Barrie, Robert. “Telmahs:
Carnival Laughter in Hamlet.” New Essays on
Hamlet. Ed. Mark
Thornton Burnett and John Manning. Hamlet Collection 1. New
York: AMS, 1994. 83-100.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / CARNIVAL / DECONSTRUCTION / NEW
HISTORICISM / PERFORMANCE
This essay approaches Hamlet “as his own Fool,”
who “can be seen to subvert Hamlet so thoroughly as
to reduce to laughter the very idea of serious tragedy” (83).
A review of concurring critics (e.g., Levin, Graves, McGee, Wiles,
Bristol) provides some basis for this argument. Theater history suggests
changes in theatrical conventions to explain why Hamlet’s
laughter has been subverted: while Elizabethan audiences were encouraged
to “participate,” modern audiences fear making a faux
pas and suffer from the social constraints of an elitist forum (91).
Perhaps Elizabethan audiences would have perceived Hamlet’s
“insults to the groundlings” as “rough intimacies”
(92), laughing at the ritualistic sacrifice of the fool in carnivalesque
style and at Horatio’s suggestion of singing angels (94). Hamlet
“appears to erase itself not merely through metadrama or other
linguistics-based critical theory, but through the laughter of Death,
which is not satirical laughter but the inclusive, absolute, all-affirming,
feasting, social laughter of the folk (all the people), the
laughter of carnival” (97).
[ top ]
Brooks, Jean R. “Hamlet and
Ophelia as Lovers: Some Interpretations on Page and Stage.”
Aligorh Critical Miscellany 4.1 (1991): 1-25.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / HAMLET / OPHELIA / PERFORMANCE
This essay asserts that “Getting Ophelia right
involves, by implication, Hamlet’s love relationship with her,
and a re-examination of the question, in what sense they can be considered
as ‘lovers’” (1). While literary scholars frequently
get Ophelia wrong, actors and directors (e.g., Olivier, Jacobi) also
make mistakes, such as altering the “To be, or not to be”
soliloquy and negating textual evidence of Ophelia’s chastity.
Actors also tend to stereotype Ophelia, whether as the “unchaste
young woman” (e.g., West) (8) or as “more child than woman”
(e.g., Mirren, McEwan, Tutin) (10). In actuality, the text purports
“a well-disciplined Renaissance woman,” “a young
woman, not a child, with her ‘chaste treasure unopen’d’
but at the peak of sexual attractiveness, because the key to the nunnery
and play scenes lies in the difference between what the audience sees
on stage and what Hamlet sees in his mind’s eye” (12-13).
He projects “on to the innocent and—as the audience can
see—unpainted Ophelia the disgust he feels at his mother’s
sexual sins” (13) and the self-disgust he feels for inheriting
“original sin” from his parents (14). But his ordering
of her to a nunnery “suggests a kind of love that makes Hamlet
wish to preserve Ophelia’s goodness untouched” (15). Ultimately,
“it is Hamlet who rejects Ophelia, not Ophelia who rejects Hamlet”
(15-16). But her “constant love gives positive counterweight,
for the audience, to Hamlet’s too extreme obsession with the
processes of corruption” (17). The “good that Ophelia’s
constant love does for her lover, from beyond the grave, is to affirm
his commitment to the human condition he had wished to deny”
(21). Beside her grave, Hamlet belatedly testifies to his love for
Ophelia, acknowledging “the good in human nature that Ophelia
had lived for, and that Hamlet finally dies to affirm. Given the tragic
unfulfilment of the human condition, could lovers do more for each
other?” (23).
[ top ]

Brown, John Russell. Connotations of Hamlets
Final Silence. Connotations 2 (1992): 275-86.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / FINAL SCENE / HAMLET / PERFORMANCE
This article responds to the criticism leveled at John Russell Browns
Multiplicity of Meaning in the Last Moments of Hamlet,
particularly the charge of failure to show how the wide range
of meanings in the single last sentence was related to the whole of
the play in performance (275). This article insists that the Hamlet
actors presence on stage and enactment of events provides the
audience with a physical knowledge of Hamlet, void of the psychological
dimension that ambiguous language camouflages. Hamlets wordplay
is an essential quality of his nature, which remains intact
during the process of his dying (275). While the original articles
dismissal of the O, o, o, o addition (present in the Folio
after Hamlets last words) received negative responses from Dieter
Mehl and Maurice Charney, this article argues that doubts of authenticity,
authority, and dramatic effectiveness justify this decision. The physical
death on stage and the verbal descriptions of Hamlets body also
negate the need for a last-minute groan. Ultimately, the stage
reality co-exists with words yet seems beyond the reach
of words; hence, in Hamlet, Shakespeare created a character
who seems to carry within himself something unspoken and unexpressed
. . . right up until the moment Hamlet dies (285).
