A general problem of philosophy concerns the possibility of objective knowledge of other cultures (including past cultures), and the adequacy of their reconstruction. The problem of cultural development is also crucial. In this paper, I argue that a culture which has expanded its potentialities in various independent forms is an open culture capable of entering into dialogue with other cultures.

'The world is tragically splendid in its fragmentedness. Its harmony lies in its disharmony, its unity in its enmity. Such is the paradoxical doctrine of Heraclitus, subsequently paradoxically developed by Friedrich Nietzsche into the theory of 'tragic optimism."'.

O artigo examina o problema de identificar a verdade e a beleza em teorias axiomáticas significativas e a formação desses valores no processo de ensino de certas seções de um curso de matemática de uma escola de educação geral com os traços característicos de teorias axiomáticas significativas. critérios de beleza científica ou matemática são considerados um fator na formação e identificação da verdade e da beleza. Tais critérios foram introduzidos pelo filósofo escocês Hutcheson no século XVIII e por seus muitos (...) seguidores nos séculos subsequentes. Este trabalho examina os grupos formativos, unificadores e lógicos de critérios objetivos de beleza científica. Mostra que: a) critérios formativos: simetria, comparação, harmonia, ritmo, aplicabilidade são mais propensos à formação e identificação da beleza dos objetos de uma teoria axiomática significativa do que a verdade nela contida; b) critérios unificadores - unidade de diversidade, generalidade, registro matemático de leis científicas visam revelar a verdade em uma teoria axiomática significativa. E a beleza dos objetos aqui é determinada pela conexão dos critérios com a verdade, c) critérios lógicos - rigor lógico, clareza, simplicidade, redução do complexo ao simples visam a formação e identificação em uma teoria axiomática significativa de ambas as verdades e a formação e identificação da beleza dos objetos. (shrink)

Cosmogonic myths, also referred to as creation myths, are theological and philosophical explanations of ancient myths of creation within a religious Homo sapien hamlet. In the context of this article, the word myth is attributed to the extravagant quixotic interpretation in anecdote of what is accomplished or ceased as a key or essential phenomenon. The terms or language concepts of cosmogonic or creation invoke the start of things, whether by the desire and action of a surpass Actuality, by emergence (...) from some eventful Actuality or by an additional alternative process. Mystics, scientists, philosophers and theologians of today set forward a method, to my mind, of pluralistic interpretation of the whole understanding and interpretation of a cosmogonic and creation myth that includes a variety of Actualities, in the world, according to basic Western and Eastern religious and rational classifications. These rational classifications have a phenomenological epistemic impact and even a certain righteousness of whoever wants to believe whatever of creation. Let it be …, as it should be ontological and epistemological and be positive for theologians as objects and religious sapiens as subjects. (shrink)

This is an account of Ian Charleson's extraordinary performance in Richard Eyre's production of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The essay is divided into four parts: the original Hamlet in Eyre's production was Daniel Day-Lewis whose stirring but erratic portrayal strangely terminated in mid-performance; Ian Charleson's rehearsal process, including comments by actors and friends about his talent and courage in preparing for the role; Charleson's brilliant acting, his triumph in overcoming his physical weakness and ravaged appearance as he was dying of (...) AIDS; and personal memories of Charleson's November 3, 1989 performance. (shrink)

In the article on material of seventeen texts, the problem of world outlook strategy in the American novel of the 21th century is studied. The most influential author’s models are considered: neodecadence, post-apocalyptic humanity, personal versions of social and psychological realism and existentialist consciousness. The main attention is paid to the description and interpretation of the general for modern American novels of a national picture of the world. The family history remains the stable level of a narration. At other level, (...) there is a depressive or protest word about a condition of life, about the absolute beginnings dooming the person to suffering. In the narrative center, there is a hero, who has to solve personal problems in the context of the opened emptiness capable to get metaphysical meanings or to replace them. Reducing dynamics of a plot and formation of character, the novel becomes a form of the image of a steady state. For this state, the complex combination of two literary archetypes is characteristic: Job and Hamlet. The love to the world is not provided, the problem of finding of arguments for continuation of life is perceived by writers as main. If the classical American novel has positioned itself between dream and the tragedy, the modern novel settles down between everyday life and emptiness. The key paradox of the studied art texts is connected with it: two forms of fatigue - not only from the Absolute responsible for weight of existence, but also from its absence connect in one complex. The hero does not know with whom he does not agree: God or with essentially subjectless life depriving any God of will, power and sense. Search of new moral rituals is represented in this situation quite natural. (shrink)

A Persian translation of William Shakespeare's Hamlet along with the original text.

