Shakespeare's Play Research Articles

Образ Сесилии Невилл, герцогини Йоркской в пьесе У. Шекспира «Ричард III» и в романе Ш. Пэнмэн “The Sunne in Splendour”

The article discusses the images of Cecily Neville, Duchess of York in W. Shakespeare's play "Richard III" and Sharon Penman's novel "The Sunne in Splendour". Despite the "alternative" interpretation of the events and characters of the War of the Roses, Sharon Penman creates an image of the heroine in some respect similar to Shakespeare's: a wise, knowing mother, courageously bearing the blows of fate. However, the wisdom of Cecily Neville’s wisdom in Sharon Penman’s novel is also the ability to find balance between the standards of the historical era with love for children and self–realization.

Transformative Potential and Utopian Performative: Postdramatic Hamlet in Turkey

Turkey is among those Non-Anglophone countries which have had a keen interest in Shakespeare and his plays for over two hundred years. When it comes to the staging of Shakespeare in Turkey, especially when protagonists or leading roles are considered, “overacting” is one of the most notable techniques highlighting, presumably, the spirit of the Renaissance and Jacobean times. Still, in recent years, there have been some productions which try to challenge and deconstruct the traditional ways of staging a Shakespearean play. One of such productions is Hamlet of Istanbul State Theatre, directed by Işıl Kasapoğlu in 2014, in which the director makes use of postdramatic theatre techniques. As the play begins, the audience sees a huge red jewel box which has been placed onto the centre of the stage. Soon after it is opened, it becomes clear that the character coming out of the box is playing and enacting not only the role of Hamlet but also many other roles in the play. Disrupting the habitual Shakespearean staging which heavily relies on mimesis in a closed “fictive cosmos” (Lehmann 22), the production, more strikingly, allows for an innovative Shakespearean acting as an innovative Shakespearean acting possible as the actor acts out all the major roles, such as Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius, etc., in such various ways as holding dummies in his hands and enacting their roles in monologues and dialogues. Fusing Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory of postdramatic theatre with Jill Dolan’s argumentation on utopian performative, this study will investigate how postdramatic theatre techniques challenge the traditional Shakespearean performance and contends that postdramatic theatre techniques used in Kasapoğlu’s Hamlet contribute to the utopian performative and the possibility of creating a utopian impulse in the audience. The paper thus will claim that postdramatic performance of Hamlet renders a utopian performative possible by presenting a transformative potential in the audience members which engages in our present moment.

Tyrannicide, Law, and Sacrifice in Julius Caesar

This essay introduces Plutarch's Life of Publicola as a crucially important yet previously neglected intertext. The first of two passages relevant to Shakespeare's drama involves Publicola's legislation granting immunity to anyone carrying out tyrannicide if specified conditions are met; the second concerns an abortive conspiracy against the Republic's founding consuls. In conjunction with Graeco-Roman and early modern views of tyranny and antityranny, these passages act as an imaginative matrix and new interpretative framework for Julius Caesar's engagement with tyrannicide, the constitutional implications of one-person rule, the conspirators' hands immersed in the slain Caesar's blood, and the Republic's transition to Imperial rule.

No Othello: Disidentification in Season of Migration to the North

Abstract: In this piece, I consider how Tayeb Salih's novel Season of Migration to the North uses the image of Othello from Shakespeare's eponymous play to critique colonial desire and self-making. Appropriating José Esteban Muñoz's theory of disidentification and Homi Bhabha's concept of mimicry, I argue that Season of Migration to the North models in its depictions of Mustafa Sa'eed's sexual carnage and iconographic self-making a disidentificatory critique of Othello 's sense of racial tragedy.

From Adfectatio to “Affectation”: Affection as Catachresis in Shakespearean Texts

This article argues that the catachrestic usage of “affection” to mean “affectation” in Shakespearean drama may be best understood with reference to Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, which employs catachresis in using the existing Latin word adfectatio to render the Greek word κακόζηλον [cacozēlon]. Quintilian’s influential picture of the all-encompassing rhetorical vice of adfectatio, his catachrestic practice, and his descriptions of catachresis as both a necessary extension of the meaning of an existing word and a poetic device, appear to have influenced Shakespeare’s portrayal of some of his most complex and articulate characters, among them Hamlet and Leontes (of The Winter’s Tale). Through these characters and their catachrestic speeches, we are forced to contend with the possibility that their “affections” may be nothing more (or less) than “affectations.”

