Tag: Hamlet
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“Conference With the Dead”: A Brief History of Haunting
This chapter is part literature review, part mission statement: in it, I outline how the notion of a “ghost” would have been understood by somebody living at the turn of the 17th Century. What – or who – *were* ghosts? What did they look like? Where did they come from? Most importantly, I begin to explore how might the various historical, religious, and political significations of the ghost may have influenced the characters we see on the early modern stage…
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Antonio’s Revenge: The Metatheatrical Ghost
In this paper, I argue that throughout Antonio’s Revenge Marston establishes a clear relationship between the appearances of ghostly characters and glaring shifts in his play’s tonal register. Specifically, ghosts – primarily the recurring figure of Andrugio – appear to both signpost and facilitate a gloriously self-aware metatheatrical undercurrent designed to entertain and emotionally unsettle the audience in equal measure.
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“I depart laughing”: Living Death in the “The Lady’s Tragedy”
Few plays explore the rich dramatic potential of living death as explicitly as Thomas Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy (or, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, as the play is sometimes known), a tragedy that in the first three acts alone presents suicide, grave-robbing, defiled corpses, and ghosts. Middleton did *not* do these things by halves.
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3-Minute Reads // Antonio’s Revenge: a peek into Marston’s metatheatrical closet…
For a Senecan-styled tragedy of inordinate bloodshed, things work out remarkably well for the characters who survive John Marston’s 1602 Antonio’s Revenge…
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Fatherly and Fearsome: the Ghost in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996)
Does Branagh’s “Hamlet” offer audiences the most complete and compelling version of the Ghost to be put to film. I think so.
Writus Andronicus 