xiphias | (Reply)

From:

Ian, did you read the ASP Blog before writing your review?

Compare your "challenge number one" above, with what David Evett wrote last month:

Since modern actors are very often trained to look at characters as real people, with whole lives behind them of which the play is only the most recent piece, we talked a lot about the backstory. Are Hamlet and Horatio boyhood friends, or did they meet as students at the University of Wittenberg? What was Polonius' role in the government of Hamlet's father? Was the throne of Denmark Fortinbras's real objective when he set off to fight the Poles? These questions carry on into the timeframe of the play. Hamlet says he has been "in continual practice" at swordplay. For how long? Where? With whom? Why? Some of our talk concerned our necessary effort to connect the concerns of the play, in the language of the play, to our modern ways of thinking and talking. Can the post-Freudian understanding of human sexuality really help us understand the relationship between Gertrude and her son, or her son and his uncle? Can we give the word "election" its modern force, or should we try in some way to historicize it? Should we accept the way Ophelia's father and brother treat her as merely a function of the way society viewed women at the turn of the 17th century, or use it as a lever to open up a feminist dimension of the production?

Great minds think alike?