andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> Gertrude as the trophy wife
> Basicaally he kills Claudius as
> soon as he reasonably can after he's made up his mind on evidence he
> has, rather than that reported to him by questionable Ghosts, that
> Claudius is murderer.
>
How the play is produced makes a tremendous difference here. Olivier cut deeply, and still had a long movie. Acting probably moved _much_ more rapidly on the Elizabethan stage, with little if any time for mooning around. With that kind of production the idea of delay (or even of deep introspection) would not occur.
Joanna's idea that "he cannot restore a natural order that never existed in the play in the first place" is interesting. Harriett Hawkins, in _Poetic Freedom and Poetic Truth: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton_, takes up arms against those critics who damn everyone in sight in pre-modern literature for going against order. The following quotation from the book is probably a bit inaccurate, since in taking the notes I quote I always assumed I would recheck them before use in a formal essay:
***** [After quote from Mason on Desdemona, Othello, Juliet.] And so it goes, on and on, in essay after essay, book after book. Desdemona and Juliet disobey their fathers -- off with their heads! The Duchess of Malfy defies her brothers -- off with hers. Yet modern critics who rail against the "sin" of "disobedience" [*] to parents and other authorities conveniently overlook the obvious fact that, in his comedies, Shakespeare gives such "sins" no weight whatsoever. To give only a few examples: Hermia and Celia both disobey their fathers; Orlando disobeys his brother; Florizel elopes with Perdita; and all of them live happily ever after, while we ourselves feel not the slightest uneasiness over the "degree of deliberate deception inevitably involved."^ [*From her quote from Mason, Shakespeare's Tragedies of Love (London, 1970), pp. 79-84; in quoted passage it refers to Othello and Desdemona's elopement.]****
Carrol