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Shakespeare and the First Hamlet
Terri Bourus, Terri Bourus
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eBook - ePub
Shakespeare and the First Hamlet
Terri Bourus, Terri Bourus
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The first edition of Hamlet â often called 'Q1', shorthand for 'first quarto' â was published in 1603, in what we might regard as the early modern equivalent of a cheap paperback. Yet this early version of Shakespeare's classic tragedyis becoming increasingly canonical, not because there is universal agreement about what it is or what it means, but because more and more Shakespearians agree that it isworth arguing about.The essays in this collected volume explore the ways in which we might approach Q1's Hamlet, from performance to book history, from Shakespeare's relationships with his contemporaries to the shape of his whole career.
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Chapter 1
Shakespeareâs Early Gothic Hamlet
Gary Taylor
In the beginning was the Ghost.
In every text of Shakespeareâs Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark we hear about, and see, the Ghost of Hamlet before we hear about, or see, Prince Hamlet.
The first known quotation from a play about Hamlet quotes the Ghost, and only the Ghost. Twenty-three seventeenth-century allusions to the play mention the Ghost.1 Theatrical tradition claims that âthe top of [Shakespeareâs] Performance was the Ghost in his own Hamletâ.2 Shakespeare played the Ghost better than any other role.
Our assumptions about the literary, theatrical and textual history of Hamlet are quotations from the ghost of the eighteenth-century scholar Edmond Malone, telling us a story about a ghost play, an allegedly lost âUr-Hamletâ written in the 1580s.
The Ghost is male, Hamlet is male, the first Elizabethan writers to mention Hamlet are male. Shakespeare is male, Malone is male, Maloneâs ghost play was allegedly written by the English male playwright Thomas Kyd, inspired by the Roman male playwright Seneca. Saxo Grammaticus (who Latinised the medieval Scandinavian myth) and François Belleforest (who translated that story into French) were male. Contemplating Hamlet, we seem to be trapped in a haunted menâs club, or a haunted all-male English grammar school, or a haunted all-male university, like Wittenberg â or like âthe Universities of Cambridge and Oxfordâ, where Shakespeareâs Hamlet was performed in Shakespeareâs lifetime, according to the title page of the first edition.
But the ghost does not appear in the stories told by Saxo or Belleforest, and the ghost in the Elizabethan Hamlet fundamentally differs from all the ghosts dramatised by Seneca or Kyd. If you want to understand any of Hamletâs ghosts, you would be better off paying attention to the words of six women: Belsey, Bourus, Gertred, Kristeva, Montagu and Radcliffe.
Womenâs ghosts
The most important source of Shakespeareâs ghost, Catherine Belsey tells us, is not Seneca, not a writer, and almost certainly not a man. Hamletâs first scene dramatises âa dark winter nightâ, Belsey reminds us, where âthree seated figures are absorbed by a ghost storyâ, a story interrupted by the arrival of an actual ghost. That Ghostâs description of his torments owes something to Seneca and to medieval depictions of purgatory, but âthe ghost lore and the storytelling skills that make the apparition in Hamlet chilling grow out of the conventions of popular narrativeâ, which Shakespeare would have learned from âthe old wivesâ tales and fireside stories of his Warwickshire childhoodâ.3 In Macbeth, Shakespeare acknowledges such sources: Banquoâs ghost is compared to something out of âA womanâs story at a winterâs fire, / Authorized by her grandamâ (Macbeth 3.4.63â64). Hamletâs ghost rises from the same matriarchal font. More generally, Belsey argues that what most distinguishes Shakespeare from his contemporaries is his incorporation and transformation of the fundamentally oral, fundamentally rural and popular, tradition of fireside tales.4
In another essay, published in 2014, Belsey more explicitly and systematically contrasts Shakespeareâs populist Ghost in Hamlet to Kydâs elite Ghost of Andrea in The Spanish Tragedy. Andrea âdoes not interact with the participants in the plotâ and âhe is not uncannyâ; the role of the former King of Denmark âis unlike Andreaâs in almost every wayâ. In particular, Kydâs Andrea and other Elizabethan ghosts âmay have frightened playgoers but, even when they participate in the action of the play, there is little evidence that they had the same effect on the fictional characters they hauntedâ.5 The Ghost in Hamlet represents not only a departure from the precedent created by Kyd, but an innovation in early modern drama. No stage ghost before Shakespeare resembles the âthingâ that walks the battlements of Elsinore.
Belsey sustains this argument across three different publications, not because she particularly cares about nailing down every possible âsourceâ for Shakespeareâs plays, but because she is challenging a long patriarchal scholarly tradition that emphasises Shakespeareâs connections to classical literature and the Protestant Reformation. Connecting Shakespeare to Seneca situates him as a âRenaissanceâ superman, capable of leaping across centuries with a single bound, and worthy of comparison to the intellectual and aesthetic giants of the Roman Empire. Connecting Shakespeare to the Reformation endows him with the intellectual seriousness of theology, the moral authority of Christianity, and the imperial nationalism of an England independent of Rome or any other European obligations. Both connections link Shakespeare to the educated male elite that dominated the editing and interpretation of his work from the early eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth.
