To Be or Not to Be

By: Douglas Bruster, Ewan Fernie (Editor), Simon Palfrey (Editor)

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Hardcover | 23 March 2007 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
128 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
19.68 x 12.7 x 1.27

Hardcover

RRP $170.00

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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.

Industry Reviews

"[In this] 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 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"--Sanford Lakoff

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