Hamlet Between the Lines

Shakespeare, 2016

Terry Hands' Hamlet marks his swansong as artistic director of Clwyd Theatr Cymru, bringing to an end two decades of Shakespeare productions characterized by bold, imaginative touches and deep understanding of the text. As with Hands' last Shakespeare production, the 2012 As You Like It (see Roberts), a colour scheme signified the characters' place in the moral pecking order (the handsome design was by Mark Bailey). In 1.2, Hamlet (Lee Haven-Jones) was dressed entirely in black while the King, Queen and court were in white. Their entrance was accompanied by music like the chiming of wedding bells, and Ophelia (Caryl Morgan) carried a bouquet (perhaps prefiguring her later entrance with flowers). (All this was conventional enough; the masterstroke was that, after the interval, Hamlet returned in dazzling white to a black-clad court in mourning for Polonius and his daughter. 1 ) A large gold disc hanging from the flies established the tone for this scene; it matched the colour of Gertrude's closet, with its golden arras and gold-framed wall-length mirror. In this glittering world, the Prince's shabby scarf marked him out as an outsider; his clothing assimilated him to lowly, straight-talking characters such as Horatio and the soldiers, who also wore scarves and anklelength black coats. (For the performance of The Mousetrap, Horatio wore formal academic robes, his black gown again signalling his affinity with Hamlet.) Haven-Jones stressed his comradeship with these figures: he spoke his lines taking leave of Horatio and Marcellus -"And what so poor a man as Hamlet is / May do t'express his love and friending to you, / God willing, shall not lack" (1.5.185)with great sincerity and clapped his hands on their shoulders, before exiting with his arms around them. By contrast, the preening, fawning courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were significantly white-clad. This was a detail that, like their low, scraping bows and asinine laughter, invited the audience to see these two as (like Osric) absurd, unsympathetic characters from the start. Both would snigger grotesquely at Hamlet's "man delights not me" (2.2.310); during the playwithin-the-play, as Hamlet monitored Claudius and the King watched aghast at the representation of him killing his own brother, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern vacantly munched sweets, oblivious to any subversive content. Meanwhile, the Players (a social rung or two above the average Elizabethan actor) dressed uniformly in smart charcoal grey, their status something intermediate between the courtiers and soldiers.

Hamlet 1 is a play about intergenerational conflict. The parents, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, and the Ghost, are consistently shown trying to control the children, commanding, cajoling, lecturing, threatening, reproaching, spying, manipulating, and conspiring. The children, Hamlet, Laertes, Fortinbras and Ophelia, are shown in various characteristically uneasy and unsatisfactory reactions to this parental control. There is Fortinbras' apparent loyalty to a supposedly loved father, which is revealed as cynical opportunism by the ease with which he gives up his war of revenge for one of pure self-promotion. There is Laertes' superficially respectful but emotionally empty deference to the spying Polonius, from whom he is understandably eager to get away.

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2014

Ophelia is a paradox. She is marginalized, victimized, and even brutally mocked in Hamlet, yet she is one of the most quoted female figures of Shakespeare. Her victimization and above all, her poignantly symbolic and yet picturesquely framed suicidal death have given rise to certain movements and trends in art. Her corpse has been eroticized, with her pictures demonstrating a transcendental sensuality. Ophelia has been transformed in revisioning literature; yet the revisionings of Ophelia cannot be construed as mere responses to the text of Hamlet which creates a tendentious ambience for her characterization; the play provides meagre insight into her psyche and represents her not only as a meek but as an unsavoury character. This paper argues that these revisionings of Hamlet constitute a response to the image of Ophelia as femme fragile that has taken form throughout the centuries. The present article explores the voice, mind, and agency of Ophelia as depicted in three 21 st century novels which have transformed Hamlet. Attempts are also made to demonstrate that modern revisionings of Ophelia are not an exclusive reaction to the text of Shakespeare which was written more than four hundred years ago; the transformations of Ophelia have to be construed as responses to a range of historical and artistic accounts of Ophelia.

