Shakespeare's Narrative Research Articles

The ‘pre-Shakespearean’ balcony and outdoor spaces from the European sources to Romeo and Juliet

This article shows how the balcony scene has been represented in Romeo and Juliet's narrative sources and how it has been treated by Shakespeare and on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stages. It focuses on the absence of any balcony in Shakespeare's play and on the actual presence of a balcony in one of the Italian indirect sources of the play, Luigi Da Porto's novella; it also explores how all the spatial, gender, and power connotations of the balcony have been ‘translated’ from the sources to Shakespeare, where they are conveyed by the use of a ‘window’ and an ‘orchard’. The article shows how, thanks to the SENS: Shakespeare's Narrative Sources: Italian Novellas and their European Dissemination digital archive a comparison of multiple texts at a time, focusing on the words ‘balcony’, ‘window’, ‘garden’, and ‘orchard’, favours the investigation of the way in which these liminal spaces are represented.

Graphic Novel Hamlet: Reaching Beyond Stage and Page

The persistence, abundance, and diversity of Shakespearean adaptations across many media shows Shakespearean narratives to be “successful replicators,” the terminology proposed by Bortolotti and Hutcheon (2007). In the past decade, many graphic novel adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays have been produced. While graphic novels have their own affordances that allow the Shakespearean plays to be assembled for “performance” on the page, at the same time they open up connotations that would not be available in a conventional stage performance. The conventions of the comic book allow storyworlds to be opened, worlds that reach beyond the page and stage, and that exist on different narrative, or diegetic, levels. At the same time, a graphic novel adaptation can highlight the ephemeral nature of performance and the fragile network of human and nonhuman elements that hold together a Shakespeare narrative in performance —whether this performance is on the stage or the page. This article will examine and compare three graphic novel adaptations of Hamlet: Hamlet (Manga Shakespeare) by Richard Appignanesi and Emma Vieceli (2007) (hereafter referred to as Manga Shakespeare); Hamlet (No Fear Shakespeare Graphic Novels) by Neil Babra (2008) (hereafter referred to as No Fear); and Shakespeare’s Hamlet by Nicki Greenberg (2010). Together these texts show that graphic novels can use comic book conventions to tap into the “agency of adaption” that is inherent in dramatic pretexts. When creating a stage performance, a director must make creative decisions that move outside the explicit instructions of a dramatic text. There is a similar but more complicated agency at work when a dramatic text is brought together as a performance on a page. Shakespearean adaptations bring their own particular joy and complexity, as the pretexts themselves serve as invitations to partake in an intense flux of meaning and mixed ontologies.

Transplacing Ophelia: Woman and Nation in the Earliest Russian Hamlets

Transplacing Ophelia:Woman and Nation in the Earliest Russian Hamlets Daria Chernysheva (bio) Shakespeare's Hamlet has always been accompanied by international politicization. As early as 1605—within a couple of years of the play's publication in England—an anonymous English author described the contemporaneous deposition of the government of Boris Godunov, a Russian tsar, as being "a first [tragedy], but no second to any Hamlet."1 Centuries later, in 1828, Ludwig Borne turned to Shakespeare in an attempt to explain Germany's destiny; he linked the country's failure to take political action with Prince Hamlet's famous hesitation.2 And in China of the 1930s, Lao She's New Hamlet parodied what was called the "Hamlet complex," or China's "inability to act at a time of national crisis."3 This tendency to superimpose the eponymous hero's idiosyncratic traits atop political phenomena, in any country or culture, has only strengthened across the centuries, so that terms such as "Hamlet complex" and "Hamletism" have come to exist in multiple languages. In Russia's case, the country's association with the play has been a long and ever politically charged one. Famously punctuated by figures such as Turgenev, Stalin, Pasternak, and Kozintsev, perhaps this association had truly begun, unbeknownst to Russia, with the aforementioned observations of the Englishman in 1605.4 Yet, when the Romantic actor Pavel Mochalov presented "an ideal theatrical signifier of authentic Russianness" in his portrayal of Prince Hamlet, or when Grigorii Kozintsev criticized the oppression of the Soviet state in his 1964 film, these were not foreigners who superimposed the Hamlet narrative onto a real account of political turmoil because they saw a resemblance.5 Rather, Hamlet served as a foreign lens through which the refraction of a domestic vision was possible. [End Page 188] This introspective appropriation of the English play is particularly notable in the two earliest versions of the work to appear in the Russian language. Aleksandr Sumarokov (1717–77), a translator and pioneer of classical theatre in Russia, presented the first Russian Hamlet as Gamlet in 1748.6 It was not until the next century, in 1810, that a second play appeared, a Gamlet written by Stepan Viskovatov (1786–1831), who worked as a translator under the direction of St. Petersburg theatres.7 Despite this chronological gap—and Viskovatov's profound obscurity when compared to Sumarokov's lately bourgeoning popularity among scholars of Russian literature—the two Gamlets behave in similar ways. By having the characters confront those questions of authority, faith, and passion such as were relevant to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, these plays domesticize Shakespeare's narrative, as well as the French intermediaries by means of which the Russian playwrights accessed that narrative. Sumarokov, it is known, worked from the adaptation of Shakespeare first performed by the editor and writer Pierre Antoine de la Place (1707–93), while Viskovatov turned to the translator and dramatist Jean-François Ducis (1733–1816). Even as the Gamlet plays boast of such a multicultural heritage, they ultimately articulate local, Russian concerns. Sumarokov, as the better-known playwright, has received considerable scholarly attention with respect to the politics of his dramatic corpus, including the ways in which his Gamlet behaves on Russian soil. By reworking the defining indecisiveness and melancholy of the English prince, Sumarokov is read as having created a new Prince Gamlet, a character who provides insight into political themes ranging from divine and autocratic justice to the coup d'état.8 Sumarokov's Gamlet has thus been identified as an equal contender with other moments in history that seek to use Shakespeare's prince to explain local political preoccupations, moments which give rise to concepts such as "Hamlet complex" and "Hamletism." But what if, in reading the earliest Gamlet plays in their political contexts, we were to move past the traditional politicization of Hamlet with its narrow emphasis on the Prince of Denmark? Political readings of literary works can tend to focus their analysis of authority and power on masculine characters, especially if these characters are also the eponymous heroes. The early Russian Gamlet plays invite a different approach, [End Page 189] however, by rewriting the Hamlet...

