The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 28.187 Monday, 22 May 2017
[1] From: Hannibal Hamlin <
Date: May 2, 2017 at 2:03:49 PM EDT
Subj: Re: SHAKSPER: Podcast on Counterfatual Thinking
[2] From: David Frankel <
Date: May 3, 2017 at 3:43:39 PM EDT
Subj: RE: SHAKSPER: Podcast on Counterfatual Thinking
[3] From: Sean Lawrence <
Date: May 7, 2017 at 2:32:04 PM EDT
Subj: Re: SHAKSPER: Podcast on Counterfatual Thinking
[1]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Hannibal Hamlin <
Date: May 2, 2017 at 2:03:49 PM EDT
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Podcast on Counterfatual Thinking
Following up on Neema Parvini’s reply to C. David Frankel, I still value Maynard Mack’s old essay on Hamlet, in which he points out that it begins in an interrogative mood (“Who’s there?”) that pervades the entire play. I also agree that, assuming we don’t know the play already, we would not be certain of Claudius’s guilt until he himself reveals it. Claudius’s response to the Mousetrap is striking but his motives aren’t clear (Harry Levin pointed out way back that he could easily be responding to a perceived threat rather than a mirroring of his guilt, give that what he sees is a nephew killing an uncle). And I agree about the reasonableness of Hamlet’s doubt and hesitation. Apart from the fact that killing your uncle as an act of vengeance is wrong by any Christian standard, he would also be twice-widowing his mother. And the ghost is hardly trustworthy, especially for a student from Wittenberg. Even if we decide that Hamlet does somehow achieve his revenge by the end of the play (highly debatable), what has it achieved? The deaths of the entire Danish ruling family and court, and the return of Denmark to Norwegian rule, making meaningless the military achievements of the man whose ghost apparently set the whole plot afoot. Hamlet should perhaps have thought even more, and hesitated further.
Hannibal
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: David Frankel <
Date: May 3, 2017 at 3:43:39 PM EDT
Subject: RE: SHAKSPER: Podcast on Counterfatual Thinking
I wrote:
“The play does not expect the audience to know only what Hamlet knows. If it did, there’d only be scenes in which Hamlet is present. And even if that were the case, we couldn’t only know what Hamlet knows because the way in which we perceive (what reaches us) is going to be different than what reaches Hamlet (pretending for the moment that he’s a real person).”
To which Neema Parvini replied:
While this might be the case it is easy to forget. For example, can you tell me how and when the audience might know that Claudius is guilty without prior knowledge of the play?
(me) – that’s a very different issue than whether the audience knows only what Hamlet knows. Furthermore, it’s not clear what audience’s in Shakespeare’s day knew about the story before they came to the theatre. Presumably, most Athenian audiences knew before seeing Oedipus Tyrannos that he’d married his mother and killed his father. The story of Hamlet may not have been as well-known to Elizabethan audiences as Oedipus was to Athenians, but some probably knew it – and some probably didn’t.
C. David Frankel
Assistant Director of Theatre
School of Theatre and Dance
University of South Florida
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Sean Lawrence <
Date: May 7, 2017 at 2:32:04 PM EDT
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Podcast on Counterfatual Thinking
On how not knowing the play in advance might change our perception, I think an even better example would be King Lear. As R. W. Chambers showed in a lecture delivered in 1939, all the versions of the story available to Shakespeare would have included a restoration of Lear to power.
The tragic conclusion not only is shockingly excessive --- as Samuel Johnson noted --- but also would be unexpected.
Yours,
Sean Lawrence.