Renaissance and Reformation, 2009

In a play filled with alien presences from the outseta ghost from purgatory, a usurper king, an oedipal mother, a Norwegian political rival, treacherous friends, and the protean Hamletian essence of "man"it is nonetheless Ophelia, passive Ophelia, who constitutes the "other" in Hamlet. Even though contemporary feminist criticism is pluralistic and often contradictory, about Ophelia and her sisters there is consensus: Catherine Belsey notes that "woman" is defined only vis-à-vis "man";L inda Bamber describes the "feminine as a principle of Otherness. .. unlike and external to the Self, who is male";^Annie Leclerc protests that "Woman is valuable in so far as she permits man to fulfill his being as man";^and John Holloway assesses the function of Ophelia as reinforcing the centrality of Hamlet."* Her critical history, much like her treatment in the play, has been from the beginning a paradoxical one of possession and objectification: for Voltaire she is "Hamlet's mistress" and for Samuel Johnson "the young, the beautiful, the harmless, and the pious. "^D espite Ophelia's own sketch of the Prince in Ill.i as courtier, soldier, scholar,ŵ e would be shocked to find Hamlet described by critics in terms parallel to those shadowy abstractions often applied to Opheliaas "the mature, the handsome, the powerless, and the well-intentioned," for exampleprimarily because Shakespeare allows the language of Hamlet to particularize and individuate him indelibly. The world of Hamlet is to a great extent the self of Hamlet, and the self of Hamlet is to a great extent the language of Hamlet. Critics have often adopted Hamlefs own line of reasoning in generalizing about the nature and behavior of the "frail" gender and explained Ophelia only by linking her to Gertrude. Ophelia is actually a muted structural pivot, a Braille rendition of the hero's own progress. For Jacques Lacan, Ophelia is essential only because "she is linked forever, for centuries, to the figure Renaisance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, XXVI, 1 (1990) 1

Cankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2022

In Howard Barker's Gertrude-The Cry (2002), all the things most popularly known about Shakespeare's play Hamlet are subverted and transformed to a great extent. In this adaptation, the title character of the source text is changed from Hamlet to Gertrude, who is presented as a villainous woman in Hamlet with her potential involvement in her husband's murder and subsequent marriage to Claudius. Barker alters the status of Hamlet as the tragic hero and makes his mother the new heroine of the play who does not conform to any of the norms set for her in Shakespeare's text. Instead, Gertrude behaves as a woman extremely driven by erotic desire towards several male characters in the play. This paper analyses Barker's rewriting as an attempt to challenge the norms of womanhood represented in conventional literary works. The transformations in Barker's version are also related to women's role and status in society at the time the play was written. Regarding the dominant ideas of the play such as personal will and sexual liberation in light of the relevant legislations of the New Labour as the ruling party in Britain in the early years of the twenty-first century, Barker's play is also discussed as a politically driven adaptation.

The enigmatic qualities of Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet make this drama an appropriate choice for high school students who can evaluate and analyze the complexity of Hamlet's situation, his motivations, and the choices and decisions he makes. Students are immediately intrigued by the play, especially if teachers introduce them to the complicated dilemma of Prince Hamlet before they begin reading. Once students are aware of Hamlet's tragic story, they are compelled to learn what he decides to do and the consequences of his decisions.

Hamlet, the most significant play both in English and world literature, is a masterpiece of Shakespeare who is famous as the most well-known poet and dramatist. His masterpiece Hamlet was possibly written in the first period of the 17th century, but the source of Hamlet is Amleth (a revenge tale) which was published in the 16 th century. However, because of Shakespeare's genius, Hamlet, instead of Amleth, has become the source or subject for many studies and works going on the present since the 17 th century. Even though people do not take place in academic life, and do not read Shakespeare, they have knowledge about Hamlet in one way or another. Hamlet has taken place in their daily language and has been used to speak out for specific worldviews. In this play, it is easily observed that most of critics and scholars give full attention to Hamlet himself, but Hamlet is not just an attractive character in this tragedy. We can focus on characters of Hamlet that are victimized/ marginalized by the other, 'important' characters. Two victimized/ marginalized women characters are involved in Shakespeare's play. These women characters are Gertrude and Ophelia. They should be regarded as important for their very detailed positions, and by the help of these women characters; the play has raised in value. The purpose of this paper is to explain the power of males' effects over these characters, and analyse victimized Gertrude's and Ophelia's characteristic features.

There is something about Hamlet that is deeply familiar. However, a review of performance history over the last 100 years or so demonstrates that the Hamlet audiences and critics have come to “recognise” and value most highly came into being through specific staging interventions that secured a firm association between the play, Freudian psychoanalysis and the troubled interiority associated with modern subjectivity. It may be obvious to audiences, since Freud, that Hamlet is caught in a vortex of tormented, inward-looking indecision and Oedipal self-doubt, but he only became that with the help of centuries of interpretation, informed by the preoccupations of post-Enlightenment Europe and Freudian and post-Freudian theories of subjectivity and sexuality. This article examines the ways in which Freud’s cultural successors have fostered an understanding of Hamlet’s interiority excised from its social context. I argue that the many distinct “Hamlets” generated within countless interpretative contexts across the globe have opened the critical gap between what we think we might know about Hamlet and the less explored ways in which this play may continue to provoke social critique and inspire reflection. “Indigenised” Hamlets are far removed from what has emerged out of a cultural and philosophical tradition that still looks to Freud for its interpretative framework. They demonstrate that what we “recognise” in Hamlet is as provisional, as located, and as specific as the cultural context in which we have come to “know” him, and ourselves.