Showing papers on "Hamlet (place) published in 2009"

Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics

Abstract: Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: impure aesthetics Part I. A Shakespearean Aesthetic: Into the Woods outside Athens: 2. A Midsummer Night's Dream - eros and the aesthetic 3. Modernity, usury, and art in Timon of Athens Part II. The Aesthetics of Death and Mourning: 4. Hamlet as mourning play 5. Beautiful death in Romeo and Juliet Conclusion: the critical present Bibliography Index.

Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought

Abstract: This is the first collaborative volume to place Shakespeare’s works within the landscape of early modern political thought. Until recently, literary scholars have not generally treated Shakespeare as a participant in the political thought of his time, unlike his contemporaries Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney. At the same time, historians of political thought have rarely turned their attention to major works of poetry and drama. A distinguished international and interdisciplinary team of contributors examines the full range of Shakespeare’s writings in order to challenge conventional interpretations of plays central to the canon, such as Hamlet; open up novel perspectives on works rarely considered to be political, such as the Sonnets; and focus on those that have been largely neglected, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor. The result is a coherent and challenging portrait of Shakespeare’s distinctive engagement with the characteristic questions of early modern political thought: among them, corruption and citizenship, education and persuasion, the hazards of the court and the demands of the commonwealth.

Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse

Abstract: Preface Introduction: wresting an alphabet 1. Shakespeare without words: the nineteenth-century legacy 2. Biograph's pioneering film of King John (1899) 3. Conflicted allegiances in Shakespeare films of the transitional era 4. Corporate authorship: the Shakespeare films of the Vitagraph Company of America 5. Pedigree and performance codes in silent films of Hamlet 6. Shakespeare films of the 1916 tercentenary 7. Asta Nielsen and Emil Jannings: stars of German Shakespeare films of the early 1920s 8. Afterword: 'No tongue, all eyes! Be silent': performing wordless Shakespeare today Filmography: A. Commercially available Shakespeare films of the silent era B. General filmography Bibliography.

Hearing Ophelia: Gender and Tragic Discourse in Hamlet

Abstract: Hearing Ophelia: Gender and Tragic Discourse in \"Hamlet\" Author(s): SANDRA K. FISCHER Source: Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, New Series / Nouvelle Série, Vol . 14, No. 1, Art, Literature and History in the Renaissance / L'Art, Literature et Histoire ( Winter / hiver 1990), pp. 1-10 Published by: Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43444750 Accessed: 22-02-2016 16:48 UTC

The pith and marrow of our attribute: dialogue of skin and skull in Hamlet and Holbein's The Ambassadors

Abstract: The heuristics of difference have proved enormously valuable to early modern critical studies, bringing the lives of women, subalterns, as well as national, ethnic, and racial minorities and others...

Making “Young Hamlet”

Abstract: While youth’s subordinate position in Hamlet has played a vital role within the play’s critical tradition, this tradition has not questioned the ideological processes that create “youth” as a social category—that define what youth means, whom it includes, and why. Rather than portray an archetypal contest between the young and the old or portray Hamlet’s developmental progression from youth to maturity, the play examines the production and application of these categories as political phenomena. By exposing the circumscribed logic that produces these categories, Hamlet fractures the ideological justifications for early modern constructions of youth and age.

To be or not to be (a gendered subject): was that the question?

Abstract: In the third act of one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated works, Hamlet asks of himself: To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of...

Hamlet and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto

Abstract: During the long eighteenth century, discussions of theatrical performance increasingly focused on the actor’s body and its expressive potential to perform emotion. Hamlet —in particular, the prince’s initial meeting with his father’s Ghost—became synonymous with the passion of terror. Horace Walpole appropriates this encounter from Shakespeare’s play, this essay argues, and uses it as a template for terror in his Castle of Otranto . The novel employs the natural language that governs visible, theatrical bodies and familiar episodes from performance to heighten the private experience of the solitary reader.

The Wooster Group's Hamlet, According to the True, Original Copies

Abstract: To all appearances, the Wooster Group’s Hamlet evades the burden of critical interpretation by reconstructing John Gielgud’s 1964 memorial production starring film celebrity, Richard Burton, as mediated through Bill Colleran’s filmic record of it. Upon closer inspection, though, director Elizabeth LeCompte stages the dynamic between the archive and the repertoire to foreground the problematic performance of compulsive mourning, an issue exacerbated by the digital media relied on in the 1964 production’s intermedial reconstruction. For all its humor, the Wooster Group’s Hamlet brings home, with a vengeance, the idea that any attempt at working through traumatic losses by remediating them inevitably is suffused by the paradoxical logic of reproduction that forces us endlessly to repeat the painful resuscitation of specters, private and cultural, domestic and foreign: Shakespeare’s son; sorely missed Wooster Group members; the deceased philosopher, Jacques Derrida; the democratizing challenges to Shakespeare’s canonical status; and the fear of communism in the capitalist US and in the patriarchal International Labor Federation’s feminist shadow. The Wooster Group’s reenactment thus rejoins Andy Warhol’s mechanically reproduced memorial silkscreens of Liz Taylor, whose presence equally haunts Kathe Burkhart’s Liz Taylor Series— two visualarts “libraries” that perform a counter-memory to the Wooster Group’s Hamlet and supplement the promotional imagery on the company’s web site, in the program for the production’s preview, and in Richard Prince’s publicity card for the New York Public Theater’s opening.