Hamlet’s character sets, under different shapes and extents, the benchmark against which a large part of the European philosophy of the very long «short twentieth-century» behind us has had to measure. In the name of Hamlet as the most enigmatic among Shakespeare’s creatures, even Europe, its spirit and destiny, is identified, according to the well-known claim by Paul Valery.Common trait to a big part of these interpretations – from the juvenile works of Pavel Florenskij and Lev S. Vygotskij (...) to Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet oder Ekuba. Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel – is offered by the detection, in Hamlet’s figure, of the contradiction inherent to an epochal transition: the time of an unresolved passage between two ages that only knows the endless pain of an “interim”. My paper concerns the possibility to interpret Hamlet’s time as the time of an “interim” in light of Benjamin’s claims about Shakespeare’s drama contained in his book on the German Trauerspiel.While Florenskij interprets Hamlet’s time as tragic and the figure of Hamlet as a tragic one, in my essay - moving from some observations on the " Hamlet Problem " by the young Franz Rosenzweig - I consider the original Benjaminian thesis about the character and the drama of Hamlet as the end of the modern Trauerspiel. Starting from a statement by Theodor Adorno in the famed Hornberger Brief to Benjamin of August 2, 1935, I outline, therefore, how Benjamin characterizes the figure of Hamlet. This, from his early writings on the relationship between tragedy and Trauerspiel up to the great book on the Origin of the German Trauerspiel. In the frame of Benjamin’s interpretation, exactly by virtue of its distance from the thesis on the duality of tragedy, the Shakespearian theatrum of consciousness, paradigmatically represented in the figure of Hamlet and in the intimately dialectic character of his drama, is accounted for as necessary correlate of the Cartesian’s theatrum of consciousness. From a theoretical point of view, the Benjaminian characterization of Hamlet's figure reveals, therefore, something of the nature of modern consciousness and of consciousness in general in relation to the problem of truth and its representation. Hence the end of modern Trauerspiel coincides with the original incompleteness of its time. Consequently, I also claim Hamlet's dramatic figure to represent the aporetic characters of modern politics. This contrasts the thesis of Carl Schmitt who speaks, instead, of the Shakespearean drama as an expression of a pre-modern barbaric time. (shrink)

A deconstruction of Hamlet's ontological metaphor—"the time is out of joint"—indicates Shakespeare has made an implicit commitment to a conception of time that is explicitly and systematically developed by Kant's transcendental philosophy. Consequently, a retro reading explains how Hamlet temporarily identifies with the Ghost's temporal-categorical mind-set, and how Hamlet, who has been acutely aware of the passage of time, loses track of time during the prayer/closet scene sequence. More specifically, I assert that Hamlet's identification with the (...) Ghost's categorical sense of what is possible and impossible in accordance with the passage of outer time is what causes his inaction. (shrink)

I think I would not err in saying that Dvoretskii's chronicle of our times, The Man from Outside, is stimulating unusual interest on the part of theater companies and audiences. It has been produced on two Moscow stages, something that is quite rare. It is playing in Leningrad, Kiev, Vilnius, Arkhangelsk, Barnaul, Vladivostok, Volgograd, Kuibyshev, Murmansk, Novokuznetsk, Petrozavodsk, Pskov, Sverdlovsk, Simferopol, Stavropol, and other cities. Judging by the reviews, the play and its productions are successful everywhere. It is as hard (...) to get a ticket to Moscow's Malaia Bronnaia Theater as to Spartacus at the Bolshoi or Hamlet at the Taganka. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhile in the 1960s Allan Bloom suggested to read William Shakespeare’s works through the prism of political philosophy, a decade earlier Carl Schmitt used the works of English poet in a reverse way: he read political philosophy and history through Shakespeare. Deprived – under the influence of Leo Strauss – from the possibility of considering Thomas Hobbes a decisionist thinker, Schmitt in his ‘Hamlet or Hecuba’ used Shakespeare’s most famous work to interpret origins of disappearance of the state of (...) emergency from English soil. Shakespeare was seen by Schmitt as a writer who captured the Sixteenth and seventeenth century changes in thinking about sovereignty and the state. Interestingly, Schmitt did not use Shakespeare as method for the first time: in first decades of twentieth century, in his diary, he made ‘Othello’ a prism through which he read his love life. Because the author of ‘The Concept of the Political’ is one of the less methodologically cohesive writers of twentieth century, his usage of Shakespeare twice, in different circumstances, is interesting. In an article, author links ‘Hamlet or Hecuba’ with Schmitt’s geopolitical works and presents Shakespeare’s works as the coherent method of interpretation in Schmitt’s philosophy of decisionism. (shrink)