[ top ]

Brown, John Russell. Multiplicity
of Meaning in the Last Moments of Hamlet. Connotations
2 (1992): 16-33.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / FINAL SCENE / HAMLET / PERFORMANCE / RHETORICAL
Given that a tragedy excites an audiences interest in the heros
private consciousness, this article asks, Has Shakespeare provided
the means, in words or action, whereby this hero [Hamlet] comes, at
last, to be denoted truly? (18). Throughout Hamlet,
the protagonist speaks ambiguously. His linguistic trickery only heightens
the audiences anticipation of resolution (and revelation of Hamlets
inner thoughts). Yet the last line of the dying Princethe
rest is silence (5.2.363)proves particularly problematic,
with a minimum of five possible readings. For example, Shakespeare perhaps
speaks through Hamlet, telling the audience and the actor that
he, the dramatist, would not, or could not, go a word further in the
presentation of this, his most verbally brilliant and baffling hero
(27); the last lines of Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night,
The Merchant of Venice, and Loves Labors Lost
suggest a pattern of this authorial style. While all five readings are
plausible, they are also valuable, allowing audience and actor to choose
an interpretation. This final act of multiplicity seems fitting for
a protagonist whose mind is unconfined by any single issue
(31).
[ top ]

Clary, Frank Nicholas. The
very cunning of the scene: Hamlets Divination and the Kings
Occulted Guilt. Hamlet Studies 18.1-2 (Summer/Winter 1996):
7-28.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / HAMLET / NEW HISTORICISM
This essay argues that contemporary circumstances would have
enabled late Elizabethan and early Jacobean audiences to recognize Hamlets
Mousetrap play as an evocation of the theatricalized divinations
of English cunning men (8). Reports of cunning
men and cunning women (a.k.a. sorcerers and witches)
reveal that these people were once popular in England and that they
performed ritualistic functionssuch as detecting guilt in criminals.
Hamlets Mousetrap duplicates methods of ceremony used
by the cunning, suggesting his occultism; his language,
particularly in the soliloquy following The Murder of Gonzago,
implies that the Prince has been instructed in that devilish art
(11). He becomes a mimic celebrant in an inversion ritual,
which is a perverse imitation of the method of sacramental atonement
(12). The Jacobean audiences would have recognized Hamlet as a cunning
man because of King Jamess active persecution of sorcerers
and witches, as well as his publications on the evils of occultism,
perhaps explaining the renewed popularity of this revenge tragedy (14).
Fortunately, Hamlet leaves his sinister education at sea and returns
from his voyage with a new faith in Christian tenets (e.g., providence).
When Hamlet does strike against Claudius, he reacts spontaneously
as an instrument of divine retribution (15), proves his
readiness and confirms his faith (16). By reworking the legend
of Amleth, Shakespeare removes Hamlet from the clutches of the
devil by having him place himself in the hands of providence (15).
This tragic drama ultimately transcends the practical concerns
of politics and exorcises the occultism of the blacker arts (16).
[ top ]
Dickson, Lisa. “The Hermeneutics
of Error: Reading and the First Witness in Hamlet.” Hamlet
Studies 19.1-2 (Summer/Winter 1997): 64-77.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / CLAUDIUS / HAMLET / PERFORMANCE
While occasionally using Hamlet productions
to describe the potential audience experience, this article posits that
Claudius and Hamlet “are engaged in a border conflict where power
is linked to the ability to control the dissemination of information,
the passage of knowledge across the boundary between private and public”
(65). While Hamlet “is about the hermeneutic task,”
its “circles within circles” of overt and covert interpreters,
of stage and theater audiences (65), displace “Truth” “along
the line of multiple and multiplying perspectives” (66). Using
his “wit and word-play, to deflect the hermeneutic onslaught,
Hamlet mobilizes his own interpretive strategies under the cover of
the antic disposition, where madness, collapsing the categories of the
hidden and the apparent, allows him to hide in plain sight” (67).
Likewise, Claudius attempts “to hide in plain sight” by
providing the court with a reading of recent events “that he hopes
will neutralize [and silence] Hamlet’s threat and control the
dissemination and reception of the facts” of his own crime(s),
as evident in act one, scene two (68). Although Claudius and Hamlet
struggle to maintain the “borders of silence and speech, public
and private, hidden and apparent,” they inevitably fail (69-70).
In the nunnery scene, in which Hamlet is aware of the spies behind the
curtain in most productions (e.g., 1992 BBC Radio’s, Zeffirelli’s,
Hall’s), he attempts to hide behind his antic disposition, but
the seeming truth in his anger suggests an “explosion” and
“collision” between his “inner and outer worlds”
(71). Claudius “suffers a similar collapse”: “his
hidden self erupting to the public view out of the body of the player-Lucianus”
(73). Claudius and Hamlet are also alike in their problematic perspectives:
Hamlet’s “desire to prove the Ghost honest and justify his
revenge shapes his own ‘discovery’ of Claudius” (74);
and Claudius’ “reading of his [Hamlet’s] antic disposition
is complicated by his own guilt” (72). “Within the circles
upon circles of watching faces, the disease in Hamlet may well
be the maddening proliferation of Perspectives on Hamlet, where
the boundaries constructed between public and private selves collapse
under the power of the gaze” (75).