The death of Hamnet: an essay on grief and creativity.

Abstract: The author argues that Shakespeare's Hamlet (1600) was influenced by the death in 1596 of the playwright's 11-year-old twin son, Hamnet. Beyond the similarity between the dead child's name and the play's title, the language of the play, a supreme act of sublimation, does at times seem preoccupied with a kind of linguistic twinning. The play's variations on the theme of doubling-pairs of characters, for example, and the many instances of hendiadys, a figure of speech using two substantives to denote a single complex meaning, as well as Hamlet's play within a play-are indirect references to the dead twin, the author contends.

Hamlet hears Marlowe; Shakespeare reads Virgil

Abstract: The excerpt from Aeneas' tale to Dido which Hamlet elicits from the Player is based in part on Marlowe's Dido Queen of Carthage . As a melodramatic description of the culmination of the Trojan war with the slaughter of Priam, the Player's speech appears to be specified by Hamlet because it recalls Old Hamlet's preceding account of his own murder — a report which figures Old Hamlet's body as an assailed citadel. These two accounts, with other Virgilian and contemporary allusions, associate the action and apparent inaction of Hamlet with the manoeuvres and stalemates of an extended siege war. Elizabethan land warfare was chiefly siege campaigning, and there was an extensive contemporary literature on this mode of conflict. Marrying Virgil's account of Troy to Renaissance siegecraft theory, Shakespeare makes the Aeneid and elements of contemporary warfare an entelechy of Hamlet .

Homophonic Hamlet: Making Hamlet Ma(i)d

Abstract: (2009). Homophonic Hamlet: Making Hamlet Ma(i)d. The Explicator: Vol. 67, No. 3, pp. 209-212.

Shakespeare's Hamlet as a Precursor of the Theatre of the Absurd

Abstract: Being regarded as a dramatist of all times, Shakespeare and his work is studied with a modern view point by many critics. Shakespeare is part of a modern tradition trying to mirror human psychology and condition in all its absurdity. The innovations the theatre of the Absurd has brought not only provide an influence for the works of the later generations but also, they make it possible to look back at the past works of the theatre with a contemporary critical eye. Shakespeare’s vision of the world is similar to that of the absurdists, mainly due to their shared confidence in humanity’s capacity to endure, and the precarious nature of human existence. This book analyzes Hamlet, mainly the drama of its protagonist, as a precursor of Absurd drama. In Hamlet, Shakespeare represents man’s existential anxiety and precarious condition in a nonsensical world, which is stripped of all logical explanations and accounts. To examine the play in the context of the theatre of the Absurd, it will be discussed in relation to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame with regard to their common concerns for the themes of the theatre of the Absurd such as uncertainty and inertia.

Shakespeare and the politics of superstition

Abstract: This is the first collaborative volume to place Shakespeare's works within the landscape of early modern political thought. Until recently, literary scholars have not generally treated Shakespeare as a participant in the political thought of his time, unlike his contemporaries Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney. At the same time, historians of political thought have rarely turned their attention to major works of poetry and drama. A distinguished international and interdisciplinary team of contributors examines the full range of Shakespeare's writings in order to challenge conventional interpretations of plays central to the canon, such as Hamlet; open up novel perspectives on works rarely considered to be political, such as the Sonnets; and focus on those that have been largely neglected, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor. The result is a coherent and challenging portrait of Shakespeare's distinctive engagement with the characteristic questions of early modern political thought.

The inability to mourn and the inability to love in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Abstract: The author discusses the special role played by Shakespeare's masterpiece Hamlet in the history of psychoanalysis. Freud and many of his followers have treated Hamlet as if he were a real person inhibited by the Oedipus complex. In this presentation, Hamlet is understood as the embodiment of a brilliant artistic endeavor aimed at both revealing and concealing the power of this complex. The author proposes that, if Hamlet is autobiographical, it expresses Shakespeare's inability to mourn and love until a childhood homosexual memory has emerged. Hidden in Hamlet is a cure through the recall of a childhood memory.