Este artículo tematiza la relevancia del Hamlet, de Shakespeare, para el pensamiento de T. W. Adorno, aun cuando este no haya escrito in extenso sobre aquel. El drama aparece sobre todo en su discurso oral como modelo para describir la relación de discontinuidad entre teoría y práctica. Aquí se desea mostrar cómo el teórico crítico del pensamiento moral abstracto piensa el paso del conocimiento a la praxis a partir del vínculo entre Hamlet y el llamado “factor añadido” (Das (...) Hinzutretende). Desde esta lectura, el Hamlet de Adorno representa un lugar clave de transiciones malogradas. (shrink)

Affect Theory, Genre, and the Example of Tragedy employs Silvan Tomkins' Affect-Script theory of human psychology to explore the largely unacknowledged emotions of disgust and shame in tragedy. The book begins with an overview of Tomkins' relationship to both traditional psychoanalysis and theories of human motivation and emotion, before considering tragedy via case studies of Oedipus, Hamlet, and Death of a Salesman. Aligning Affect-Script theory with literary genre studies, this text explores what motivates fictional characters within the closed conditions (...) of their imagined worlds and how we as an audience relate to and understand fictional characters as motivated humans. (shrink)

O texto busca apresentar a recepção da céle-bre peça de Shakespeare em solo alemão, as-sim como as consequências que essa leitura teve em diferentes momentos do que se con-vencionou chamar de Goethezeit.

Two philosophical tools are used in this article, namely that of philosophical-pluralism and transcendent pluralism as a kind of glue to enhance our examining of creative pluralism. There is a diversity implant in positive modus of understanding this pluralistic pristine of creative pluralism within transcendence modus. To help facilitate this pluralistic pristine, the author makes use of three constructivist paradigms that are distinguished and used, namely exogenous constructivism emphasising the reconstruction of structures preformed in the environment; endogenous constructivism emphasising the (...) coordination of previous organismic structures and dialectical constructivism emphasising the construction of new structures out of organism and environmental interaction.Contribution: The aim of this article is to present a coherent metatheory by specifying the boundary conditions in which each root metaphor best applies. These above-mentioned versions of pluralism as tools are a reminiscence and a jubilee of the efforts made by sapiens through diversity onto or into pluralism to enable the religious hamlet to think and share. This pluralistic approach of orientation, I hope, will empower sapiens in their respective hamlets to define, articulate and designate to enhance their own epistemological and ontological vantage points wherefrom their individual, coherent and contextual ways of thinking, acting and projecting their lives in a positive modus by emphasising the reconstructions of their performance in their environment. (shrink)

Excerpt from Schopenhauer, Hamlet, Mephistopheles: Drei Aufsatze zur Naturgeschichte des Pessimismus Barmhersigen Siebe, Die Die Seele Des Chriftentums ift, jener Siebe, Die Das Bofe wohl lennt, aber auf Das (ente blicft, Die auch noch in Der Derfommenheit Die menfchliche Seele fieht und fucht; und Dicier mangel an Siebe geht mit Dem mangel an olauben 3ufammen: Die menfchen taugen aus Dem orunde nichts; Darum, feine muhe mit ihnen verlieren! About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and (...) classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

