Top Research Papers on Hamlet

In the large body of scholarship devoted to the study of Shakespeare’s classical sources, a relatively small but distinguished segment deals with the direct or indirect influence of Attic tragedy on Shakespeare’s dramatic art. In spite of or even in accordance with the firmly established and widely accepted tenet of Senecan influence, scholars never cease to surprise us with new theories and findings about possible parallels between the tragedies of Shakespeare and those of Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides. The scope of such research may range from a philologically oriented critical revaluati...

Automatic term extraction (ATE) is an important task within natural language processing, both separately, and as a preprocessing step for other tasks. In recent years, research has moved far beyond the traditional hybrid approach where candidate terms are extracted based on part-of-speech patterns and filtered and sorted with statistical termhood and unithood measures. While there has been an explosion of different types of features and algorithms, including machine learning methodologies, some of the fundamental problems remain unsolved, such as the ambiguous nature of the concept “term”. Th...

The protagonist of Jenny Andreasson's autobiographical novel Teatern (2022) is a young female director whose feminist production of Hamlet at the Swedish national stage fails to have its planned premiere. While the novel makes a point of describing the misogynist structures behind this failure, the present article suggests that class structures and precarity are the main reasons behind it. The financial difficulties of the theatre generate a clear discrepancy between cultural capital – embodied by Shakespeare's canonical play – and economic. The resulting precarious work situation is reflecte...

Hamlet is Shakespeares most famous play. Scholars have engaged in extensive debates regarding the themes of revenge and procrastination in Hamlet. However, existing research falls short in fully exploring Hamlets thoughts on kingship and his relationship with power. Despite the extensive examination of Hamlets complex character, a more in-depth analysis from this perspective is warranted. This paper, therefore, aims to further explore the connection between Hamlet and political power from three key angles. Firstly, it examines Hamlets reflections on kingship as presented through the drama and ...

An unpublished short story by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It fancifully elaborates the story of Acts 4 and 5 of Hamlet, starting on board the ship taking Hamlet to England after the killing of Polonius. The story begins before the Danish vessel’s encounter with a pirate ship and Hamlet’s capture by the pirates, and imagines the circumstances by which he returns to Denmark in the changed state of mind in which we meet him in Act 5.

This introductory chapter argues that William Shakespeare's Hamlet can be read as a profound meditation on the nature of human individuality without relying on conceptual frameworks drawn from the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Just as historical discourses beyond those of Hamlet itself provide a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the political and dynastic forces shaping life in Shakespeare's Denmark, so what might be called Hamlet's “character” appears in unfamiliar and revealing relief when read against the textual contours of the psychological, rhetori...

"Hamlet" without Hamlet, by Margreta de Grazia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 267. Cloth $101.00; paper $41.99. Margreta de Grazia's "Hamlet" without Hamlet rejects two hundred years of psychological readings of the play's hero to ground her interpretation of Hamlet in ground itself, in "the close relationship between human and humus, man and manor," and even Hamlet and hamlet (6). This attention to the land resurrects both the political nature of the play as a dynastic struggle and resurrects the plot, too often ignored since Coleridge in favor of character. Overall, ...

Preface: Hamlet without Hamlet 1. Modern Hamlet 2. 'Old Mole': the modern Telos and the return to dust 3. Empires of world history 4. Generation and degeneracy 5. Doomsday and domain 6. Hamlet's delay Select bibliography.

Serve esta reflexao  para ensar e abordar o tema do fantasma em Hamlet - peca de Shakespeare, quanto a nos, desprovida de um centro claro, cheia de momentos de hesitacao e reflexao profunda. Estes aspectos serao aqui explorados, apresentando-se a proposta do espectro vir a ocupar esse centr ovazio.  O espectro, seguindo esta linha de pensamento, podera operar como um centro panoptico que vigia todas as personagens e, de uma forma ou de outra, acaba por estabelecer entre elas accoes de poder. Pensa-se ainda sobre o que chamamos efeitos do fantasma. Questoes como a noite - horario nobre das apar...