[ top ]

Dollerup, Cay. Filters
in Our Understanding of Hamlet. Hamlet Studies 13
(1991): 50-63.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / PERFORMANCE
This article argues that although any treatment of Hamlet (e.g.,
performance, reading, interpretation) reflects individual views, the
act of filtering is an integral and indissoluble part of Shakespeares
play (50). For modern audiences, some filters prove involuntary,
such as the loss of historical relevance and of dramatic anticipation.
Some prove necessary, like the cutting of lines and scenes for performance.
While textual modifications can alter Hamlets characters
(e.g., Polonius), themes (e.g., death, love), emphasis (e.g., revenge),
and imagery (e.g., botany), each individuals decision can lead
to new insights, experiences, and interpretations. Ultimately, as
receptors of the artefact, as editors, critics, as directors and actors,
as audience or readers, the artefact forces us to take a stand on a
number of points on which we simply cannot reach an agreementand
perhaps Shakespeare never expected/intended us to (63).
[ top ]

Evans, Robert C. Friendship
in Hamlet. Comparative Drama 33 (1999): 88-124.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / FRIENDSHIP
This article modestly hopes to establish the general importance of
friendship in Hamlet by showing its presence throughout the entire
play (88). The opening scene initiates the plays theme: Barnardo,
Francisco, and Horatio begin to form a bond, which is strengthened by
the shared experience of the Ghosts appearance. The interaction
among these friends works dramatically to contrast sharply with Hamlets
social isolation in the following scene and to present Horatio with
the potential of becoming a good friend to Hamlet. The friendship between
Hamlet and Horatio that develops throughout the play eloquently culminates
in the final scene; but the Hamlet/Horatio relationship is not the only
example of friendship treated. Ophelia / Laertes, Hamlet / Rosencrantz
/ Guildenstern, Hamlet / Ghost, Hamlet / players, Claudius / Laertes,
the gravediggers, as well as Hamlet / Laertes all receive attention.
Line-by-line analysis of dialogue among these friends, potential friends,
and false friends highlights linguistic ambiguity; but the multiple
meanings behind every word illustrates the difficulty of making
clear, unambiguous interpretations of others motivesa difficulty
relevant to the friendship theme (105). Through their interactions,
Shakespeares characters easily seem as complex as our own
friends or ourselves (119).
[ top ]

Goldman, Michael. “Hamlet:
Entering the Text.” Theatre Journal 44 (1992): 449-60.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / METADRAMA / NEW HISTORICISM / PERFORMANCE
While suggesting “that drama may provide, at least
in some respects, the more illuminating case of the encounter with writing,”
this article explores Shakespeare’s treatment of the person/text
“negotiation” in Hamlet (449). Through “the
dynamism of performance, script and actor become inseparable”
(450) because “scriptedness” and “improvisation”
merge on stage (450). This “interplay of script and improvisation”
underlies the call to revenge in Hamlet: the Ghost “seems
to provide a clear cut script for his son,” but Hamlet’s
“path to revenge is tortuous, filled with improvised diversions
and digressions” (452). While “the play explores”
the “necessary relation” between “scriptedness”
and “improvisation,” it is also “concerned . . . with
what’s involved in entering into a script” (452).
Hamlet “regularly reenacts the basic scene that takes
place when an actor prepares or performs a part,” the “entry
into the text” (453), such as the replaying of a situation (e.g.,
Old Hamlet’s murder) (453). While such a metadramatic “acting
exercise” (453) suggests one method of entering the text, “a
concern with the stability and instability of texts runs through the
play” (454). Hamlet’s sense “of a tense and
uncertain relation to a text, which exacts both commitment and risky
departure, may have had a special relevance to the circumstances of
Elizabethan dramatic production” (455) because the performance
of an Elizabethan play momentarily “stabilized the uncertain mix
of possibilities contained in the playhouse manuscript” (456).
The play’s exploration of “play-acting and the relation
of texts and scripts to performance may also be reflective of “the
larger problematic of human action” that Hamlet experiences and,
ultimately, comes to terms with: “human action itself, like the
performance of an actor, is an intervention, an entry into
something very like a script, a text of interwoven actions, an entry
that, though it raises the central questions of human choice and responsibility,
can never be made in full knowledge or confidence about the ultimate
result of that choice” (457). This article recommendation is “to
conceive of this critical relation . . . of reader and text, in a way
that acknowledges something of that importance which is felt by all
who are drawn to literature—as a relation of commitment, a relation
of responsibility, a relation certainly requiring the focus of one’s
full bodily life on something which is not oneself, a relation constrained
by time and history and the need for choice, but above all a relation
of adventure” (460).
[ top ]
Gorfain, Phyllis. “Toward
a Theory of Play and the Carnivalesque in Hamlet.” Hamlet
Studies
13 (1991): 25-49. [Reprinted in Donald Keesey’s Contexts for
Criticism (1994) and in Ronald Knowles’ Shakespeare and
Carnival: After Bakhtin (1998).]
