Showing papers on "Hamlet (place) published in 2012"

What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?*

Abstract: When Hamlet reflects on the charged power of the tragic theater, the figure who haunts his imagination is Hecuba, Queen of Troy, whose tragedy came to define the genre in sixteenth-century Europe. As a bereaved mourner who seeks revenge, Hecuba offers a female version of Hamlet. Yet even while underscoring her tragic power, Shakespeare simultaneously establishes a new model of tragic protagonist, challenging the period’s longstanding identification of tragedy with women. In exploring why both Hamlet and Shakespeare are preoccupied with Hecuba, this article argues that ignoring the impact of Greek plays in sixteenth-century England has left a gap in our understanding of early modern tragedy. Attending to Hecuba highlights Shakespeare’s innovations to a genre conventionally centered on female grief. In invoking Hecuba as an icon of tragedy, Shakespeare both reflects on and transforms women’s place in the genre.

The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge: Giordano Bruno in England

Abstract: Preface 1. The Brunian Setting 2. The Northumberland Texts 3. The Northumberland Circle: Harriot's Papers 4. Bruno and Marlowe: Dr Faustus 5. Bruno and Shakespeare: Hamlet. Words for Posterity. Appendices.

Hamlet the Difference Machine

Abstract: Our task, lest the rest become statistics and a mere matter for computers, is the labor of difference. Hamlet, the failure, did not achieve it, this is his crime. --Heiner Muller, "Shakespeare a Difference" (1) As Heiner Muller declared in his 1988 presentation to the Weimar Shakespeare Festival, Hamlet (the eponymous dramatic character extracted from "his" play) is Shakespeare's emblematic failure, unable to break free of "all hitherto existing culture" (SD). Hamlet is emblematic of atemporal failure, which for Muller is the structural failure of both intellectual discourse and revolutionary change, his--Hamlet's and Muller's--discourse itself confessing its own failure to produce action. How must we see this ubiquitous disappointment, which must seem at first a curious, even impossible, criterion for failure, particularly in light of the fact that in "Shakespeare a Difference" Muller's exemplar of "success" is Hamlet's opposite, Caliban, referred to by Muller as "the new Shakespeare's reader?" But this Hamlet/Caliban dyad is itself unsettled since, as Caliban "reads" Shakespeare (presumably including Hamlet), "he" is also doomed to Hamlet's failure; clearly, Muller is concerned with cultural technics, the mechanisms by which the repetition compulsion of culture drives ahead, on the one hand suspended between Caliban and Hamlet, "beast and Overman," as for Zarathustra and his tightrope walker, and on the other situated between soma and tekhne, as we are generically for Deleuze and Guattari. (2) This is the core of Muller's astonishing distillation of Hamlet: in both guises, as Shakespeare's Hamlet and Muller's actor-Hamlet, theatrical exploration of the human dilemma consists of a "labor of difference" amounting to nothing less than the technical work of meaning-making as the ground of culture-formation. In Hamletmachine Muller attempts an amalgamation of the synchronic and diachronic critique of revolutionary cultural change; the play is the result, the condensed product, of this labor of difference, a difference-machine rotating around the circular question of the historical meaning and value of human action. Hamletmachine shows us a perpetual motion machine of eternal return, both in and out of time. His 1988 Weimar speech, "Shakespeare a Difference," provides an essential blueprint to Hamletmachine, Heiner Muller's masterpiece of condensation; I want to use that blueprint to explore Muller's Shakespeare-derived strategy of meaning-making in his constructing of the Hamletmachine: the play, Hamletmachine, is itself a technology, a skilled technological structure of fragmented references to other (literary and historical) machines such as the state and its apparatus, and the drama and its supporting technologies. Thus, Hamletmachine is also "the Hamletmachine." In order to understand the nature of meaning-making in Hamlet-machine, we must return to the early modern worldview that so strongly influenced Heiner Muller when he first encountered Hamlet in his school library as a thirteen-year-old. Muller had what he calls an instinctive reaction to the play: "I suspected more than I understood; the leap drives experience, not the step" (SD). In this regard, Muller receives his inspiration from more than Hamlet itself; he reacts to Shakespeare's manifested conflict in Hamlet between "providence" and something that might be called "free will," as the play explores in each of its characters the dynamics of constructing a worldview. Indeed, for the eight central characters in Shakespeare's play this complex conflict leads to destruction, not construction) Hamlet is caught in a transition from a stultified, rigid medieval framework to a humanist one, with all the problematics of the corruption inherent in the latter as seen from the former. Claudius and Gertrude, in their violent subversion of medieval behavioral codes (regicide, but more importantly, the violent wresting of control over their autonomy relative to the power structure they murder along with Hamlet pere) are emblematic of the then-current threat to a rapidly disappearing feudal sense of the world and its proper order. …

