Hamlet (place)

About: Hamlet (place) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2771 publications have been published within this topic receiving 16301 citations.

Hamlet's Alchemy: Transubstantiation, Modernity, Belief

Abstract: This essay addresses the history of disputes over the physics of transubstantiation in order to dispute the historicity of skepticism that is typically applied to the treatment of the Eucharist in Hamlet . It then turns to the way that Hamlet’s pondering of the nature of physical change also touches on alchemy, whose own theories of material change are inextricable from medieval and early modern theories of Eucharistic transformation. Alchemical imagery flashes only occasionally in Hamlet , but alchemy’s associations with transubstantiation should lead us to perceive quite a different model of belief in the play than one that imagines a medieval community of believers disaggregating into an early modern individuated skepticism. Because both transubstantiation and alchemy had always been associated with bad—that is, counter-Aristotelian—physics, acceding to them had always implied a simultaneous state of belief and unbelief. When Hamlet brackets the fate of human flesh with alchemy and transubstantiation, it exposes Hamlet’s hopeless nostalgia for a medieval, preskeptical, Eucharistic-style unity of body and spirit as false nostalgia.

Spectres of Shakespeare: Ong Keng Sen’s Search: Hamlet and the intercultural myth

Abstract: This is the final draft, after peer-review, of a manuscript published in Cahiers Elisabethains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies. The published version is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0184767816642986

The Question of Original Sin in Hamlet

Abstract: The idea that original sin is not only present in Hamlet but also heavy with moral and aesthetic meaning is relatively recent but also implicit at earlier stages of the critical tradition In 1980, Alan Sinfield crucially drew attention to Hamlet’s “special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (F 52167–68) as the play’s Calvinist turning point, one which “we are slow to recognise because we have been taught a more amiable conception of the Christian God”1 Some few years later, Philip Edwards asserted the play’s “religious element” after the moral disenchantment of the “anti-Hamlet” school of the midcentury2 Although the anti-Hamlet critics had not grasped the pertinence of original sin to their own argument, in retrospect, their leveling of the moral distinctions between Hamlet and his adversaries is clearly in step with more recent original-sin readings, not to mention a longstanding “counter-enlightenment” project to rehabilitate original sin as a philosophical category3 What Edwards and Sinfield reluctantly acknowledged is the virtually scandalous thought welcomed by Kierkegaard: that the conclusion of Hamlet is deliberately framed in religious categories and is incomprehensible without them Kierkegaard imagines Hamlet shrinking back from his revenge in “religious doubt” or a religious horror at the depravity of human nature4 By contrast, Sinfield’s Hamlet, like those Dutch and Huguenot Protestants who evolved a theory of resistance or “controlled revolt” from Calvin, “believes that providence wants Claudius removed and that he should do it”5 Edwards, remarking the disinclination of the anti-Hamlet critics to endorse Hamlet’s sense of holy mission, concludes, “It is not faith we need to understand Hamlet but doubt about our own skepticism”6 We might say that independently of its becoming an object of critical discussion, the meaning of original sin in Hamlet has been in question The theme of original sin was explicitly recognized in Donald V Stump’s demonstration of how motifs of the Fall and Cain’s murder of Abel in chapters 3 and 4 of Genesis join in a coherent thematic symbolism7 The result is a leveling reading: Hamlet’s disastrous impatience with Providence shows that he “is doomed to become like Cain”8 Catherine Belsey teases out further links between the Fall story and that of Cain in the context of Elizabethan family values9 Heather Hirschfeld reads the architecture of the Fall in terms of the logic of trauma: “It is this type of deferred or belated recognition that underwrites the sustained allusions throughout Hamlet to the early chapters of Genesis”10 The play presents us with “a narrative of repeated and deferred recognitions,” the effect of which is to capture Hamlet’s project within a compulsive rehearsal of sin’s traumatic origin This logic extends to the supposed metanoia of Act 5, which is no “providential sea change”11 Hirschfeld’s is the most comprehensive original-sin reading of Hamlet that we have and, to my mind, the most thoughtful Insofar as it sees Hamlet’s awareness of original sin condemning him to repetition, it too is a leveling reading Two further leveling studies are worthy of mention John Alvis comes at the play from the republican angle of Machiavelli’s commentary on Livy, wanting to know why Hamlet can’t dispose of the tyrant cleanly To Alvis’s chagrin, the answer is that Hamlet is disabled by his original-sin fixation12 Finally, Vladimir Brljak reads Hamlet’s excuse to Laertes in Act 5 for killing Polonius (“That I have shot mine arrow o’er the house / And hurt my brother” [Q2 52190–91]) as a reference to a late medieval legend derived from an obscure utterance in Genesis 4 by Lamech (an impious descendant of Cain whose inadvertent killing of Cain brings God’s curse upon him)13 Again, the consequence for Hamlet—whose traditional name “Amleth” is an anagram of “Lameth,” a common form of “Lamech”—is a leveling of moral distinction Of all these original-sin-focused studies, only Belsey’s is not a leveling reading To my mind, the presence of original sin in the play provokes more fundamental questions

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.