Hamlet: The State of Play

Description

This collection brings together emerging and established scholars to explore fresh approaches to Shakespeares best-known play. Hamlet has often served as a testing ground for innovative readings and new approaches. Its unique textual history surviving as it does in three substantially different early versions means that it offers an especially complex and intriguing case-study for histories of early modern publishing and the relationship between page and stage. Similarly, its long history of stage and screen revival, creative appropriation and critical commentary offer rich materials for various forms of scholarship. The essays in Hamlet: The State of Play explore the play from a variety of different angles, drawing on contemporary approaches to gender, sexuality, race, the history of emotions, memory, visual and material cultures, performativity, theories and histories of place, and textual studies. They offer fresh approaches to literary and cultural analysis, offer accessible introductions to some current ways of exploring the relationship between the three early texts, and present analysis of some important recent responses to Hamlet on screen and stage, together with a set of approaches to the study of adaptation. Cover page Halftitle page Series page Title page Copyright page CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS LIST OF TABLES NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS PREFACE SERIES PREFACE Introduction Sonia Massai and Lucy Munro 1 Hamlet ’s Touch of Picture Kaara L. Peterson Staged portraits Setting the scene Hamlet ’s afterlife 2 Remembering Ophelia Theatrical Properties and the Performance of Memory in Shakespeare’s Hamlet Kathryn M. Moncrief 3 ‘Tragedians of the City’ Hamlet and Urban Exile Kelly Stage Urbanitas Local-London-exile Hamlet the Dane 4 Code Black Whiteness and Unmanliness in Hamle tDavid Sterling Brown 5 Character Fictionsin Hamlet Jay Farness 6 Q1 Hamlet and the Sequence of Creation of the Texts Charles Adams Kelly and Dayna Leigh Plehn Variant texts Memorial reconstruction: The evidence against audience reporters The evidence against a cut version of Q2 as a possible Q1 source text The evidence against F1 or a post-F1 text as a possible source of Q1 The evidence for the Brudermord text (BB) as an early text Other evidence more easily reconciled with Q1 as a pre-Q2 text 7 The Hamlet First Quarto Traces of Performance? William Dodd A. Openers/closers, attention-getters E. Speech linkers G. Subjective responses I. Vocatives 8 ‘You May Wear Your Rue With a Difference’ Gertrude, Ghazala and the Sati in Haider Pompa Banerjee India’s Hamlet Unsettling Hamlet in Haider Gertrude and Ghazala 9 ‘Most Eloquent Music’ (and Multiple Texts) The 2017 Glyndebourne Opera of Hamlet Neil Taylor and Ann Thompson The plot The words Scene 1: The Funeral Scene 4: The Conspiracy Theory Scene 5: The Players Conclusion: Hamlet in pieces INDEX