Ahrends, Günter. "Word and Action in
Shakespeare's Hamlet." Word and Action in Drama: Studies
in Honour of Hans-Jürgen Diller on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday.
Ed. Günter Ahrends, Stephan Kohl, Joachim Kornelius, Gerd Stratmann.
Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1994. 93-105.
HAMLET / METADRAMA / PERFORMANCE
While contending that Hamlet "is a meta-play
dealing with fundamental principles of the art of acting," this
essay analyzes the play's didactic presentation of word and action:
"the verbal and the mimic-gesticulatory forms of expression are
equally significant signs which have to be put into a balanced relationship
with each other" (93), otherwise "they degenerate into deficient
signs" (94). Through the player's excellence with the Hecuba speech
and Hamlet's reaction to it, Shakespeare's "most famous tragedy
contains not only a theory of mimesis but also a concrete example of
how theoretical principles can be translated into practice" (98).
Hamlet understands the principles of the art of acting, as he demonstrates
in his advice to the players, and his insight motivates The Mousetrap.
While The Mousetrap succeeds in provoking Claudius, the closet
scene is "a continuation of the play within the play in so far
as it is now Gertrude's turn to reveal her guilt" (100). Hamlet's
initial effort with his mother fails because he "proves to be a
bad actor" (101), but the son eventually remembers his own advice
to the players and matches action with word; "It is exactly by
making Hamlet's first attempt fail that Shakespeare turns the bedroom
scene into a further example of how the principles of theatrical representation
have to be transformed into practice" (100). Hamlet, like Claudius
and Gertrude, "appears as a dissociated human being" for most
of the play because his words and actions are unbalanced; but he distinguishes
himself from the others with his knowledge "that the art of theatrical
representation makes it possible for man to overcome the state of dissociation
by not tolerating the discrepancy between action and word" (102).
[ top ]

Ashley, Leonard R.N. “The Observed of All Observers: Hamlet on the
Stage.” Hamlet Studies 24 (2002): 39-55.
PERFORMANCE
This article purports that “Hamlet always
was and still remains a resounding theatrical success, through good
productions and bad” (46). Shakespeare’s tragedy “has been performed in
practically every language [. . .] and it has been subjected to every
trend” (46). The “simple process of undergoing drastic transformation,
generation after generation, in order to fit the tastes of the time”
allows Shakespeare and his Danish prince to achieve timelessness (47).
The lead role being performed in a myriad of types (i.e., heroic,
romantic, revolutionary) and a favorite for actors (47) also keeps
Hamlet “very much alive” (46). With productions influenced by various
forces, particularly scholarship (48) and politics (50), Hamlet
“as cultural icon and directors’ and actors’ plaything suffers many a
sea-change rich and sometimes strange” (51). “History seems to suggest
that this play about the intellectual loaded with a burden he cannot
bear [. . .] will last for a long time more”; “It likewise appears that
Hamlet will undergo manipulations currently unimaginable” (55).
But perhaps as George Bernard Shaw once optimistically suggested, “after
directors had totally exhausted every harebrained scheme for mistreating
Hamlet, in the long run they would have to seek originality by
doing it right” (55). “What is right will, of course, as
in everything else, depend entirely upon where and when”
(55).
[
top ]

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 ]

Dawson, Anthony B. Hamlet.
Shakespeare in Performance. New York: Manchester UP, 1995.
PERFORMANCE / RECEPTION THEORY
This monograph provides “some sense of the performance history
of Hamlet, differences among interpretations, and the multiplicity
of possible ways of reading and enacting this most famous and slippery
of plays” (3). Chapters are divided into periods of importance
(e.g., post-WWII), transitions in theatrical styles (e.g., 1920’s),
and innovations with performance mediums (e.g., film). A primary goal
“is to suggest, however tentatively, some of the links that may
exist between how the theatre gives Hamlet meaning and produces
Hamlet’s subjectivity and how the culture generally approaches
problems of meaning, value, and selfhood” (22). Although primarily
confined “to the Anglo-American tradition of Hamlet performance,
concentrating on those canonized performers who have a legendary relationship
to Shakespeare’s most famous role,” this monograph utilizes
its last chapter, “Translations,” to explore Hamlets
on “‘foreign’ stages” (224).
