The Implications of Metaphysical "Doubt" in Shakespeare's Hamlet

In his likening of Shakespeare's Hamlet to a sponge which absorbs all the problems of our time[i], the Polish poet, critic, and Professor of Literature Jan Cott implies that Hamlet will continue to be contemporary no matter what time has passed. The timelessness of the play derives in the first place from its liability to re-interpretation and re-contextualization in different political and social circles by virtue of its humanitarian, existential and metaphysical implications. The skeptical philosophy background of "Knowledge and suspicion" seems to have had its profound impact on Shakespeare that he can be seen more like an ideological thinker and philosopher than simply a playwright. In Hamlet the Bard problematizes the philosophical nature of the human individual and puts into question the individual's relation to matters of decision-making, fate and willpower. The play puts into true moral test the nature of the human soul as a plot which moves the action forward, and simultaneously reflects on questions of relevance to knowledge and doubt. This article seeks to explore points of intersection between Hamlet and the philosophy of doubt, which lingered over the Renaissance and throughout the seventeenth century. The Central questions evoked revolve around two postulations: whether certainty about knowledge is reachable, and whether Prince Hamlet and ourselves are the ones who choose our destinies or whether our fates are pre-determined and we cannot change anything but yield in full subservience. Of all Shakeseare's plays Jan Kott wrote of Hamlet in particular: "Hamlet’ is like a sponge. Unless it is produced in a stylised or antiquarian fashion, it immediately absorbs all the problems of our time." His chapter on Hamlet focused on a Polish performance just after the end of Stalinism (Stalin hated this play, of course). Kott wrote, "here on the public stage was what Hamlet meant in 1956, there and then: ‘It was a political drama. Everybody, without exception, was being consistently watched… unequivocally and with a terrifying clarity.’

Det syge USA

Acknowledging the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic as an exacerbating factor for precarious US communities, this article reads Tony Kushner’s critically acclaimed play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1992-95) and Michael Henson’s collection of short stories Maggie Boylan (2015) alongside Susan Sontag (Illness as Metaphor), Jasbir Puar (The Right to Maim) and Lauren Berlant (“Slow Death”). The play and the short story collection represent examples of critiques of a deep-rooted disorder that characterizes the precaritizing American social and political system. From the severely mishandled AIDS crisis in Reagan’s conservative United States to the equally disastrous management of the opioid and meth epidemics in the 21st century, American society and politicians are failing their citizens, a failure reflected in and critiqued by literary texts. Whereas Angels in America is an overtly political drama, in which marginalized people come together to respond to political erasure and violence with imaginative countercultural utopianism, Maggie Boylan traces the gradual decay and corruption of a contemporary American community, functioning as a microcosm of the Unites States as a whole. This society is plagued by several crippling “epidemics” and “crises” that leave bodies broken and communities in tatters. Despite glimmers of hope, Kushner and Henson paint a grim picture of a sickness at the core of American society.

Political History of Zimbabwe Since 1980

The political history of Zimbabwe has been one of radical shifts and turns. Winning its political independence from white minority rule in 1980, Zimbabwe emerged as a promising nation. The new prime minister, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, preached hope and reconciliation. There was euphoria at independence as the nation celebrated political freedom achieved through war and highly emotive negotiations at Lancaster House Conference. Before the first half of the decade passed, the new government was already engaged in a war against its citizens, dubbed Gukurahundi. By the end of the decade, it was also clear that its socialist rhetoric and corruption, among other things, were plunging the nation into an economic crisis, which drove the nation into the jaws of the IMF and World Bank. The economic crisis only worsened, and the so-called neoliberal era in the 1990s sent the nation into an economic quagmire. The economy has always been inextricably intertwined with the politics of the country. Political (mis)calculations triggered economic problems, while on other occasions the reverse was true. The years 2000–2009, in particular, were truly a lost decade. The century began with the controvertible Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP). After a period of extreme political tensions in the country, a Government of National Unit (GNU) was established in 2009 in which the ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU PF), and the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), came to form a government. The period from 2010 to 2013 seemed to offer some relief to the nation, partly as a result of the GNU. However, this honeymoon was short-lived. As soon as ZANU PF regained power after the contested 2013 elections, there was a noticeable decline of the economy. Meanwhile, as the economy melted, power struggles intensified within ZANU PF. These reached their peak in 2017, culminating in what has come to be known as the November coup that saw the demise of Mugabe and the takeover by his deputy, Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa, as president. The post-coup era in Zimbabwe has been a period of political drama and deeper economic challenges.

