Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons^™

Hamlet In Narnia: The Prince And The Poem In Lewis’S Chronicles Of Narnia, Sarah R. A. Waters

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

C.S. Lewis is little-known for his Shakespeare scholarship except perhaps for his lecture “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem” for the British Academy (1942). This essay begins by discussing Lewis’s approach to the play and his desire to reenchant his audience with the play he had loved as a child, before character-criticism got in the way. It then explores how Lewis takes the Prince and the aspects he found most affective in Hamlet out of the play and explores them, imaginatively, in another world: recasting them “for children” in Narnia. The essay considers Hamlet in The Silver Chair in …

Teaching The Structure Of Hamlet: The "To Be Or Not To Be" Soliloquy Repositioned In Recent Film Adaptations, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

At a crucial turning point in online access to quality productions of Shakespeare, the (April 2010) Great Performances airing of Hamlet (with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart), the occasion arose to turn the open access to it into teaching strategies. Along with all else quirky about it, the production accepts what seems to be a trend in recent film adaptations, dating from at least Zeffirelli's with Mel Gibson in 1991; that is, to rearrange the sequence of Hamlet's 2.2 and 3.1 soliloquies. The precedent dates to the 1603 First Quarto, perhaps, but everything else about the first quarto …

What Happens (And Doesn't) In Hamlet (And Who Cares?), Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

This lecture, sponsored by Sigma Tau Delta, uses the classic text by John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, to initiate some important considerations on appreciating and teaching Hamlet. Attached as addenda 3 is a Handout which includes the list of soliloquies, keyed to act, scene, lines, as recorded in both the Riverside 2^nd edition and Norton 3^rd edition texts.

Wilson often gravitates to conundrums of the text. Is Hamlet fearing his own mental instability when he warns Marcellus and Horatio that he may put an "antic disposition" on? Why does Shakespeare give us two versions …

Bloody Thoughts: Violence And Wit In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Aubrey Keller

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

In this Honors thesis, I examine the roles of wit and violence in Shakespeare's The Tempest, exploring my original suspicion that the play is a pacifist work. Noticing references to "bloody thoughts" in both Hamlet and The Tempest, I hypothesized that while Shakespeare resolves his tragedies using violence, he resolves his comedies using wit, making the two foil plot devices. I discovered that the plot is not propelled by either violence or wit on their own, but by Prospero's cunning. Rejecting the conventional reading of Prospero as a sorcerer, I read Prospero as a Machiavellian figure. I examine …

Dadless: Dead Dads In Hamlet And The Effects On Their Children, Erin Diiorio

Student and Faculty Research Days

This research is a close look at the methods of grief as depicted by the children who lose their fathers in William Shakespeare’s classic, Hamlet. The goal is to track each child’s reaction to the sudden bereavement in a variety of physical and emotional manifestations. This has been done by first examining current literature on the text, followed by a review of historical context of the period in which the play was written, and finally analyzing each character’s behavior. In doing so, this research seeks to highlight the importance of the presence of fathers within Hamlet and provide insight …

The Shadow Puppets Of Elsinore: Edward Gordon Craig And The Cranach Press Hamlet, James P. Taylor

Mime Journal

Taylor considers the role that book arts may play in Craig’s theories of the new theatre, or the Art of the Future. He expands our understanding of Craig’s design work to include print culture, examining his engravings for the monumental editions of Hamlet published by Count Harry Kessler’s Cranach Press in 1929–30. Taylor explores the relationship of Craig’s designs for the 1912 Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet to his engravings for the German and English-language Cranach Press editions of the play. He suggests that it was only with this print publication that Craig finally achieved the absolute artistic control …

Something Is Rotten In The Unreal City: Hamlet In The Waste Land, Aimee Valentine

The Hilltop Review

T.S. Eliot’s poem of 1922, “The Waste Land,” lays philosophical and stylistic ground for the Modern literary movement in which human experience takes the performative shape of inner dialog (or soliloquy) for the benefit of the reader/audience. This essay will argue that Eliot’s poem is an existentialist work that is not merely informed by Shakespeare’s Hamlet (the earliest example of British existentialism), but is directly modeled after it, in Eliot’s attempt to rectify the play’s perceived failings. Existentialism as a key to unlocking the mood of Modern literature is overlooked by those critics who relegate existentialist literature to the …

Ophelia And The Feminine Construct, Lilly E. Romestant

Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research

In Shakespeare's celebrated tragic masterpiece, Hamlet, one of the most controversial and seminal characters, Ophelia, continues to have a heavy influence on contemporary culture today in some unexpected ways. Her prevalence in mainstream media––including film, literature, drama, and music homages––validates not only her importance now but also reimagines and reinforces her parallel importance at the time of her debut in 1603. Her association with global teenage culture, suicide, and mental illness, puts her in the unique position of being heralded, generation after generation, as an icon of depression in female youth. This can be both positive and negative, as …

Hamlet Reinvents Himself, William Walsh

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

We see the early modern as an open carry society. Hamlet’s success in the swordplay at the end is usually seen as his triumph, fulfilling his father’s injunction at last. The 2013 RSC production of Hamlet projected ambiguity, which I share. The most intriguing angle was Hamlet’s costume. Jonathon Slinger very quickly donned half of a fencing jacket; but the straps of the jacket dangled, strongly suggesting a straight jacket. Half mad, half resolute, Hamlet is driven through much of the play until, I will argue, he reinvents himself as a mad version of divine providence. The providential idea is …

Hamlet #Princeofdenmark: Exploring Gender And Technology Through A Contemporary Feminist Re-Interpretation Of Hamlet, Allegra B. Breedlove

Scripps Senior Theses

Exploring the process of designing, producing, directing and starring in a multimedia feminist re-interpretation of Shakespeare's Hamlet set in a contemporary social media landscape.

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.