[ 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 ]
Edelman, Charles. The very cunning
of the scene: Claudius and the Mousetrap. Parergon
12 (1994): 15-25.
CLAUDIUS / MOUSETRAP / PERFORMANCE
This article hopes to resolve the apparent inconsistency
of the ineffective dumb show in The Mousetrap in a manner
which takes audiences more deeply into the text, while enriching both
the theatrical power and thematic significance of The Murder of Gonzaga
(15). Although generations of critics and editors have attempted to
define the stage business during the silent prologue, they mistakenly
assume that Claudius guilt is proclaimed by
some outward display of emotion when Lucianus poisons the Player King
a second time (19). Instead, arguments could be made that The
Mousetrap, in its entirety, is a methodically drawn out processes
of imposing pain/discomfort. For example, the dumb show is similar to
a dentists extraction of the first tooth in that Claudius can
endure the experience and his suffering; The Murder of Gonzaga,
the pulling of a second tooth, proves more difficult to bear; the verbal
exchanges between Claudius and Hamlet may even constitute the figurative
removal of a third and a fourth to a weakened tolerance. But how does
Claudius react to The Mousetrap? A hysterical departure or a
passive retreat seem unlikely. Rather, textual evidence suggests that
Claudius expresses disgust and defiance, when he tells Hamlet, Away
(23). Aside from the theatrical power and climactic energy
of such a staging, this reading permits consistency in Claudius and
the play because the advantage is with Claudius after The
Mousetrap (24).
[ 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. “When
Nothing Really Matters: Body Puns in Hamlet.” Bodylore.
Ed.
Katherine Young. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1993. 59-87.
HAMLET / PERFORMANCE / REHTORICAL
By “calling attention to the astonishing energy
of reflexive puns,” this article focuses “on how they reflect
on the problematic relationship between the intellectual production
of meaning and the physical body through which ideas must be expressed
in precise social situations in the world of Hamlet”
(60). While puns in general are probed within the article, puns voiced
during social greetings and farewells merit attention because “these
encounters are occasions for formulaic performances” (e.g., handshake,
bow, embrace) (60). For example, at the beginning of The Mousetrap,
Hamlet responds to Claudius’ greeting with puns in order to disrupt
the social relationship and social form. Like every pun in Hamlet,
the actor’s physical performance (e.g., posture, gesture) and
body become factors, possibilities for meaning. Hamlet also uses puns
“to undo, through language, the finality of death,” as his
response to Polonius’ accidental murder demonstrates (76). The
transport of Polonius’ dead body “places the real gravity
of the body centrally next to the consoling rites and puns that would
reinterpret death for cultural recuperation” (77). By the final
scene,
“the question of how to ‘take up the body’—physically
and morally, verbally and symbolically—has been so thoroughly
complicated by the puns on bodies and how and where to ‘take’
them, that no stage, just as no political realm, whatever its embodied
metaphors may be, can fully contain the body’s dispositions”
(80-81).
[ top ]
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Remember
Me.” Hamlet in Purgatory. By Greenblatt. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 2001. 205-57.
GHOST / NEW HISTORICISM / PERFORMANCE / THEOLOGICAL
While continuing the monograph’s historical exploration
of “the afterlife of Purgatory” and of remembrance of the
dead in England (3), this chapter begins by examining Hamlet’s
“shift of spectral obligation from vengeance to remembrance”
(207) and by analyzing how Shakespeare “weirdly and unexpectedly
conjoins memory as haunting with its opposite, the fading of remembrance”
(218). It then approaches the core argument of the monograph: “the
psychological in Shakespeare’s tragedy is constructed almost entirely
out of the theological, and specifically out of the issue of remembrance
that . . . lay at the heart of the crucial early-sixteenth-century debate
about Purgatory” (229). Although “the Church of England
had explicitly rejected the Roman Catholic conception of Purgatory and
the practices that had been developed around it” in 1563 (235),
the Elizabethan theater circumvented the resulting censorship by representing
Purgatory “as a sly jest, a confidence trick, a mistake . . .
