Hamlet (place)

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

Of Bread and Wine, and Ghosts: Eucharistic Controversy and Hamlet's Epistemological Quest

Abstract: The critical epistemological conundrum, faced alike by characters within and audiences of Hamlet, concerns the ambiguous ontology of the ghost. What is the nature of this supernatural being that so resembles the father and whose enigmatic advent will overturn the world of the son? Irreconcilable disputes over the essential nature of the sacrament of the Eucharist created a similar pressing epistemological conundrum in Shakespeare's world that contributed to its overturning. With allusions to the Eucharist by both the revenant and Hamlet, the playwright imports into the world of Elsinore the contemporary hermeneutic and epistemological anxiety, as well as the tension, associated with the theological controversy, especially the interpretation of Christ's words of institution ‘Hoc est corpus meum’. The oblique analogies drawn between the ghost and aspects of the sacrament imply that the former is an intentionally opaque and ambiguous site of knowledge, a parody of Christ. Furthermore, the Eucharistic...

Hamlet and Soviet Humanism

Abstract: The “thaw” slips farther back into History. Displaced from our attention by the renewed obscurantism, those heady days are seldom studied any more. This is unfortunate. For, it seems to me, it is particularly now, as a counter to the broadening repression, that we should gather and preserve the achievements of that hopeful decade. It is in this vein that I want to go back to the period and recall a dramatic and brilliant expression of the liberal, “thaw” spirit, as well as a splendid contribution to the rich gallery of Russian Aesopian polemics: Soviet Shakespeare criticism and, especially, the revival of sound and insightful commentaries on Hamlet by Soviet critics and playwrights.

Responsibility and Crime in Literature

Abstract: Accountability for one's actions has been a major theme that literary artists have grappled with over the centuries. Among the works in which it plays a significant role, and which are here analyzed, are the Oedipus trilogy, Hamlet, The Brothers Karamazov, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Trial, The Stranger, and three twentieth-century American novels: An American Tragedy, Light in August, and Native Son. Insights into the dark recesses of the human mind, which can complement the insights of legal philosophers and social scientists, are revealed in these and other works. They point to an argument that prophesy is not immutable destiny and that social causation is not social determinism. The human being achieves freedom by acceptance of responsibility, each man for his own acts, each woman for hers.

"I Lack Advancement": Public Rhetoric, Private Prudence, and the Political Agent in Hamlet, 1561-1609

Abstract: This article situates Shakespeare's Hamlet in the context of the changing political uses and readings of the history of Hamlet through the late 16th and early 17th centuries. It argues that by revising the story, Shakespeare's play introduces to the English stage a new perspective on the realm of politics. Instead of focusing on issues of legitimacy and on agents making public arguments about those issues, Shakespeare's play withdraws from the public, polemical mode of discussion implied by these topics (a mode of discussion Francois Belleforest's histoire tragique of Amleth was intensely engaged in), and restricts its attention to the political agents' private interests and loyalties. The elimination of open political opposition to royal power, and the parallel emergence of the character of the low-born, upwardly mobile friend provide the templates for the play's dramatization of the contemporary shift of emphasis in political discussion from counsel to statecraft. In this reading, the various "tragical histories" of Hamlet allow us to recognize a much-discussed change in the modality of political discussion as a function of the changed in the understanding of the political agent.