Hamlet is a hero of the Renaissance. His melancholy and morals as well as his limitations and tragedy all are typical to the humanist qualities.

This article discusses a 2018 theatrical production of Hamlet with Romanian teenage arts students, directed by one of the article’s authors, actress and academic Dana Trifan Enache. As an artist, she believes that the art of theatre spectacle depends pre-eminently on the actors’ enactment, and hones her students’ acting skills and technique accordingly. The other voice in the article comes from an academic in a cognate discipline within the broad field of arts and humanities. As a feminist and medievalist, the latter has investigated the political underside of representations of the body in re...

General Background: Counter-discourse serves as a vital mechanism for marginalized and oppressed groups to challenge dominant narratives that often marginalize alternative perspectives. Specific Background: The concept of counter-discourse has been explored in various contexts, yet its application to classic literature, such as Shakespeare’s "Hamlet," remains underrepresented. Knowledge Gap: To date, no comprehensive studies have applied the lens of counter-discourse to "Hamlet" within a postcolonial framework. Aims: This study aims to bridge this gap by examining how "Hamlet" can be understoo...

IKE every play, Hamlet is a complex rhetorical structure, a series of verbal and visual cues which guide its audiences' responses. The function of these cues is to create a coherent dramatic experience in the minds of its audiences, for that is j finally where all plays are enacted. At the same time, however, the speeches, gestures, and settings, all those things which serve as rhetorical cues, come together as dramatic phenomena in creating an apparently self-contained world on stage. Thus, about a single speech we may say either, "Here Hamlet reveals such and such about himself," or, "Here w...

Sosnowska, Monika. Hamlet uzmystowiony (Sensuous Hamlet). Lodz: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Lodzkiego, 2013. Pp. 201.Today, the range of academic approaches applied to the study of senses has reached beyond areas limited to psychological inquiry. Sensuality has become an object of study for scholars representing various academic disciplines, proving them to be both challenging and significant terrains for numerous, often interdisciplinary academic analyses. Senses have, therefore, begun to be seen as cultural formations which are subject to considerable changes in time and a topic which requires ...

Penelitian ini membahas tentang depresi yang ada pada novel hamlet karya Shakespeare. Penelitian ini focus kepada Hamlet sebagai karakter utama di dalam novel. tujuan dari penulisan ini untuk mengungkapkan alas an kenapa Hamlet mengalami depresi dan menganalisa efek dari sifat depresi. Penelitian ini menggunakan penilitian kepustakaan untuk mengoleksi data dan menjawab masalah. Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa karakter utama di dalam drama ini adalah Hamlet, pangeran dari Denmark, memiliki sebuah objektivitas untuk menganalisa deprei yang dialami oleh Hamlet sebagai pelaku protagoni...

about narrative sequence are implicated in representations of eroticism” (279). Her test case, as with Smith, is Shakespeare in Love. Analyses of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece in this volume also center on sexuality. As Richard Rambuss notes, Shakespeare dedicated his first lengthy poem, an erotic epyllion, to a young aristocrat (Southampton) known for his good looks and his refined taste in literature. Rambuss argues against reading the poem in terms of role reversals and androgyny; he chooses instead to emphasize the poem’s “overtones of male friendship, male initiation or coming ...

The Renaissance context Ever since nineteenth-century historians such as Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt began elaborating a systematic concept of the Renaissance, the idea has proved controversial. Some have questioned whether it is accurate to speak of the Renaissance as a distinct period; others have confined themselves to questioning the dating of the age, or proposing a variety of Renaissances. Certainly when one surveys what has come to be known as the Renaissance, it looks different in different countries, and seems to proceed at different rates in different areas (the Renaissance i...

to comedies and tragedies also, as Bevington illustrates in his spatial analysis of Romeo and Juliet, with its changes from ballroom to garden, from appearances at a window to descents to the main stage, and from bedroom to tomb. He gives examples from several plays of the multiple uses of the stage’s upper gallery (which was not the balcony conventionally imagined in Romeo and Juliet), as well as the discovery space from which the action was brought forward to the main part of the stage. With later productions that strove for verisimilitude the flexibility was lost, though audiences were able...

