ophelia herself dies a sympathetic character, we should not dismiss her "old lauds" as simply the spurious ravings of a madwoman. Ophelia seems to resort to old forms of piety precisely because they offer some solace in her personal wasteland. By showing Ophelia's emotional and imaginative landscape scattered with the debris of old doctrines and ritual practices, Shakespeare uses her final madness to reflect on the costs-especially to women-of the English Reformation.8 As Gertrude recounts, Ophelia drowns while "chanting snatches of old lauds / As one incapable of her own distress" (4.7.176-77), and this description suggests that a bygone Catholic form of piety informs her final moments. Although "laud" can be a generic noun denoting any song or hymn of praise, it was typically used in a religious context. Furthermore, it carried specifically Catholic associations. …

The Mimesis of Time in Hamlet

Abstract: Hamlet opens on intense attention to time, as the sentries "watch the minutes of this night" (1.1.30). (1) The emphasis gains thematic depth when Hamlet formulates his predicament in terms of temporal dislocation: "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right" (1.5.196-97). The problem of time is raised to philosophical status in Polonius's rhetoric: "Why day is day, night night, and time is time" (2.2.88). The importance of time in Hamlet has provoked numerous studies, but none has approached the marter through recourse to the temporal analysis of John McTaggart, whose celebrated article on the unreality of time, published in 1908 and later republished in the second volume of his metaphysical work, The Nature of Existence, is often recognized as the seminal treatise in the philosophy of rime of the last one hundred years. (2) Though virtually no philosophers have defended McTaggart's claim that time is unreal, scores of them, in hundreds of articles and books on the subject, have addressed some aspect of his description of the two temporal series proper to time (or, more precisely, the notion of time). These two series, easily defined, can serve as powerful lenses though which to analyze and illumine the structure of rime in Hamlet. The result of our inquiry will be a new understanding of the representation of time--or, more precisely, what Gerhard Dohrn-van-Rossum terms "time-consciousness"--in the text. (3) For the elements which we shall draw from McTaggart are not theoretical (in the sense of imposing ideational constructs on reality or what actually is), but descriptive, in the sense of articulating the actual conceptual content of the notion of time--what E.J. Lowe calls the "indispensable ingredients in our understanding of what time is" and what L. Nathan Oaklander calls the "two ways in which we ordinarily conceive and talk about time." (4) Despite the fact that McTaggart's theory of the non-reality of time turned out historically to be a dead end, his succinct and penetrating analysis of what time is conceptually--what concepts are intrinsic to the very idea of time--has exercised profound and lasting influence on philosophers of time, ever since he published his formulations. Ironically, though ultimately concerned with demonstrating that time is not, McTaggart's analysis has become indispensable to many philosophers in defining what time is. But before proceeding with this investigation, brief recapitulation of earlier approaches to the problem of time in Hamlet will contextualize discussion. A convenient introduction to such considerations concerns emphasis on the Renaissance as the period when temporal awareness broke through to a new level. Georges Poulet stresses the upsurge in the sense of transience: "It is indeed true that one felt then as always, and perhaps more keenly then ever before, the precarious and fugitive character of each lived moment." David Scott Kastan elaborates on this aspect of the temporal awareness of Renaissance man: "His world is one in which the unidirectional and irreversible flow of time brings an intensified sense of the fragility and precariousness of being." Ricardo Quinones underscores this temporal insecurity by pointing to the Renaissance concern with the Saturnine quality of time, construed in terms of its "menacing and destructive" activity, analogous to that of the mythological Saturn, the god who consumed his own offspring. Other scholars foreground more positive aspects of Renaissance temporality, by focusing on the achievement of historical perspective. Erwin Panofsky, for example, highlights the role of intense philological study of classical texts which enabled the understanding of ancient civilization "as a phenomenon complete in itself, yet belonging to the past and historically detached from the contemporary world." Dohrn-van-Rossum addresses the role of nascent technology in fostering awareness of the difference between past and present: "From the beginning of the fifteenth century, at the latest, the preoccupation with inventions developed a historical perspective. …

The Breach and the Observance : Theatre retranslation as a strategy of artistic differentiation, with special reference to retranslations of Shakespeare's Hamlet (1777-2001)

