"Shakespeare Now!" is a series of short books of truly vital literary scholarship, each with its own distinctive form. "Shakespeare Now!" recaptures the excitement of Shakespeare; it doesn't assume we know him already, or that we know the best methods for approaching his plays. "Shakespeare Now!" is a new generation of critics, unafraid of risk, on a series of intellectual adventures. Above all - it is a new Shakespeare, freshly present in each volume. Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy is quoted more often than almost any other passage in Shakespeare. Parodies and advertisements show us that invoking even its first two words is enough to imply the rest of the speech - though few of us can recall much about it. For we like to think we know this speech, even as we like to think we know our Shakespeare. "To Be or Not to Be" takes this most famous speech and unpacks it's meaning to reveal the questions and problems it raises. Hamlet's speech asks us to ask serious questions about knowledge and existence. The book asks what close attention to Shakespeare's words can tell us about what we don't and perhaps can't know. If this speech concerns what isn't knowable, what else is it about? Is it or is it not about suicide? Do the King and Polonius overhear? If so, does Hamlet know or care? What must we bring to it, as readers? What about as audience members: to what do we need to pay attention? This book reads the individual words, phrases and sentences of Hamlet's famous speech in 'slow motion' to highlight its material, philosophical and cultural meaning and its resonance for generations of actors, playgoers and readers.
Show more"Shakespeare Now!" is a series of short books of truly vital literary scholarship, each with its own distinctive form. "Shakespeare Now!" recaptures the excitement of Shakespeare; it doesn't assume we know him already, or that we know the best methods for approaching his plays. "Shakespeare Now!" is a new generation of critics, unafraid of risk, on a series of intellectual adventures. Above all - it is a new Shakespeare, freshly present in each volume. Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy is quoted more often than almost any other passage in Shakespeare. Parodies and advertisements show us that invoking even its first two words is enough to imply the rest of the speech - though few of us can recall much about it. For we like to think we know this speech, even as we like to think we know our Shakespeare. "To Be or Not to Be" takes this most famous speech and unpacks it's meaning to reveal the questions and problems it raises. Hamlet's speech asks us to ask serious questions about knowledge and existence. The book asks what close attention to Shakespeare's words can tell us about what we don't and perhaps can't know. If this speech concerns what isn't knowable, what else is it about? Is it or is it not about suicide? Do the King and Polonius overhear? If so, does Hamlet know or care? What must we bring to it, as readers? What about as audience members: to what do we need to pay attention? This book reads the individual words, phrases and sentences of Hamlet's famous speech in 'slow motion' to highlight its material, philosophical and cultural meaning and its resonance for generations of actors, playgoers and readers.
Show moreGeneral Editors' Preface
1. In the Shakespeare Museum
2. What are the Questions?
3. There's the Rub
4. How Does it Mean? (The Speech as Poem)
5. The Name of Action (The Speech in Context)
6. Not One Speech but Three, or 'There's the Point'
7. Consummation (Some Conclusions)
8. Acknowledgments and Further Reading
Index
Provides a sustained and challenging exploration of Hamlet's 'To Be or Not to Be', the most celebrated and least understood speech in the English language
Douglas Bruster is Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, USA. He is the author of Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare; Quoting Shakespeare; Shakespeare and the Question of Culture; and, with Robert Weimann, Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre.
"Douglas Bruster's To Be or Not to Be should delight and instruct
anyone who has ever read, seen, or struggled with the central
speech of Hamlet...Bruster has done a remarkable job building
bridges over notoriously choppy waters, and this book is highly
recommended." - Studies in English Literature, Spring
2008
*Peter G. Platt*
"[A] fine contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare as
artist nonpareil. I was particularly taken with Bruster's insight
into the way this ‘most resonant presentation of the personal in
all of literature' achieves a surprising impersonality by eschewing
the use of the first person, making the speech ‘float above the
rest of the play'." - Michael Taylor, Shakespeare Survey 61
(2008)
"The ambitious project of the Shakespeare NOW series is to bridge
the gap between ‘scholarly thinking and a public audience' and
‘public audience and scholarly thinking'. Scholars are encouraged
to write in a way accessible to a general readership and readers to
rise to the challenge and not be afraid of new ideas and the
adventure they offer. There are other bridges the series is
ambitious to cross: ‘formal, political or theoretical boundaries' -
history and philosophy, theory, and performance." English Vol. 58,
2009
"[Shakespeare Now! is] an innovative new series... Series editors
Simon Palfry and Ewan Fernie have rejected the notion of business
as usual in order to pursue a distinctive strategy that aims to put
"cutting-edge scholarship" in front of a broad audience.
Shakespeare Now! with its insistent appeal to the contemporary-
this is fresh Shakespeare for readers turned off by the prospect of
dry-as-dust scholarship-aims to reach a general audience... The
book [To Be or Not to Be] commences with an intriguing
conceit: Bruster imagines a Shakespeare museum with rooms for
different plays. In this fantasized museum, there is an "entire
gallery devoted" to Hamlet's famous soliloquy (1). What this
gallery offers is a chronological sequence of overlapping
performances beginning with the earliest and continuing up to the
present. An oral palimpsest is created, as more and more speakers
add their voices to the mixture- this idea neatly captures the
enormous multiplicity of Hamlets that have come into being, but it
also manages to maintain the singularity of the text, despite the
differences in presentation (not only embodied performance, but
gramophone, film, and video) and even language... To Be or Not To
Be is a precisely rendered formalist exercise"
*Shakespeare Quarterly*
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