The importation of Shakespeare into Japan in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, following the opening of Japan to the outside world effected by the Meiji empire, generated a culture clash between the antiquity of the plays themselves, and the identification of Shakespeare with modern English drama. Harue Tsutsumi’s play Kanadehon Hamlet explores this conflict, dramatizing the difficulties encountered by a troupe of Japanese actors attempting to perform Hamlet, when their deeper loyalty is to the traditional Japanese revenge play Kanadehon Chushingura. Homing in on a crucial moment...

To be or not to be, the famous monologue that is very present in the actors’ repertoires, has suffered many changes overtime which either gave us extraordinary moments or it was simply transformed into dialogue, it was fragmented, moved into different acts other than where the author put it.

Quinnopolis vs. Hamlet is ultimately an emanation of Hamlet. Most meta-characters, at least in the Western tradition, absorbed in the process of coming-into-consciousness and ensnared by the anxieties that attend on the awareness of mortality, trace their lineage back to Shakespeare's play; Quinnopolis vs. Hamlet simply discloses this relationship. But by divesting themselves of Hamlet's equanimity in the face of mortality and by replacing Shakespeare's heightened language with a howl of grief, the characters in Quinnopolis vs. Hamlet refuse to concede to Hamlet the final word.

This study aims at investigating the theme of heroism in four reworkings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet produced in the early period of the Arab Spring.  It briefly traces how Hamlet is dramatized as a hero in Hayder Abdullah AL-Shatery’s In Waiting for Hamlet as a rewriting In Iraq, Mohammad Farouq ‘s Goodbye Hamlet and Hani Affefi’s I’m Hamlet as stage Adaptations in Egypt, and  Urwa Al-Araby’s The Syrian Hamlet as stage adaptations in Syria. The study then analyses how the four plays were impacted by the sense of political hope and heroism that accompanied the Arab uprisings and seen in the Arab y...

A companion to volume 1,Hamlet: Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition,Volume 2presents key critical accounts ofHamletfrom 1885-1964. The volume offers, in separate sections, both critical opinions about the play across the centuries and an evaluation of their positions within and their impact on the reception of the play. The volume features criticism from leading literary figures, such as Sigmund Freud, T.S. Eliot, A.C. Bradley, Helena Faucit Saville and Matthew Arnold. The chronological arrangement of the text-excerpts engages the readers in a direct and unbiased dialogue, whereas the introdu...

In his creation of characters, Shakespear has surpassed the limits of the form of playwright and ingeniously used the dramatic device of soliloquy to reveal the thoughts and feelings hidden deeply in the hearts of the characters, thus making them figures with a vast and complex inner world. Soliloquies of Hamlet express his complicated psychological state of being idealistic yet pessimistic for the cruel reality, bold in action but hesitating in decision, diligent in thinking but restricted only to his inner world. In this way, these soliloquies help bring to light the multio-level characters ...

to the audience’s enjoyment. Nonetheless, the feeling of a rushed end remained to some extent. The play closed with Julia and Proteus (Mark Arends), standing diagonally across the stage, contemplating a tentative reconciliation that abided by the 2020 norms of social distancing. But, before that, had Sylvia really intended to kill Proteus, only to be prevented by Valentine (Michael Marcus) even as he offered to ‘give her’ to his friend? Was she in such a state of anger and shock that she didn’t really take in what he was saying, which is why she went off with him placidly? Who is Sylvia? Certa...

Dr. Eissler's double expertise as psychoanalyst and Shakespearian scholar becomes quickly apparent. Shakespeare's plays, he says, offer a "mind-created world... but a complete one, parallel to the one we know... the vicissitudes of human life appear to be compressed into... solid and meaningful forms..." The "New Criticism," he points out, finds the psychoanalytic approach a deliberate attempt to equate Shakespearian characters with living human beings, in an effort to unearth unconscious motivations. In the body of Shakespeare's work, there are depths that scientific psychology has not yet co...