Out of the shadow, into the light

Abstract: In 1813, Adelbert von Chamisso published a novel that became a major literary success. It was the story of Peter Schlemihl, the man who sold his shadow. He wrote the text during a stay in Kunersdorf, a hamlet 80 km east of Berlin. This is the place where the Chamisso Society held its yearly meeting yesterday within the facilities of the Kunersdorfer Musenhof, a house hosting a permanent exhibition dedicated to Chamisso. I realized then how many different ways of looking at Chamisso's life ...

Mourning the soviet victims in a cosmopolitan way: Hamlet from Kozintsev to Riazanov

Abstract: The article contextualizes Grigorii Kozintsev's celebrated films, Hamlet and King Lear, and El'dar Riazanov's Beware of the Car, in the historical environment of post-Stalinist Russia. Scrutinizing Kozintsev's political and artistic itinerary, the Shakespearean productions are interpreted as works of mourning for Soviet victims. In his writings on Shakespeare as well as in his films, Kozintsev insisted that his ideal was not historical accuracy but rather a self-conscious modernization of the classical text. Having found in Shakespeare an adequate cultural idiom that was resonant, cosmopolitan and ambitious, Kozintsev developed his language for a mournful meditation about the long Soviet period. In response, his former student, Riazanov, inserted a parody on Kozintsev's Hamlet into his popular but subtle epitaph on Soviet utopianism, Beware of the Car.

Hamlet, Metaphor, and Memory

Abstract: This essay reconsiders Hamlet's second soliloquy by locating it within the reconstructed contexts of early modern writing on memory and the ars memoriae . Within these, the Aristotelian distinction between remembering and recollecting is shown to be crucial, as is the interwoven series of metaphors through which mnemonic activities were discussed. These metaphors enable Hamlet to misrepresent the reality of his inner life in response to the Ghost's revelations, most notably in his pursuit of mnemonic erasure. Viewed from this perspective, Hamlet emerges not as one burdened by the memory of his father, or by the need to purge himself of it; rather, from the moment the revenge plot is set in motion, Hamlet is shown to struggle against the very lack of vividness with which both his father and the urge to vengeance exist in his mind.

Kozintsev's Shakespeare Films: Russian Political Protest in Hamlet and King Lear

Abstract: This book is a study of Grigory Kozintsev's two cinematic Shakespeare adaptations, Hamlet (Gamlet 1964), and King Lear (Korol Lir 1970). The films are considered in relation to the historical, artistic and cultural contexts in which they appear, as well as the contributions of Dmitri Shostakovich, who wrote the films' scores, and Boris Pasternak, whose translations were used in both films. The films are also analyzed respective to their place in the translation and performance history of Hamlet and King Lear from their first appearances in Tsarist Russian arts and letters; in particular, the ways in which these plays have been used as a means to critique the government and the country's problems in an age in which official censorship was commonplace.

