Hamlet as Poet

2020 ◽  
pp. 174-237
Author(s):  
Rhodri Lewis
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Poetic Fiction

This chapter focuses on Hamlet's imagination and his accomplishments as a poet. It begins with the love poetry that Hamlet writes for Ophelia. The chapter then turns to consider the before, during, and after of Hamlet's attempt to adapt The Murder of Gonzago with a view to catching Claudius's conscience and unkennelling his guilt. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which Hamlet responds to the lead player's speech in the person of Aeneas; to the advice offered by Hamlet to the players; to the central role of the imagination both in seeing ghosts and in creating works of poetic fiction; to the action of the play-within-the-play and the dumb show that precedes it; and to the language and assumptions through which Hamlet convinces himself that The Mousetrap has been a forensic success. As will become clear, William Shakespeare allows Hamlet to delineate his beliefs about the nature of poetic endeavour at unusual length. Crucially, one is also allowed to judge the ways in which Hamlet applies these beliefs in practice; in so doing, a series of disjunctions emerge between the theoretical and practical discourses of humanist poetics.

Lust, Desire, Hope. Dante and the Problem of Love (Inf. V; Purg. XVII–XVIII; Purg. XXVI)

2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gaia Gubbini
Keyword(s):  
Free Choice ◽  
Courtly Love ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Moral Structure

AbstractThe article reconstructs the ‘strategy’ used by Dante in the Commedia for solving the problem of love: moving from lust (Inf. V), to the possibility of controlling natural desire through free choice (Purg. XVII-XVIII), to the role of hope in the pursuit of divine love, abandoning cupiditas and embracing caritas (Purg. XXVI). This trajectory is identified through lexical, rhyme-related, and thematic connections. It begins and ends with the first and the last sinners Dante encounters during his journey: Francesca and Arnaut Daniel - both condemned for their lust. The article also explores the reflections of Dante on the previous romance literature dealing with love, providing in particular a more convincing explanation of the presence of Arnaut Daniel - whose courtly love poetry was grounded on the theme of hope - at the end of Purgatory, the supernatural realm of Hope. Moreover, the investigation is set in the context of Dante’s philosophical and theological background - confirming with new elements the coexistence of his Augustinian imagery with the Thomist moral structure of the Commedia.

Love's Wounds

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia N. Nazarian
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Francesco Petrarca ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Agrippa D'aubigne ◽  
French And English ◽  
The Relationship

This book takes an in-depth look at the widespread language of violence and abjection in early modern European love poetry. Beginning in fourteenth-century Italy, the book shows how Petrarch established a pattern of inequality between suffering poet and exalted Beloved rooted in political parrhēsia. Sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century French and English poets reshaped Petrarch's model into an idiom of extravagant brutality coded to their own historical circumstances. The book argues that these poets exaggerated the posture of the downtrodden lover, adapting the rhetoric of powerless desire to forge a new “countersovereignty” from within the heart of vulnerability—a potentially revolutionary position through which to challenge cultural, religious, and political authority. Creating a secular equivalent to the martyr, early modern sonneteers crafted a voice that was both critical and unstoppable because it suffered. The book tracks the development of the counter-sovereign voice from Francesco Petrarca to Maurice Scève, Joachim du Bellay, Théodore-Agrippa d'Aubigné, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. Through interdisciplinary and transnational analyses, the text reads early modern sonnets as sites of contestation and collaboration and rewrites the relationship between early modern literary forms.

The Letter of the Law

2021 ◽  
pp. 142-200
Author(s):  
Ioannis Ziogas
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Love Letter ◽  
Latin Elegy ◽  
Materiality Of The Text ◽  
Legal Force

This chapter studies the correspondence between Acontius and Cydippe (Heroides 20–1). The main argument is that Ovid highlights the fundamental confluence of the love letter with legal correspondence. The discussion ranges widely through comparative material from contemporary Latin elegy (Propertius in particular) to its intertextual matrix (Callimachus’ Aetia), in order to spell out the dependence of both poetry and law on precedent. Core aspects of Heroides 20–1, such as the materiality of the text, iterability, performativity, and intertextuality show that the invention of love is inextricably related to the invention of law. The chapter further investigates the triangulated relations between magic spells (carmina), love poetry (carmina), and legal statements. In its historical context, the crucial role of epistolography in the production and communication of laws in the Roman Empire is important for understanding the legal force of Ovid’s love letters.

Animals

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Gray
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Mating Behaviors ◽  
Direct Models

This chapter focuses on poetry’s frequent use of animals to explore the complexities of love. Animals feature in poems as objects of love, as lovers themselves, or in various other, more figurative, capacities. Although creatures of all kinds populate love poetry, birds are the most ubiquitous. The mating behaviors of birds, at once instinctive and highly patterned, offer a natural parallel to the combination of impulse and predetermined structure that characterizes both love and poetry. And while the same could be said of other animals, birds employ song as a key component of their courtship and so reflect the work of love poetry. A focus on birds and other animals also offers the poet scope to celebrate the role of sexual desire in love. Yet animals, in their mingled familiarity and alienness, ultimately appeal to love poets less as direct models than as signs of erotic uncertainty, queerness, and inconclusiveness.

Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Knoll
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
John Lyly ◽  
Cognitive Theories ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Considerable Length ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Erotic Desire

Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare explores the role of the mind in creating erotic experience on the early modern stage. To “conceive” desire is to acknowledge the generative potential of the erotic imagination, its capacity to impart form and make meaning out of the most elusive experiences. Drawing from cognitive and philosophical approaches, this book advances a new methodology for analysing how early modern plays dramatize inward erotic experience. Grounded in cognitive theories about the metaphorical nature of thought, Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare traces the contours of three conceptual metaphors—motion, space, and creativity—that shape erotic desire in plays by John Lyly and William Shakespeare. Although Lyly and Shakespeare wrote for different types of theatres and only partially-overlapping audiences, both dramatists created characters who speak erotic language at considerable length and in extraordinary depth. Their metaphors do more than merely narrate or express eros; they constitute characters’ erotic experiences. Each of the book’s three sections explores a fundamental conceptual metaphor, first its philosophical underpinnings and then its capacity for dramatizing erotic experience in Lyly’s and Shakespeare’s plays. Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare provides a literary and linguistic analysis of metaphor that credits the role of cognition in the experience of erotic desire, even of pleasure itself.

SHAKESPEARE AND RADICALISM: THE USES AND ABUSES OF SHAKESPEARE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY POPULAR POLITICS

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANTONY TAYLOR
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
The Political ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Reform Movements

This article seeks to locate William Shakespeare in the traditions of nineteenth-century popular politics in Britain. The bards of radicalism are usually seen as the romantic poets, particularly Byron and Shelley. Nevertheless, Shakespeare's national standing, the lack of hard details about his life, and the subversive messages many radicals believed to have discovered in his plays allowed reformers to project him as a ‘son of the soil’, and to contest appropriations of him by the aristocratic patrons of events like the Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1864. Through the agitation surrounding this celebration, a link into a radical bardolatry is established that indicates the centrality of memories of Shakespeare's England to the popular platform. The article concludes with a consideration of the light shed by ‘Shakespearean radicalism’ on current debates about continuity between Chartism and liberalism in popular politics, and the role of memory and memorialization in the political culture of nineteenth-century plebeian reform movements.

Centaurs of the Mind

2018 ◽  
pp. 99-118
Author(s):  
Freya Sierhuis
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Courtly Love ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Faculty Psychology ◽  
Religious Controversy ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Poetic Fiction ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Erotic

This chapter champions the erotic sonnets of the Caelica cycle, often ignored in favour of the philosophical and religious poems of the middle, and final section of the sequence; highlighting both their playful eroticism and philosophical depth. The love poetry which scrutinizes the relationship between the mistress and the lover in terms of projection and fetishization, on closer inspection turns out to share the same philosophical grounds as the poems which examine the mechanisms of spiritual slavery later in the cycle. While certain poems, such as Caelica 39, 43, and 56 explicate the link between courtly love and idolatry, this chapter argues how Greville’s poetry contributes to the debates on the status of the imagination in Renaissance poetics, faculty psychology, and religious controversy, by exploring its affective investment in the act of poetic fiction-making.

Coleridge and Shakespeare

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Mahoney
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Close Reading

This article examines the role of Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a critic of William Shakespeare. It discusses the loss of Coleridge's notebook for the Lectures on the Principles of Poetry, which made it difficult to accurately assess his criticism on Shakespeare. The article suggests that the innovations of Coleridge's criticism came out of the depths of his own mind and years of thinking on the principles of poetry, while his close reading of Shakespeare provided him with the necessary figures, accidents, and minutiae to substantiate his claims.

Multi-nodal politics: globalisation is what actors make of it

2009 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILIP G. CERNY
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Multiple Equilibria ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Structural Variables

AbstractWhat has been traditionally conceptualised as ‘the international’ has been undergoing a fundamental transformation in recent decades, usually called ‘globalisation’. Globalisation is a highly contested concept, and even among those who accept that some sort of globalisation process is occurring, attempts to analyse it have focused on a range of structural explanations: the expansion of economic transactions; the development of transnational or global social bonds; and the emergence and consolidation of a range of semi-international, semi-global political institutions. In all of these explanations, the role of actors as agents strategically shaping change has been neglected. In this article I argue that structural variables alone do not determine specific outcomes. Indeed, structural changes are permissive and can be the source of a range of potential multiple equilibria. The interaction of structural constraints and actors’ strategic and tactical choices involves a process of ‘structuration’, leading to wider systemic outcomes. In understanding this process, the concepts of ‘pluralism’ and ‘neopluralism’ as used in traditional ‘domestic’-level Political Science can provide an insightful framework for analysis. This process, I argue, has developed in five interrelated, overlapping stages that involve the interaction of a diverse range of economic, social and political actors. Globalisation is still in the early stages of development, and depending on actors’ choices in a dynamic process of structuration, a range of alternative potential outcomes can be suggested. There is a tide in the affairs of menWhich, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;Omitted, all the voyage of their lifeIs bound in shallows and in miseries.On such a full sea are we now afloat,And we must take the current when it serves,Or lose our ventures.(William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, IV.ii.269–276)

Role of dactinomycin in the improved survival of children with Wilms' tumor

JAMA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 195 (12) ◽  
pp. 1005-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. J. Fernbach
Keyword(s):  
Wilms Tumor
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