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / CARNIVAL / METADRAMA
Drawing heavily on Bakhtin’s understanding of carnivalesque,
this article approaches Hamlet “as Shakespeare’s
most ludic and metatheatrical tragedy” (26). The “carnivalesque
in Hamlet intensifies its complex tragic mode” (27),
as the “irreversible and vertical movement of tragic form joins
to the reversible and horizontal continuum of carnival in Hamlet
to produce the double vision” (28). “The alliance of
linear consequence with cyclical carnivalesque reversibility becomes
most evident in the final act of Hamlet”: on the one
hand, the play “concludes with a carnivalesque fearlessness and
freedom as Hamlet decides to engage in an open-ended fencing match”;
but, on the other hand, it “also concludes with a devastating
finality when the cheating and intrigue of Claudius defeat this ludic
spirit” (31). “This consolidation of irreversible history
and reversible art matches other patterns of assertion and denial in
the play” (31), such as “wordplay (punning, witty literalism,
clownish malapropism, word corruptions, nonsense)” (31) and storytelling
(which “in Hamlet then replaces revenge)” (29).
The repetitive presentation of Old Hamlet’s murder, through narrative,
mime, and performance, demonstrates how the “self-reflexive play
with the boundaries between event and representation, past and present,
subjunctive and actual, audience and performers defines and dissolves
the differences between the world of the play and the world of the theater”
(29). “As carnival obscures the differences between performers
and audience, blending us all in a comedic vision of performance culture,
so Hamlet uses its reflexive ending to make us observers of
our own observing, objects of our own subjective knowledge, inheritors
of the playful knowledge paradox” (43)—and “the noblest”
audience (5.21.88).
[ top ]
Halverson, John. The Importance of Horatio.
Hamlet Studies 16 (1994): 57-70.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / HAMLET / HORATIO
By analyzing the role of Horatio, this essay attempts to show that
Shakespeare had a much clearer and fuller conception of the part
than is usually granted and that he developed the character with care
and skill, though by extraordinarily minimal means, for a significant
purpose (57). Inconsistencies in this character receive clarification,
using textual evidence (e.g., age, knowledge, relationship with Hamlet
at Wittenburg). Although Horatio seems expendable in Hamlets
plot development, Shakespeare evidently thought him important
enough to invent the character (probably) and have him dominate both
the opening and closing scenes (62). Horatio is also invested
with the favorable qualities of learning, courage, loyalty, and candor;
he appears as the disinterested witness (63), who speaks
directly and virtually compels trust (64). The strong bond
that Horatio forms with Hamlet encourages the audience to vicariously
follow suit. Without Horatio, the audience would be suspicious of rather
than sympathetic with Hamlet. Reducing Horatio to merely Hamlets
foil/confidant belittles the importance of the role and Shakespeares
artistry. Although Horatio is more stageworthy than text
worthy due to his frequently silent-yet-important presence
as witness (67), Shakespeare created the role, and with few but
sure strokes of his theatrical brush, endowed it with complete credibility
(68).
[ top ]

Harris, Arthur John. “Ophelia’s
‘Nothing’: ‘It is the false steward that stole his
master’s
daughter.’” Hamlet Studies 19.1-2 (Summer-Winter
1997): 20-46.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / OPHELIA / OPHELIA'S MURDER(ER)
While exploring what J. Max Patrick calls “the
‘erotic estimate’ of Ophelia,” this essay argues that
audiences “are to suspect Claudius himself as the principle cause
of Ophelia’s madness and death; specifically, that at some point
shortly before her madness there has been a liaison between the two,
that she has been sexually abused, and that he has been not only the
sexual predator but also the one who ‘dispatched’ (1.5.75)
Ophelia to her grave” (21). In Hamlet, Shakespeare creates
“a world that one senses is somehow thoroughly contaminated”
and a pervasive “sense of uncertainty, suspicion, and doubt”
(22). The ambiguity surrounding Ophelia contributes to this aesthetic
project. For example, the “sexually suggestive language”
of her mad songs (e.g., tricks, hems, beats,
spurns) encourages audiences to “suspect misfortune”
(24). In addition, her statement, “It is the false steward that
stole his master’s daughter” (4.5.171-72), strongly implicates
the King as the thief. Upon hearing these words, Laertes suspects “This
nothing’s more than matter” (4.5.173). But the King, Ophelia’s
frequent interrupter, attributes Ophelia’s behavior to excessive
grief. In actuality, the mad scene presents evidence that Ophelia has
been sexually abused by the King (31). Further proof appears in “the
curious (and obvious) stress upon sexual imagery” in Gertrude’s
report of Ophelia’s drowning (35), the gravedigger’s exposition
on the uncertainty of the death and cryptic ballad (which seems intentionally
altered from the original to raise suspicions), and the priest’s
oddly timed stress on Ophelia’s chastity. Perhaps “the formation
of suspicions—without sufficient evidence as proof—is exactly
what Shakespeare intends to elicit” (24). But, while Horatio is
responsible for telling Hamlet’s story, audiences are responsible
for “‘hearing’ Ophelia’s story” (42).