Theatre Direction of Peter Hall: Specificity of Artistic Interpretation of W. Shakespeare's Dramaturgy

The purpose of the article is to reveal the peculiarities of the artistic interpretation of W. Shakespeare's drama by the British theatre director Peter Hall and to develop a periodisation of his interpretive strategies in the second half of the 20th century. Research methodology. The research is based on the achievements of the domestic school of theatre studies and the principles of study and analysis of the play, in relation to the historical and cultural context, as well as in relation to the worldview and individuality of the director. The research methodology is based on the traditions of domestic theatre and art studies and modern approaches that combine the methods of related humanitarian disciplines – cultural studies, philosophy, and aesthetics. A complex theatre analysis of the features of the artistic interpretation of W. Shakespeare's plays by P. Hall determines the logic of the research: Through the identification of the director's orientation of the drama, the formation of the principles of play theatre in the director's reading of W. Shakespeare's plays, to the definition of the aesthetic foundations of Peter Hall's direction. The bibliographical method, the method of art analysis, the stylistic method, the systematic method, and the method of comparative analysis are applied. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that, for the first time, it attempts a comprehensive art analysis of the interpretive strategies of the British director Peter Hall in the context of W. Shakespeare's theatrical discourse of the second half of the 20th century (on the material of the performances “Coriolanus”, “War of the Roses”, “Henry VI”, and “Hamlet”); little-known facts from the life and work of P. Hall were introduced into domestic scientific circulation, and an art analysis of the director's most resonant performances was carried out; for the first time, the periodisation of P. Hall's work is proposed, based on the analysis of his performances from the perspective of the given theme, the study of the specifics of the artistic interpretation of W. Shakespeare's drama and the evolution of the master's philosophical and aesthetic vision. Conclusions. The figure of Peter Hall is one of the most significant in the history of British theatre of the 20th and early 20th centuries. The famous theatre director changed the situation and, in many ways, determined the direction of the development of the British theatre by creating repertory troupes based mainly on the works of W. Shakespeare. Based on the art analysis of Peter Hall's work from the perspective of the given topic, the periodisation of his interpretive strategies was developed in accordance with the specifics of the artistic interpretation of W. Shakespeare's drama and the evolution of the director's philosophical and aesthetic vision in the second half of the 20th century. The first period, 1955–1959, is characterised by high creative activity and the ease with which the young director masters the theatrical language, the system of stage thinking of the English theatre of the 1940s–1950s, develops an author's handwriting, emphasising devotion to traditions; performances are distinguished by the delicacy of the reading of W. Shakespeare's drama, aesthetic perfection and the presence of meaningful and verified innovation (for instance, “Twelfth Night”, 1958). The second period, 1959–1968, is characterised by mastering and rethinking the problematics and poetics of W. Shakespeare's drama; in the performances of the 1960s, the aesthetics of the deromantic Brechtian style of P. Hall was formed; the emphasis in productions shifts to the problem of repetition of historical patterns, to the de-aestheticization of events and historical figures; the stylistics of interpretative thought and modern theatrical vocabulary receive a new development. The third period, 1968–1970s, is characterised by the desire to preserve the theatrical tradition from excessive conceptualisation of direction; the strengthening of the importance of protecting W. Shakespeare's drama from modernist interpretations and P. Hall's desire to convey to the viewer the full content of the world's masterpieces due to an in-depth study of the classical text. The fourth period, 1980–1990, marked by the creation and development of a new style of Shakespearean productions, caused by the rethinking of approaches to the figurative translation of classical drama into stage language in accordance with the trends of postmodernism.
 Key words: Peter Hall, theatre direction, dramaturgy, W. Shakespeare, interpretive strategies, Royal Shakespeare Company.