Abstract: The subject of "The Breach and the Observance" is retranslation for the theatre. Besides offering a model that incorporates the findings of previous scholarship, it casts new light on the motivation behind retranslation, using the case of translations of Shakespeare's Hamlet on the Dutch stage. The history of Dutch Hamlet performances shows a number of constants in the retranslation of the play. Since the establishment of a Hamlet tradition and the rise of the director's theatre, the retranslations that functioned within the community of Dutch theatre were the fruit of the collaboration of translators with directors. Each translator changed its strategy towards at least one cardinal norm to be different from his theatrical predecessor. This new strategy formed an intrinsic part of the strategy of the director, who used the new text to support a new interpretation of the play that also differed from his predecessor's. Staging a retranslation can therefore be said to be a strategy to differentiate a theatre production from previous theatre productions through the application of differing translational norms.

Print Culture as an Archive of Dissent: Or, Delia Bacon and the Case of the Missing Hamlet

Abstract: If I discover that Shakespeare was not born in the house that we visit today, that is a modification which, obviously, will not alter the functioning of the author's name. But if we proved that Shakespeare did not write those sonnets which pass for his, that would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in which the author's name functions. If we proved that Shakespeare wrote Bacon's Organon by showing that the same author wrote both the works of Bacon and those of

Arab Shakespeare: Sulayman Al-Bassam’s The Al-Hamlet Summit

Abstract: This paper offers an analysis of Anglo-Kuwaiti dramatist Sulayman AlBassam’s celebrated adaptation The Al-Hamlet Summit, and situates the play into the history of Arable appropriations of Shakespeare. Despite the uneven development of theatre as a medium in Arab cultures, Shakespeare has been a familiar point of reference for Arab dramatists since the late 19th century. Received in the Middle East as a great icon of classical theatre, Shakespeare is there for writers to admire, emulate, imitate or challenge. Arab productions of Hamlet have taken different forms over the years: early productions produced a romantic Arab national hero, while later works from the 1970s onwards cast Hamlet as an impotent intellectual. Al-Bassam’s play fuses these traditions to bring Hamlet right up to date, as both a freedom fighter and a suicidal martyr. Al-Bassam’s adaptation modernises Shakespeare, demonstrating the capacity of his plays to speak about urgent issues of the present as well as indispensable meanings from the past.

When the Villain Steals the Show: The Character of Claudius in Post-1975 Arab(ic) Hamlet Adaptations

Abstract: The character of Claudius dominates post-1975 Arabic adaptations of Shakespeare's Hamlet. After a brief survey of the twentieth-century Arab Hamlet tradition, this essay examines five recent Arab Hamlet plays. In four Arabic-language plays, a hypertrophied Claudius plainly allegorizes contemporary or recent regimes in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. He displaces both Hamlet and the Ghost, who become weak characters. Recurrent animal imagery portrays him as literally a brute, lacking a conscience and impervious to reason. However, this essay argues, the plays are not "political in function": they do not work to build audience support for political change. Instead, Claudius' irresistible power demonstrates the futility of political action (in the Aristotelian sense), including political theatre. A recent Arab-themed Hamlet adaptation in English con firms the pattern but enlarges it to cover the international backers of the local tyrant. Rather than a call for political awakening, then, these five plays offer a dark meditation on the limits of politics.

Hamlet and psychoanalytic experience.

Abstract: Hamlet draws us into its rendered world, enabling us to experience it with depth, awareness, and resonance, in a mode we recognize as aesthetic. By way of Shakespeare's play—primarily the first act...