The traditional image of northern Iberian mountain settlements is that they are largely egalitarian, homogeneous, and survivals of archaic forms of 'agrarian collectivism'. In this book, based both on extensive fieldwork and detailed study of local records, Brian Juan O'Neill offers a different perspective, questioning prevailing views on both empirical as well as theoretical and methodological grounds. Through a detailed examination of three major areas of social life - land tenure, cooperative labour exchanges, and marriage and inheritance practices - in (...) one particular hamlet, the author demonstrates the predominance of forms of institutionalized economic inequality and social differentiation within the peasantry. Situating the local study within a wider European and Mediterranean ethnographic and geographical framework, O'Neill offers a refreshing and challenging way of combining the research methods of anthropology with those of social and economic history. His book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, sociologists, geographers and demographers interested in the present and past social structure of European village communities, as well as to those concerned with the growing links between anthropology and history. (shrink)

El personaje de Hamlet ha sido un punto de referencia para gran parte de la filosofía europea del siglo XX, representando el espíritu y destino de Europa. Diversos autores, como Pavel Florenskij, Lev S. Vygotskij y Carl Schmitt, han visto en Hamlet la contradicción inherente a una transición epocal no resuelta, caracterizada por el dolor interminable de un interim. Mi artículo explora la posibilidad de interpretar el tiempo de Hamlet bajo esta luz, en relación con las ideas (...) de Walter Benjamin sobre el Trauerspiel alemán. A diferencia de Florenskij, que lee a Hamlet de manera trágica, sigo la tesis benjaminiana que sitúa a Hamlet como el fin del Trauerspiel moderno. En este marco, se revela la naturaleza de la conciencia moderna y su relación con la verdad, destacando cómo Hamlet encarna los rasgos aporéticos de la política moderna, en contraste con la visión premoderna de Carl Schmitt. (shrink)

Where science has often been used to explore the questions raised by art, this book does the reverse, suggesting that art can address a problem raised by science: the deep challenge to ethics posed by Darwin’s discovery that we are intentional beings living in an unintentional world. Using Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, among others, Angus Fletcher shows how the physical experience of art can transform Darwin’s discouraging theory into a practice-based ethics that establishes pluralism, curiosity, and cooperation as the (...) basis of progressive life. (shrink)

I give cases where the contrast between "if Shakespeare had not written Hamlet someone else would have" and "if Shakespeare did not write Hamlet and someone else did"is found in future tense sentences. This is often denied.

