Reflections on Early Modern Understanding of Affects in Shakespeare's Hamlet: Humors, Bodies and Passions in the Player's Hecuba Speech Shakespeare'in Hamlet Oyununda Erken Modern Dönemin Duygu Anlayışı (original) (raw)
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Cankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences
Considered to be affective mediums exercising powers changing the humoral balances of bodies, theatre plays have been severely attacked on the grounds that they provoke strong emotions by early modern critics such as Stephen Gosson and Philip Stubbes in the Shakespearean period. According to Stephen Gosson, for instance, due to their emotional and physiological impact theatre performances weakened and undermined audiences’ capacities to reason and judge; and thus, needed to be prohibited altogether. This study provides a detailed analysis of the Hecuba speech (II, ii) in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Through the Player’s and Hamlet’s reactions to the Hecuba-speech, it will discuss the characters’ attitudes towards theatre and comment on early modern theatre debates. The study will further discuss William Shakespeare’s stand on the affective potential of theatre in times when theatre plays have been considered contagious and altering the balance between minds, passions and bodies.
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Theatre, at a dialogical level, presents encounters and clashes of different perspectives, world-views, styles, languages, ideologies. In Shakespearean theatre the word, from a rhetorical point of view, becomes someone else word to be disputed. The rhetorical aim of this dispute is to attain pathos through ethos. The actor, like a skillful orator, arouses passions in the mind and in the soul of his audience. In Shakespeare's theatre, passions are a real poetic practice, in particular in the great tragedies and in the romances. The paper will investigate different, and opposite, ways of the theatricalizing passions in Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale.
Shakespearean and Brechtian Drama and Theatre: An Audience Response Perspective
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Shakespearean Dramatic theatre and Brechtian Epic theatre represent two divergent paradigms in the field of genre-drama. The plays falling under these two varying paradigms invite their readers or audience to learn to approach them by adopting a different theoretical perspective or critical stance. As per Martin Esslin “human capacities can change through time: human beings may learn to adjust themselves to new ways of perception ..., and gain practice in accepting new ways of seeing both reality and art” (15). In the proposed study, the two plays chosen for comparative analyses are Hamlet by Shakespeare and Mother Courage and Her Children by Brecht: the former one centring on empathy, and the other one on alienation. Of the two paradigms discussed in the present study, in one type, admittedly, an emotional catharsis occurs and the second theoretically disclaims emotional catharsis.
Shakespeare’s mundane theatre: a provocative defence of the actor and the spectator
Etudes Episteme, n°33, Profane Shakespeare. Perfection, Pollution, and the Truth of Performance, dir. Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, Karen Britland et Line Cottegnies, 2018, http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/1977, 2018
Compared to Ben Jonson, Shakespeare seems far more discreet, or even removed from the controversy about the theatre. But appearances can be deceiving: although less visible and more oblique, his responses to the attacks against the stage are nonetheless present in his plays. Against the enemies of the stage who identify theatre as a source of profanation and pollution of bodies and souls, most of the defenders emphasize the virtuous exemplarity of performance. Shakespeare responds in a provocative manner and elaborates another conception of theatre, involving the actor as well as the spectator. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It and Hamlet reproduce the theatrophobic accusations against actors and the contamination of the spectator by the passions performed on stage. Yet even as he accumulates elements of accusatory discourse, the playwright displaces the terms in order to think through the emotional (and thus necessarily impure) experience of theatre and give it a social and moral function: the actor’s art turns into a form of magic devoid of supernatural qualities and the spectator’s reception is redefined as intelligence through emotions.
A Close Focus into the Inner World and Mind of William Shakespeare's Hamlet
A Close Focus into the Inner World and Mind of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, 2019
William Shakespeare's longest play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, has been a point of focus of critics for centuries. What makes Hamlet so popular and perennial is its intricate structure and oblivion message in terms of what the real doctrine behind the work is. Hamlet's inner world has still remained unsolved though a number of interpretation studies have been conducted. The murder of the former king triggers Hamlet to change his character. It is seen that this change is actually what makes the work a deep pit. His plans and actions are formed by the sentiments that he gets as a result of discovering his father's murder and his mother's affair with his uncle, the murderer at the same time. The more he discovers, the deeper he gets into both emotionally and mentally. In order to shed more light on Hamlet and the work, his emotional progression and state of mind were analyzed and interpreted in depth in this study.