Imagining the Actor's Body on the Early Modern Stage

Abstract: THIS essay is a prolegomenon to a larger study of the relationship between casting, dramaturgy, and theatrical rhetoric on the early modern stage. The last decade or so has seen an increased interest in the importance of the acting company (rather than the playwright) as the fundamental unit of the early modern theater. Theater historians such as Roslyn Knutson, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, Andrew Gurr, and Tiffany Stern have focused our attention on the relationship between the structures of repertory playing and the creation of theatrical meaning. (1) My goal is to build upon the methods and discoveries of these scholars and to combine them with more literary, formal analysis in order to develop a critical method that attempts to imagine the way early modern acting companies, and their playwrights, might have used actors' bodies as formal devices not distinct from dramaturgical elements such as verse style, subject matter, and staging habits. Such a critical method might, I suggest, help put early modern plays into vivid and as yet unfamiliar dialogue with one another. Much of the work of such a project is and will remain necessarily speculative, and the first word of this essay's title is intended to insist upon the value of speculation. Caesar and Polonius were probably played by the same actor, as probably were Brutus and Hamlet. The grim joke Polonius and Hamlet share about Polonius playing the part of Caesar at University (3.2.101-2) is probably the first half of an intertextual rhyming couplet that is completed when Hamlet kills Polonius in 3.4. (2) We do not, of course, have anything like evidence to support the claim that this cross-casting actually occurred. Nor do we have evidence to support the idea that Shakespeare was writing for a company in which there were two particularly strong boy actors, of notably different height and temperament (it doesn't help that he often seems unable to decide which is which) as he created the wonderful pairs of female characters in the stretch of plays through the mid-1590s: Helena and Hermia, Rosalind and Celia, Portia and Nerissa, Beatrice and Hero, Mistress Page and Mistress Ford. Criticism at least since Gerald Bentley has been reluctant to pursue intertextual rhyming of this kind in large part because we cannot attach actors' names to roles (much less physical appearance or personalities to names). I think it is important not to be overly cautious about identifying particular bodies to the extent that we simply go on forgetting that some bodies did in fact inhabit these roles in the late sixteenth century. (3) Thinking about actual pairs of boy actors on Shakespeare's stage in the mid-1590s--whether the same or different pairs from play to play--creates a productive position from which to view the point of entry for particularly Shakespearean fantasies about love and language into literary and theatrical culture. A discussion, for example, of the convention of the witty but submissive woman from Hermia to Beatrice would be richly filled out by an attempt to imagine the way in which these roles might represent the career of a single actor (or even several different actors), and the way in which the ethics of the convention might have become tied to, and/or authorized in, an actor's body. (4) I return to this point in more specific detail later in the essay. For the moment I want simply to say that the methodology I am trying to develop is not one of identifying likely role-rhyming or specific actors across plays and authors and companies; rather, it is one of imagining early modern characters as actors and actors as necessary agents of theatrical meaning--much as we might think of words or scenes or props--so that we can begin to think more specifically about the effects of acting on an early modern audience. In "Personations: The Taming of the Shrew and the Limits of Theoretical Criticism." (5) Paul Yachnin argues that "the semantic unit--the quantum of theatrical meaning-making in Shakespeare's playhouse--comprised the person. …

I covet your skull - death and desire in Hamlet

Abstract: O skull! O skull! O skull! I hold thee out . . . Was here the brain that wrought some forty plays . . . And brought forth endless comments everywhere?’ Belgrave Titmarsh, Shakspere‚s Skull (1889) You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull. A. Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) I am Hamlet the Dane Skull-handler, parablist . . . Seamus Heaney, ‘Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces’ (1975) In July 1648 John Evelyn, early and influential member of the Royal Society, sat for prolific portraitist Robert Walker. 1st July. I sate for my picture, in which there is a Death’s head, to Mr. Walker, that excellent painter. The painting was designed to accompany Instructions Oeconomique , a treatise on marriage written for Evelyn’s (very) young wife. He had hoped to have it executed as a miniature ’by Peter Oliver, Hoskins or Johnson‚, but with Oliver dead and the other two unavailable, Evelyn ’could meet with none capable‚. This context of marital intimacy now seems out of keeping with the image, which displays Evelyn with one hand embracing a human skull, and is annotated by a Greek motto (‘Repentance is the beginning of Philosophy’) and a quotation from Seneca on the importance of preparing for death.

The Al-Hamlet Summit

Abstract: Sound familiar? It is more than that. Sulayman Al-Bassam's reworking of Shakespeare's play is a brilliantly simple theatrical conjuring trick that has Elsinore fitting the current explosive state of Middle East politics like a silk glove. There are some oddities: I couldn't quite work out why Ophelia ends up as a fundamentalist suicide bomber, and as the piece nears its climax it becomes slightly overloaded with conflicting themes.

