Hamlet (place)

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

Shakespeare at Work: The Four Closet Scenes

Abstract: Hamlet is the only Shakespeare play to have come down to us in three distinctly different versions. The three Hamlets (1603, 1604, 1623) embody different versions of the “closet scene,” in which Hamlet kills Polonius and takes Gertrude to task for having married Claudius. Shakespeare wrote a fourth closet scene in the climactic Othello “death scene,” which also depicts a man enraged at a woman to whom he is deeply attached and who he feels has betrayed him. This paper argues that as Shakespeare moved from version to version of the closet scene, he penetrated a defensive, wish-fulfilling fantasy as well as other defenses. He was then able to access and dramatically symbolize painful and powerful inner states as well as to create a lifelike, three-dimensional character in Hamlet. The process has implications about how Shakespeare worked.

Maclise and Macready: Collaborating Illustrators of Hamlet

Abstract: This essay focuses on the relationship between theatrical performance and the visual arts through a specific exploration of the relationship between the nineteenth-century actor William Charles Macready and the painter Daniel Maclise. The study's exploration of the association between Macready and Maclise, largely from the perspective of Maclise's 1842 painting The Play Scene in \"Hamlet\", in addition to its exploration of the history of artistic representation of The Mousetrap, serves to illustrate tension between animation and repose that arises from the comparison of the scene in performance to the scene on canvas, as well as within each. Through a detailed analysis of the multitudinous visual signs and emblems of Maclise's painting and an engagement with the literature surrounding Macready's performance as Hamlet, the article addresses both the similarities and disparities between performance and painting, placing emphasis on the theatrical qualities of Maclise's artwork, and the 'painterly' qualities of Macready's work in the theatre. In doing so, it finds in the relationship between the two artists, as well as their work's co-dependency, the energy lent to performance by the confines of a painterly mode, highlighting how both Maclise and Macready transformed Shakespeare's words on the page into speaking pictures on their respective stages.

Godard and Lear: Trashing the Can(n)on

Abstract: In the late 1990s, the endlessly reinvented Shakespeare has apparently become a popular and successful screenwriter. The recent release of Richard III, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Twelfth Night and Hamlet have brought an enthusiastic movie-going public to see, among other things, the Capulets and the Montagues on the beach and Hamlet striding through a cast of thousands at Elsinore. But this is not to suggest that this particular genre success is either new or inappropriate; the collection of artifacts known as Shakespeare (including but not limited to the plays themselves) has long signified as high art dedicated to the education of not just a theatre-going elite nor the mass audiences of popular media, but everyone. On a global scale, Shakespeare means culture or, as Michael Bristol would more wittily have it, Shakespeare is “big time.” This history of the cultural capital that is Shakespeare continues to have a fascination for, and a usefulness to the producers and distributors of films. Thus, to turn Shakespeare from playwright to screenwriter is, culturally speaking, both a pragmatic and predictable strategy. And it is a strategy that has more or less existed as long as film itself.