Hamlet (place)

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

Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self

Abstract: Bridget Escolme, Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self (London: Routledge, 2005) 'To be, or not to be: that is the question' (Hamlet, 3.1.56.) Who is being asked this question by Hamlet? Is Hamlet simply asking it of himself, thinking aloud, as it were, as he considers the possibility of suicide? Or is he talking to the audience? Or is he talking both to himself and to the audience at the same time? The answer makes a big difference to our reading of both Hamlet the character/performer and of the play as a whole, whether we are director and actor approaching this moment in rehearsal, an audience in the theatre, or readers of one of the written versions of the play. The question of who is being addressed when Shakespeare's characters soliloquise lies at the heart of Bridget Escolme's book, which describes and discusses many actual performances of the three plays on which she primarily focuses: Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet and Richard H. Escolme argues that the mode of direct address is central to both the dramatic structure and the meaning of these plays. This is a good book, which will be of interest both to performers and students of Shakespeare's plays - to the former because Escolme has a sure sense of the place taken by these works in the history of live theatre, particularly in regard to the paradigm shift in the early modern period from 'playing' to 'acting'; and to the latter because Escolme understands what some literary critics have still not yet understood: that these plays were made in the theatre and that their scripts are unlike the texts of poems and novels, in that their words point beyond themselves to realisation in performance. If we try to imagine an actual performance of Hamlet - especially in the intimate, open-air spaces in which the play was first performed - we will suspect that Hamlet's famous question might well be addressed to the audience. Keeping such a possibility in mind as we read the printed text some four hundred years after the play was first created is, however, not easy, since the concept of a communal art, of drama created in open space, has, over these centuries, become quite foreign to most of us. As Tadashi Suzuki wrote in The Way of Acting in 1986, 'the theatre has become a kind of rite performed in a secret room. The sense of public space has been lost, rendering the act of watching a play quite close to the experience of watching a film or reading a novel.' Shakespeare's plays have indeed been read and discussed for so long that, when we read them, their action and dialogue seem to take place in the mind in the same place as the action and dialogue of realist novels. The resulting confusion has had an enormous impact on the literary-critical reception of Shakespeare's and indeed all 'plays' over the years. It becomes all too easy for literary critics to assume a moralising, judgmental detachment from the characters; and so Othello's downfall, for example, is patronisingly described in terms of the alleged problems of (the hubris of) his 'character', whether fifty years ago by F. R. Leavis or one of his followers (New Criticism), or much more recently by, say, Stephen Greenblatt or one of his followers (New Historicism). Some of the most powerful soliloquies in all of Shakespeare are given to Othello's rival Iago. Whether we read these soliloquies as private meditation overheard by an audience or as plotting between Iago and a highly complicit audience makes a big difference to our reception of Othello. Escolme does not fall into this 'graphocentric' trap but, rather, does much to expose the commentators who fear audience address and devalue it as 'showy'. …

When the Cock Crew: The Imminence of Hamlet

Abstract: From its opening on starlit battlements, “Who's there?”, Hamlet announces itself as an Advent play for a New Year. So it is no surprise that Hamlet studies took a messianic turn at the millennium, when the text's unhinged gates welcomed Derrida to futurity, while apocalyptic critics like Girard read it as a vigil for the end of the world. As Europe's ghost story, however, Hamlet looks back to what belief in “the end of history” would repress: the religious violence encoded in its terrorist call to revenge. Francis Barker's insight that “the only thing Hamlet doesn't escape is its historicity”, is thus enhanced by the shifting outlook as Quartos and Folio adapt to prospects for a religion to come. Shakespeare may have hoped that if “the world's grown honest” then “is Doomsday near”, but in Hamlet was terrified of waking too soon—like the girl from New Place buried alive in Stratford church. So the cock crows three times in this tragedy to warn against betraying the future with false starts. Though “Present...