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SHAKESPEARE Aims of the Paper RL.05-06.I.5 PART I: PAPER 5 SET TEXT ‘HAMLET’ SHAKESPEARE Aims of the Paper Shakespeare is manifestly a great writer, perhaps the greatest ever to work with the English language, and his influence on subsequent generations of poets, dramatists and novelists—in England and abroad—has been immense. But the scale and quality of this achievement, and the merits of particular parts of it, have been continuously debated by critics ever since Francis Meres, in 1598, praised Shakespeare for 'mightily' enriching the English language, and called him one of the best writers for lyric poetry, comedy and tragedy, as well as one of 'the most passionate among us to bewaile and bemoane the perplexities of Love'. When his friend Ben Jonson proclaimed that Shakespeare was 'not of an age but for all time', he cannot have foreseen the wealth of criticism that would be built up as each succeeding 'age' interpreted and re-assessed the play for itself. In the theatre too, discovery, re-thinking—and argument—have been continuous. The Part I paper gives students an opportunity to think both in detail and in broader terms about the full range of Shakespeare's output, both as the product of a distinctive intellect at work in a rich literary and historical context, and as that of a writer whose influence has been enormous. In order to give students the chance to explore one work in depth, with particular attention to its language, the Faculty identifies a set play (Hamlet) for close study in small groups. But it also encourages examination of the entire canon, including the less well-known plays rarely encountered in school, and the non-dramatic poems. Shakespeare's relation to other 16th- and 17th- century writers is also an issue. (Here, the paper overlaps provocatively with the Part I 1500-1700 paper, with the compulsory Tragedy paper in Part II, and with various Part II options.) The Examination In the examination itself, students are asked to answer three questions. In the first, they gloss difficult or problematic words and phrases in passages taken from the set play, and write an essay linked to one of these passages, either in the form of a commentary on it, or as a point of departure. They then answer two other questions broader in scope. Teaching for the Paper Various kinds of teaching are offered for this paper: formal lectures, seminars, faculty classes on the set play in which students from different colleges meet and exchange approaches, and college supervisions. For help with the Hamlet glossing exercise see Exegesis on the Faculty website http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ The following Faculty teaching will be on offer in the year 2005-2006: IN THE LENT TERM Dr. J.P. Casey Shakespeare: Roman and Tragic Themes (6L) IN THE EASTER TERM Dr C J Burrow Glossing Hamlet (1L) Dr J L Fleming Shakespeare’s Language (3L) The Ladies Shakespeare (2L) Dr E P Griffiths Hamlet: a rehearsal (8L) Dr J R Harvey Shakespeare in Time (3L) Dr D A Hillman Shakeapeare Critisicm (4L) Dr M D Long Shakespeare and Tragedy (5L), Shakespeare (2L) Dr A G Milne & Others Hamlet Circus (4L) Dr G F Parker Shakespeare (4L) Faculty Classes Hamlet Classes 2 Using the List The quantity of Shakespearean scholarship and criticism is phenomenal. This reading list can only begin to suggest the variety of approaches that have been applied to this writer, helping students to orient themselves in an exceptionally large field of secondary material. Essentially, students must make up their own minds which issues they want to address—whether kingship, gender, tragi- comedy, adaptation, textual problems, or theatricality, to name a few—and what criticism is most helpful. The plays, however, very much remain the thing. Texts Early editions are reproduced in Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto (1981), ed. M.J.B. Allen and Kenneth Muir, and Charlton Hinman, ed., The First Folio Shakespeare. The Norton Facsimile (1968). The quarto and Folio texts can also be found on Early English Books Online (available via the University Library website). Among one-volume texts, Peter Alexander's (1951) is the plain text supplied in Tripos exams. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (1974), now available in a revised, slightly enlarged edition (1997), has some valuable introductions and notes. It is the basis of The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare, ed. Marvin Spevack (1973). William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (1986), diverged from traditional practice—most spectacularly by providing two distinct texts of King Lear. The Oxford text has been largely absorbed into The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (1997), a convenient one-volume paperback with up-to-date introductions and notes. No series of individually edited plays and poems is uniformly commendable, though the Oxford, New Penguin, New Cambridge and Arden 3rd series (all in progress) contain much of the best work. Students focussing on particular texts should accustom themselves to comparing editions, some of which will have better notes, others stronger introductions, and others again better stage histories and accounts of performance. Those most interested in theatre and film should consult the editions in the Shakespeare in Production series, published by Cambridge University Press. Contexts, Sources, Language, Performance John F. Andrews, William Shakespeare: His World, His Work, His Influence 3 vols (1985) Jonathan Bate and Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History (1996) Russell Jackson, eds, Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare's Theatre (1991) Harry Berger, Jr., Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (1989) Norman Blake, A Grammar of Shakespeare's Language (2001) Lynda E. Boose and Shakespeare the Movie: Popularising the Plays on Film, TV and Video Richard Burt, eds, (1997) Tucker Brooke, ed. The Shakespeare Apocrypha (1908) Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (2000) Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (1992) Geoffrey Bullough ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (1957-75) Anthony Davies, Filming Shakespeare's Plays (1988) Margreta de Grazia The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2001) and Stanley Wells, eds. Allan C. Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary (1996) Allan C. Dessen and A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642 (1999) Leslie Thomson, eds., Janette Dillon, Theatre, Court and City, 1595-1610: Drama and Social Space in London (2000) Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship 1660-1769 (1992) Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, 2nd edn., (1996) 3 R.M. Frye, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (1963) Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642, 3rd edn (1992) Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, 2nd edn (1996) Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (1995) Peter Holland, English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s (1997) Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (1998) S.S. Hussey, The Literary Language of Shakespeare (1982) Grace Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare (1991) Russell Jackson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (2000) Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian and Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725-1765 (1995) Ann Rosalind Jones Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (2000) and Peter Stallybrass, John Jones, Shakespeare at Work (Oxford, 1995) Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (1947) David Scott Kastan, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare (1999) David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (2001) Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance, 2nd edn (2001) John Kerrigan (ed.), Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and 'Female Complaint'. A Critical Anthology (1991) Francois Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World (1991) Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexuality in Renaissance Drama (1997) Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (1988) Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (1986) Kenneth S. Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television (1999) V. Salmon and Reader in the Language of Shakespearean Drama (1987) E. Burness, eds., Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, rev. edn (1987) James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (1996) Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (1999) Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (1991) Gary Taylor, 'General Introduction', in Stanley Wells et al., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (1987) Peter Thomson, Shakespeare's Professional Career (1992) Peter Thomson, Shakespeare's Theatre (2nd ed. 1992) Marion Trousdale, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians (1982) Stanley Wells, ed., Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism (1997) Also recommended are the accounts of performance given by actors in the Cambridge University Press Players of Shakespeare series. Students particularly interested in performance should consult the Part II Shakespeare in Performance paper reading list for further suggestions. 4 Critical Approaches Brian Vickers, ed. Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 1623-1801, 6 vols (1974-81) recovers material of value. There are various scholarly selections from Dr Johnson (e.g., ed. Woudhuysen) and Coleridge (e.g., ed. Raysor). Hazlitt’s The Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817) is usually worth consulting. Some of the following are works of high quality (e.g. Bradley on tragedy), whatever you make of the method. Others are patchy, but might suggest lines of thought worth pursuing. Much illuminating, essay-length work can also be found in volumes of the Casebook series, the Longman Critical Readers series, and in the journals Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey and Shakespeare Studies. Also recommended are the short book-length introductions in the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series - one or two of which are picked out below.
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