ANXIETY THAT CONVEYING TRAGEDY IN OTHELLO DRAMA BY SHAKESPEARE

Humans are always in touch with the needs in this life. In order to survive, one of the most important examples is the need for safety needs. The phenomenal drama Othello by Shakespeare was chosen as the main data source in this research. This research aimed to analyze the unfulfilled of safety needs in the form of anxiety and its impact on the main character in Shakespeare's drama "Othello". This drama was set in 1603 with a tragedy and was written by the world-famous playwright William Shakespeare. The story that ended in tragedy is inseparable from the anxiety used by others to overthrow power and the Othello family. With these problems, the researchers explored the anxiety factor by using Maslow's psychological theory about the hierarchy of needs, especially at the level of safety needs. This research used qualitative descriptive method because the data collection technique used is to describe the analysis through words and sentences that exist in the data source. The approach used in this research was psychological approach in a literary work. The results found from this research that there is an anxiety factor that underlie Othello's feeling that he is always threatened. Jealousy is a factor that causes anxiety in the character "Othello" which focused on household relationships. This excessive anxiety then causes impacts in the form of misunderstanding, the death of Othello's wife, and Othello's suicide.

The Theme of Revenge in Shakespeare's play Hamlet

The Theme of Revenge in Shakespeare's play Hamlet

From Adfectatio to “Affectation”: Affection as Catachresis in Shakespearean Texts

:This article argues that the catachrestic usage of “affection to mean “affectation” in Shakespearean drama may be best understood with reference to Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, which employs catachresis in using the existing Latin word adfectatio to render the Greek word ϰαϰόζηλον [cacozēlon]. Quintilian’s influential picture of the all-encompassing rhetorical vice of adfectatio, his catachrestic practice, and his descriptions of catachresis as both a necessary extension of the meaning of an existing word and a poetic device, appear to have influenced Shakespeare’s portrayal of some of his most complex and articulate characters, among them Hamlet and Leontes (of The Winter’s Tale). Through these characters and their catachrestic speeches, we are forced to contend with the possibility that their “affections” may be nothing more (or less) than “affectations.”

Building Compassion and Empathy in Medical Students through Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

With the aim of introducing medical humanities to medical colleges in Iraq, the researcher, who teaches English to medical students at Al-Nahrain University in Baghdad, initiated the idea of a performance of Shakespeare’s most popular play Romeo and Juliet. The main aim was to promote empathy and compassion for medical students after realizing that biomedical sciences have detached them from these feelings. Through activities in the English Language lectures, students, particularly 2nd and 3rd year, reflected on stories and passages in a way that lacked any connection or empathy. In one of the units of their English coursebook, there are two pages dedicated to Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet. With the idea of the pair of star-crossed lovers, who suffer misfortunes brought upon them by causes quite independent of any flaw of character or immorality of conduct in both or either of them, the researcher found in the play a work of art that can create empathy and compassion in the readers as well as the audience, and hence came the idea of the performance. The researcher chose an abridged version of the play found on the Internet. To link the play with science to avoid objection from the scientific institution, the researcher added a scene taken from a speech by the scientist Fatima AlZahra’a Alatraktchi comparing the secret communication of bacteria with this Shakespearean play. The paper is about the reception of the idea of the play by the students at the medical college, who were overjoyed when they read the call for actors for the play and immediately a huge number of them showed interest in taking part in the performance. Though the performance was supposed to take place in mid-March, it was postponed because of the end-of-term exams. The paper deals with the manners of building empathy and compassion among the medical college community. Finally, the paper tries to show the importance of introducing literature and arts to medical students with the aim of giving more emphasis to the study of humanities disciplines in medical colleges in Iraq in the future.

LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF SEMANTIC INNOVATIONS IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE AND MODERN TRAGIC WORKS

In this article, a linguistic-philosophical analysis of semantic innovations in the tragic works of the English Renaissance and modern times was carried out, as well as comments related to the comparative-typological study of Shakespeare's dramas and works of representatives of modern literature.

