What, has this thing appeared again tonight - in TRI (original) (raw)
ARTICLE Hamlet and the Ghost: A Joint Sense of Time
Johns Hopkins Project Muse PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE , 2013
Key points: The paper addresses the question: why and how does Hamlet lose track of time in the Prayer-Closet scene sequence? While Deleuze aptly notes the poetic formula “the time is out of joint” is indicative of time no longer being subordinate to cyclical rhythms of nature, or as Polonius asserts: “Time is time”(II. ii. 88), but rather movement being subordinated to time, it is argued that the HAMLET text goes further in its pre-figuration of Kant’s concept that time is a mysteriously autonomous form. More specifically, it is explicated via a close textual reading that in Kantian terminology Hamlet's temporary identification with the Ghost’s categorical sense of what is possible and impossible in accordance with the passage of outer time is what causes Hamlet’s temporal confusion.
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE GHOST APPEARANCE IN HAMLET
The careful observer can easily realize that certain cultural practices from afar look strangely like those performed in his/her own culture. As an African, I definitely perceive this reality through Shakespeare's works. The appearance of a ghost is highly significant since it may reveal hidden facts. The one presented here-King Hamlet-has a matter to settle with his murderer and brother Claudius. And to achieve this, he confides in his son Hamlet. Its recommendation is clear: give me justice. Its repeated appearance prompts this son, so dull and brooding, to pass to the act. What if the latter had other reasons to do so! That is what this article will consider, focusing on Hamlet, prince of Denmark. Our goal is to reveal these hidden reasons. Resume L'observateur attentif peut aisément se rendre compte que certaines pratiques relevant de la culture d'ailleurs ressemblent étrangement à ce que présente sa propre culture. L'Africain que je suis le remarque fort bien avec les oeuvres de Shakespeare. L'avènement d'un fantôme par exemple est chose curieuse et redoutée car ce 'revenu' a certainement des choses cachées à révéler. Celui que nous présente le dramaturge-King Hamlet-avait un contentieux à régler avec son meurtrier et frère Claudius. Et pour y parvenir, il se confie à son fils héritier Hamlet. Sa recommandation est claire : rends-moi justice. Son apparition répétée finit par décider ce fils-trop pensif et timoré-à passer à l'acte. Et si ce dernier avait aussi d'autres raisons de le faire ! C'est ce que cet article étudiera en s'appuyant sur l'oeuvre Hamlet, prince de Danemark. Notre objectif est de révéler ces motifs dissimulés.
Fooles of Nature: The Epistemology of Hamlet
English Literary Renaissance, 2020
Bar. Whose there? Fran. Nay answere me. Stand and vnfolde your selfe. Bar. Long liue the King (4-7; 1.1.1-3) 1 W e begin in uncertainty. It is dark, midnight in fact. The circumstances-the speakers are soldiers, situated on a platform, distant enough from each other to be unidentifiable-invite hostility and distrust. Seeking information that will resolve the uncertainty, Francisco demands stability ("Stand") and transparency ("vnfolde your selfe"). The man arriving, in this case Barnardo, must be manageably contained for examination and probed for information that is represented as concealed beneath the surface. Without more light and more soldiers, Francisco cannot be sure that either of his demands will be met. Barnardo in fact ignores his demand for visually verifiable information, but resolves the uncertainty and tension in a different way-by affirming a shared allegiance. It does not matter in the immediate that the king to whom they swear allegiance is, as we discover, a villain. In the enterprise of the watch, the 1. This is the second quarto text of 1604. I have retained original spelling and punctuation to discourage domestication of this very familiar text, which would be counterproductive in an essay dedicated to enhancing our sense of the richness of the experience of Elizabethan readers and theatergoers with Hamlet. My source is The Three-Text Hamlet: Parallel Texts of the First and Second Quartos and First Folio, ed. Paul Bertram and Bernice W. Kliman (New York, 1991). Parenthetical Hamlet references include the Q2 through-line numbers, followed by the equivalent act, scene, and line numbers from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (1972) as provided by The Three-Text Hamlet; the few Q1 and F references are so designated. Quotations of Shakespearean works other than Hamlet are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed.
