By R. A. Foakes
This e-book makes a speciality of the 2 performs of Shakespeare that experience normally contended for the identify of "greatest" between his works. fresh serious theorizing has destabilized the texts and undermined the thought of "greatness" or any attention of the performs as artistic endeavors. Foakes takes factor with such theories and reconsiders textual revisions, with a purpose to argue for the integrity of the performs as interpreting texts, and to get better a versatile feel in their artistry when it comes to which means.
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Extra info for Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art
Sample text
Hamlet's frustration parallels that of the male artist who, as a man, was expected to do something practical in the world; and Hamlet's inability to achieve could be related to the woman in himself, so that he could appear feminine as in Delacroix's painting, just as the artist, in his ineffectuality, occupied with words or paint on a canvas, might seem effeminate or androgynous. Tonio Kroger in Thomas Mann's story, who identifies himself with Hamlet, comments on himself as artist: 'a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes .
1*2 Another version of Hamlet highlights nausea, in the wake of Nietzsche and Sartre, either as a condition of existential despair in the face of an inexplicable and corrosive world, or as a pervasive sex-nausea, a misogyny that is a mode of anger Hamlet directs 'towards the Other for destroying his old selfcentered world'. 145 The privatized Hamlet, abstracted from the play and turned into a projection of each of us as individuals ('I have a smack of Hamlet myself; 'It is we who are Hamlet'), democratized criticism by opening up the possibility of any number of subjective interpretations, and the range of responses to this most famous of literary creations has indeed been very wide.
Here, in a sweeping view of the evolution of civilization as a struggle between 'Eros and Death, the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction', the price of advance in civilization is seen as a 'loss of happiness through heightening the sense of guilt', and this is manifested as anxiety or malaise. 124 Such a view was deflected into quasi-religious terms by G. 126 Knight was exceptional in associating Claudius with a healthy state, but a politically hostile attitude to Hamlet can be found in other influential treatments of Hamlet in this period, such as that by George Santayana (1936), who saw 'a sort of passionate weakness and indirection' in Hamlet's will, that left him floating without direction in a world he cannot escape or understand, I27 or that by L.