Word: shakespeareã
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2001-2001
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...literary world that it is difficult to view his story lines in new ways. However, one member of the freshman class, Jeremy R. Funke ’03, has attempted and achieved just that. His new play, A Counterfeit Presentment, challenges the traditional interpretation of one of Shakespeare??s most famous plays, Hamlet. Funke’s play is a blend of Hamlet’s original text (as well as Othello and King Lear) and his own semi-Elizabethan prose. Although it would seem like a tall order to even attempt to change Shakespeare?...
...Shakespeare??s Hamlet has not been a play for almost 300 years and everybody knows it. More studied, quoted and lauded than any other dramatic work in the Western canon, it has become something of a foundational myth for the European and American worlds. Harvard’s own Marjorie Garber asserts that one never really reads Hamlet for the first time; our culture is so permeated with the play that we grow up knowing it, even if were not aware of this knowledge. And I’ve even heard some Shakespeare enthusiasts...
...fact, while much of the Shakespeare cult of modern times can be seen as a relatively recent historical phenomena, the overwhelming reverence paid to Hamlet extends as far back as the late 17th century. While English dramatists of the Restoration were adapting Shakespeare??s plays left and right, altering them to fit the popular penchant for love triumphant and a happy ending, Hamlet remained untouched. Even King Lear got a makeover in the form of a glorious marriage between Edgar and the distinctly not-dead Cordelia. But the thwarted love, the suicides and the excessive carnage of Hamlet...
Admittedly, not all of these problems are new and some of them seem legitimately unavoidable. Certain lines of Shakespeare??s are dead and gone forever. According to Harold Bloom, there were lines from the Ur-Hamlet, the play (probably by Thomas Kyd) on which Shakespeare??s Hamlet was most immediately based, which remained a source of mockery for years in the world of Elizabethan theatrics due to their utter ridiculousness. (The ghosts overemphatic and rather simple cry of “Hamlet, revenge!” was among the most common targets.) Now, what Shakespeare undid...
...story that has two sets of identical “twins” roaming the stage. (Mercury takes a stint as an identical copy of Amphitryon’s slave in order to facilitate Zeus bedroom escapades.) But the script, to its own detriment, borrows freely from Shakespeare??s Comedy of Errors (which was based in part on Plautus’ Amphituo) and in doing so brazenly ignores any and all possible questions or concerns to which this unique and fascinating interaction of gods and humans might lead. The result is a brilliantly polished but rather empty...