Elizabeth’s reign. In the second I will try to show how closely engaged Shakespeare was with questions generated by his understanding of Scottish history, concentrating especially on Hamlet , a play that has already been persuasively read as a work informed by an understanding of Scottish affairs and politics. 1 Scotland was also a divided and fractious land. It appeared to some
Hamlet is probably the most famous play in literature, thoroughly international in its appeal, admired and imitated in Asian cultures as well as in the west. Its fame in its own time may be considered a matter of record, though the record has certainly been overstated; and that is a good place to begin. For a reading public, several Shakespeare plays were
Hamlet is, of course, ‘the melancholy Dane’, and his play is, of course, one of the world's great tragedies. But there is a way in which emphasis on the first of these (supposed) facts can be seen to diminish some of the force of the second. Hamlet is certainly not the most painful of the ‘great’ or ‘mature’ Shakespearean tragedies— Othello and King Lear compete for that honor—but Hamlet can and, I think, should be seen as the saddest of them. Part of this sadness springs from the fact that, unlike Lear, Othello, or Macbeth, Hamlet did
the future, we hear everywhere today, it must not re-incarnate itself; it must not be allowed to come back since it is past. 1 A quite different spectre haunts Derrida’s own text, that of Hamlet . Although ostensibly a political response to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a critique of capitalism, Spectres of Marx seems
Chapter 9 . Hamlet and succession Richard Dutton There are those who think that the late long First Folio Hamlet is a messy author’s expansion of the short, stern early quarto, but they are a minority. — Adam Gopnik Mapping [genetic differences between species of humans] is, in principle, pretty straightforward – no harder, say, than comparing rival editions of Hamlet. — Elizabeth Kolbert 1 T he question of who was to succeed Elizabeth I – and how – hung over the drama of her reign from its first major work, Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, to the eve of her
, 1607 In Hamlet , in addition to something rotten, the court of Denmark houses a strange menagerie of beasts: images of frog, cat, bat, camel, weasel, fox, ape, mouse, rat, and ostrich, among others, appear in the play, creating meaning through reference to extratextual traditions of animal symbolism, but also signaling an affiliation with the
THE EMOTIONS ARE NOT simply a matter for literature: critics have them too. Or, more interestingly, perhaps, they play an important role in the critical process which goes far beyond any naively expressive response to the emotional content of literary works. The reading of Hamlet presented here raises this as a problem in the theory and
Part I – The philosophical Hamlet With respect to Montaigne, the argument can at least start on familiar ground. A number ofverbal correspondences – some widely classed as decisive, others as suggestive – establish that Shakespeare drew on the Essais, at least in the translation of Florio (in manuscript until 1603), and perhaps also in the
position the audience’s reading of each play. In both Hamlet and Coriolanus , Shakespeare brings this interest in the mother’s significance for her children to bear upon two very different extant tragic narratives where there is already a focus upon the mother’s influence upon her son. These narratives are developed by Shakespeare in part to tell of the subjective experience of a mother by her son, but both also tend to interrogate that