The Hamlet – or Faulkner's Infatuation with V.K. Ratliff

A Close Focus into the Inner World and Mind of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, 2019

William Shakespeare's longest play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, has been a point of focus of critics for centuries. What makes Hamlet so popular and perennial is its intricate structure and oblivion message in terms of what the real doctrine behind the work is. Hamlet's inner world has still remained unsolved though a number of interpretation studies have been conducted. The murder of the former king triggers Hamlet to change his character. It is seen that this change is actually what makes the work a deep pit. His plans and actions are formed by the sentiments that he gets as a result of discovering his father's murder and his mother's affair with his uncle, the murderer at the same time. The more he discovers, the deeper he gets into both emotionally and mentally. In order to shed more light on Hamlet and the work, his emotional progression and state of mind were analyzed and interpreted in depth in this study.

Acta Neophilologica

This article fuses a survey of the play’s most important standard interpretations with those aspects which may be considered particularly fascinating about this text: the conflict of England’s catholic past with the rise of protestant culture in the early modern period; the meta-dramatic dimension of the play; the theatricality of Renaissance court life; the play’s reflection of the emerging modern subject triggered off by the rise of reformation discourse. To elucidate some aspects which tend to be overlooked in the scholarly discussion of Hamlet, the article will bring two important topics into focus: the courtly discovery of perspective and the dying Hamlet’s request to tell his story to the afterworld at the end of the play.

In this [essay] I examine another character who is a prolific master at the art of self-invention, namely, Hamlet. Yet I would also remember that the play Hamlet is a mystery play in the modern sense. From the very beginning to the end of the play, it continually raises questions that remain mysteries. For too long, however, these mysteries have been considered principally in relation to the eponymous hero. What would happen to our understanding of the other characters if we extended the mystery of the play to them? This is a question I would like to explore in this chapter. It is also a question that will lead to the ultimate mystery: What lies beyond the grave, and what does it matter what lies there?

Revised, expanded version of the draft first posted 15 April 2018. Published on-line first 27 June 2018. Rhodri Lewis argues here that Shakespeare’s best-known tragedy is a commentary on his intellectual context. More specifically, Hamlet’s failures as a historian (ch. 3), poet (ch. 4), and philosopher (ch. 5) reveal Shakespeare’s dissatisfaction with ‘Christian humanism’ (p. 307). “Hamlet turns to moral philosophy, love, sexual desire, filial bonds, friendship, introversion, poetry, realpolitik, and religion in the search for meaning or fixity. In each case, it discovers nothing of significance" (p. 39). As in Derrida’s ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’, anything that seems to be a centre or ground of existence turns out to be empty, absent, or illusory. All that remains is ‘opportunistic nominalism’ (p. 26). "Whatever an individual might strive to believe, he always and only exists as a participant in a form of hunting—one in which he, like everyone else, is both predator and prey" (p. 50)

Hamlet: Critical Insights

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2009

Critical Quarterly, 1986

Modern Philology, 2018

Rhodri Lewis's Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness is a work of tremendous erudition, channeling a formidable range of classical and humanist texts as well as contemporary criticism into chapters on Hamlet 's sustained engagement with early modern discourses of selfhood, hunting, cognitive theory, poetics, and moral and speculative philosophy. With highly original but also extensively documented discussions of nearly every line and textual crux, it has the impact of a variorum. Of course, the book is designed for a very different purpose: to prosecute a comprehensive argument about Shakespeare's critique in Hamlet of Renaissance humanism as "a set of doctrines that distorts reality and constrains all human beings to obscure their true natures" (10). This critique depends upon the portrayal of the play's protagonist as a "victim, a symptom, and an agent of th[e] decay" that Lewis associates both with Elsinore and with the failures and insufficiencies of humanist orthodoxy (12). Lewis thus puts Hamlet back "within" Hamlet-a clever riposte to Margreta de Grazia's influential "Hamlet" without Hamlet (2006) and its deflation of Hamlet's vaunted interiority-while still emphasizing on Hamlet over Hamlet. The Hamlet so situated thus becomes a curious, even unfamiliar, one: a character whose lack of vengefulness in the face of the murder of his father contributes to his "unrelenting superficiality, confusion, and pious self-deceit" (238). The book's first chapter offers a deft examination of Hamlet's competing investments in authenticity and self-dramatization. Both investments, Lewis explains, answer to the humanist principle of nosce teipsum, the demand for self-knowledge as the basis of action in the public sphere. But Modern Philology, volume 116, number 2.

Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 2012

Questions of gender, ethnicity and sexuality have all been raised by novelists intent on rewriting Shakespeare from the position of what have been seen as cultural margins. While discussions of such rewritings are ongoing, few concerted efforts have been made to trace a pattern in the treatment of Shakespearean allusion and adaptation at the hands of British and American writers of the literary mainstream. The present essay sets out to investigate the way in which three such writers —Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, and John Updike— employ allusion to/adaptations of Hamlet in their novels and what their respective stances reveal about their understanding of their role as canonical writers.

College Literature, 2009