[ top ]
Hunt, Maurice. Art of Judgement, Art of Compassion:
The Two Arts of Hamlet. Essays in Literature 18 (1991):
3-20.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / HAMLET / METADRAMA / MOUSETRAP
This article uses the Troy playlet, which Hamlet requests of a player,
and The Murder of Gonzago to argue two points: Shakespeares
idea of the relevance of mimetic art for the past and future,
and Shakespeares conception of the humane use of his tragic
art (3). The Troy playlet seems an odd choice for Hamlet because
it displaces sympathy from the avenger to his victim; but, for Shakespeare,
its blending of vengeance and compassion seems to imply that art does
not mirror life, it refines human experience. Although Hamlet initially
praises the Troy performance, his hunger for revenge overrules his appreciation
of art. He misuses art in The Mousetrap scene, with the utilitarian
hope of detecting guilt and without recognition of the forms power
to influence/transform will. The player king recommends human compassion,
but Hamlet only judges others. His (unmerited) condemnation of Gertrude
leads him to fail in his goals with The Mousetrap. While Hamlet
remains unmoved by The Murder of Gonzago, the theater audience
is encouraged to join him in scrutinizing Claudius (and Gertrudes)
reaction. Yorks skull offers another example of Shakespeares
metadramatic commentary because it resembles dramatic tragedy
in its effect upon certain viewers (14). After shifting from pity
for to criticism of the skull, Hamlet exploits the object as an
iconographically stereotyped battering ram in the Princes campaign
against women (14). The skull is misused, just like The Murder
of Gonzago. In the course of Hamlet, the protagonist harshly
assesses others who seem deserving of pity but never questions the Ghost,
who is suffering for previous crimes. Hamlets judgement reminds
the audience of what makes his experience tragic, and of what
we might attempt to avoid in our lives beyond the theater (16).
[ top ]

Kim, Jong-Hwan. “Waiting for Justice:
Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Elizabethan Ethics of
Revenge.” English Language and Literature 43 (1997):
781-97.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS
“This study focuses on the Elizabethan ethics concerning
revenge and the meaning of Hamlet’s waiting for justice or delaying
for revenge and its meaning will be discussed with reference to the
Elizabethan ethics of revenge” (782). Shakespeare endows the Ghost
with ambiguity, mixing “personal vindictiveness” with a
“concern for Gertrude” (782), and Elizabethan audiences
“regarded the ghost which keeps on urging to revenge as a devil”
(783). Naturally, Hamlet has suspicions “about the nature of the
Ghost as Elizabethans did, and it is natural that he waits for revenge
until he confirms the credibility of the Ghost’s statements”
(782). While The Mousetrap elicits proof of the Ghost’s
accusations, the “command to revenge still contains ethical problems
in terms of the Elizabethan ethics” (784): “All Elizabethan
orthodoxy condemned and punished personal revenge” (785). But
Shakespeare’s contemporary audience was still influenced by a
residual pagan revenge ethic which commanded a person to avenge the
murder of a family member. Perhaps Shakespeare “hoped to appeal
to audiences’ instinct” by presenting an individual’s
“struggle against ruthless revenge and his reluctance to be the
conventional revenger” (788). Fortunately, the “contradiction
between the official code of the Elizabethan ethics of revenge and the
popular code of revenge is resolved” in the final scene of the
play (794). Hamlet appears as “an agent to practice the public
revenge or justice through the hand of Providence, when Claudius’
crime was exposed to public. Through this device, Shakespeare made the
Elizabethan audiences sympathize strongly with Hamlet’s final
action; he abstains from ruthless vengeance. His action might have had
their emotional approval and not disturbed their moral judgement”
(788). “Hamlet’s action of waiting for justice and delaying
injustice, the core of his action, may be admired from either the Christian
point of view or the view point of the Elizabethan ethics” (795).
[ top ]

Matsuoka, Kazuko. “Metamorphosis
of Hamlet in Tokyo.” Hamlet and Japan. Ed. Yoshiko
Uéno. Hamlet Collection 2. New York: AMS, 1995. 227-37.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / RECEPTION THEORY
Initially discussing Bergman’s Hamlet in
Tokyo and other “daring, new interpretations of the play,”
this essay attempts to explain why Japan “has had a long love-affair
with Hamlet” (229). One explanation is that this tragedy
possesses the most “references to foreign countries closely related
to the plot and the life situations of the characters” in the
Shakespearean canon, creating “an open basis” that fosters
adoption/adaptation (232). Also, Hamlet’s “peculiarly modern
sense of powerlessness” (232) may draw Japanese audiences because
they feel powerless due to the bombardment of “the world’s
troubles” through information networks (233). Also, the increasing
life-span in Japan allows the older generation to retain (and to withhold)
power from the younger generation (233). The modern Japanese people
may see themselves “in Shakespeare’s image of a thirty-year-old
‘eternal’ prince” (233).