This is that Hamlet the Dane, whom we read of in our youth, and whom we seem almost to remember in our after-years; he who made that famous soliloquy on life, who gave the advice to the players, who thought ‘this goodly frame, the earth, a steril promontory, and this brave o’er-hanging firmament, the air, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours;’* whom ‘man delighted not, nor woman neither;’* he who talked with the grave-diggers, and moralised on Yorick’s skull; the school-fellow of Rosencraus and Guildenstern at Wittenberg; the friend of H...

Shakespeare and Hamlet both use existing sources for the plots of “Hamlet” and “The Murder of Gonzago” respectively. 1 Shakespeare, who is said to have played the role of the ghost of Hamlet’s father at the Globe Theatre, could be regarded not only as the writer but also as the first director of “Hamlet”. 2 Like him, Hamlet is also staging a play in “Hamlet”, and even makes some modifications to it. As Marvin Hunt puts it, “In contributing ‘some dozen lines, or sixteen lines’ to “The Murder of Gonzago”, Hamlet becomes, as it were, a coauthor of “Hamlet” [Hunt, 2007: 213]. 3 However, the idea o...

This book differs little from previous conceptions of Hamlet the man and of his dynamics and problems and carries the long-existing and deep veins of misogyny revealed in the interpretations of the characters of Queen Gertrude and Ophelia.

Among Shakespeare's plays, "Hamlet" is considered by many his masterpiece. Among actors, the role of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is considered the jewel in the crown of a triumphant theatrical career. Now Kenneth Branagh plays the leading role and co-directs a brillant ensemble performance. Three generations of legendary leading actors, many of whom first assembled for the Oscar-winning film "Henry" V, gather here to perform the rarely heard complete version of the play. This clear, subtly nuanced, stunning dramatization, presented by The Renaissance Theatre Company in association with "Bbc" Br...

In this account of Hamlet I am concerned to shift attention from Hamlet himself to the larger conflicts and issues that now seem important to me in shaping the action. It is almost impossible to comment on a drama without treating the characters as if they were human beings acting in full autonomy, and it would be rather absurd to preface every remark by noting that the characters only exist as we produce them from Shakespeare's words on the page. Furthermore, as critics have shown over and over again, the characters and the play take on a life of their own in relation to the world of the crit...

Basing her conclusions of research into apocalyptic and Mariological imagery in Hamlet, Hoff offers a comphrensive solution to Hamelet's personal problems. The study includes an examination of the textual history and various biblical translations and word comparisons. The guide aims to convince through historical analysis that standard readings of "Hamlet" have missed a theological superstructure running throughout the play.

This research delves into the intricate relationships depicted in William Shakespeare's “Hamlet”, with a focus on Hamlet's interactions with female characters. It aims to unravel the complexities of these relationships, shedding light on Shakespeare's portrayal of gender dynamics, power struggles, and emotional entanglements. Employing a qualitative approach, the study analyzes interactions between Hamlet and characters like Ophelia and Gertrude, drawing from primary texts and scholarly analyses. Primary data sources include the original text of “Hamlet” and reputable academic commentaries, co...

Giovanni Testori (1923-1993) is an atypical figure in the Italian cultural panorama of the second half of the twentieth century, especially because of his multidimensional artistic output and an overt obsession with Hamlet . Tracing Testori’s life-long relationship with Shakespeare's Hamlet, and focusing on his intense dramatic and poetic production in the early 1970s, this article reflects on the evolution of Testori's Hamlet into an ultimate character endowed with mythological and anthropological dimensions. Deconstructing Testori's encounters with Hamlet's haunting presence involves more th...