Belsey does not deny that Shakespeare owes something to Seneca. But she does make that Senecan connection secondary, and dissociates it from the most interesting features of King Hamletâs Ghost. As A.J. Boyle observes, Seneca gave Renaissance dramatists, in and out of England, models for âvivid and powerful declamatory verse, psychological insight, highly effective staging, an intellectually demanding verbal and conceptual framework, and a precocious preoccupation with theatricality and theatricalizationâ.6 Senecaâs plays do contain ghosts, which did influence the drama of the European Renaissance, beginning with Gregorio Correrâs neo-Latin Procne in the 1420s.7 But only two of Senecaâs ghosts talk, and neither directly engages with the playâs âlivingâ characters.
All the features of the Ghost that Belsey describes occur in all three early versions of the play, and she does not commit herself to a particular textual hypothesis about the origins of Q1 Hamlet. Nevertheless, she makes a number of standard assumptions about Shakespeareâs play. âHamlet must have been written between 1599 and 1601â, she states, without feeling the need to cite any evidence for this traditional date, which goes back to Malone; likewise, she suggests that Shakespeareâs Hamlet and Marstonâs play Antonioâs Revenge may well draw on âa common source, probably Kydâs lost Hamletâ â thus assuming, like most scholars since Malone, that Shakespeare was influenced by a lost play about Hamlet, written in the late 1580s by Thomas Kyd.8
Belsey accepted those assumptions in 2014, but they were not important to her argument, and they were systematically demolished that same year. Terri Bourus, re-examining the long scholarly history of claims about the chronology of Shakespeareâs works, including all early references to âHamletâ in the theatre, demonstrated that âMaloneâs insistence that the 1589 Hamlet cannot have been written by Shakespeare is unwarrantedâ.9 She also argued that Q1 Hamlet could be the tragedy about Hamlet that Thomas Nashe mocked in 1589, that the Chamberlainâs Men performed in 1594 and 1596, that Thomas Lodge mocked in 1596, that was performed in the City of London and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the late 1580s or early 1590s.
In 2014, Belsey had not read Bourus, and Bourus had not read Belsey. But their separate claims strengthen each other. Belseyâs evidence that the Ghost reflects provincial folk tales and Shakespeareâs own âWarwickshire childhoodâ reinforces the evidence, marshalled by Bourus, that links Q1 Hamlet to events in Warwickshire between 1579 and 1585 (and to texts, political events and theatrical fashions of the 1570s and 1580s). Shakespeareâs best performance as an actor was a role inspired by stories that laid the first foundations of his imagination. Likewise, if Shakespeare wrote his first Hamlet in late 1588 or early 1589 (as Bourus argues), then âShakespeareâs own first sad tale of and for winterâ (as Belsey calls Hamlet) is a defining âfirstâ, an authorial signature, from the outset of his career.10
That authorial signature, in turn, explains the caustic tone of early references to Hamlet in the theatre. Bourus brilliantly and originally analyses Thomas Lodgeâs 1596 pamphlet, which alludes to âthe Vizard of the ghost which cried so miserally at the Theater like an oyster wife, Hamlet, revengeâ.11 But if Bourus had read Belsey, she might also have recognised the particular resonance of Lodgeâs otherwise superfluous âoyster wifeâ. Lodge associates the Ghost in Hamlet with a source, and a stereotype, that is female, oral and uneducated â just like the âold wivesâ who were associated with the telling of ghost stories. University-educated critics like Lodge (in 1596) and Thomas Nashe (in 1589) mocked the early Hamlet play precisely because it did not uphold the elite male values of their own classical education. But Lodge specifically tells us that, in the original Hamlet performed at the Theatre, the Ghost spoke directly to Hamlet. It thus engaged directly with the playâs living characters â as Senecaâs ghosts do not, as Kydâs ghost does not, but as the ghosts of traditional stories did. That early Hamlet ghost was typical not only of Shakespeareâs other ghosts, but of his many portrayals of other âontological outliersâ: weĂŻrd sisters, fairies, a puck like Robin Goodfellow, a spirit like Ariel, a âmonsterâ like Caliban.12 These hybrid beings all draw upon medieval storytelling, and all initiate interaction and dialogue with humans. Lodge was mocking a characteristically Shakespearian ghost.
The motherâs scene
Like Belsey, Bourus challenged the patriarchal scholarly tradition that has governed interpretation of Hamlet; but unlike Belsey, Bourus was primarily interested in textual and theatrical issues. Young Shakespeareâs Young Hamlet seems to me the single most important book in Shakespearean textual criticism since The Division of the Kingdoms, published thirty years earlier â and it has provoked similarly hostile reactions from self-appointed guardians of Shakespeareâs reputation.13 But Bourus, in reframing the textual issues, also reinterprets t...