Description
Book SynopsisHamlet stands as a high water mark of canonical art, yet it has equally attracted rebels and experimenters, those avant-garde writers, dramatists, performers, and filmmakers who, in their adaptations and appropriations, seek new ways of expressing innovative and challenging thoughts in the hope that they can change perceptions of their own world. One reason for this, as the book argues, is that the source text that is their inspiration was written in the same spirit. Hamlet as a work of art exhibits many aspects of the “vanguard” movements in every society and artistic milieux, an avant-garde vision of struggle against conformity, which retains an edge of provocative novelty. Accordingly, it has always inspired unorthodox adaptations and can be known by a neglected portion of the company it keeps, the avant-garde in every age. After placing Hamlet alongside “cutting edge” works in Shakespeare’s time, such as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, chapters deal with the ways in which experimental writers, theatre practitioners, and film-makers have used the play down to the present day to develop their own avant-garde visions. This is a part of the uncanny ability of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to be “ever-now, ever-new.”
Trade ReviewThere is certainly much to welcome in this new study of Hamlet’s afterlives.... White writes with real felicity, and he has done us all a service in providing so much useful information so intriguingly packaged.... This is a hugely worthwhile and abundantly provocative book. * Renaissance Quarterly *
Revolution, rebellion, absurdism, the right to mourn: these are all expressions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But in R.S. White’s Avant -Garde Hamlet, the author doesn’t posit these as expository universal qualities: rather they are driving energies, powering productions in a diversity of ways that makes each production real, vital, experimental, worth staging for more than the power of the beautiful meditations therein. A recent review of The Bell Shakespeare’s Hamlet suggested: 'When companies approach Shakespeare without a clearly defined vision or a genuinely contemporary take on the text, it makes the very notion of the Bard’s 'universal truths' look increasingly tenuous.' R.S. White knows this, and he infuses his understanding of it into the very architecture, the living blood-flow, of Avant Garde Hamlet. In his hands, Hamlet is ever-now, ever-new. -- Philippa Kelly, Author of "The King and I," "Shakespeare Now!" Series
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 1. Aspects of Avant-Garde 2. Avant-Garde Hamlet: Then and Now 3. Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text 4. Hamlet and Avant-Garde Literature 5. On Stage: Hamlet and Avant-Garde Theatre 6. On Screen: Hamlet and Film Genres Epilogue Bibliography