The path to which wild error leads: A Lucretian Comedy of Errors

Disrupting the causal progress of his comic design, Shakespeare's narrative swerve introduces the accidental into a teleological plot, allowing the errancy of individual will while promoting new energetic narrative structure. Offering a Lucretian reading of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, I consider how the playwright's complex association of identity, chance, and genre can be informed by philosophical atomism, approached along the trajectory of a readerly clinamen.

Narrating the visual in Shakespeare

This book examines Shakespeare's fascination with the art of narrative and the visuality of language. Richard Meek complicates our conception of Shakespeare as either a 'man of the theatre' or a 'literary dramatist', suggesting ways in which his works themselves debate the question of text versus performance. Beginning with an exploration of the pictorialism of Shakespeare's narrative poems, the book goes on to examine several moments in Shakespeare's dramatic works when characters break off the action to describe an absent, 'offstage' event, place or work of art. Meek argues that Shakespeare does not simply prioritise drama over other forms of representation, but rather that he repeatedly exploits the interplay between different types of mimesis - narrative, dramatic and pictorial - in order to beguile his audiences and readers. Setting Shakespeare's works in their literary and rhetorical contexts, and engaging with contemporary literary theory, the book offers new readings of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, Hamlet, King Lear and The Winter's Tale. The book will be of particular relevance to readers interested in the relationship between verbal and visual art, theories of representation and mimesis, Renaissance literary and rhetorical culture, and debates regarding Shakespeare's status as a literary dramatist.

Exonerating Rape: Pornography as Exculpation in Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece

This essay aims to justify a deeply contentious and probably unpopular claim that Shakespeare's narrative poem attempts to exculpate Tarquin's offence. Though modern criticism might recoil from a work that sympathizes (albeit to the slightest extent) with a rapist, we must be forthright enough to assert the possibility, at least, that in the early modern period, it was feasible to write a poem of sexual assault which attempts to exonerate the male aggressor. The essay considers Sonnet 129, Hamlet and Philip Larkin's “Deceptions” (which converses intertextually with the Nunnery Scene) in an effort to formulate a theory of pornography as that which allows the titillation of a masculine reader while clearing him of any moral culpability. The essay takes issue with Ian Frederick Moulton's assertion that the term “pornography” is inappropriate and anachronistic when applied to early modern texts. Finally, in demonstrating the poem's pornographic character, the essay also accounts for the anxious incapacity of feminist criticism to deal with it adequately.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Men Who Weep and Wail: Masculinity and Emotion in Sidney's New Arcadia

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Men Who Weep and Wail: Masculinity and Emotion in Sidney's <i>New Arcadia</i>

Henry Carey's Peculiar Letter

What seems strange here is not the company's plan to start growing in the liberty of Blackfriars, but the claim that the Lord Mayor had recently banned playing inside the city. No papers survive to say when or even that such a ban was issued. The authority that normally sent out such orders was not London's mayor but the Privy Council, acting for the monarch. Yet the thirty-four petitioners-residents of the afflicted liberty-should have known what they were saying. They were led by Lady Elizabeth Russell, sister-in-law to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who chaired the Privy Council. The others included Richard Field, the printer from Stratford who had issued Shakespeare's narrative poems in 1593 and 1594. Though the claim that the Lord Mayor had banned playing in the city does echo twenty years of mayoral complaints to the Privy Council, it is distinctly mysterious. Just which Lord Mayor was it who took authority to initiate this unique ban on playing inside the city? Had the Privy Council, which had resisted Guildhall's pleas before, nothing to say about it and no say in it? Henry Carey, the first Lord Hunsdon, Lord Chamberlain, and the Privy Council member who might have been most concerned, had died in July, some months before the petitioners set down their complaint. Burbage's new indoor playhouse was built for use by the company that Carey himself had set up in May 1594 as the Lord Chamberlain's Men. At the time of the petition, William Brooke, Lord Cobham, Carey's successor as Lord Chamberlain, was less interested in helping Carey's company, now the second Lord Hunsdon's; it may even have been Brooke's objection that, in the same year as the petition, made them change the

Shakespeare's Narrative: Acts of Memory

Shakespeare's Narrative: Acts of Memory

"These Contraries Such Unity Do Hold": Patterned Imagery in Shakespeare's Narrative Poems

"These Contraries Such Unity Do Hold": Patterned Imagery in Shakespeare's Narrative Poems