At the Margins: Ophelia in Modern and Contemporary Photography

Abstract: Displaced to the somber back room of a bar in Miller’s letter quoted above; vanishing down the long corridors of a castle in Laurence Olivier’s film; or partially submerged in a bath or in a river following the style inaugurated by John Everett Millais, Ophelia lives at the margins of our memory of Shakespeare’s play, as liminal and peripheral as one of Hamlet’s subplots.4

Shakespeare and the Landscape of Death: Crossing the Boundaries of Life and the Afterlife

Abstract: This essay explores how denying or ignoring the meanings of the spaces scripted for the dead, or “deathscapes” as anthropologist Lily Kong calls them, can lead Shakespeare's characters to a spiritual death as well as a bodily one. I examine the cultural meanings of deathscapes in the early modern era – specifically the grave, graveyard and church – through the lens of the schism of Christianity caused by separation of Protestantism and Catholicism. When Hamlet, for example, makes the mistake of treating the spaces of the dead in ways that speak more to how Catholics define and use them, he puts himself in deadly peril. I argue, however, that this in no way makes Hamlet a “Catholic play”, as some critics have in the past claimed. Instead, I show how Shakespeare reinforces the tenets and ideas of Protestantism by punishing Hamlet's lapses with such a thorough and unavoidable harshness that Hamlet's anti-Protestant actions and behaviours serve as a warning to audience members. The fact that Hamlet appears to...

What Chaucer Did to Shakespeare: Books and Bodkins in Hamlet and The Tempest

Abstract: This article is less concerned with what Shakespeare did to Chaucer than with what Chaucer did to Shakespeare: that is, how the experience of reading Chaucer, in certain cultural and bibliographical contexts, engaged Shakespeare throughout his career, not only providing sources but provoking his imagination. Like so many of his sources and inspirations, Chaucer's poetry came to Shakespeare not as a performative tradition but as a published book. We take a close look at Thomas Speght's 1598 volume, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, reprinted in 1602, the only edition to appear in Shakespeare's lifetime. And we examine, in particular, Chaucer's treatment of the death of Julius Caesar in the Monk's Tale, in order to show how Chaucer's handling of this political assassination provoked Shakespeare's exploration of this subject in his own Julius Caesar, as well as in Hamlet and The Tempest.

Simulating Hamlet: Questions, Cautions, and Critique

Abstract: This paper explores the implications of the use of System Dynamics to model dramatic works and examines the model used in Pamela Lee Hopkins’ “Simulating Hamlet in the classroom.†This paper addresses this issue from both a literary and a modelling perspective. It begins by discussing the use of System Dynamics modelling in literature within the framework established by Forrester. Two aspects of the model, motivation and evidence revelation, are then examined against evidence from the text, supported by historical information. Some difficulties inherent in modelling drama are highlighted and the paper concludes that the model does not adequately capture the complexity of the play because System Dynamics modelling is not an appropriate tool for literary analysis.

The Politic Worm: Invertebrate Life in the Early Modern English Body

Abstract: Almost everyone seems to know at least one thing about Hamlet’s Denmark: it is rotten. This famous sentiment is rivaled only by “to be or not to be” as source of popular allusions and parody. For the most part, this phrase—and language like it in the play—have been taken as purely metaphorical. Powerful people have been behaving badly, and “rot” seems to reflect a suitably disgusted attitude toward their malfeasance. Here, for example, is a conversation in which Hamlet, feigning madness, traverses rapidly through a constellation of possibilities.

Shakespeare and the Apocalypse: Visions of Doom from Early Modern Tragedy to Popular Culture

Abstract: List of Figures Preface 1. The Reechy Painting and the Old Church Window 2. Hamlet and the Living Dead 3. Masochistic Damnation in Othello 4. Macbeth and the Angels of Doom 5. King Lear's Promised End 6. Conclusion Bibliography Index.

Revisionings of Hamlet: The Crux of an Interpretive Paradigm

Abstract: This article is a brief survey of Hamlet criticism along with different types of revisioning Hamlet in a variety of genres since the early twentieth century. Four major types of revisioning Hamlet are considered in this article: absorption of Hamlet by a competent writer as a challenge to Shakespeare; rewriting of the play as a response to the questions unaddressed in the original text; revisioning of the play as a feminist struggle intent upon defending women against patriarchal readings of them; transforming Hamlet as a postcolonial urge to rewrite the past. Further, it is argued that varied types of revisioning, adapting, or transforming Hamlet, though roughly different in their exact significations and delineations, are the consequence of two major factors: psychological reaction to Shakespeare, and, being situated within a socio-political context. By reducing the causes of revisioning into the two broad categories of psychological and contextual, varied types of revisioning that are ostensibly discrepant and unrelated may obtain a common foundation for analysis and comparison. Further, it is argued that Hamlet is surrounded by the enormous bulk of criticism on Hamlet which informs the readers and affects their interpretation of both the play and its revisionings. Developing an interpretive paradigm for revisioning phenomenon entails the investigation of the basic concepts on which revisioning phenomenon is founded. Revisionism is a complex phenomenon; a reductionist approach toward the basic concepts involved in revisioning and its analysis can be regarded as a step toward gaining more insight into the revisioning phenomenon in our era.