Correlation between the Dissemination of Classic English Literary Works and Cultural Cognition in the New Media Era

With the continuous development of new media technology, the spiritual needs of the masses have been greatly satisfied and the aesthetic ability has also been significantly improved compared with the past. From the current point of view, “literary works,” as the spiritual food of contemporary people, are promoting social spirit. The use of natural language processing and knowledge graph technology can improve cultural cognition to promote the dissemination and development of classic English literature, which has become a necessary means of dissemination of classic English literature. Most of the existing classic English literary works are appreciated based on modern literature datasets. Nowadays, with the continuous development of new media technology, there are fewer studies on the dissemination and cultural cognition of classic English literary works. This makes it impossible for readers to obtain cultural cognition from classic English literary works, making it difficult for the dissemination and development of classic English literary works. In view of the above problems, using natural language processing and knowledge graph technology, taking Shakespeare's play “Hamlet” represented by classic English literary works as an example, the research on the construction method of knowledge graph is carried out and the cultural characteristics in literary works are extracted and analyzed. In parsing, a bidirectional gated recurrent unit network model based on hybrid character embedding is proposed. Based on n-gram embedding, by combining pretraining embedding and radical embedding, it can fully consider the rich semantic information in English literature works to extract. Feature: in terms of named entity recognition, based on the existing iterative atrous convolutional network model, an iterative atrous convolutional network model is proposed. To get the best sequence label and get the last labeled entity information, in terms of knowledge graph construction and visual query, a workflow method for building knowledge graph from unstructured text is proposed and a flask-based knowledge graph visual query system is designed, which applies the best model of the above two tasks. We decode the complete “Hamlet” text, extract entities and their semantic links as nodes and relationships in the knowledge graph, store knowledge through the graph database, and finally form a visual query system that combines the front and back end.

Theatricality and Race in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Raquel Carrió and Flora Lauten’s Otra tempestad

Otra tempestad was performed at La Habana’s Teatro Buendía in 1997, with dramaturgy by Raquel Carrió and Flora Lauten.2 This play marked a new direction in Latin American rewritings of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This tradition began with Ruben Darío, Paul Groussac and José Enrique Rodó, who discussed the image of Caliban in relation to the United States and its intervention in Latin America. The climax of these rewritings came with authors such as George Lamming, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Kamau Brathwaite and Roberto Fernández Retamar. Their readings and understanding of the play vindicate the image of Caliban and emphasize the processes of colonization in the context of the Cuban Revolution, the Négritude Movement, and the decolonization of the Caribbean. Continuing with this tradition, Carrió and Lauten composed their play focusing on the processes of globalization and the new millennium (Flaherty 102), transferring their focus to the experimentation with new ways of understanding theatricality and Cuban identity through dialogue, establishing a counterpoint with The Tempest. Carrió herself has stated that rewriting the plot of the Shakespearean play became more complex by the end of the century (“Otra” 159). This results in a temporal and thematical distance with Césaire’s rewriting and the Caribbean tradition of the 50s and 60s because, for Carrió, it is not enough to negate the language of the colonizer but researching the process of cultural formation through cultural contact is also needed (“Otra” 159). The main gesture that the dramaturges offer comes from the title itself. By entitling it Otra tempestad (Another Tempest), Carrió/Lauten include the play in relation to Césaire’s play Une Tempête (A Tempest). […] By María José Cornejo

Films as a Medium of Politics: Haider - Representation of Kashmir Politics in Shakespearean Tragedy

Films are an important medium for the portrayal and representation of politics. Kashmir, known for its natural beauty, became an essential destiny for Bollywood films. Many films were made in the 1960s with Kashmiri protagonists. Most of the films made in the 1960s era were apolitical, but in the post-1990s period, the films made on Kashmir reflected on the politics too. One of the films on Kashmir and its post-1990s is Haider, based on the Shakespearean play - Hamlet. This film was acclaimed by film critics as the bold job by the director to adopt the Shakespeare play in the context of Kashmir. This paper will analyze the story, dialogues, characters, and cinematography of the Film- Haider and explore how much it represents the politics of the 1990s in Kashmir. Using the content analysis approach, this paper will explore the relationship between the plot in the Shakespearean play and the political context of Kashmir.

