"But in a fiction, in a dream of passion..." In an extended commentary on this passage this book offers a rationale for the excellence and primacy of this play among the tragedies. Throughout, emphasis is placed on Hamlet's fantasies and imaginations rather than on ethical criteria, and on the depiction of Hamlet as a revenge play through an exploration of its dark and mysterious aspects. The book stresses the importance of Passion and Its Fictions in the play and attempts to explore the very Pirandellian topic of Hamlet's passion and dream of passion. It goes on to examine the organization of dramatic energies in the play - the use Shakespeare makes of analogy and infinite regress and of scene rows, broken scenes and impacted scenes, and the significance of the exact middle of Hamlet. The final section is devoted to conventions of style, imagery, and genre in the play - what is the stage situation of asides, soliloguies, and offstage speech? How is the imagery of skin disease and sealing distinctive? In what sense is Hamlet a comedy, or does it use comedy significantly?

Hollywood in the Thirties: Nazi saboteurs, gangsters running gambling ships, British spies and diplomats, FBI agents, starlets looking for the big break, cheap hustlers on the fringes of the law, local cops—some are friends and some are adversaries, but all are involved somehow with Riley Fitzhugh, a private eye who’s wondering whether the death of an English aristocrat really was an accident.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.

This work defines the dramatic rationale of the Hamlet soliloquies in their dramatic contexts, thereby clarifying the tragic idea that organizes the play.

This book argues that play offered Hamlet, John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Robert Burton, and Sir Thomas Browne a way to live within the contradictions and conflicts of late Renaissance life by providing a new stance for the self. Grounding its argument in recent theories of play and in a historical analysis that sees the seventeenth century as a point of crisis in the formation of the western self, the author demonstrates how play helped mediate this crisis and how central texts of the period enact this mediation.

Hamlet stands as a high water mark of canonical art, yet it has equally attracted rebels and experimenters, those avant-garde writers, dramatists, performers, and filmmakers who, in their adaptations and appropriations, seek new ways of expressing innovative and challenging thoughts in the hope that they can change perceptions of their own world. One reason for this, as the book argues, is that the source text that is their inspiration was written in the same spirit. Hamlet as a work of art exhibits many aspects of the “vanguard” movements in every society and artistic milieux, an avant-garde vision of struggle against conformity, which retains an edge of provocative novelty. Accordingly, it has always inspired unorthodox adaptations and can be known by a neglected portion of the company it keeps, the avant-garde in every age. After placing Hamlet alongside “cutting edge” works in Shakespeare’s time, such as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, chapters deal with the ways in which experimental writers, theatre practitioners, and film-makers have used the play down to the present day to develop their own avant-garde visions. This is a part of the uncanny ability of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to be “ever-now, ever-new.”

When the ghost of his father appears to Prince Hamlet of Denmark, urging him to avenge the king's murder upon the prince's uncle, the tragic flaw of indecision leads Hamlet to ruin

Building on current scholarly interest in the religious dimensions of the play, this study shows how Shakespeare uses Hamlet to comment on the Calvinistic Protestantism predominant around 1600. By considering the play's inner workings against the religious ideas of its time, John Curran explores how Shakespeare portrays in this work a completely deterministic universe in the Calvinist mode, and, Curran argues, exposes the disturbing aspects of Calvinism. By rendering a Catholic Prince Hamlet caught in a Protestant world which consistently denies him his aspirations for a noble life, Shakespeare is able in this play, his most theologically engaged, to delineate the differences between the two belief systems, but also to demonstrate the consequences of replacing the old religion so completely with the new.

Every reader is an actor according to Rosenberg. To prepare the actor-reader for insights, Rosenberg draws on major intepretations of the play worldwide, in theatre and in criticism, wherever possible from the first known performances to the present day. The book is rich and provocative on every question about the play.

In Shakespeare's powerful drama of destiny and revenge, "Hamlet", the troubled prince of Denmark, must overcome his own self-doubt and avenge the murder of his father. Contains a selection of the finest criticism through the centuries on "Hamlet", as well as a biography on Shakespeare.