In Hamlet's Shadow: Mourning and Melancholia in Little Dorrit

Abstract: In Little Dorrit , Charles Dickens turned both to Romantic and Victorian appropriations of Hamlet and to an emerging naturalistic psychology to dramatize a condition anticipating, and influencing, Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia.” Arthur Clennam becomes identified with the ghost of Hamlet’s father and, implicitly, with his own father’s ghost. He retraces the father’s past, unconsciously seeking out the dimly remembered mother in the form of Little Dorrit. In his psychological bankruptcy, he embraces his Marshalsea imprisonment until, in his marriage to Little Dorrit (always “Little Mother”), he is released without recovering knowledge of his past that lies buried within him.

Hamlet and the French Connection: The Relationship of Q1 and Q2 Hamlet and the Evidence of Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques

Abstract: Since the rediscovery of the first Quarto of Hamlet in 1823 there has been uncertainty among scholars about its relationship with the second Quarto, and about the priority of the quartos. However, there is agreement that the primary underlying source for Hamlet is Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques. This detailed three-way comparison between the three texts reveals the borrowings of plot, character, language, and, critically, the evolution of ideas originating in Belleforest. Two points emerge: the shorter text, Q1, borrows proportionally more than Q2, and some borrowings appear to evolve from the source through Q1 to Q2, suggesting that Q1 is anterior.

Passion Turned to Prettiness: Rhyme or Reason in Hamlet

Abstract: This essay links the changeable nature of rhyme in Hamlet to a sixteenth-century critical debate in England about the moral, cultural, and intellectual value of rhymed poetry. It demonstrates that Shakespeare was especially aware of and invested in the controversy over rhyme’s relationship to reason. Highlighting his ambivalence toward rhyme, the discussion explores his ironic attraction to the Platonic idea of furor poeticus , his sense of rhyme’s complicity in poetic “madness,” and his tendency to both belittle and exalt rhyme in the plays and sonnets. The essay argues further that this ambivalence was something Shakespeare shared with Sir Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, and other early modern literary critics who wavered uncomfortably between disparaging and defending rhyme. Considering how Shakespeare and his contemporaries convey the generic and social slipperiness of rhyme, equally at home in a king’s couplet and a minstrel’s ballad, the essay contributes to the current authorship debate in Shakespeare studies by positioning rhyme at the intersection of literacy and orality, poetics and performance, and page and stage. Segueing into Hamlet , the essay reads the prince’s couplets and ballad fragments, the play within the play, and Ophelia’s songs as moments that collectively evince the passion or madness of rhyme. The analysis then turns to the gravedigger, whose song signals a change in the status of rhyme. The essay concludes by arguing that rhyme and reason approach one another as the play approaches its end; it is only when Hamlet reconciles himself to his fate that rhyme and reason are finally reconciled.

The Delay of Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Abstract: In a play built on Hamlet’s hesitation or delay, it should come as no surprise that Polonius’s own long-winded delaying finds a home. In fact, Polonius’s delay is intricately wound up with Hamlet’s in the play. Polonius may provide us with “comic relief” in Hamlet, but it is not of the gratuitous kind. Rather it is structurally necessary: his comic delay places Hamlet’s own tragic delay or hesitation in perspective; and it leads, in the turning point of the drama—the closet scene—to the stunning, fateful meeting of both “delaying” forces. This essay considers each of Polonius’s delays in Hamlet in detail and attempts to relate them to the larger action, and meaning, of Shakespeare’s drama.