مسرحية "عطيل" لوليام شكسبير: وجهة نفسية اخرى

تهدف الدراسة الحالية الى تسليط الضوء على مسرحية " عطيل" لوليام شكسبير, والتي تعتبر أحدى أهم تراجيدياه. تقسم الدراسة الى فصلين, ألاول عبارة عن مقدمة مقسمة الى ثلاثة فروع تعنى بتحليل القصيدة كصورة تعكس المشاكل النفسية للبطل و مأساة لأنسان يفشل في فهم أهمية ألحب في حياته وكونه غير قادر على تمييز العدو الحقيقي. أما الفصل الثاني فيركز بدوره على موقع المسرحية بين اعمال شكسبير الاخرى من خلال تحليل دور الخصم في الايقاع بالبطل.

David McInnis. Shakespeare and Lost Plays: Reimagining Drama in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2021.

This review considers Shakespeare and Lost Plays: Reimagining Drama in Early Modern England.

Unfinished Poetry

Unfinished Poetry

Making a drama out of a mental health crisis

Abstract A recent production of Romeo and Juliet at the Globe Theatre in London has foregrounded the themes of mental health and a sick society. My essay begins by exploring the controversial reception of the 2021 production. But Shakespeare's play has a number of key features that are undecidable, by design. These are directly relevant to the kinds of things we are concerned with when it comes to mental health. Perhaps the critics of the 2021 production are therefore missing a trick … And are there not lessons for the mental health of young people today to be taken from the fact that romance seems to have withdrawn from the world of this contemporary Romeo and Juliet?

Horrible Imaginings: Jan Kott, the Grotesque, and “Macbeth, Macbeth”

Throughout Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, a keyword for the combination of philosophical, aesthetic and modern qualities in Shakespearean drama is “grotesque.” This term is also relevant to other influential studies of early-modern drama, notably Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque, as well as Wolfgang Kayser’s psychoanalytic criticism. Yet if this tradition of the Shakespearean grotesque has problematized an idea of the human and of humanist values in literature, can this also be understood in posthuman terms? This paper proposes a reading of Kott’s criticism of the grotesque to suggest where it indicates a potential interrogation of the human and posthuman in Shakespeare, especially at points where the ideas of the grotesque or absurdity indicate other ideas of causation, agency or affect, such as the “grand mechanism” It will then argue for the continuing relevance of Kott’s work by examining a recent work of Shakespearean adaptation as appropriation, the 2016 novel Macbeth, Macbeth by Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey which attempts a provocative and transgressive retelling of Macbeth that imagines a ‘sequel’ to the play that emphasises ideas of violence and ethics. The paper argues that this creative intervention should be best understood as a continuation of Kott’s idea of the grotesque in Shakespeare, but from the vantage point of the twenty-first century in which the grotesque can be understood as the modification or even disappearance of the human. Overall, it is intended to show how the reconsideration of the grotesque may elaborate questions of being and subjectivity in our contemporary moment just as Kott’s study reflected his position in the Cold War.

Three Daughters, Two Stories, One Tragedy: Ownership and Incest in William Shakespeare's King Lear and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres

In Shakespeare's play, Lear links his daughters to British soil, making them his possessions. Seeing his daughters as owned things, Lear believes he can do what he wants to them. Subsequently, Lear crosses boundaries, namely in his "love test" where he expects competitive courtship behavior from his daughters. The father's peculiar actions and inappropriate conduct with his daughters carry incestuous resonances. These themes of ownership and incest are starker in Acres, specifically, when Larry rapes his daughters. Larry projects a wifely role onto his daughters by having sex with them. He then makes sex something daughters "owe" their fathers. This wifely role metastasizes so that, in the end, Larry's wishes transform his daughters beyond their role as surrogate wives into, collectively, a symbolic mother. With this metaphor, Smiley picks up on resonances in her Shakespearean source and extends this theme of ownership. Acres' blunt use of incest underscores the latent psychological effects suggested by Lear's possessive conception of parental roles. As a retelling, Acres posits that even the experiences of malevolent women require scrutiny through which their pernicious behavior can be understood.