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Humour can be theorised as integral to the genre even if there are some films that do not provoke laughter. Romantic comedy has been described as a narrative of the heterosexual couple with a happy ending in which humour does not necessarily play an important part. The comic, protective, erotically-charged space is the space of romantic comedy. This book proposes a revised theory of romantic comedy and then tests its validity through the analysis of texts, but these films must not be expected to fully embody the theory. It proposes a change of approach in two different but closely linked directions. On the one hand, a comic perspective is a fundamental ingredient of what we understand by romantic comedy; on the other, the genre does not have a specific ideology but, more broadly, it deals with the themes of love and romance, intimacy and friendship, sexual choice and orientation. The book discusses two films directed by two of the most prestigious figures in the history of Hollywood comedy: Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. Lubitsch's
I. Laughter, love and World War II: To Be or Not to Be There can be little doubt about the importance of history for a proper understanding of To Be or Not to Be . When the film started production on 6 November 1941, the United States was a neutral nation in the war that was raging in Europe and was rapidly extending to other parts of the world. Before production ended, on 23
can now find the real artists, dressed in American-style clothes. You may find a few of them high on cocaine, but that doesn’t matter; the principles of most Parnassois (so called to distinguish them from the Parnassians) are opposed to the consumption of artificial paradises in any shape or form.15 In Fabian’s case, his published prose of 1909, titled ‘To Be or Not To Be … American’, is a practical exercise in thinking out loud as he resists deliberate conclusion. It might surprise us that this particular text is the aspiring poet’s first published work
85 6 Desplazado: to be or not to be Being a desplazado is ‘a burden, a mark of the beast. It’s a sign one has. They [people] look at you as the worst possible [person],’ says Juan, as he draws on the biblical reference to explain what it feels like to be categorised. The policy category marked him out as different and he experiences the negative consequences of categorisation predominately in the manner others view him and consequently relate to him. Fabio, unlike Juan who is an IDP leader, uses the category and his IDP identity to a lesser extent, similarly
term: Shakespeare’s writing papers, his performance scripts and the printed witnesses of his work all existed as temporary, in-progress versions. When Hamlet utters the most famous line in English literature, ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’, we encounter a moment which raises problems for the actor, the reader, the editor, the critic and the audience member. An
striking portrait, which illustrates just how bioethics provides a decisive shift in the location and exercise of biopower. The Telegraph pictured Warnock in a classic philosophical profile, contemplating a human embryo as if it were Yorick’s skull in Hamlet (see Figure 1). Lest anyone miss the Shakespearian overtones, the portrait sat above a caption that read ‘To be or not to be?’ This quote is from one of Hamlet’s most memorable soliloquies and evokes the classic existential dilemma of whether or not it is better to choose life or death. But in picturing Warnock
double-binds that surrounds him. He wants one; he gets two: a Protestant education and a Catholic ghost; an aristocratic culture of honour and a Christian code of forgiveness; an instruction to revenge his father’s murder but to leave his mother’s fate to heaven; Cornelius and Voltimand; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; ‘to be or not to be’. Hamlet, rather than Claudius (or just like
history’: 4 Let us call it a hauntology . This logic of haunting would not be merely larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being (of the ‘to be’, assuming that it is a matter of Being in the ‘to be or not to be’, but nothing is less certain). It would
more mature consideration, Kessler stopped short of including Hauptmann’s most radical revisions; the fourth and fifth acts are relatively undisturbed, and the German Hamlet remains as spineless a procrastinator as he is in English. (Schlegel’s version itself, however, was not unproblematic: it moves the “To be or not to be” soliloquy to the fifth act.) For the English edition
character's most memorable lines (e.g. “To be or not to be …”) and, ultimately, in Hamlet 's denouement: Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage; For he was likely, had he been put on To have proved most royally ( Hamlet , V.ii.409) Of course, identifying this sort of recursive and self-reflexive objective correlative needn't be restricted to Hamlet . Many of Shakespeare's plays employ similar allusions of actors and acting. Indeed, self-reflexivity of this sort has become an