In his essay “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” Charles Lamb criticizes the theatrical performances of Shakespeare for providing an experience that inherently provides at worst, a misrepresentation or at best, a shallow representation of a particular character’s emotional depth. This is not to say that Lamb is necessarily criticizing bad acting, but rather he argues that the activities of acting and judging of acting raise “non-essentials” to an unjustified importance that is “injurious to the main interest of the play.” In other words, the viewer’s experience of watching a play is an experience inferior to a reader’s experience of reading the play. It is precisely for this reason that dramatic plays, such as Byron’s Manfred, cannot be staged. The experience of reading Manfred, a closet drama about Manfred, a noble tormented by his guilt for a mysterious transgression, provides a more emotionally intense experience than seeing the play acted out. The chamois hunter’s struggle and eventual failure to empathize with Manfred’s emotional turbulence in Act II, Scene I of Manfred can be interpreted as an experience which parallels the inevitable emotional chasm between audience and characters and ultimately hinders the audience’s sense of character empathy.
Much like how the audience relies on physical cues from the actor to understand the nature of the character, the chamois hunter relies on his observations of Manfred’s manner of dress and speaking to draw conclusions about Manfred’s background. Upon saving him, the chamois hunter notes is Manfred’s noble status: “Thy garb and gait bespeak thee of high lineage” (7). The hunter’s methodology draws on the effect of what Lamb describes as “theatrical representation,” where the viewer’...
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...e reduced to nonsensical, beastly madness.
From Lamb’s essay, we can conclude that for Lamb, there is something imperfect about using drama as a means of storytelling. It is a narrative mode that relies on external appearances to convey abstractions and forces the imagination to play a lesser role. Instead of using our imaginations to interpret a character’s emotions by directly experiencing them, we are given a version of a character which supplants the personal version half-formed in our minds. Regardless of how excellent the acting, the level of character depth and intensity will always fall short. The viewer is further removed from the creative process of character-making, and as a result, any emotional responses will be muted. This suggests that empathy with others may be better cultivated in the reader’s solitude rather in the social environment of theater.
Empathy is used to create change in the world by reaching out to the emotions of people and attending to them. It is used to help others learn and decide on matters that would not be reasonable without feelings attached to them. Empathy helps bring together communities that would have long ago drifted apart, but instead welcomed all who were different. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. This attribute of human-beings really allows us to not only attend to situations as if they were our own, but it allows us to feel most of what others feel because humans are very much alike in some ways. In many of the articles and novels that we have read this quarter, characters from different pieces of context have portrayed empathy whether it was toward
Schlegel, August Wilhelm. Criticism on Shakespeare s Tragedies . A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. London: AMS Press, Inc., 1965.
Riddled with ambiguity by its very nature, the text of William Shakespeare's Hamlet has been a commonly debated subject in literary circles since its first performance. The character Hamlet undergoes intense physical and emotional hardship in his quest for revenge against his despicable uncle. This hardship, some argue, leads to an emotional breakdown and, ultimately, Hamlet's insanity. While this assessment may be suitable in some cases, it falls short in others. Since Hamlet is a play, the ultimate motivation of each of the characters borrows not only from the text, but also from the motivations of the actors playing the parts. In most respects, these motivations are more apt at discerning the emotional condition of a character than their dialogue ever could. Thus, the question is derived: In Kenneth Branagh's film adaptation of Hamlet, does the character Hamlet suffer from insanity? Giving halt to the response, this paper will first endeavor to establish what insanity is and will then provide sufficient examples both from the text, film, and Branagh's own musings on his motivations as proof that Hamlet's character, at least in Branagh's version of the play, is not insane.
In Hamlet’s speech, Shakespeare’s efforts to target his Elizabethan audience develop the theme of the frailty of man. Shakespeare conveys this underlying theme of the play by subt...
Many would perceive madness and corruption to play the most influential role in Hamlet. However, it could be argued that the central theme in the tragedy is Shakespeare's presentation of actors and acting and the way it acts as a framework on which madness and corruption are built. Shakespeare manifests the theme of actors and acting in the disassembly of his characters, the façades that the individuals assume and the presentation of the `play within a play'. This intertwined pretence allows certain characters to manipulate the actions and thoughts of others. For this reason, it could be perceived that Shakespeare views the `Elsinorean' tragedy as one great puppet show, "I could see the puppets dallying".
...elm. Criticism on Shakespeare s Tragedies . A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. London: AMS Press, Inc., 1965.
In 1600, William Shakespeare composed what is considered the greatest tragedy of all time, Hamlet, the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark. His masterpiece forever redefined what tragedy should be. Critics have analyzed it word for word for nearly four hundred years, with each generation appreciating Hamlet in its own way. While Hamlet conforms, without a doubt, to Aristotle's definition of a tragedy, one question still lingers. Did Shakespeare intend for the reader or viewer of Hamlet to feel greater sympathy for Hamlet, or for Ophelia, Hamlet's lover? Both characters tug at the heartstrings throughout the play, but it is clear that 'the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark' is a misrepresentation of Shakespeare's true intention.
