John Lennard, Shakespeare: 'Hamlet'

This book (also in paperback: see below) aims to give students the basis for an informed discussion of Shakespeare’s play and to explore it as a play profoundly concerned with the business of playing and the tragedy of Hamlet as a actor.

Contents

The book aims to introduce students (including those with little or no prior experience of the field) to the worlds of Shakespeare and his theatre revealed in Hamlet. It begins by ‘Approaching Shakespeare’ as utterly a man of the theatre, a professional actor before he was a playwright and a resident dramatist who knew intimately the actors for whom he wrote. It continues by ‘Approaching Hamlet’ in that light, and as a revenge tragedy deliberately overloaded with complications. The middle chapters look in detail at the ‘Actors and Players’ of the drama, starting with the Ghost and ending with ‘the best actors in the world’, and at Shakespeare’s favourite ‘Acts and Devices’ as deployed within it. A final chapter considers Hamlet and Twelfth Night, written and premiered in close succession, as an unexpectedly resonant pair, a surprisingly funny revenge tragedy and a surprisingly bleak revenge comedy that for the first audiences would have complemented one another. The annotated Bibliography includes the current major editions of Hamlet, the major film-adaptations, and a selection of both the best criticism and the most useful websites.

John Lennard

John Lennard took his B.A. and D.Phil. at Oxford University, and his M.A. at Washington University in St Louis. He has taught Shakespeare via all 37 plays and the poetry in the Universities of London, Cambridge, and Notre Dame, and for the Open University. He is now Professor of British & American Literature at the University of the West Indies—Mona. His publications include But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Clarendon Press, 1991), The Poetry Handbook (1996; 2/e, OUP, 2005), and with Mary Luckhurst The Drama Handbook (OUP, 2002). He is the general editor of the Genre Fiction Sightlines and Genre Fiction Monographs series, and has written several Sightlines titles, and most recently a critical collection, Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (2007).

Other Formats

In Paperback from Troubador.co.uk at £5.99:

Troubador paperback : John Lennard on Hamlet

A PDF edition is available to library subscribers from MyiLibrary.com