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2009
The present article tries to answer the question whether it is possible to think of William Shakespeare's Hamlet as a dream vision in which the Ghost plays the role analogous to the Dreamer's supernatural guide, which is the situation we meet with in medieval dream visions, such as Chaucer's The book of the Duchess, or The Pearl. It seems that such an interpretation is possible, even though it should be approached cautiously because medieval ghosts and dead souls, and other supernatural phenomena, not only in dream visions, usually function as a means to solve, or at least alleviate, a crisis, whereas in Hamlet the Ghost comes rather to exacerbate it, and make it more tragical. To prove this point, the author makes comparisons not only between Hamlet and dream visions, but also some medieval ghost stories, and the thirteenth century romance Havelok the Dane, which is based on a narrative pattern not very different from that of Hamlet. Another problem examined in this article is that of the extent to which we can talk of the motif of reduplication and monstrous double as a leitmotif in Hamlet, and also in some of its analogues. Some comments and ideas by Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom are made use of in this context. The topic of the present paper is a little paradoxical. Strictly speaking, Shakespeare's Hamlet is clearly not a dream vision, nor are there any dream visions inside it. And yet the motif of sleep and dream figures in it very prominently, the play is permeated with it, we might even say. It all starts with Bernardo's words, at the beginning of Act 1, scene 1: "get thee to bed, Francisco" (I.1.7), goes through Hamlet's dreamlike seeing his father in his "mind's eye" (I.2.185), and ends with the famous words of Horatio, from Act 5, scene 2, addressed to Hamlet just after the latter's death: "Good night, sweet prince; and flights of
New Old Readings in the Texts of Hamlet
1998
This paper seeks to draw attention to several original readings in the early texts of Hamlet – specifically those from which the play is commonly known– which traditional or standard critical editing has relegated to oblivion in the small print of textual apparatuses, that section of critical editions which the average reader seldom or never reads. The standard critical edition of Hamlet aims to reconstruct or approximate the text its author wrote. To that end, editors study the textual transmission of the play, by analysing and comparing its early texts, especially those that are not derivatives from any previous witness and therefore are accorded primary authority: namely, the First Quarto printed in 1603, the Second Quarto dated 1604/5 and the First Folio published in 1623 (no witness has survived that has a direct relationship with the author’s hand, such as holographs or authorially corrected copies). 1 Having a preconceived history of the ‘text’ of Hamlet, editors establish th...
Revised, expanded version of the draft first posted 15 April 2018. Published on-line first 27 June 2018. Rhodri Lewis argues here that Shakespeare’s best-known tragedy is a commentary on his intellectual context. More specifically, Hamlet’s failures as a historian (ch. 3), poet (ch. 4), and philosopher (ch. 5) reveal Shakespeare’s dissatisfaction with ‘Christian humanism’ (p. 307). “Hamlet turns to moral philosophy, love, sexual desire, filial bonds, friendship, introversion, poetry, realpolitik, and religion in the search for meaning or fixity. In each case, it discovers nothing of significance" (p. 39). As in Derrida’s ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’, anything that seems to be a centre or ground of existence turns out to be empty, absent, or illusory. All that remains is ‘opportunistic nominalism’ (p. 26). "Whatever an individual might strive to believe, he always and only exists as a participant in a form of hunting—one in which he, like everyone else, is both predator and prey" (p. 50)
‘The single and peculiar life’: Hamlet’s heart and the early modern subject
Shakespeare Survey, 2009
... you would pluck out the heart of my mystery. 1 Revisionist accounts of Early Modern subjectivity almost invariably begin with Hamlet"s accusation. Elizabeth Hanson"s fine book Discovering the Subject opens with the phrase as a paradigmatic statement, in which Hamlet assumes the position of the modern subject, endowed with an inner mystery, and resistant to its penetration and discovery. 2 In this model the subject contains something elusively called "mystery"; the space of mystery is the interior of the subject"s body, here symbolized by the heart; and other people are desperate to get access to that mystery, if necessary by tearing the heart out of the subject"s body. Since this was physically accomplished in contemporary rituals of execution for crimes involving treason, especially at this time religious treason, the phrase seems to gesture towards the torture chamber, the scaffold and the whole dangerous recusant world of Catholic England and "Secret Shakespeare". Removing the heart from the chest was never a practical way of acquiring information, but here the torturer and the executioner merge into one, and the symbolic and literal are hard to prise apart: "To know our enemies" minds, we rip their hearts". 3 Hamlet"s phrase has been extensively deployed in recent discussions of Renaissance subjectivity, but without reference to its immediate dramatic context. It appears almost accidentally in Hamlet"s speech to Guildenstern, after the play-within-the play, about the recorders. Hamlet is not, he protests, a musical instrument to be manipulated and played upon. But perversely he then proceeds to draw an elaborate parallel between man and recorder.