[ top ]
McGuire, Philip C. “Bearing
‘A wary eye’: Ludic Vengeance and Doubtful Suicide in Hamlet.”
From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama. Ed.
John Alford. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1995. 235-53.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / METADRAMA / PERFORMANCE
This essay explores how audiences and readers “find
themselves engaged in judging and interpreting Hamlet, Prince of
Denmark” (235). For example, in the final scene, how does
Hamlet stab and poison Claudius? In what manner? Does he balance “reason
and passion” during the act(s) (241)? Actors and directors must
judge and interpret the ambiguous stage directions, as must audiences
and readers. Fortinbras interprets the dead Hamlet to be a potential
soldier in order to convert “his claim to the Danish throne into
a political fact” (245); and Horatio interprets events “for
reasons that are at least partly political”: “to avoid social
and political disorder” (245-46). By ending with these “acts
of interpretation and judgement,” Hamlet holds up “a
mirror in which those who experience the play—in performance or
on the page—can see the processes of interpretation and judgement
in which they are themselves engaged” (246). Ophelia’s questionable
demise provides one facet of this mirror, as several characters (e.g.,
grave diggers, priest) “impose certainty of judgement on what
is ‘doubtful’” (248-49). “Hamlet is
profoundly concerned with the specific judgements and interpretations
one comes to, but it is also concerned, at least equally, with the processes
by which they are reached” (250).
[ top ]

Ratcliffe, Stephen. “What Doesn’t
Happen in Hamlet: The Ghost’s Speech.” Modern
Language
Studies 28.3 (1998): 125-50.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / CLAUDIUS / GHOST / RHETORICAL
This article argues “that Claudius did not
murder his brother” and explores the Ghost’s account of
its poisoning as the imaginings of “a world beyond the world of
stage, a world of words in which the eye sees only what the ear hears,
thereby sounding the limits of perception itself” (126). The death
of Old Hamlet “is performed by means of words whose effect is
to ‘show’ us what cannot be shown” (130). A detailed
linguistic analysis of the Ghost’s account highlights how the
Ghost’s words “enter (as the poison entered the Ghost’s
body) not just Hamlet’s ears but ours as well” (143). The
“experience of a multitude of casual, seemingly insignificant
patterns of interaction among words in this speech” invites the
audience/reader “to imagine and believe in something that doesn’t
happen in the play”—except in words (147). While The
Mousetrap’s dumbshow “echoes visually the Ghost’s
acoustic representation of that same event” (133), Claudius’
response to it does not prove his guilt—nor does his supposed
confession. Claudius’ private words provide “no details
that would place him at the scene of the crime that afternoon”
and use “a syntactic construction whose hypothetical logic casts
more shadow of doubt than light of certainty over what he is actually
saying” (135). And the confession comes from an unreliable source,
a figure whose every action in the play has “everything to do
with subterfuge and deception” (137). Perhaps, Claudius “is
not speaking from the bottom of his heart, as one who prays presumably
does, but rather in this stage performance of a prayer means to deceive
God” (137). Besides, the “confession” from “this
master of deception” (138) is for “a purely imaginary, hypothetical
event that takes place outside of the play, beyond the physical boundaries
of the stage” (139).
[ top ]

Ratcliffe, Stephen. What Doesnt
Happen in Hamlet: The Queens Speech. Exemplaria
10 (1998): 123-44.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / GERTRUDE / OPHELIA'S MURDER(ER)
With a concentrated focus on Gertrudes report of Ophelias
drowning, this article explores how something that doesnt
happen in Hamlet happens, how action that takes place off stage
happens in the words the play uses to perform it (125). The underlying
hypothesis is that the drowning report suggests Gertrudes involvement
with Ophelias murder. Every word of the speech receives meticulous
dissection and analysisfrom the opening word there, which
directs the audiences attention to the plays exterior, to
the last word, as Ophelia vanishes in a muddy death. Plural
meanings implied by audible homonyms and stark shifts in verbal descriptions
appear when the progression of the lines is slowed to a snails
pace. As each studied word provides suggestion and direction to the
audience, a case against the Queen builds. For example, the language
of flowers used by Gertrude in the drowning report and by Ophelia
in her madness creates a relationship that in effect places them
in close proximity to each other, as the first is the speaker
and the latter becomes the object of her gaze, the person she
herself [Gertrude] watched beside the stream (130-31). Although
the critic humbly acknowledges the inability to prove (or disprove)
speculations about off stage events, a singular certainty remains: Gertrude,
as the reporter of Ophelias demise, removes herin
effect kills herfrom the play (144). Ophelias death
provides a paradigm of all off stage events, in a world of words
called the theater (144).
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Rosenberg, Marvin. The Masks of Hamlet.
Newark: U of Delaware P, 1992.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / CLAUDIUS / GERTRUDE / GHOST / HAMLET / HORATIO
/ LAERTES / OPHELIA / PERFORMANCE / POLONIUS
Combining literary scholarship with interpretive performances, this
monograph promises "a way to listen to and grasp the complex tones
of Hamlet and the other characters" (x). Chapters follow the chronological
order of the play, pausing to "discuss the important characters
as they appear" (12). For example, the first chapter explores the
opening scene's setting and events, as well as the variations staged
in performances; the examination of this scene is briefly suspended
for chapters on Horatio and the Ghost but continues in chapter four.