Ingmar Pörn (Inquiry 27 [1984], nos. 2?3) claims that certain ideas of Kierkegaard's can illuminate a notion of the self articulated in action?theoretical terms. Through a reconstruction of Kierkegaard's concept of despair, couched in these terms, Pörn aims to show how these ideas can contribute to the study of the self. Because he misconstrues an important distinction in Kierkegaard's account of selfhood, Pörn fails to show this. It remains uncertain what use the study of the self would have for Kierkegaard's (...) notion of selfhood, and whether an action?theoretical analysis is capable of bringing out whatever may be of interest in it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 364-367 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Hamlet in Purgatory Hamlet in Purgatory, by Stephen Greenblatt; xii & 322 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, $29.95. Hamlet in Purgatory is both more and less than literary criticism of Shakespeare's most haunting and most critically belabored play. Greenblatt has captured an evolving culture of belief which informs the play and goes far (...) beyond source studies or the history of ideas. He assays to show how the Medieval doctrine of Purgatory and the rejection of it by Protestant Reformers shaped the structure of Hamlet and the world of Hamlet's spiritual agony.Central to the argument is the notion that the rejection of Purgatory, and ritual practices associated with the doctrine, threatened to disrupt community and sever the relations between the living and the dead. Thus, the senior Hamlet's plea to "Remember me" takes precedence over his injunction to revenge; traditional preoccupations of Hamlet criticism become secondary to the concern for spiritual community which Reformation doctrine threatened. The exegesis is scholarly and the prose is engaging, yet the book suffers from the new historicist tendency to become absorbed more with context than with criticism and to assume too readily the relevance of the context to the criticism. Put another way, Greenblatt, like other new historicists, is not always rigorous in his inferences.Greenblatt warns that his book "requires a certain hermeneutical patience, a willingness to suspend direct literary analysis, in order to examine more thoroughly what has been treated as mere background for the canonical work of art" (p. 5). Although the book culminates in a description of the migration of discarded religious ritual into the theater, and a thoughtful commentary on Hamlet, Greenblatt cautions that "... for the book to work properly, the reader should understand literary analysis, and specifically the analysis of Hamlet, to be suspended in another sense as well, that is, distributed in tiny, almost invisible particles throughout my account" (p. 5). Amen. The caveats are essential for anyone who might expect an "interpretation" of Hamlet. Rather, Greenblatt has evoked the conflict of enduring beliefs and Reformist critiques which animated Shakespeare's imagination and Hamlet's suffering.Hermeneutical patience certainly is demanded of the reader, because more than half of the book presents commentaries on the doctrine of Purgatory from the late Middle Ages to the early seventeenth century. Greenblatt begins with Simon Fish's 1529 "Supplication for the Beggars," (p. 15) an anti-purgatorial (and anti-clerical) tract addressed to Henry VIII. Fish argued that the doctrine of Purgatory is at the heart of ecclesiastical corruption and is a danger to the state, because the fear that the doctrine can generate enables the clergy to extort enormous wealth in the form of "suffrages," donations for trentals, anniversary Masses, and other perpetual penitential memorials on behalf of the dead. Fish's argument is double: its theological burden is that Purgatory is a non-scriptural superstition; its rhetoric is that it is an abuse of the [End Page 364] poor and a danger to the economic solvency of the kingdom. Fish invokes both doctrinal error and political danger; this is thus an excellent tract to begin the elucidation of the complexity of Reformist objections to Purgatory in sixteenth-century England. Greenblatt adds that other Reformers saw Purgatory as a poetic creation, a fable, and therefore a vain imagining. John Donne's "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions" is cited to show that post-Catholic divines believed that purgation must be completed in this life.According to Greenblatt, an unintended consequence for the laity of the rejection of Purgatory is the creation of a radical divide between the living and the dead. If we pray for the dead, they are not as absent from us as if they had passed on to the timeless worlds of Heaven or Hell. Even if Purgatory is expensive or fabulous, its loss destroys a community with the dead that involved a reciprocal and continuing relationship, whereby the living can aid the dead towards Heaven and saved souls can eventually become intercessors in Heaven for the living... (shrink)

This essay investigates the rôle of the North Atlantic as a silent actant in the dramatic economy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It takes the series of actions of Hamlet’s deportation by sea, his nocturnal transformation on board and his surprise return with the pirate ship as the axis around which the play turns. It examines the movement of deterritorialization and mimesis in the constitution of sovereignty by the ceaseless transference of piracy and inter-imperial rivalries and passages. Interpreting Hamlet (...) as being not just a play of nothingness and nihilism, born of and residing in the interstice of disjointed historical time, this essay argues that Hamlet is a play that inherits and inhabits the cranny of fractured historical space from Elizabethan to Jacobean England when the English isle became what Carl Schmitt called the “agency of the spatial turn to a new nomos of the earth.” The old nomos of the earth, terra firma in the Greco-Roman and feudal senses, was challenged by the new freedom of the sea which demanded a separate and distinct global order. This essay poses the question whether the dramatic economy of Hamlet as split by and revolving around the physical presence and symbolic charges of the North Atlantic in fact constitutes the irrhythm and mis-punctuation of this spatial turn toward a maritime modernity. (shrink)

One of the principal challenges to human survival will be for human beings, embedded in a plurality of cultural contexts, to engage with and learn from one another respectfully in the continuing task of creating a more liveable world. I argue here that theoretical psychology can contribute to setting some of the terms for this effort through the kind of conception it advances of the person as agent. I discuss broadly two philosophical perspectives toward human agency which have become prominent (...) in psychology in the last few decades, the humanistic and the hermeneutic. I argue that these two different frameworks make complementary contributions to the project of understanding ourselves and furthering the development of our humanity. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This book assembles a team of leading literary scholars and philosophers to probe philosophical questions that assert themselves in Shakespeare's Hamlet, including issues about subjectivity, knowledge, sex, grief, and self-theatricalization.