The Hamlet Zone: Reworking Hamlet for European Cultures

Abstract: Detached from Shakespeare’s English, Hamlet has been rewritten numerous times in European languages, the various translations into any one language jostling with each other for dominance and spawning new Hamlets that depart decisively from Shakespeare as a source. This book focuses on the rich tradition of drawing from Hamlet in European cultures to produce new, independent works, which include Hamlet theatre, Hamlet ballet, Hamlet poetry, Hamlet fiction, Hamlet essays and Hamlet films. It examines how the myth of Hamlet has crossed back and forth over Europe’s linguistic borders for four hundred years, repeatedly reinvigorated by being bent to specific geo-political and cultural locations. The enquiries in this book show how, in the process of translation, adaptation and reinventing, Hamlet has become the common cultural currency of Europe.

"The drops which fell from Shakespear's Pen": Hamlet in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract: Questions of gender, ethnicity and sexuality have all been raised by novelists intent on rewriting Shakespeare from the position of what have been seen as cultural margins. While discussions of such rewritings are ongoing, few concerted efforts have been made to trace a pattern in the treatment of Shakespearean allusion and adaptation at the hands of British and American writers of the literary mainstream. The present essay sets out to investigate the way in which three such writers —Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, and John Updike— employ allusion to/adaptations of Hamlet in their novels and what their respective stances reveal about their understanding of their role as canonical writers.

Gertrude’s Transformations: Against Patriarchal Authority

Abstract: Gertrude’s characterization in Hamlet is extensively analyzed with regard to her infidelity, promiscuity, and ostensibly virtuous nature. Further, much criticism on Gertrude is based on the content of Hamlet and the Ghost’s parlance which is male-oriented in perspective. Within the domain of revisioning literature, Gertrude and the characters who have assumed a role resembling that of Gertrude have been subject to a variety of transformations. The present article intends to explore these transformations in two twenty-first century novels: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski (2009) and The Dead Fathers Club by Matt Haig (2006). Gertrude’s new characterization is analyzed with regard to three features: ecstasy, motherhood, and agency. Whereas Gertrude’s agency in Hamlet is conjectural and though her soundness of mind and her personality as a responsible mother are questioned in the play, the two female characters in these two novels reveal new dimensions which starkly distinguish them from Gertrude’s Shaksepearean characterization. Further, it is argued that these new revisionings of Hamlet should not be construed as mere responses to the original text, but also to the idea that Shakespeare has provided the ultimate representations of humanity. As such, the new characterization of Gertrude is subversive of both the patriarchal voice within the Shakespearean text and some portion of the contemporary social text which believes in the superiority of Shakespeare’s thought.

Shakespeare's Play with Perspective: Sonnet 24, Hamlet, Lear

Abstract: Indebted to Shakespeare’s understanding of perspective in the visual arts as much as to the tradition of ut pictura poesis , Sonnet 24 uses poetry’s capacity for ambiguity and references drama’s ability to create slippage between character and actor to demonstrate that manipulated surfaces—to wit, the perspectival paintings in vogue since the early fifteenth century—cannot delve into the interior but only discover, or create, more surfaces By understanding and to some degree exploiting the techniques of perspectival artists, Shakespeare is gradually able to create a play space at once deeply physical and insistently metaphysical The chamber scene in Hamlet , with its mirror and thrust-through arras, and the final scene in King Lear , with its stage-versioned vanishing point at the silent mouth of the dead Cordelia, suggest that Shakespeare uses his knowledge of perspective and its limitations in part to explore the dramatic possibilities for character interiority

Creating Discursive Space for Religion and Spirituality in Universities: A Review Essay.

Abstract: Katherine Grace Hendrix and Janice D. Hamlet. (2009). As the spirit moves us: Embracing spirituality in the postsecondary experience. New Directions in Teaching and Learning, Vol. 120. San Francisc...

Parody, Play, and Purposeful Deconstruction: A Discussion of Umberto Eco's Hermeneutic Theory in Relation to His Parodic Practice

Abstract: All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex. Clergymen’s discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato’s world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys. —James Joyce