Hamlet (place)

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

From the Horse’s Mouth: Branagh on the Bard

Abstract: In the space of an extraordinarily productive career, Kenneth Branagh has rapidly established himself as one of the twentieth century’s foremost Shakespearean interpreters. His major directed cinematic productions span the whole range of the dramatist’s oeuvre, from comedy to history and tragedy. Henry V (1989) offered itself as a seminal demythologization of a work traditionally read as a celebration of the English heroic endeavour; Much Ado About Nothing (1993) breathed new comic life into a ‘problematic’ representation of male-female rivalries; Hamlet (1997) served up the ‘whole text’ in a sumptuous widescreen format; and Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) merged music from the 1930s and spectacular set-pieces in a bold revision of the play. As well as directing Shakespeare, Branagh has also been busy in being directed, chiefly in Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995), in which he played Iago. These film versions of single plays can be supplemented by a body of related work which bears a Shakespearean theme. In the Bleak Midwinter (1995), the tale of a beleaguered repertory company struggling to mount a production of Hamlet, announced Branagh’s continuing interest in the play from a simultaneously farcical and melancholic perpective.

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. …

Bilingual Hamlet: Der Bestrafte Brudermord in the 21 st Century

Abstract: I was fascinated by the production—I was thrilled when there was the occasional passage in German that I could understand—and I was intrigued by how, on the one hand, it had such a connection with Hamlet, and, on the other, it was so different. Giles Block (Text Associate at Shakespeare’s Globe, London) On the 18th and 19th of January 2010, a group of professional and amateur actors performed Der Bestrafte Brudermord (Fratricide Punished, or Prince Hamlet of Denmark) at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, VA. The text of the play, transcribed from an eighteenth-century manuscript, had been performed in Germany by a German acting group, though it almost certainly derived from a play performed by the English actors who were on the Continent in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Today, the manuscript, along with its surrounding factual history, has been lost. Nonetheless, the coincidence of its story with that of Hamlet, along with our knowledge of the significant influence English touring companies had on German theater, points across the channel to England and Shakespeare. These English actors, called the English Comedians, toured Europe for almost a century—surviving records go from 1585 until 1659—and left many traces behind. Other than records

Hugh O'neill As ‘Hamlet-plus’

Abstract: Critical approaches to Friel's work have often pointed out his indebtedness to current trends in European and American literary theory as demonstrated in plays such as Philadelphia, Here I Come!, T...