In this chapter I want to explore a comment made by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze that presents a connection between two figures: Kant and Hamlet.1 In his most important early work, Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes, “the Northern Prince says ‘time is out of joint’. Can it be that the Northern philosopher says the same thing?” (Deleuze 2004, 111). In this chapter, I want to look at the question of drama and see how different conceptions of drama allow (...) us to understand action, or more precisely inaction, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I want to show how these different conceptions of dramatic action tell us something about the nature of temporality. I will begin by reversing Hamlet’s claim, and discussing what time “in joint” would look like, tracing it back to Aristotle’s conception of drama, before moving on to Plato’s characterization of temporality. (shrink)

The play's the thing,"1 Hamlet says in act 2, scene 2 of Shakespeare's finest tragedy. Hamlet is referring here to the forthcoming performance of The Mousetrap, the play that he has asked the newly arrived players to perform that evening in the presence of his mother and uncle. "The play's the thing," Hamlet says, "Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King". But it is not confirmation of his uncle's guilt as the murderer of his father that (...) Hamlet really needs or ultimately receives from this piece of theater he has asked be performed but rather the clarification and redemption of his own confused and violent psyche.Hamlet is a character who spends the first two acts of Shakespeare's play alternately... (shrink)

Every day doctors bear witness to others about the experiences, needs and feelings of their patients, drawing on what they have learnt from clinical consultations. This paper considers the medical task of bearing honourable and truthful witness through an examination of the role and actions of Horatio in Hamlet. Horatio is simultaneously located among the background machinery of the play, separate from the lives of the protagonists, and in the foreground, where his authoritative witness is repeatedly called upon by (...) the play's characters. Horatio is invited to watch an unfolding disaster, his warnings are not heard, and at its conclusion he stands apart from the drama to give its account. The tensions between engagement and observation, and between partial and impartial accounting echo those faced by doctors in everyday clinical practice. The act of bearing witness, Shakespeare suggests, even for those who are tasked with being objective, is necessarily imperfect, and not dispassionate. Those people, including doctors, who are expected to construct authoritative accounts of the motives and actions of others may find in Hamlet a small lesson on the need to approach their summary narratives about others more humbly, aware of the narrowness and partiality of their perspective. (shrink)

The survival of some masterpieces of literature across the ages is still an unexplained mystery. Deeply rooted in their time, they reflect the preoccupations of a given historical period and have an impact, by means of their testimony, on future generations. They bring into play images, drives and phantoms which have remained unchanged from prehistoric time to our day. The perfection of their form has remained unequaled; their examples incite us to meditation and creativity.

