Topic
Hamlet (place)
About: Hamlet (place) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2771 publications have been published within this topic receiving 16301 citations.
Papers published on a yearly basis
Papers
More filters
TL;DR: Aboudoma's Dance of the Scorpions as discussed by the authors is an Arabic-language offshoot of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and it was performed in Egypt in 1989 and 1991, with only five scenes, no Gertrude or Ophelia, no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, no Players, no metaphysics and no poetry.
Abstract: A scorpion, its poisonous tail torn out, runs desperate circles around a piece of burning coal. A small boy sits in front of a screen, watching a film of a play translated from one language he does not understand into another. Twenty-five years later, these two events an upperEgyptian game, a Russian film of an English play coalesce into a one-act play called Dance of the Scorpions, an Arabic-language offshoot of Shakespeare's Hamlet. This, at any rate, is the simple etiology offered by the offshoot play's creator, Egyptian playwright/ director Mahmoud Aboudoma.1 Let me summarise Aboudoma's offshoot play and two versions of his first Shakespeare encounter before pointing to the larger questions these stories help to frame. This article will then make a start at addressing those questions.2 Aboudoma's play, Dance of the Scorpions , is part of an Arab Hamlet tradition that has produced countless citations, allusions, adaptations and other intertextual appropriations in the past half-century. Written in the 1980s, it was performed in Egypt in 1989 and 1991.3 Its five characters carry Shakespearean names: Hamlet, Horatio, Claudius, Polonius and the Ghost. However, many Shakespearean ingredients are altered or absent. There are only five scenes, no Gertrude or Ophelia, no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, no Players, no metaphysics and no poetry.4 Aboudoma's unimpressive protagonist is not eloquent and lacks any deep ('Hamletian') sense of consciousness. Instead, the play offers a sharp meditation on misgovernment: Horatio becomes a folksy narrator and double agent; a council of nobles is staged as a puppet show with life-sized dolls; and an ambiguous ending shows a group of domestic revolutionaries mounting a successful coup (Polonius escapes).5 Arguably the central character is Claudius, the 'scorpion' of the title: an unapologetic tyrant who conspires with foreign enemy Fortinbras, rigging a fake war to sideline his political opponents and defraud his people. Were
4 citations
01 Jan 2011
TL;DR: In a seminal discussion of the popular legacy of Hamlet, Linda Charnes argues that Shakespeare's play o&ers "the first fully noir text in Western literature, and Prince Hamlet [...] the rst noir revenger" as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In a seminal discussion of the popular legacy of Hamlet, Linda Charnes argues that Shakespeare’s play o&ers “the rst fully noir text in Western literature, and Prince Hamlet [...] the rst noir revenger”, the work and character which denitively inaugurate the ontological ethos of noir literature and lm and from within whose psychoanalytic coordinates noir works take their cultural power. “Situating a plot-driven classical revenge tragedy within the recursive circularity and ethical indeterminacy that characterize noir”, she argues, “Shakespeare’s Hamlet is modernity’s inaugural paranoid text” . ough Charnes’s discussion focuses on Ze(relli’s 1990 lm Hamlet and its degraded counterpart LA Story (dir. Mick Jackson, 1991), it is Laurence Olivier’s 1948 lm adaptation which most explicitly acknowledges the relationship between Hamlet and !lm noir by recasting Shakespeare’s play within the visual vocabulary and pathological psychology of detective lms of the 40s . e deep shadows, diagonal compositions and layered deep-focus shots, the treatment of mise-en-scene at Elsinore as a symbolic extension of Hamlet’s psychological state, the prevailing atmosphere of oppressiveness, surveillance and vexed sexuality,
4 citations
TL;DR: Stoppard's political phase proved to be shortlived, but in Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth he created an effective and suggestive piece of theater.
Abstract: \"I haven't even got the courage of my lack of convictions,\" quipped Tom Stoppard in 1974, but a few years later his writing became explicitly political. Professional Foul (1977), Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), Night and Day (1978), and Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth (1979) all exhibit a concern for what Stoppard rather coyly called \"topics of the day.” In this period he marched with Amnesty International, protesting the treatment of Soviet dissidents, wrote to The Times concerning the Czech government's harrassment of Vaclav Havel, and in 1977 visited his native Czechoslovakia where he met the playwright Pavel Kohout and the actor Pavel Landowsky, whose theatrical output had been confined to writing and performing abbreviated versions of Shakespeare in private living-rooms. Not surprisingly, considering his overall career interests, Stoppard's political phase proved to be shortlived, but in Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth he created an effective and suggestive piece of theater.
4 citations