Histrionic Hamlet
Histrionic Hamlet

Author: Piotr Sadowski

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-18

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1040127428

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According to psychological research on acting, the histrionic personality consists of a compulsive tendency to play-act, exaggerate emotions, succumb to illusions, seek attention through speech, body language and costume, to be seductive and impulsive. An original intervention in the critical history of Shakespeare’s most famous play, Histrionic Hamlet argues that the Danish Prince is a stage representation of just such a personality—a born actor and a drama queen rather than a politician—incongruously thrown in the middle of ruthless high-stakes power struggle requiring pragmatic rather than theatrical skills. Uniquely among other English revenge tragedies, in Hamlet a histrionic protagonist striking a series of gratuitous, baffling, self-indulgent, and counterproductive poses is called upon to carry out a challenging and brutal political task, which he spectacularly and tragically mismanages. Unable to perform on a theatrical stage as a professional actor, the Clown Prince bitterly play acts anyway, turning all situations into opportunities of pretend play rather than effective political action. In consequence he wastes tactical advantages over his enemies, endangers himself, and jeopardizes his revenge plan, if ever there was one. Histrionic Hamlet should be of interest to students of Shakespeare, theater practitioners, and anyone interested in human dysfunctional and maladaptive behavior.

Hamlet's Fictions
Hamlet's Fictions

Author: Maurice Charney

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-02-03

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 1317814428

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"But in a fiction, in a dream of passion..." In an extended commentary on this passage this book offers a rationale for the excellence and primacy of this play among the tragedies. Throughout, emphasis is placed on Hamlet's fantasies and imaginations rather than on ethical criteria, and on the depiction of Hamlet as a revenge play through an exploration of its dark and mysterious aspects. The book stresses the importance of Passion and Its Fictions in the play and attempts to explore the very Pirandellian topic of Hamlet's passion and dream of passion. It goes on to examine the organization of dramatic energies in the play - the use Shakespeare makes of analogy and infinite regress and of scene rows, broken scenes and impacted scenes, and the significance of the exact middle of Hamlet. The final section is devoted to conventions of style, imagery, and genre in the play - what is the stage situation of asides, soliloguies, and offstage speech? How is the imagery of skin disease and sealing distinctive? In what sense is Hamlet a comedy, or does it use comedy significantly?

Hamlet
Hamlet

Author: Anthony Dawson

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780719046254

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In this illuminating study, Anthony Dawson surveys the stage history of Hamlet from its appearance in Shakespeare’s time to the efflorescence of new and challenging productions in our own. He vividly re-creates more than a dozen representative performances across three centuries. Bringing together theatre history and the interests of cultural criticism and performance theory, Dawson traces the Anglo-American acting tradition and provides a succinct account of the interpretative problems associated with texts, character, design, and the production of meaning. The final chapters extend the analysis to a number of film versions, notably those of Olivier, Kozintsev and Zeffirelli, as well as to several important European stage productions.

The Ghosts of Hamlet
The Ghosts of Hamlet

Author: Martin Scofield

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1980-11-27

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0521227356

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This study approaches Hamlet through its influence on the work of some writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Anecdotal Shakespeare
Anecdotal Shakespeare

Author: Paul Menzer

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-10-22

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1472576179

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Shakespeare's four-hundred-year performance history is full of anecdotes – ribald, trivial, frequently funny, sometimes disturbing, and always but loosely allegiant to fact. Such anecdotes are nevertheless a vital index to the ways that Shakespeare's plays have generated meaning across varied times and in varied places. Furthermore, particular plays have produced particular anecdotes – stories of a real skull in Hamlet, superstitions about the name Macbeth, toga troubles in Julius Caesar – and therefore express something embedded in the plays they attend. Anecdotes constitute then not just a vital component of a play's performance history but a form of vernacular criticism by the personnel most intimately involved in their production: actors. These anecdotes are therefore every bit as responsive to and expressive of a play's meanings across time as the equally rich history of Shakespearean criticism or indeed the very performances these anecdotes treat. Anecdotal Shakespeare provides a history of post-Renaissance Shakespeare and performance, one not based in fact but no less full of truth.

Shakespeare and the Modern Stage; with Other Essays
Shakespeare and the Modern Stage; with Other Essays

Author: Sidney Sir Lee

Publisher: Good Press

Published: 2019-12-19

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13:

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As this book was first published in the early twentieth century, it should be remembered that 'modern' can refer only to nineteenth-century theater. Sir Sydney Lee writes very much from the point of view that Shakespeare must be performed to be fully appreciated.