In his seminar on 'Desire and its Interpretation' Lacan gives a detailed interpretation of Shakespeare's Hamlet. We present this interpretation as an alternative to the psychobiographic approach which has been dominant in the psychoanalytic tradition. According to Lacan Hamlet is a poetic creation and nothing else. In order to understand it wedon't have to look at the unconscious motives of the author, but at the composition of the text. The deliberate articulation of the signifier accounts for the effect (...) of the play on its readers. According to Lacan Hamlet is a tragedy of desire that informs us onthe truth of human existence. It also shows how we can get access to this truth. In that sense Shakespeare's text can, according to Lacan, also learn us something about the aim of the psychoanalytic process. The conclusion argues that Lacan's interpretation of the nature of the psychoanalytic process is heavily dependent on the phenomenological tradition and more particularly that it ressembles the problematic of the 'phenomenological reduction'. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sighs and Tears:Biological Signals and John Donne's "Whining Poetry"Michael A. WinkelmanPhebe: Good shepherd, tell this youth what 'tis to love. Silvius: It is to be all made of sighs and tears...—Shakespeare, As You Like It (5.2.83–84)ISighs and tears permeate John Donne's poetry, as well they should. Crying in particular functions as a costly signal in biological terms: a blatant, physiologically-demanding, involuntary indicator of hurt feelings. "Tears dim mine eyes," (...) laments Donne's Sappho ("Sappho to Philaenis," l. 56); they are "Fruits of much grief" in "A Valediction of Weeping" (l. 7).1 The theory of costly signaling, related to the handicap principle, was developed fairly recently by Israeli zoologists Amotz and Avishag Zahavi. As the Zahavis explain: "in order to be effective, signals have to be reliable; in order to be reliable, signals have to be costly."2 Initially their idea was resisted, but it has since become widely accepted and it has proven very helpful in making sense of both animal and human behavior. Wasteful conspicuous consumption among upper-class Americans, as noted a century ago by sociologist Thorstein Veblen, exemplifies this handicap principle in action. Like gazelles jumping in place or stotting rather than running away when wolves appear, it indicates fitness by flaunting excess resources.Shedding tears when feeling sad is an evolved human adaptation that broadcasts unhappiness. The wailing of infants demands attention, and crying does something similar for grown-ups: among other things, it tests the commitment of hearers to appease the distressed. For instance, in Chaucer's tragic medieval romance Troilus and Criseyde, Pandarus advises [End Page 329] Troilus to provoke a suitable reaction from Criseyde by embellishing his billet-doux: "Towchyng thi lettre... Biblotte it with thi teris ek a lite" (touching thy letter... Be-blot it with thy tears a little).3 Early modern authors also knew their importance. In the words of Robert Herrick, "tears are tongues," while Claudius suspects that "There's matter in these sighs, these profound heaves" (Hamlet, 4.1.1).4As a case in point, Donne was overwhelmed by the death of his dear wife Anne in 1617. As his contemporaneous biographer Izaak Walton reported: "his very soul was elemented of nothing but sadness; now, grief took so full a possession of his heart, as to leave no place for joy."5 Donne even hoped to be literally entombed with her soon: "as the grave is become her house, so I would hasten to make it mine also; that we two might there make our beds together in the dark" (Walton, p. 51). His miserable mood was revealed in his initial sermon after her demise:His first motion from his house was to preach, where his beloved wife lay buried (in St. Clement's Church, near Temple-Bar, London) and his text was a part of the Prophet Jeremiah's Lamentation: "Lo, I am the man that have seen affliction."And indeed, his very words and looks testified him to be truly such a man; and they, with the addition of his sighs and tears expressed in his Sermon, did so work upon the affections of his hearers as melted and molded them into a companionable sadness; and so they left the Congregation.(Walton, p. 52)Listeners responded in kind to his honest confessions, a textbook illustration of the empathy generated by crying. (A related issue—how and why literature affects audiences so strongly—is currently generating some very interesting work from New Humanists investigating the question from an evolutionary perspective.)These qualities make sighs and tears fundamental to love poetry. In other words, writers deploy them because they reflect universal states of mind, rather than originating as some arbitrary, socially-constructed literary device. The copious opening sonnet of Petrarch's magnificent Rime sparse codifies the theme:6You who can hear in scattered rhymes the soundof all that sighing which once fed my heartin my first youthful error, when in partI was a person of a different kind—my changing manner as I weep and reason, [End Page 330] between vain aspirations and vain grief,leads everyone who has known... (shrink)

The paper addresses the question: why and how does Hamlet lose track of time in the Prayer-Closet scene sequence? While Deleuze aptly notes the poetic formula “the time is out of joint” is indicative of time no longer being subordinate to cyclical rhythms of nature, or as Polonius asserts: “Time is time”(II.ii.88), but rather movement being subordinated to time, it is argued that the HAMLET text goes further in its pre-figuration of Kant’s concept that time is a mysteriously (...) autonomous form. More specifically, it is explicated that in a Kantian sense Hamlet's temporary identification with the Ghost’s categorical sense of whatis possible and impossible in accordance with the passage of outer time is what causes Hamlet’s temporal confusion. (shrink)

This article explores the contradictory nature of the ghost in Hamlet and shows how Shakespeare seeks to manipulate the reader’s response in Hamlet by using contradictions and ambiguities. The article also explores the ways in which the reader responds to these contradictions and reconstructs a palpable world in the impalpable world of the text. These contradictions compel the reader to participate in the composition of the text and make him keep changing his own approach to the work with (...) the result that the more he reads the play, the deeper he finds himself entrenched in contradictions. As he fails to grasp the logic of events, the reader relates his own world to the text instead of relating the events of the text to his world and recreates his own world. Therefore, he can easily detach himself from the text and let his imagination run loose as the play proves too vague for him to comprehend. In reading Hamlet, the imagination runs wild and travels far beyond the text to an extent where the reader perceives things, which stand not within but utterly outside the text. Eventually, the reality achieved by the reader in the course of reading the play is only the reality which dwells in the innermost recesses of his mind. (shrink)