But it could not be represented as a frightening reality. Hamlet
comes closer to doing so than any other play of this period” (236).
Through “a network of allusions” to Purgatory (e.g., “for
a certain term” [1.5.10], “burned and purged” [1.5.13],
“Yes, by Saint Patrick” [1.5.136], “hic et ubique”
[1.5.156]), as well as Hamlet’s attention to (and brooding upon)
the Ghost’s residence/source (236-37), the play presents a frightening-yet-absolving
alternative to Hell. The play also seems “a deliberate forcing
together of radically incompatible accounts of almost everything that
matters in Hamlet,” such as Catholic versus Protestant
tenets regarding the body and rituals (240). The prevalent distribution
of printed religious arguments heightens the possibility that “these
works are sources for Shakespeare’s play”: “they stage
an ontological argument about spectrality and remembrance, a momentous
public debate, that unsettled the institutional moorings of a crucial
body of imaginative materials and therefore made them available for
theatrical appropriation” (249). For example, Foxe’s comedic
derision of More’s theological stance “helped make Shakespeare’s
tragedy possible. It did so by participating in a violent ideological
struggle that turned negotiations with the dead from an institutional
process governed by the church to a poetic process governed by guilt,
projection, and imagination” (252). “The Protestant attack
on ‘the middle state of souls’ . . . did not destroy the
longings and fears that Catholic doctrine had focused and exploited”;
instead, “the space of Purgatory becomes the space of the stage
where old Hamlet’s Ghost is doomed for a certain term to walk
the night” (256-57).
[ top ]

Hapgood, Robert. Hamlet Prince
of Denmark. Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1999.
PERFORMANCE / RECEPTION THEORY
Cross-referencing eye-witness accounts, performance reviews, promptbooks,
rehearsal logs, as well as memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies
of major actors and directors, the introduction to this Hamlet
edition provides “a chronological survey of the main productions
of Hamlet from Burbage to Branagh” (ix). Productions
are examined “in a cultural context that includes developments
in theatre history and literary analysis” (ix). Although the survey
reflects the contemporary emphasis on the role of Hamlet, “the
historical record is full enough to give as well a sense of whole productions”
and the people involved (e.g., supporting actors, directors, designers)
(ix). This seemingly-extensive study of Hamlet’s performance
history introduces the play text, footnoted with staged theatrical variations
of productions (e.g., cuts, additions, verbal annunciation, directions
of directors).
[ top ]

Hirsh, James. “Shakespeare and
the History of Soliloquies.” Modern Language Quarterly
58 (March 1997): 1-26.
HAMLET / NEW HISTORICISM / PERFORMANCE / “TO BE,
OR NOT TO BE” SOLILOQUY
This article declares that the “To be, or not to
be” passage was originally staged as “a feigned soliloquy,
spoken by Hamlet to mislead other characters about his state of mind”
(2). The Shakespearean canon provides evidence that Shakespeare, perhaps
more than other playwrights, “explored the potential consequences,
comic and tragic, of the fact that human beings do not have access to
one another’s minds” (9). He was able to do so because Elizabethan
theatergoers were not required to distinguish “soliloquies that
represent speech from those that represent thought” (7). In Hamlet,
when a suspicious Hamlet “arrives at the location designated by
his enemy, sees Ophelia, and draws the obvious conclusion that she has
been enlisted in a conspiracy against him, he also sees an opportunity
to turn the tables on the conspirators” (12). He does not mention
his real concerns: the Ghost, Claudius, and The Mousetrap.
And, departing from his other soliloquies, Hamlet never refers to “his
personal situation” or uses a first-person singular pronoun (12).
Although the “To be, or not to be” passage “was originally
staged as a feigned soliloquy” (14), the closing of the theaters
in 1642 broke the “English theatrical tradition” (15). When
they reopened in 1660, preferences had changed: “Restoration playgoers
lacked the taste for elaborate eavesdropping episodes that had so fascinated
Renaissance playgoers” (15). A historical survey charts the results
of this “profound change in taste,” such as the misapplication
of the term soliloquy and the obliteration of any “distinction
between the representation of speech and the representation of thought”
(17). Unfortunately, the “erroneous belief that the ‘To
be’ soliloquy represented Hamlet’s thoughts and the erroneous
belief that soliloquies of all ages typically represented the thoughts
of characters became mutually reinforcing” (22). If critics continue
to operate with a “blind adherence to untenable orthodox assumptions,”
then this “most famous passage in literature, countless other
episodes in plays before the middle of the seventeenth century, the
history of dramatic technique, and the history of the construction of
subjectivity will all continue to be grossly misunderstood” (26).