Finally, this compound of overwhelmingly convincing humanity and psychological contradiction is the greatest of Shakespeare’s legacies to the men of his own quality. No ‘part’ in the whole repertory of dramatic literature is so certain of success with almost any audience, and is yet open to such a remarkable variety of interpretation. There are as many Hamlets as there are actors who play him; and Bernhardt has proved that even a woman can score a success. (101)
For being considered one of the greatest English plays ever written, very little action actually occurs in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The play is, instead, more focused on the progressing psychological state of its protagonist, after whom the play is name, and his consequent inaction. It is because of this masterpiece of a character that this play is so widely discussed and debated. Hamlet’s generality, his vagueness, his supposed madness, his passion, his hesitation, and his contradictions have puzzled readers, scholars, and actors for centuries. In this paper I will attempt to dissect this beautiful enigma of a character to show that Hamlet is much more self-aware than many people give him credit for and that he recognizes that he is an actor in the theatre of life. He understands and accepts the role he is given, he studies it carefully and thoughtfully, he rehearses and even converses with fellow actors, and he gives one final performance.
Shakespeare thus leaves his audience to fabricate their own perception with serving only minor stage directions. They are then left with Hamlet’s lingering words, actions, and the reactions to predisposed whether Hamlet’s madness is actually feigned or legitimate. Nevertheless, The evidence does not actually define Shakespeare’s character, Hamlet. To relate, modern audiences must do their research to become accustomed to the way of thinking done by people of the Renaissance. All in all, Hamlet’s true soundness is left up to the people of today’s
Relations between sympathy-empathy expressiveness and fiction have become a significant issue in the debate on the emotional responses to the film fiction. Due to their complexity many scholars found it useful to diagram them. With his essay, “Empathy and (Film) Fiction”, Alex Neill tries to develop new theory for analyzing the fiction and, especially, the emotional responses from the audience on it. The project of this essay is represented with an aim to show the audience the significant value of the emotional responses to the film fiction. From my point of view in the thesis of his project he asks a simple question: “Why does the (film) fiction evoke any emotions in the audience?”, further building the project in a very plain and clever way. Tracing the origins of this issue, he distinguishes between two types of emotional responses, sympathy and empathy, as separate concepts in order to understand the influence of both types of emotional responses to fiction. However, relying mostly on this unsupported discrepancy between two concepts and the influence of the “identification” concept, Neill finds himself unable to trace sympathy as a valuable response to fiction. This difficulty makes Neill argue throughout the better part of the text that empathy is the key emotional factor in the reaction to (film) fiction and that it is a more valuable type of emotional response for the audience.
The impeccable style and craft of Shakespeare’s writing has always been looked upon with great respect, and it continues to serve as an inspiration to writers and thinkers today even as it did when it was being first performed in London. Shakespeare’s modern audience, however, is far less diverse than the one for which he originally wrote. Due to the antiquity of his language, Shakespeare’s modern readership consists mostly of students and intellectuals, whereas in Shakespeare’s own time, his plays were performed in playhouses packed with everyone from royalty to peasants. Because of this, Shakespeare was forced to write on many different levels, the most sophisticated of which appealed to his more elite audience members, while the more straightforward and often more crude of which appealed to his less educated viewers, and the most universal of which still appeals to us.
Hamlet is not only a representation of the world, but it is a presentation of the theatricality of the world, and it aims to acquire the detachment that allows self-reflection. According to Catherine Jo Dixon, the word “meta-theatre” is derived from the Greek prefix meta, which signifies a “level beyond the subject that it qualifies” (1). Arguably one of the most memorable examples of meta-theatricality is from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Act III, Scene II, where Hamlet stages a play in an attempt to “catch the conscience of the King” (2.2.526). However, while this is one instance of meta-theatre in Hamlet, Shakespeare created an entire work infused with meta-theatre, either through the direct use of theatre or theatrical metaphors and imagery. Others include Polonius’ praise and report on the Players (Ham. 2.2.325-29), Hamlet’s advice to the Players (Ham. 3.2.1-39), and Hamlet’s antic disposition. The effect of this was that it allowed the emphasis of the contrast between truth and pretence, reality and illusion.
Samuel Johnson within ‘The Plays of Shakespeare’ highlights how ambition of a protagonist leads to detestation on the part of the readers: Or in other words an ambitious nature can be used as a tool by the playwright to produce a sense of loathing and dislike amongst the audience.
Gunnar Bokland in “Judgment in Hamlet” explains Shakespeare’s attraction to the psychological dimension of the drama: