Hamlet (place)

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

Fielding, Dickens, Gosse, Iris Murdoch and Oedipal Hamlet

Abstract: Fielding's "Tom Jones" - encountering the king Dickens - "Great Expectations" and the ghost of the father Edmund Gosse's "Father and Son" - remembering the mother Iris Murdoch's "The Black Prince" - overthrowing the tyrant and inscribing the feminine.

Myth or Knowledge? Reading Carl Schmitt's Hamlet or Hecuba

Abstract: Carl Schmitt's Hamlet or Hecuba (1956) is a peculiar text. For one, it stands out as the only detailed interpretation of a literary work that Schmitt ever produced. This is not to deny Schmitt's overall erudition and familiarity with Western literature nor his particular interest in the intricate relationship between aesthetics and politics, all of which can be traced throughout his writings from the 1910s to the 1950s. But the fact remains that apart from Hamlet or Hecuba, Schmitt did not employ close readings of literary texts as a means to elaborate on his politico-philosophical ideas. Hamlet or Hecuba is…

'Nor th'exterior nor the inward man': The Problematics of Personal Identity in Hamlet

Abstract: Hamlet begins with an urgent questioning of identity: `Who's there?' A similar query is soon directed at the Ghost: `What art thou that usurp'st this time of night' (1.1.49). The interrogation is complicated by the very nature of the problem. For identity in this context is not simple but polar. That is, it comprises a totality whose two aspects are public and private or what Claudius terms `th'exterior' and `the inward man' (2.2.4). Therefore, if the question of identity is to be answered at the most fundamental level, the proper relation of the inward and outward dimensions of identity must first be determined. As we shall find, Hamlet profoundly critiques prevailing assumptions regarding this relation, and dramatizes an alternate conceptualization of human identity: `what is a man' (4.4.33).

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.