This monograph clarifies dilemmas and indicates "the choices that
have been made by actors and critics," but its actor-readers must
decide for themselves (xi): "I believe this book will demonstrate
that each actor-reader of you who engages with Hamlet's polyphony will
uniquely experience the tones that fit your own polyphony" (x).
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Sanchez, Reuben. “‘Thou
com’st in such a questionable shape’: Interpreting the Textual
and
Contextual Ghost in Hamlet.” Hamlet Studies
18.1-2 (Summer/Winter 1996): 65-84.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / GHOST / NEW HISTORICISM
This article suggests “that in rendering the ‘shape’
of the Ghost ‘questionable,’ or indeterminate, Shakespeare
has created a text that both resists and embraces context” (66).
It begins with a survey of critical studies regarding the Ghost to show
diversity “based on selective contexts” (68). A review of
Levin’s and Fish’s explanations for such diversity finds
that the two seemingly-opposite methodologies “complement one
another in that neither argues that an understanding of context is irrelevant”
(69). In a historical context, Hamlet’s Ghost, a spirit,
is perceived as distinct from a soul, and Protestants “might very
well suspect the spirit of having evil intentions” (71). But Hamlet
“does not act as though he suspects the Ghost to be a devil”
(at least not initially), and the scene of this first meeting may be
even humorous (71-72). In the plays’ opening scene, the Ghost’s
pattern of appearance / disappearance / reappearance conveys “the
fright and curiosity, perhaps even the humor, but also the extreme confusion
resulting from the Ghost’s appearances” (75). Also in this
scene, Horatio, Barnardo, and Marcellus attempt to explain the ghostly
visitations, representing “at least two different interpretive
communities: Christian and Pagan” (75). The Ghost’s appearance
in the closet scene is utilized to compare the Folio and the First Quarto,
each text “indeterminate in and of itself, each indeterminate
when compared to the other” (79). “Whether one speaks of
text or context, however, Shakespeare seems to be interested in presenting
a Ghost who conveys information and withholds information, a Ghost who
educates and confuses, a Ghost who evokes terror and humor, a Ghost
whose signification is both textual and contextual” (79).
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Simon, Bennett. “Hamlet
and the Trauma Doctors: An Essay at Interpretation.” American
Imago 58.3 (Fall 2001): 707-22.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / HAMLET / OPHELIA / PSYCHOANALYTIC
After reviewing “several broad trends in the history
of interpretation of the play” and locating “within those
trends some dominant themes in psychoanalytic interpretation,”
this essay offers a “late-twentieth-century psychoanalytic interpretation—both
of Hamlet and Hamlet—based on trauma theory” (707).
Trauma research provides insights pertinent to Hamlet: trauma
victims often experience oscillations between numbness and overwhelming
emotions, difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy, “a
sense of unreality,” a sense that the “self and the world
become loathsome,” a thirsting for revenge or scapegoat, and “a
profound mistrust of the future” as well as of other people (e.g.,
family members, friends) (712). But “secrecy associated with a
trauma is especially devastating” because secrets “combined
with confusion about fact and fantasy often lead to incomplete or fragmented
narratives”; “a story that cannot be told directly in narrative
discourse finds expression through displacement, symbolization, and
action” (713). In Hamlet, the protagonist’s trauma
derives from his first encounter with the Ghost, which leaves Hamlet
“both certain and uncertain” of his father’s death,
his uncle’s responsibility, and his mother’s involvement
(714). Following this meeting, Hamlet mutely expresses his story in
Ophelia’s closet (717). His madness (perhaps more real than even
Hamlet realizes) “is a symptom of the ‘feigning’ and
deceit around him,” such as Claudius’ secrecy and Ophelia’s
seeming betrayal (715). In comparison, Ophelia experiences various traumas,
including “a web of half-truths, paternal attempts to deny her
perceptions,” the loss of “male protection” (716),
the secrecy surrounding her father’s murder (and her lover’s
responsibility), as well as “the impossibility of any kind of
open grieving or raging—let alone discussion” (715-16).
While her “feelings are consistently ignored and she is silenced,”
Ophelia’s madness “is focused on her speaking in
such a way that she cannot be ignored” (715). In this “aura
of a traumatized environment,” the theater audience must “live
with a discomforting set of ambiguities” that Horatio’s
promised narrative cannot entirely clarify (717).
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Stevenson, Ruth. “Hamlet’s Mice, Motes, Moles, and Minching
Malecho.” New Literary History 33 (2002): 435-59.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / HAMLET / “OLD MOLE”
This article refers to Hamlet “as a ‘poem’”
(435), while tracing the “metaphoric permutations” (437) of the “mole”
(1.4.24 and 1.5.170) within “the drama of words” (438). It offers “a
brief explanation, first, about Shakespeare’s use of poetry itself and,
second, about the implications of this use for his audience” (435).
