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Full-Text Articles in Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory

Fresh Shakespeare From The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner Oct 2015

Fresh Shakespeare From The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

Some critics have argued against the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's contemporary English translation project, but Daniel Pollack-Pelzner argues it's part of the process of keeping Shakespeare alive.


Webster's Geometry; Or, The Irreducible Duchess, Benjamin Bertram Phd Dec 2014

Webster's Geometry; Or, The Irreducible Duchess, Benjamin Bertram Phd

Faculty Publications

This study of geometry, gender, and skepticism in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi argues that the play leaves us in a hall of mirrors, a horror show of optical tricks, delusion, narcissism, and perspectivism from which there seems to be no escape, no masterpiece of God’s creation upholding reality beyond sensory images. In the absence of a transcendental referent, the Duchess’ willful and fearful journey «into the wilderness» – the life she leads as a result of her furtive marriage to her steward Antonio – becomes an alternative to both the public sphere mapped by divine patterns of order …


Dickens And Shakespeare’S Household Words, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner Jan 2011

Dickens And Shakespeare’S Household Words, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

Though Dickens' Shakespearean qualities have often been noted, less attention has been paid to the way that Dickens constructed the terms of his comparison to Shakespeare, scripting the response he received from critics from the nineteenth century to the present and shaping Shakespeare's reception as well. Focusing on The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield in the context of their Victorian reception, this essay shows how Dickens used Shakespearean quotation to market his characters' quotability, turning them into household words and popularizing Shakespeare's sayings in turn, even as he challenged the universality of quotable phrases.


Dickens's Hamlet Burlesque, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner Jan 2007

Dickens's Hamlet Burlesque, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner considers what an interlude in Great Expectations involving a spectacularly bad production of Hamlet can do for Hamlet. Specifically, Pollack-Pelzner looks at what Dickens's rendering of Mr. Wopsle's travesty reveals about Hamlet's openness to an audience's derisive laughter. Wopsle’s production may be a travesty, but Dickens’s narrative of that production is a burlesque, with Hamlet as much its target as Wopsle.