[ top ]
Malone, Cynthia Northcutt. Framing in Hamlet.
College Literature 18.1 (Feb. 1991): 50-63.
GHOST / HAMLET / METADRAMA / MOUSETRAP / PERFORMANCE
With the goal of bringing the self-effacing frames of Hamlet
into focus (50), this essay examines the particular theatrical
frame in which Hamlet was first performed, the Globe theater
and considers thematic and formal issues of framing in Hamlet,
positioning these textual issues within the discussion of the theatrical
space (51). The performance space cannot be contained completely
by the theatrical frame; it seeps outward: before [e.g., extruding
limbs or bodies of actors], behind [e.g., actors holding
place behind the stage], between [e.g., sites
of transition between spectacle and spectator or inside and outside],
above [e.g., the Globes open roof], below [e.g., the Ghosts
voice from beneath the stage] (52). While the theatrical frame
simultaneously defines and questions the boundaries of the performance
space, Hamlet plays out a sequence of dramatic frames that
mirror the theatrical frame and double its doubleness (53). For
example, the Ghost provides the pretext for the revenge plot but functions
at the outermost edges of the play (53), seeming to inhibit
the very borders of the dramatic world (54); in The Mousetrap,
Revenge drama is enacted within revenge drama, with the players
of the central drama as audience, and stage as theater (57); Hamlet
exists inside and outside of The Mousetrap, enacting the roles
of both chorus and audience (58). But Claudiuss interruption of
the play-within-the-play begins the process of closure for the
configuration of frames (58), and All of the frames in the
play undergo some transformation in the process of closure (59).
For example, the framing Ghost of Hamlet is internalized
by the son when Hamlet fully appropriates his fathers name (59):
This is I, / Hamlet the Dane (5.1.250-51); Hamlet transforms
into the avenger, murderer (Claudiuss double), and victim (Old
Hamlets double) (59). Ultimately, he passes from the world
of speech to the world beyond; in comparison, Horatio is
released from his vow of silence, his function is transformed from providing
the margin of silence surrounding Hamlets speech to presenting
the now-dumb Prince (60). As Hamlets body is carried away,
a figured silence closes the frame and dissolves into the background
of life resumed (60).
[ 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 ]

Pennington, Michael. Hamlet: A
User’s Guide. New York: Limelight Editions, 1996.
CLAUDIUS / GERTRUDE / GHOST / HAMLET / HORATIO / OPHELIA
/ PERFORMANCE / POLONIUS
Framed by introductory and concluding chapters that narrate
personal experience as well as insight, this monograph “is only
in the slightest sense a history of productions”—“really
imitating a rehearsal” (22). The first chapter focuses on the
action by following the script “line by line” in the style
of “a naive telling of the story” which can “often
provoke a discovery” (22). As in “most productions,”
the “script” is an “accumulated version”: a
combination of elements “from the Second Quarto and the Folio
and any number of later versions, with occasional mischievous forays
into the First (‘Bad’) Quarto” (24). Act and scene
designations are replaced by days to avoid confusion and “to draw
attention to the fact that, while five separate days of action are presented,
Shakespeare’s manipulation of ‘double time’ is so
skilled that you can believe that several months have passed by between
the beginning and the end” (23). The chapter on Hamlet’s
characters comes second because one should not “make assumptions
about character until the action proves them” (22). Characters
are approached in groups, such as “The Royal Triangle” (Claudius/the
Ghost/Gertrude) and “The Commoners” (players/gravediggers/priest).
Then attention shifts to Hamlet. After discussing the demands of casting
and rehearsing the role of Hamlet, the second chapter describes the
excitement of opening night and the energizing relationship an actor
shares with the audience. Although challenging, playing the role of
Hamlet “will verify you: you will never be quite the same again”
(193).
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Portillo, Rafael, and Mercedes Salvador. “Spanish Productions of
Hamlet in the Twentieth Century.” Four Hundred Years of
Shakespeare in Europe. Ed. A Luis Pujante and Ton Hoenselaars.
Newark: U of Delaware P, 2003. 180-95.
PERFORMANCE HISTORY / RECEPTION THEORY
This essay outlines the history of Hamlet
(performance and print translations) in Spain, beginning with the first
stage production (Ramón de la Cruz’s in October 1772) through to the
last Spanish production of the twentieth century, “Teatre Lliure” (by
Joan Sallent, July 1999). Although “Hamlet first became important
in the Spanish theater repertoire in the late nineteenth century, once
the romantic mood was finally accepted,” “there is, as yet, no distinct
national tradition in its stage representation, as companies have mostly
relied on what has been done abroad. In fact, they imitate French and
Italian adaptations first, then British, German, or even American
productions, and eventually, film versions of the play, especially
Olivier’s” (192). “Hamlet is not yet Shakespeare’s most popular
play in Spain, perhaps because both plot and characters are still
relatively alien to Spanish taste and culture. This would explain the
continuous rewriting of the original text” (193). Another objection
“that Spanish theater companies may have had to the play was that its
female roles were not important enough, at least, when compared with
that of Prince Hamlet”; hence, some leading actresses (e.g., Torres,
Xirgu, Espert) have “dared to play the title role,” despite the
occasional “hostile criticism. Since the role of women in theater
circles is substantial now, it is not unlikely that an all-female cast
Hamlet will be seen in one of the Spanish professional playhouses
in the near future” (193).
[ top ]
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).
[ top ]

Shand, G. B. Realising Gertrude: The Suicide
Option. Elizabethan Theatre XIII. Ed. A. L. Magnusson and
C. E. McGee. Toronto: Meany, 1994. 95-118.
FEMINISM / GERTRUDE / PERFORMANCE
This article uses an actorly exploration of Hamlet
to account for how an apparent subtextual subversion of the script
[Gertrudes conscious act of suicide] might actually have its birth
not in wilful actorly or directorly self-indulgence, but in close and
honest realisation of the textual evidence (99). Gertrude exists
in a male-dominated world, where she is commanded by males and offered
no privacy. Her limited ability to speak does not reflect ignorance,
as several critics have contended, but the Renaissances expectations
of the female gender. These social constraints produce in Gertrude an
impacted condition, a state of painfully ingrown pressure to react
(106). Meanwhile, an astute Gertrude begins to recognize her sin in
an incestuous marriage, as well as her inadvertent responsibility for
the murder of Hamlet, Sr. and all subsequent events (e.g., Polonius
death, Ophelias madness). The Mousetrap guarantees consequential
guilt, which appears evident in the closet scene. While Polonius
murder suggests her association between guilt and death, Gertrudes
description of Ophelias drowning marks a personal desire for death.
This alert Gertrude cannot miss the development of an alliance between
Claudius and Laertes, the charge of murderer-with-poison against the
King, the tension among the males, nor the tainted cup offered to Hamlet
during the duel. She consciously drinks the poisoned wine after having
been denied virtually any other independent action from the beginning
of the play (118).
[ top ]

Takahashi, Yasunari. “Hamlet
and the Anxiety of Modern Japan.” Shakespeare Survey
48
(1995): 99-11.
NEW HISTORICISM / PERFORMANCE / RECEPTION THEORY
This essay traces the history of Hamlet’s
reception in Japan: “the whole labour of assimilating Hamlet,
from the beginning down to the present day, could be seen as the mirror
up to the nature of Japan’s modernization since 1868” (101).
With a “grand rationale of modernization-as-westernization,”
Japan was eager to appropriate works like Hamlet (100-01).
But such a transplanting required “acclimatization” of the
play and kabuki, the traditional Japanese theater (100). For
example, in the first Tokyo production of Hamlet (1903), all
soliloquies were cut because the expression-of-inner-thought style “was
something unknown to kabuki,” and the tradition of onnagata
(only male actors on stage) was challenged by a female’s playing
the role of Ophelia (104). In 1907, Shoyo Tsubouchi attempted a more
accurate production (e.g., Western costumes, original character names,
“To be” soliloquy), “using a translated (not adapted)
text,” but his “sensibility had been nurtured too deeply
by the old kabuki tradition to allow him to be ‘absolutely
modern’” (106). His second attempt in 1911 similarly failed.
While his later production marked the end of adaptation and “the
beginning of an age of faithful translation,” it also confirmed
“the impression that Shakespeare was ‘old-fashioned’”
(107). Shakespeare was replaced by Ibsen and other European avant garde
playwrights, while “shingeki, or ‘new drama’
(in Western-style)” was displacing “forms of traditional
drama” (107). Between 1913-1926, the play “ceased to be
the battleground of creative experiment in theatre” (107). Part
of this stalling resulted from the perception of Hamlet as
“the ‘safest’ play to avoid being targeted by the
secret service police” (107-08). After the war, Hamlet
made “a comeback to the forefront of the theatrical scene”:
Tsuneari Fukuda’s 1955 production “was a two-fold critique
of the limitation of shingeki and, more broadly, of the modernity
of Japanese culture” (107). Currently, Japanese dramatists (e.g.,
Ninagawa, Suzuki) liberally strive to “make Shakespeare feel contemporary”
(109). Until “the anxiety of modernity has been overcome by the
‘ludic’ spirit of post-modernity,” new Hamlets “must
and will keep emerging, embodying the perennial and specific anxieties
of contemporary self” (111).
[ 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.
[ top ]
Trivedi, Poonam. “‘Play[ing]’s the thing': Hamlet on the Indian
Stage.” Hamlet Studies 24 (2002): 56-80.
PERFORMANCE HISTORY /
RECEPTION THEORY
In addition to providing
a detailed listing of Hamlet productions in India between 1775
and 2001 (75-78), this article proposes that the “play[ing] of Hamlet
[. . .] is the thing wherein [. . .] to catch the conscience of the
Indian stage” (56-57). “Indians came to know Shakespeare first through
the English language [. . .]” (57), on stage and “via academia” (59). In
this “earliest period (1850-1890), Hamlet was seen as the disempowered
man paralysed into inaction” (58); Hamlet, “in translation and on
stage is more central to the ethos of this period which is of an
interaction with the West” (57). “Political implications may also be
seen in the second, assimilative and universalizing phase of Shakespeare
performance in India. Now we see the Indian literary and theatrical
languages attempting to measure up to the might of the master. Three
well known versions of Hamlet in Marathi, Bengali and Tamil
respectively are representative of this period” (63). During “the middle
phase (1890-1920)” Hamlet “became the prince burdened by the duty of
righteous revenge” (58). “After the 1920s with the rise of nationalism
there was a marked decline in the translation and performance of
Shakespeare, and more so of Hamlet, the more quintessentially
Western thought-provoking play” (67). “After independence there was a
resurgence interest in Shakespeare translation and performance” (68).
The “productions of Hamlet have been fewer than those of either
Othello, Macbeth or Lear, but more acutely
representative of their times” (68). During this period, Hamlet “has
represented successively, the sensitive Dane, a misfit, an emblem of
existential, social and political angst and a seeker after truth” (58).
In “the new post-colonial experimental climate attempts have been made
to make Hamlet more truly our own” (70). While this “sampling of
the fortunes of Hamlet on the diverse stages of India over more
than two centuries reveals a protean range of incarnation” (e.g.,
canonical, populist, translated, indigenized, adapted, appropriated,
deconstructed), it also suggests “that it is Hamlet, not
Othello—as is usually held—which presents a site for critical and
political intervention both in the colonial and post-colonial periods”
(74).
[
top ]

Whitehead, Cintra. “Construing
Hamlet.” Constructive Criticism 1.1 (Mar. 1991):
33-100.