Shakespeare and the Cultural Colonization of Ireland

Abstract: Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: Cultural Impressment Chapter Two: Macmorris and the Impressment of the Irish Servant Chapter Three: Richard II, Irish Exiles, and the Breath of Kings Chapter Four: Hamlet and Other Kinds of In-between-ness Chapter Five: Question and Answer Notes Bibliography Index

Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: The Tempest and the uses of late Shakespeare in the theatre: Gielgud, Rylance, Prospero

Abstract: I'm going to revive Prospero next year in The Tempest which is another role I love playing and you can do that pretty well until you're ninety so I can have another bash at that one. The play was, of course, Shakespeare's swansong. If The Tempest did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. I have argued that, almost as soon as the discourse of lateness was established as a concept within the general culture of creativity, it became subject to certain complicities; that ‘genuine’ lateness became impossible to distinguish from ‘knowing’ lateness, from lateness striven for and assumed by a given artist. Henry James's ‘Middle Years’, as I have shown, makes this clear, and the late James's engagement – indeed, obsession – with the Shakespearean late phase and in particular with The Tempest as the supreme embodiment of late Shakespeare demonstrates Shakespeare's centrality to the idea of late style as it developed in twentieth-century literary culture as the poetic counterpart to late Beethoven in musicology and late Rembrandt in art history. I have noted, too, that Edward Said's turn to the analysis of late style coincided with his own later years and terminal illness. Late Shakespeare has also, unsurprisingly, been an object of particular interest for critics late in life, who demonstrate a susceptibility to the extension of subjectivism offered by the idea of late writing, from the association of the late author with the late work to that of the late critic with the late author.

Vanishing Intertexts in the Arab Hamlet Tradition

Abstract: A scorpion, its poisonous tail torn out, runs desperate circles around a piece of burning coal. A small boy sits in front of a screen, watching a film of a play translated from one language he does not understand into another. Twenty-five years later, these two events an upperEgyptian game, a Russian film of an English play coalesce into a one-act play called Dance of the Scorpions, an Arabic-language offshoot of Shakespeare's Hamlet. This, at any rate, is the simple etiology offered by the offshoot play's creator, Egyptian playwright/ director Mahmoud Aboudoma.1 Let me summarise Aboudoma's offshoot play and two versions of his first Shakespeare encounter before pointing to the larger questions these stories help to frame. This article will then make a start at addressing those questions.2 Aboudoma's play, Dance of the Scorpions , is part of an Arab Hamlet tradition that has produced countless citations, allusions, adaptations and other intertextual appropriations in the past half-century. Written in the 1980s, it was performed in Egypt in 1989 and 1991.3 Its five characters carry Shakespearean names: Hamlet, Horatio, Claudius, Polonius and the Ghost. However, many Shakespearean ingredients are altered or absent. There are only five scenes, no Gertrude or Ophelia, no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, no Players, no metaphysics and no poetry.4 Aboudoma's unimpressive protagonist is not eloquent and lacks any deep ('Hamletian') sense of consciousness. Instead, the play offers a sharp meditation on misgovernment: Horatio becomes a folksy narrator and double agent; a council of nobles is staged as a puppet show with life-sized dolls; and an ambiguous ending shows a group of domestic revolutionaries mounting a successful coup (Polonius escapes).5 Arguably the central character is Claudius, the 'scorpion' of the title: an unapologetic tyrant who conspires with foreign enemy Fortinbras, rigging a fake war to sideline his political opponents and defraud his people. Were

Representing Shakespearean tragedy : Garrick, the Kembles, and Kean

Abstract: Introduction: Garrick's prologue 1. Winding up 'th'untuned and jarring senses': Garrick, King Lear, and contemporary theatrical/literary criticism 2. 'Who dares do more': Kemble, Siddons, and the question of sublimity in Macbeth 3. 'Speak the speech, I pray you': Kean, Hamlet, and the Romantic 'playwrights' Conclusion: Kean's farewell.

