Thursday, October 15, 2009
HAMLET
Author: William Shakespeare
Date: c. 1599
More first semester stuff. Second reading of this. This time I made the supreme effort of reading it in the original (with the help of a translation to Portuguese). I fell prey to endless musings on the play's subtleties, of which the most notable ones were the theme of the Number Two and duality, a theme prompted by a Web forum discussion, the address of which I am not sure I am able to recover; and the hypothesis, read on Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (aside from that, an often unbearable chapter), but apparently first formulated in Marc Shell's Children of the Earth: literature, politics, and nationhood, that Hamlet is hesitant to kill Claudius because of the possibility that the latter is his biological father. (And won't marry Ophelia because she may be his half-sister...)
Date: c. 1599
More first semester stuff. Second reading of this. This time I made the supreme effort of reading it in the original (with the help of a translation to Portuguese). I fell prey to endless musings on the play's subtleties, of which the most notable ones were the theme of the Number Two and duality, a theme prompted by a Web forum discussion, the address of which I am not sure I am able to recover; and the hypothesis, read on Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (aside from that, an often unbearable chapter), but apparently first formulated in Marc Shell's Children of the Earth: literature, politics, and nationhood, that Hamlet is hesitant to kill Claudius because of the possibility that the latter is his biological father. (And won't marry Ophelia because she may be his half-sister...)
