I don't mind a _production_ that reinterprets a play by going outside the text. The production is outside the text anyway. But if you interpret the play as literature, as words on the page, what you hafve the text (and its context). There isn't anything else. Just a query: why wouldn't Coleridge have seen a production of Hamlet? And another: the full text of the play is long. Wouldn't you have to race to do it in two hours? Branagh's pretty crisp movie (which does Hamlet as man of action, not a temporizer) is at least three and half hours. I took my son, then three and half, when it came out. About two hours into it, he whispered to me (Can we go now? I said, There's a swordfight coming! He said, OK, and sat down to wait through the rest till the swordfight. jks
Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote: There is no binding theoretical basis for _not_ "going outside the text" (for the sake, in this instance, of invoking a motive abstractly likely -- e.g., desire for the throne), nor is there such a basis for my preferred starting point: which is the whole play rather than any character or event in it. But once you _do_ go outside the text, it is hard to find a stopping point. Joanna does so to ground her sense of the whole in her own personal experience (assumed to be an instance of a general shared experience of grief); Shane goes outside the text to invoke a historical premise: that any rightful heir in the 16th century would _of course_ be driven by the desire to possess his patrimony.
Coleridge, who invented (or discovered) the Hamlet who delays had probably never seen the play performed. And most performances for the last two centuries (& Olivier's movie is paradigmatic) move slowly, many pauses, etc. Were the play to be performed with rapid delivery, no pauses or mooning about, quick scene changes, I doubt that anyone would see any puzzle. One drama professor I knew years ago claimed that by Elizabethan stage practices the uncut text of the play could be performed in slightly over two hours, including an intermission for pissing. That may or may not be the case, but certainly the whole could be performed much more rapidly than it usually is.
I think Joanna _might_ be able to defend her general view (no order to be reestablished) without the focus on Hamlet's grief or delay? There are lines and events to support it without focusing on Hamlet's motives or psychology.
Carrol
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> --- Shane Mage wrote:
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