Strange Episodes: Race in Stage History

Abstract: Introduction Sept 4 Towards night, the kinges interpreter came, and brought me a letter from the Portingall, wher in (like the faction) he offered me all kindly services. The bearer is a man of marvailous redie witt and speakes in eloquent Portugues. He layt abord me. Sept 5 I sent the interpreter, according to his desire, abord the Hector, whear he brooke fast, and after came abord mee, where we gave the tragedie of Hamlett. (1) ("Keeling's Journal," Hair 1981, 34) To begin with this particular epigraph, an entry from the journal of Admiral William Keeling, a seasoned East India Company man, is to rehearse a rather indelicate editorial act. I might have begun by situating the journal entries as those of the chosen General of the East India Company's third voyage. I might have further noted that the Company's objectives on this third voyage involved locating a market for English woolens somewhere beyond the Cape of Good Hope--on the Arabian sea or perhaps Socotra, Aden, or Surat (Keay 73-4). Eventually, though, I would be obliged to point out that the highlight of Keeling's official account of the voyage is set not in the East Indies, but in West Africa, Sierra Leone, where the fleet spent some thirty-eight days awaiting the recovery of sailors afflicted with scurvy and negotiating with Portuguese-speaking Africans for fresh victuals. Even without such exposition the passage seems to speak for itself: "Hamlet!" it says, "Shakespeare!" "Africa!" In effect, the editorial decision to flame Keeling's nonchalant account--another day, another performance of Shakespeare--produces a show-stopper. Literary critics, historians, and cultural theorists alike have summoned up this ghost that, for all its suggestive potency, implies more about the summoner than about anything else. In the course of this essay I examine a good deal of the textual history of the first recorded performance of"the tragedie of Hamlett," staged aboard a ship anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1607. In the case of the Hamlet 1607 performance, an episode in Shakespearean stage history that remains largely unsubstantiated, it is the editors of the extant records who have become, time and again, engaged in the cross-racial casting of this ephemeral and possibly apocryphal production. As I will show, the editorial and interpretive work that produces stage history may also usurp the role of actors and audiences in authorizing representations of race. In suggesting that both actors and audiences participate in cross-racial casting I employ Antonia Nakano Glenn's definition of casting as "an ongoing communal process of authorizing representation," a process that entails "setting forth expectations of 'type' and judging the fulfillment of those expectations" (414). (2) The highly evocative, visual vocabulary of stage history is a racially coded one, capable of "casting" actors and audiences of past performances. Scholars and editors are thus not just the chroniclers but also the agents of ideological change. Their approaches to textual transmission and description may go beyond interpretation, foreclosing meaning by suggesting the social uses of past performances as fixed. More than a review of the modes and methodologies of textual scholarship, this essay represents an attempt to identify an ethics of critical reporting. I begin with a reading of the critical prose of those scholars who have alternately buried and revived the account of a 1607 performance of Hamlet in Africa. I then recontextualize the purported "strangeness" of the event by reading it alongside a body of travel writing that features performance-as-diplomacy in episodes of encounter. Finally, I offer some strategies for evaluating the role of stage history in the production of race as static and monolithic. Strange Episodes Almost invariably, the Hamlet 1607 account is introduced in terms of its peculiarity, rarity, absurdity, or all of the above. …

Time Lord of Infinite Space: Celebrity Casting, Romanticism, and British Identity in the RSC's "Doctor Who Hamlet"

Abstract: The article considers David Tennant's recent performance as Hamlet in the light of his portrayal of the tenth doctor on British TV's most iconic show, Doctor Who. It considers the way in which the two roles inform each other, particularly in the minds of the audience, and argues for a particular notion of British cultural identity manifested by both the TV show and the recent direction taken by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

“Silencing Ophelia: Male Aurality as a Controlling Element in Olivier’s Hamlet”

Abstract: In nearly all cinematic adaptations of Hamlet, Ophelia's role is the one most radically reduced by directors: her soliloquy is frequently excised, her remaining lines are abbreviated, her appearances are shortened, and the director's visual treatment often reduces her to the status of object. Her relationship with music, a crucial element in understanding her mental condition, is also altered: her songs are often significantly reduced or even eliminated. In this article I will demonstrate how composer William Walton's musical approach to Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's 1948 film of Hamlet establishes a "male aurality" that accompanies director Olivier's male gaze, the combination of which causes Ophelia to become even more marginalized.

The play-within-the-film-within-the-play's the thing: re-transmitting analogue bodies in the Wooster Group's Hamlet

Abstract: The Wooster Group's 2007 production of Hamlet ghosts not only the history of Hamlet and the many Hamlets that have come before, but also places it on stage alongside, interacting with, and re-transmitting the Richard Burton film of his 1964 Broadway production, which acts as a form of analogous ‘master’ text. This essay argues that this production foregrounds the place of the analogue and of theatre in a digital world, placing the Wooster Group bodies on stage as conduits for historical, lost and remembered bodies.