Hamlet, the Ghost and the Model Reader
2000
In a comprehensive study of Hamlet and its reception, this dissertation offers a concept and interpretation of Shakespeare's work as a complex literary work and play for the theatre. It is argued that the play, through a series of ambiguities, implies two main levels of meaning, which complement each other in a truly dramatic contrast, exploring the main theme of Hamlet and dramatic art in general: seeming and being, or illusion and reality. On the surface, which has been usually maintained since the Restoration, Hamlet seems to be a moral hero, who "sets it right" by punishing the evil villain, the usurper King Claudius, following the miraculous return of the murdered King Hamlet from the dead.
Acta Neophilologica
This article fuses a survey of the play’s most important standard interpretations with those aspects which may be considered particularly fascinating about this text: the conflict of England’s catholic past with the rise of protestant culture in the early modern period; the meta-dramatic dimension of the play; the theatricality of Renaissance court life; the play’s reflection of the emerging modern subject triggered off by the rise of reformation discourse. To elucidate some aspects which tend to be overlooked in the scholarly discussion of Hamlet, the article will bring two important topics into focus: the courtly discovery of perspective and the dying Hamlet’s request to tell his story to the afterworld at the end of the play.
Modern Philology, 2018
Rhodri Lewis's Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness is a work of tremendous erudition, channeling a formidable range of classical and humanist texts as well as contemporary criticism into chapters on Hamlet 's sustained engagement with early modern discourses of selfhood, hunting, cognitive theory, poetics, and moral and speculative philosophy. With highly original but also extensively documented discussions of nearly every line and textual crux, it has the impact of a variorum. Of course, the book is designed for a very different purpose: to prosecute a comprehensive argument about Shakespeare's critique in Hamlet of Renaissance humanism as "a set of doctrines that distorts reality and constrains all human beings to obscure their true natures" (10). This critique depends upon the portrayal of the play's protagonist as a "victim, a symptom, and an agent of th[e] decay" that Lewis associates both with Elsinore and with the failures and insufficiencies of humanist orthodoxy (12). Lewis thus puts Hamlet back "within" Hamlet-a clever riposte to Margreta de Grazia's influential "Hamlet" without Hamlet (2006) and its deflation of Hamlet's vaunted interiority-while still emphasizing on Hamlet over Hamlet. The Hamlet so situated thus becomes a curious, even unfamiliar, one: a character whose lack of vengefulness in the face of the murder of his father contributes to his "unrelenting superficiality, confusion, and pious self-deceit" (238). The book's first chapter offers a deft examination of Hamlet's competing investments in authenticity and self-dramatization. Both investments, Lewis explains, answer to the humanist principle of nosce teipsum, the demand for self-knowledge as the basis of action in the public sphere. But Modern Philology, volume 116, number 2.