Within Hamlet, “the blank verse assimilates unto itself the
circular interiority of the lyric impulse”; the “fusion into a single
tragic consciousness of these two mediums, assimilative blank verse and
prose, as components of Hamlet’s internal organization and
network of figurative interaction, comprises the poetry of the play”
(436). “The most significant generic issue in responding to
Shakespeare’s text” seems “in discriminating between seeing a drama/poem
and reading it” (436) because “the ideal process for audiences might
consist of these three parts: first, to see and experience the
predominant dramatic elements of plot and character; second, to read and
identify the salient elements of metaphoric interaction; third, to meld
the read play into the seen play, so that it affects an
audience with terrific subliminal force” (437). “The read play [. . .]
conveys this force through the verbal relationships derived from the
most important metaphor in the play, the double figure of the mole”
(437). This article “explores how the poem works within its own
linguistic action and in particular how its metaphoric language
instigates and disseminates correlative metaphors whose interactions
shape the consciousness of Hamlet through four principal aesthetic
activities. (1) From the first lines of the play, words stir and stretch
out to other words that acquire metaphoric power and develop momentum”;
(2)
Through the use of literary illusions the linguistics process extends
and illuminates the nature of Hamlet’s emotions. (3) As it does so, it
presses towards primitive sources of life that traverse Hamlet’s mind
and eventually alter his imagination. (4) This metaphoric process
carries the play past its dramatic plot boundaries not to a progression
of cultural history but to a far more impassive, inhuman celebration of
metamorphic force” (438).
The “mole metaphor comes
full circle”: in the play’s final scene, Hamlet’s “life through the
words of the play which have comprised his consciousness and through the
words that Horatio will use to tell his story in a perpetual future
becomes itself a subliminal mole, spreading as read play fuses
into the seen play of dramatic enactment to be part of the psyche
of every audience past, present, and to come” (456).
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top ]
Thompson, Ann and Neil Taylor. William Shakespeare:
Hamlet. Writers and Their Works. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / BIBLIOGRAPHIC / FEMINISM / NEW HISTORICISM / PERFORMANCE
/ RHETORICAL
This text begins with a questioning of Hamlet's status within
the canon. Although other Shakespearean tragedies (e.g., King Lear)
have threatened to displace Hamlet in the past, its position
currently seems secure. The section titled "Which Hamlet?"
discusses the Folio/Quartos debate, as well as how understanding of
the play's meanings and values vary "according to the reader, the
actor or the audience" (17). The third chapter examines Hamlet
"as a self-contained fiction which takes history and politics as
part of its subject matter" and "as a late-Elizabethan play
which can be seen in relation to the history and politics of its own
time" (23). The next section explores rhetoric in the play, such
as how all of the characters seem to speak in the same linguistic style
and how some quotes from the play "have passed into common usage,"
creating challenges for performers (33). The chapter on gender examines
the history of female Hamlets, questions of Hamlet's sex/gender, the
play's female characters, and feminism's influence on the study of this
tragedy. "The Afterlife of Hamlet" discusses how editors,
actors, and directors "have added to the multiplicity of Hamlets
by cutting and rearranging that text" (52), how the drama has
been adapted to popular mediums, and how it has been appropriated for
political purposes in various countries. The conclusion foresees an
optimistic future for Hamlet, and assortment of illustrations
and a select bibliography round out the monograph.
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Uéno, Yoshiko. “Three
Gertrude’s: Text and Subtext.” Hamlet and Japan.
Ed. Yoshiko Uéno.
Hamlet Collection 2. New York: AMS, 1995. 155-68.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / GERTRUDE / MYTHIC CRITICISM / NEW
HISTORICISM
This essay examines “ambiguities inherent in Hamlet,
or gaps between the text and subtext, with special attention to Gertrude’s
representation” (156). Rather than possessing autonomy, the Queen
exists only in relation to Claudius and Hamlet; she also refuses to
choose between the two men, revealing “her malleability”
(158). Hence, the lack of critical appreciation of Gertrude seems understandable.
Although the closet scene should offer the greatest opportunity for
insight into Gertrude’s character, it leaves too many unanswered
questions: does she know of Claudius’ involvement in Hamlet, Sr.’s
death? Is she guilty of infidelity with Claudius before this murder?
Further uncertainties are raised by the scene’s presentation of
two Gertrudes: “Gertrude herself and the Gertrude seen from Hamlet’s
perspective” (161). Such confusion leads today’s audiences
to share in Hamlet’s confrontation “with the disintegration
of reality” (162). But the original audience at the Globe may
have had the advantages of after-images, preconceived notions of Hamlet
informed by myth and legend. A survey of plausible literary sources
(e.g., Historiae Danicae, Agamemnon, Histoires
tragiques), with emphasis on the evolving “transformations
of Gertrude,” presents “a wide range of variants”
that Elizabethan audiences may have drawn on to resolve the ambiguities
struggled with today (166).
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