Hamlet (place)

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

How Is Horatio Just?: How Just Is Horatio?

Abstract: When examined in context, two lines in Hamlet —"Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man / As e'er my conversation coped withal" (TLN 1904-5)—suggest that for Hamlet, being just and being conscientious derive from being able to take a disinterested, nonstakeholder's attitude toward what one is thinking about. Hamlet admires this attitude in Horatio without claiming to have it with any consistency himself. He does not constitute this attitude as an absolute possibility, but as a relative virtue. This mode of moral thinking looks forward toward the post-Kantian Romantics whose way of discussing the play has proved so contagious ever since. It also anticipates the form in which moral disinterestedness survives modern skepticism about the possibility of pure or absolute virtues.

Indigested in the Scenes: Hamlet’s Dramatic Theory and Ours

Abstract: Discussions of the relation between drama and performance have been dominated by two symmetrical, emancipatory impulses. Performance scholars have, for the past half-century, sought to liberate performance from the authority of the drama. Literary scholars have, for centuries, if not millennia, sought to distinguish a “literary” dimension of the dramatic text free of the flux of performance. his essay diagnoses in Shakespeare's Hamlet an alternative story about the relation between drama and performance. Paying refreshed attention to the earlier and less famous of Hamlet's statements of dramatic theory—his blurb for the “excellent play” featuring Aeneas's speech to Dido—I find Hamlet bringing drama, especially in its “literary” dimension, crashing back into performance. his collision does not reinstitute the authority of the text; rather, it radically democratizes the scene of dramatic performance by “indigesting” the behaviors of the participants therein.