A representação da natureza humana em hamlet de william shakespeare

Abstract: This article will approach the characteristics of human naturewhich we can find in Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a man who knew a lot about human nature, and we can realize this in tragedieslike Hamlet. Man’s representation in all his essence is very well worked inHamlet. Hamlet is a man who falls because his mistake of philosophizing a lot and therefore wait too much to revenge his father’s death. The treason, themurder, hate, the revenge and love are characteristics that make humannature. These characteristics are approached with authority by Shakespearein Hamlet. This proves how he knew the man and wrote about him to make this man looks like a real human being who is at the mercy of the worldlyforces.

One Size Does Not Fit All: Cinematic Approaches to the Teaching of Shakespeare

Abstract: For high school English teachers in the United States, ninth grade usually means teaching Romeo and Juliet, tenth grade Julius Caesar, and twelfth grade Macbeth, Hamlet or both. While some teachers...

The Uses and Abuses of Prayer Book Properties in Hamlet, Richard III, and Arden of Faversham

Abstract: Protestant polemicists attempted to articulate a clear opposition between word and image, depicting the faithful as godly readers who eschewed idolatrous objects such as rosaries and crucifixes. But even reformed prayer involved the use of textual guides, and because of their materiality these prayer manuals flew in the face of theologians' claims that they had eliminated all of the superficial trappings associated with Catholic worship. This essay addresses scenes of prayer book use in Hamlet, Richard III, and Arden of Faversham, arguing that each of these plays draws attention to existing contradictions surrounding the idealized image of the godly reader by highlighting the slippage between theatrical and religious practice, both of which employed prayer books as “props.” (E.W.)

'The single and peculiar life’: Hamlet's Heart and the Early Modern Subject

Abstract: Revisionist accounts of Early Modern subjectivity almost invariably begin with Hamlet‟s accusation. Elizabeth Hanson‟s fine book Discovering the Subject opens with the phrase as a paradigmatic statement, in which Hamlet assumes the position of the modern subject, endowed with an inner mystery, and resistant to its penetration and discovery. 2 In this model the subject contains something elusively called „mystery‟; the space of mystery is the interior of the subject‟s body, here symbolized by the heart; and other people are desperate to get access to that mystery, if necessary by tearing the heart out of the subject‟s body. Since this was physically accomplished in contemporary rituals of execution for crimes involving treason, especially at this time religious treason, the phrase seems to gesture towards the torture chamber, the scaffold and the whole dangerous recusant world of Catholic England and „Secret Shakespeare‟. Removing the heart from the chest was never a practical way of acquiring information, but here the torturer and the executioner merge into one, and the symbolic and literal are hard to prise apart: „To know our enemies‟ minds, we rip their hearts‟. 3

Reading for Law and the State: Theaters of Problematization and Authority

Abstract: Constructing a particular nation, that of early modern England, is seen here as a series of theatrical performances. Shakespeare’s work is taken as a series of thought experiments. Some, like The Merchant of Venice, are reassuring that threatening circumstances and innovatory social practices are capable of being overcome or assimilated from the unknown to the known. Some, like King Lear and Hamlet, ponder the consequences of a failure to discover a resolution. Some writers have argued that England was historically quite early in beginning to conceive of itself as a nation, rather than as a population of possibly heterogeneous regions subject to a dynasty, a state of affairs summarized in the by now cliched remark attributed to the Sun King, “L’Etat, c’est moi”. For Shakespeare, if not for all of his contemporaries, the Englishman is a bit slow-witted, owing to his fondness for beef and red wine, but he is distinguishable from others and provides material for the second pieces of theater I look at. If there could be an Englishman, his experience with the absolutist pretensions of the Stuart monarchy allowed there to be a free-born Englishman (and, actually, Englishwoman). The two crucial battles of the English civil war, Marston Moor and Naseby, followed by the Army Debates of 1647–1649 form the stage for an at least aspiring egalitarianism we now know as the rights of man, or the rights of the civic person.

Feigning Reason: Hamlet and the Dynamics of Desire in Graham Swift's Ever After

Abstract: This essay explores the intertextual debt to Hamlet in Graham Swift's Ever After. Employing Jacques Lacan's reading of desire in "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet," the author argues that Bill Unwin's paralysis of subjective agency encourages his identification with Hamlet so as to fix himself within the symbolic order. Unlike Hamlet, however, Unwin faces not only the crisis of the father's law, but postmodernity's collapse of symbolic authority.