Hamlet and the Reformation of the Eucharist

Abstract: In recent work, critics have found it a fruitful exercise to read Shakespeare as a writer who is interested in the effects and implications of the English Reformation, and who makes very effective use of the theatrical possibilities of Catholic liturgy and ritual. This article attempts to read Hamlet in this historically contextualised manner. Whilst it does not suggest that the multiplicities of meaning in the play can be easily collapsed into a simple defence of the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the Eucharist of traditional Catholicism, it does argue that Hamlet, is a play in which the politics and theology of commemoration occupy a central position, a text that mobilises the extraordinary signifying power of the Eucharist in its attempt to dramatise the cultural impact of the reformation.

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare 1599 (review)

Abstract: Shapiro, James. 2005. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare 1599. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. $27.95 he. 394 pp.Perhaps the greatest biographer of Shakespeare has observed that the public nature of the facts known about the poet "afford no insight into the interior life of the artist, wherein resides the chief fascination of literary biography." It is ironic that these words of Samuel Schoenbaum (1971, 1) find their echo in the last sentence of Shapiro's sterling book, clearly the most important work on Shakespeare's life among many since Schoenbaum's A Documentary Life (1975). Though able to open "the hearts and minds of others," Shapiro concludes, Shakespeare "kept a lock on what he revealed about himself" (333). Still, Shapiro's deft ability to zoom in and out on Shakespeare's life in English society in 1599 does seem to make the bard take on flesh and blood especially in the silences that Shapiro allows us to hear in the form of what Shakespeare did not-or dare not-write. Despite the beautifully written thick description that Shapiro offers of one year in Shakespeare's life unfolding season to season, we still do not know how he felt about the basic public issues that faced English culture that year. To oversimplify these, we still can ask, was he Catholic or Protestant, Monarchist or Republican or Monarchical Republican? His personal life seems even more remote, paradoxically, in the face of this most diligent, lucid book, a mustread for all who study Shakespeare. How did he feel about his marriage or his family, who probably never saw a single play by their most eminent member (240)? Such mysteries of history and life deepen, not recede, as Shapiro makes us peer across the centuries dividing the post-modern from the early modern and beyond, to a chivalric world recognized in Hamlet to be "dead but not yet buried" (276).Herein lies the great value of Shapiro's work. It shows us how, through the dark glass of history, we can vividly make out the form and pressure of the times on the four plays Shakespeare worked on in the year 1599, Henry V, As You Like It, Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Against and within the massive forces that made "the death of chivalry" coincide with "the birth of empire" (274), Shakespeare the English man both disappears and emerges. Zooming out on the grave problems of enclosure and vagabondage "particularly acute in Arden" (233), Shapiro shows the immortal poet as just one more rich man among an uneasy multitude, having already stuffed his barns in 1597 with 80 bushels of malt, not "ignorant of the consequences upon the poor of Warwickshire" (241). Through Shapiro's other lens, we see Shakespeare the Protean pleaser-and reader-of great crowds, with "over a third of London's adult population" likely to attend a play each month (9). On the stage at least, Shakespeare was able to make them think he had heard and seen their very voice and image, showing true sympathy for those hurt by "the personal and social cost of enclosure," for example, in the figure of the indigent shepherd Corin in As You Like It (243). In so hurtling and maintaining the obstacles of social class, Shakespeare emerges in Shapiro's richly detailed portrait of late Elizabethan culture like the character of Henry V, "a man who mingles easily with princes and paupers but who deep down is fundamentally private and inscrutable" (92).Indeed, Shapiro tellingly demonstrates how the fact that "Shakespeare played vasdy different roles in London and in Stratford" (240) fully situates his life and career in the growing divide of city and country, center and margin, lords and commoners in early modern British culture overall. For example, he convincingly detects in the nationalist rhetoric of Henry V the futility and desperation of the English crown's attempt to colonize Ireland in view of the 1598 massacre of English troops at Blackwater by the Earl of Tyrone. By presenting "the fantasy of English and Irish fighting side by side" so soon after Blackwater (95), Henry V displays the shallow hopes of conquest that rested now on Essex, leaving for Ireland in the spring of 1 599. …