Degeneration, Eugenics, and The Playboy of the Western World

This chapter considers Synge’s controversial, riot-inducing masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World (1907). Playboy, as a form of discursive retribution against certain restrictive politics, deploys a drama of sexual selection in a degenerated landscape in order to posit ironic humour, imaginative freedom, and ‘savage’ violence as a revitalizing impulse. Beginning with a curious phonetic letter sent to Synge by his friend, this chapter explores the themes of evolutionism, degeneration, and irony discussed in previous chapters, showing how Synge’s writing interacted with contemporary eugenicist discourses but posited the case for social and economic regeneration (rather than ‘race improvement’) as an antidote. Against this background, the chapter demonstrates that The Playboy is the apotheosis of Synge’s increasingly modernist, increasingly political, drama. For him, nationalist orthodoxies and certain forms of economic and social modernization were degenerative, and The Playboy purposefully acts as a sort of ironic protest against this. The chapter concludes by showing that writers such as W. B. Yeats, and later the playwright Teresa Deevy in her The King of Spain’s Daughter (1937), recognized Synge’s literary and political radicalism before he was effectively canonized as a cultivator of a Romantic cult of the peasant. Synge’s modernism, as The Playboy of the Western World shows most clearly, is simultaneously a form of political and literary protest. Rooted in his socialism and informed by his long-standing engagement with modernization, it is the apotheosis of his tendency towards a literary experiment which works in tandem with an ever-developing political, social, and aesthetic consciousness.

The Ungovernable Female Agency

By following McNay's conceptualization of agency and adapting Mills' feminist stylistics, this chapter examines the creation of female agency and subjectivity in the Mexican political drama Ingobernable [The Ungovernable]. The series has two complete seasons and 27 episodes so far. The plot revolves around the actions of five women, who can be identified with their unexpected and unanticipated as well as disobedient and resistant behaviors at varying levels. Each woman has different relations with power; however, all aim to engender change within the established order. Here, the author proposed a multi-layered method for analyzing female agency and subjectivity in the series by weaving the analysis through women archetypes from Mexican history and argued that female agency is created through audacious and cautious actions in Ingobernable which exists in-between these two action-based tensions.

Chapter 22

When Cary Grant coaxed Betsy Drake to join him in Hollywood in 1948, he did everything he could to kickstart her career as a film star. He used his own leverage with the powerful gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons to win favourable coverage for Drake, and he agreed to co-star with Drake in her first film, Every Girl Should Be Married (1948). He turned down several other promising films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), to make this feeble comedy. His next film was Howard Hawks’ screwball comedy I Was a Male War Bride (1949). Filming began on location in Europe, but Grant developed hepatitis and nearly died. It was several months before he could complete filming in Hollywood. The film turned out to be a huge box-office success, but the grim political drama Crisis (1950), was a box-office disaster that marked the beginning of a downturn in his career fortunes. By this time, however, he had married Betsy Drake, in a ceremony arranged by Howard Hughes, and he was looking forward to his new life with her.

«Ukrainian Transit»-6. Ukraine – is not Belarus

The events in the Republic of Belarus have attracted general attention. They overshadowed the Ukrainian political drama and sparked a desire to compare these two socio-political bifurcations. From the point of view of policy analysis, it is useful and relevant to compare what is happening in the two Eastern European countries, to look more closely at what they have in common and what they differ from each other. In general, the first approximation is their orientation. The differences, which are not insignificant, are due to objective physical parameters and historical and cultural characteristics, the characteristics of the two societies and States, and the different foreign policy context. In both cases, there has been a process of modernization that began in the late 1980s, with significant national adjustments and external stimuli or, conversely, deterrents. Accelerated modernization for both countries, involving well-known interaction and mutual assistance, remains a common goal for them, as it is for all newly independent states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. This is the main conclusion of the proposed brief analysis.

Creating the EAC in Senegal

This chapter assesses how Judge Ben Kioko, former Director of the Legal Department of the Commission of the African Union, led the AU's early efforts to construct a court to try those responsible for atrocities committed in Chad from 1982–1990. The creation of the Extraordinary African Chambers (EAC) in Senegal for the Hissène Habré trial was an important milestone for the AU. It gave a real meaning to the principles contained in the Constitutive Act that affirm the Union's commitment to fighting impunity and protecting human rights. The chapter then describes the many twists, turns, and challenges that the AU faced in the establishment of the EAC, providing insights as to the political drama surrounding the court's creation. Ultimately, Africans must continue to interrogate how international crimes committed on their continent can be prosecuted on African soil while ensuring that the interests of the victim are at the centre of all these efforts.

The Price of Blood

The discourse of loyalty produces tense predicaments for those living under counterinsurgency regimes. The essay explores this theme by analyzing the case of a Kashmiri woman who found herself in a political drama when she accepted “blood money” from the person accused of causing her husband's death. The woman's decision accompanied moral turmoil in her village, and rumors of her “betrayal” circulated. However, the turmoil threatened to go beyond this localized setting. It brought to fore the fraught implications of “loyalty” shaped by India's occupation in Kashmir, its nationalist staging of Kashmiris as the subversive other, and schisms within Kashmir's historical independence movement. By tracing how rumors of individual betrayal were laced onto narratives of political treason in the case, the essay reveals the counterinsurgency as the operative context of broken intimate and intercommunity relations in which the personal is always at the threshold of becoming intensely public.

Interlude: The Annus Mirabilis of 1529

This short chapter identifies 1529 as a hugely significant year both for the fortunes of the More–Rastell family and for the political nation as a whole. Drawing together a range of sources, it charts the dramatic consequences of the fall of Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey, and the sudden elevation of Thomas More to replace him as lord chancellor. It draws out the significance of these events for the More circle, arguing that they were the principal stimulus for Heywood’s remarkable turn to political drama in this period. Heywood’s career as a playwright would be fundamentally energized as a result of his kinsman’s elevation to the highest of political and legal offices.