PERFORMANCE / PSYCHOANALYTIC
This article begins with sketch reviews of Freud’s,
Jones’, and Lacan’s psychoanalytic readings of Hamlet
as well as Mairet’s Adleian interpretation. “Although the
psychoanalytic and Alderian theories are diametrically opposed in many
ways, they both might be called content theories in that they
look at the content of the mind rather than the operation of the mind
as construct theory does” (39-40). This article outlines the basic
tenets of the Kellyan construct theory before following “the action
of the plot chronologically, construing character through events”
(41) and entertaining the hypothesis that Hamlet “is man-the-scientist
who experiences the universal need to predict and control” (40).
It also offers suggestions for performance techniques, such as methods
to “emphasize the poignancy” of the final scene, when the
British ambassadors have come too late (97). This article concludes
that Hamlet is “a tragedy of knowing vs. not
knowing, but of knowing with the emotions and the will
as well as with the intellect. The personal construct theorist will
suspect that the play’s unrivaled position in English drama results
from its dramatization of the human need for all of us, like Hamlet,
to be man-the-scientist who must decide when to trust intuition and
emotion . . . and when and how to state and test hypotheses about life
and the universe in order to predict and control life events”
(99).
[ top ]

Wood, Robert E. Some Necessary
Questions of the Play: A Stage-Centered Analysis of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1994.
HAMLET / PERFORMANCE / RHETORICAL
Using a stage-centered approach, this monograph represents
“if not a unified theory of theatrical expression at least a series
of ‘necessary questions’ about the structural considerations
that make possible the multiplicity of contemporary approaches to Hamlet”
(21). It “begins with an examination of Hamlet’s
use of real space and time as elements of a narration which is in part
about a protagonist’s perception of space and time” (17).
Its second section deals with how Hamlet’s use of “wit and
soliloquy disrupt the normal language of drama” and of Hamlet,
but the plays’ final act “marks the end of this dislocation
and, significantly, the end of Hamlet’s distorted perception of
space and time as well” (18). The last section “examines
expectations we bring to the theater: our focus on the body as the locus
of our attention, and our understanding of the generic framework which
orders our experience” (18).
[ top ]
Yoshioka, Fumio. “Silence, Speech, and
Spectacle in Hamlet.” Shakespeare Studies 31
(1996):
1-33.
HAMLET / PERFORMANCE
“This study aims to analyse and interpret Hamlet
on the premise that the tragedy opens in silence, with a sort of dumb-show”
(4-5). Like most early modern play texts, Hamlet’s opening
scene “is not furnished with elaborate stage directions,”
but the two watchmen most likely do not “embark on conversation
right upon their entrance” (6). During this silent posturing,
Francisco approaches Barnardo, creating “an instant shift of balance”:
“the one who watches is suddenly transformed into the one who
is watched” (6). This blurring of watcher/watched initiates “the
inseparable and insoluble questions that the play continues to pose”
through double spying and The Mousetrap, for example (7). In
addition, Barnardo’s groping in the night anticipates Hamlet’s
struggle with “darkness,” “blocked vision and invisibility”
in the Danish court (7-8). The scene’s dark lighting, suggesting
night, eventually relieved by the dawning sun, also creates a binary
of black/red that bears “psychological implications” (10):
the protagonist “hesitates at the entrance of the grim world of
black and red, black for revenge and red for blood” (11). For
example, the “initial section of ‘Priam’s slaughter’
is portrayed conspicuously in black and red,” while Hamlet calls
for a drink of “hot blood” (3.2.381) and for bloody thoughts
(4.4.65-66) after gaining confidence with The Mousetrap (12).
The opening scene’s first lines foreshadow the ensuing play: “Who’s
there?” and “Stand and unfold yourself” (1.1.1-2).
While the first suggests Hamlet’s silent question to the people
around him and to himself, the latter highlights the lack of answers,
the rift in communication (23-24), and the drive to uncover mysteries—all
concerns that consume the play (27). The cemetery scene “unfolds
the ultimate phase of human nature and existence to the protagonist”
(28). The Prince discovers “spiritual tranquility” but only
briefly (29). At the play’s end, a dying Hamlet declares, “the
rest is silence” (5.2.359), and the muted funeral procession that
follows “is the last of a string of dumb-shows whose theatrical
eloquence has served to tell so much of the tragedy” (30).
[ top ]