This article discusses four Hamlet adaptations produced in twentieth-century Japan: Naoya Shiga’s ‘Claudius’s Diary’ (1912), Hideo Kobayashi’s ‘Ophelia’s Testament’ (1931), Osamu Dazai’s New Hamlet (1941) and Shohei Ooka’s Hamlet’s Diary (1955). Though differently motivated, and written in different styles, they collectively make something of a tradition, each revealing a unique, unexpected interpretation of the famous tragedy. Read as a group, they thoroughly disprove the stereotypical view that Japan has generally taken a highly respectful, imitative attitude to Western culture and Shakespea...

The present paper aims at investigating the problem of translating interjections from English into Polish. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and its Polish translations by J. Paszkowski (1961), M. S ł omczy ń ski (1978), and S. Bara ń czak (1990) are chosen as the corpus for the present study. The analysis of the translations of the original English interjections will reveal the translational strategies followed by the trans-lators. The fi rst part of the paper is devoted to a short discussion concerning the de fi nition and taxonomy of interjections. Next, the problem of the role interjections play ...

Traditional settlements that still survive until now one of them is in Sade Hamlet, Central Lombok Regency, NTB. This settlement is now a tourist destination because of the original architectural form of outer and inner spaces. These settlements have distinctive characteristics formed by local people from the time of their ancestors. Local wisdom is seen at the macro and micro scale which is a characteristic that has an opportunity value. This value arises due to trust (watu telu and watu lima) and culture (the use of cow dung when mopping) and moral values handed down by their ancestors. This...

In this dissertation I have endeavoured through words and figures to 'map' my performance of Hamlet from a feminist perspective. Assuming that both the audience and the reader are familiar with Shakespeare's text, I have centred my project around an adaptation and performance of Hamlet called 'I, Hamlet'. 'I, Hamlet' is a perspective of the play, scripted for three actors, that focuses on the performance of gender and identity. The resultant map, this dissertation, is constructed out of several different 'mappings' that intersect and inform one another. These mappings include: 1. A critical a...

There is a tradition of reading Hamlet against the tradition of reading Hamlet : just as actors in the role have attempted to shake off the overbearing weight of other Hamlets, so too have commentators attempted to unsettle received notions of the play. The most conspicuous recent example of this effort is Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor’s third edition of the Arden Hamlet (2006), which prints separately the 1603 Quarto, the 1604–5 Quarto, and the 1623 Folio editions, refuting the possibility of a clear and authoritative text (yet, enigmatically, giving pride of place to the Second Quarto by publ...

La compagnia Punta Corsara - nata dal fortunato laboratorio di non-scuola “Arrevuoto” che il regista Marco Martinelli ha tenuto con gli adolescenti di Napoli e dei turbolenti quartieri di Scampia - con il suo Hamlet Travestie non mette in scena solo la parodia del dramma di Shakespeare, ma compie un triplo salto mortale: si parte, nel titolo, dall’opera dell’inglese John Poole, ottocentesca parodia burlesque del testo shakespeariano, passando per il Don Fausto di Antonio Petito, a sua volta parodia del Faust di Goethe, per approdare, in un vertiginoso e sapiente gioco di incastri, alla tragedi...

This is a conference paper. The following thoughts arise from a book that I am writing on the twentieth-century history of editorial theories in respect of Shakespeare. The New Bibliography that emerged from the work of A. J. Pollard, W. W. Greg, and R. B. McKerrow in the first decades of the century assumed a relatively unproblematic application of Platonic idealism for the relationship between the play as conceived in the mind of the dramatist and the play as performed or written down. Such idealism has in recent critical work (especially from the schools of New Historicism and Cultural Mate...

Detached from Shakespeare’s English, Hamlet has been rewritten numerous times in European languages, the various translations into any one language jostling with each other for dominance and spawning new Hamlets that depart decisively from Shakespeare as a source. This book focuses on the rich tradition of drawing from Hamlet in European cultures to produce new, independent works, which include Hamlet theatre, Hamlet ballet, Hamlet poetry, Hamlet fiction, Hamlet essays and Hamlet films. It examines how the myth of Hamlet has crossed back and forth over Europe’s linguistic borders for four hund...

Lev S. Vygotsky is one of the major figures of psychology; however, his deep engagement with the arts is less known. This is surprising, given the fact that the arts, and especially Shakespeare’s Hamlet, are present throughout his career. In this article, we argue, first, that Hamlet was a major symbolic resource for Vygotsky in times of liminal transitions, and second, that it is this very deep experience of having been transformed by means of Hamlet that grounds his psychology of art, which aims precisely to show how Hamlet works as a “technique of emotions.” Our demonstration is organized i...

In Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov creates the world of Padukgrad, a dystopian society symbolic of Stalin's tyrannical regime. In the novel, an obscure scholar proposes an adaptation of Hamlet to be performed at Padukgrad state theater. This adaptation transforms Fortinbras into the hero of the play and presents the tragic flaw of Hamlet as secondary. I use Nabokov's anti-Stalinist appropriation of Shakespeare as a point of departure to legitimize Marxist-Leninist appropriative deployments of Hamlet that precede the taint of Stalin. German, Soviet, and American Leftists alike incorporated Haml...

The paper aims at reading Mamduh Adwan‟s play Hamlet Wakes up Late (1978) from a Marxist perspective to broadly examine how life under a Capitalist system along with its foreign investments and trading services can easily destroy the political, social as well as the cultural surroundings of a certain nation. Throughout his play, Adwan brilliantly adapts Shakespeare and offers a Marxist point of view to comment on how the West continues to dominate the East with its economic power. Importantly, in employing Shakespeare‟s portrayal of Hamlet as a tragic hero, Adwan uses him as a dramatic archety...

ABSTRACT Extracts from Shakespeare’s Hamlet are used to show how obstacles to mourning may arise from the persistent demands of melancholic internal objects demanding repair and revenge. It is only with the development of symbolic function as a result of separateness between self and object that reparation becomes possible and ghosts are turned into ancestors.

This research paper examines the portrayal of women in Shakespeare's Hamlet, looking for antifeminist overtones. The study exposes situations that maintain traditional gender stereotypes and suppress female autonomy through an assessment of female characters such as Gertrude and Ophelia. It also looks into the patriarchal power dynamics and societal expectations imposed on women in the play, taking into account the historical and social context. The research, which engages with feminist interpretations and scholarly discourse, provides a complete overview of several perspectives on the subject...

From the point of view of temporality, Shakespeare’s tragedy of Hamlet falls into two parts. The first sequence, leading from the ghost’s appearance to the Mousetrap, stages – in its manifold soliloquies and monologues slowly and painfully exploring the protagonist’s conscience – Hamlet’s inexorable inner search for truth so as to be able to legitimize his ‘sovereign’ right to act. This is what is read as a programmatic ‘interiorisation’ of structural violence. The second sequence, leading from Hamlet’s authorisation to act to his unfortunate and untimely death, pursues the contingent asynchr...

William Shakespeare emerged as a champion of dramatic art in his brilliant tragedies. Hamlet stands as a touchstone of his creative opus owing to its manifold themes and depiction of human conscience at work. The story of the tragic prince of Denmark is very enigmatic in nature. His is the saga of a creative and philosophic genius who had to undergo deeper pains to justify his existence in the not so sensitive world. That he wanted his story to be known to the posterity in its logical form and that he beseeched his confidante Horatio to live to narrate it so that he might not be misunderstood ...

In 2023, the whole world eagerly awaited the release of the book Spare by Prince Harry. It is not only the prince’s admirers and the people who are interested in the British monarchy, but also academics from humanities and popular magazines express their interest in Spare, which increases Harry’s popularity in all social groups of Western society. Spare introduces the British Monarchy through the eyes of the insider. Probably, the most popular and tragic story in the history of English and world literature narrated by the insider is Hamlet. In Shakespeare’s times, the theatre played the same r...