Aesthetic Cohesion, Transliteration, and Morality in Historia Danica, "Hamlet," and "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern"

This post is a continuation of my emphasis on Renaissance Teaching Methods.  It is also a follow up post to previous research that I mentioned performing in regards to a relationship between Hisotria Danica, “Hamlet,” and “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.”  I will be discussing how transliteration affected the depiction of morality in the portrayal of several more explicit scenes.  Let me begin by explaining a bit about transliteration.

Renaissance Learning: My Personal Findings

This course has been challenging and rewarding at the same time.  The learning curve was substantially high at the beginning of the course, yet rather than being daunting, I feel that the experience has inspired me.  This post is a summation of my observations about the academic blog, and my emphasis on Renaissance Teaching Methods.  I have built a personal learning plan that reached the following working thesis.  I call it working because while it does make a specific claim, that claim is mostly based on my learning process thus far, and given additional time, would likely further adjust becoming even more specific.  Here is that thesis:

Returning to the Renaissance Teaching Methods employed to teach English, particularly the practice of the Imitation of subject and form, will help students develop a system of analysis that they can apply to texts in visual, audio, tactile, and written formats.

Let me explain how I got here:

Critical Definitions 2

This post is the second part of my Critical Definitions and is a continuation of my overall emphasis on Renaissance Teaching Methods.  In this post I will offer definitions for the terms that I have learned associated with the skill of literary genesis in that era.

Critical Definitions

This post is a continuation of my focus on Renaissance Teaching Methods.  Through my studies I have discovered that in order to engage with literature on the level that I described in my post on Renaissance Teaching Motivations, I have to “graduate” my comprehension of the terms used in the study of language.  Knowing that this difficulty presents itself, this post offers the first half of a few definitions before diving into my discoveries:

Renaissance Teaching Motivations

This is a continuation of my focus on Renaissance Teaching Methods.  In this post I will specifically detail the type of understanding that I hope to gain from learning these methods.  I will then spend some time reviewing what I have learned about the motivations that fueled Renaissance learning.

Winter's Tale Analysis of Context

During the interview with Fred Adams he mentioned that to create realistic characters Shakespeare principally visited the pubs and played to his audience.  Since I am analyzing the strategies that Shakespeare employed in crafting his works these contextual details appealed to my interest.  In reading act 3 scene 2 from the “Winter’s Tale” for today, I couldn’t help but recall this conversation and clearly see the connection.  While thinking about this connection I read Max's blog and he had some great insights that helped lead me to this conclusion.

Culture as a Weapon?

Honestly, I had no idea what a “Moor” was and had to look it up while I was reading the play.  In the article “’That which Heaven Hath Forbid the Ottomites’: The Turks in Shakespeare’s Othello” by Joseph Locket he explains “Othello is a Moor, one of the North Africans remaining in Spain after the overthrow of the Islamic governments there.”  Luckily, in our class discussion last Friday my group really dug into Othello, particularly in the aspect of the importance of race.  We all agreed that perhaps the issue of race was one of the strong points of Othello that makes the play so distinct from many of the other main tragedies.  For instance, the rage expressed my Desdemona’s Father would seem like the same old paternal anger seen in a Shakespeare tragedy where it not for his prejudice towards Othello because he is the Moor.  Furthermore, I thought it was interesting that Othello was THE Moor, not just a moor of Venice.  Shakespeare goes through a good deal of trouble within the play to make this distinction a strong apparatus for comprehending the play with much more that simply defining Othello by his title. 

This focus on language was a key thing I notices when reading the play.  Compared to his other plays the diction of Othello seemed to contain a great deal of sophistication.  For instance, the enraged Duke berates Othello saying “the bloody book of law / you shall yourself read in the bitter letter / after your own sense – yea, though our proper son / stood in your action.”  I know Shakespeare is known for inverting sentence structure by repositioning verbs, and sometimes he sounds a bit like Yoda, (or I guess I should say Yoda sounds like Shakespeare) but the point is this play in particular seems replete with Sonnet-like lines.  This is significant in my opinion because it suggests to me that he is hiding something in the language of the play itself.  I have to admit that at first I really didn’t catch as many of these references as I have in review, but after reading Locket’s paper I think I was really on to something.  His paper is great if you want a good starting point for reading this play in light of the racial issues it brings to the surface.  I think reading it in this light both interesting, and timely given the conflict between the “western world” and the “eastern world” in contemporary society.  Clearly from the lines of Othello we see that this contention is ages old.

Consider the Audience

A Reading Audience

While the script is fantastic for Richard the III I realized while I was reading it through that I was having a bit of a hard time keeping up with the many characters.  It seemed like everyone was dying off just as you got to know them!  In an effort then to help me keep track I thought I would watch a film adaptation.  I jumped out on a limb and watched the 1995 version.  There were some parts that I could see getting bad before I got there so I would just look away, but it is Richard the III so it simply couldn’t be a pleasant story. 

A Film Audience

As I said, I decided to do this in the first place to try and get a better feel for the flow of the play and so I was following along with my book while I watched the movie.  It was interesting to see how the film played with timing the events.  Often segments that did not appear till the next scene would be interspersed with moments from the prior scene.  This made it difficult to follow at times, but I always found my bearings again and continued.  Another aesthetic choice was to shorten the dialogue.  For example in Act 4 scene 4 when King Richard is manipulating Queen Elizabeth to convince her to let him marry her daughter half of his main persuasive argument, lines 296-316, are simply removed.  This choice plays well to this screening of the film, giving it a much faster pace, and facilitating rapid shifts from event to event (building the tension of the coup and sustaining that tension as Richards power was challenged).

A Modern Play Audience

Given that a modern 2000’s audience has grown in a world full of instant messaging, fast food, and instant information, I wonder how much more of this play would need to be cut to keep a modern audience entertained?  Would it need to be shortened?  Do people who aren’t there for a class assignment really want to sit through a 2+ hour play?  I wish there was a performance of this going on nearby; I’d like to examine that.  

A posse ad esse

I started this post with a Latin Phrase that roughly translated means “from possibility to actuality.”  I still think of Latin as a power Language, and at the least intriguing, but this particular phrase encompasses the dilemma that I will address.  In my last post I posed questions about the plagiarisms of Shakespeare.  In my class we began discussing that, and my professor pointed out that while Shakespeare did clearly take many of his ideas from other works, many of the ideas were taken from works written in other languages.  As a by-product of his Renaissance education Shakespeare was skilled at analyzing which specific aspects of a work, even when in a language like Latin, made the work into a success.  Honestly, I covet this ability and think that it ought to be the focus of modern English education much more often than it is, but I digress.  Shakespeare utilized this model to heist the concepts he found most effective and to re-imagine them in his own way; in this way Shakespeare took a possibility and molded it into actuality.  For instance, the story of Hamlet closely follows that of Saxo Grammaticus’s Hisotria Danica, yet in my review of it I noticed that where Saxo’s work turned graphic, Shakespeare erred on the side of caution.

Finding out the protagonists intentions:

Hamlet = Ophelia                                 Danica = a Harlot

Killing Polonius:

Hamlet = stabbed                                 Danica = cut into pieces and dropped in the sewer

The End:

Hamlet = a duel and poison                  Danica = a Holocaust, and a vengeful second wife

The more tempered approach utilized by Shakespeare has had a longer lasting appeal, which really does say volumes about the limitations of creative expression.  Returning to my focus, while core features of the stories are the same, or similar, the interpretation of the events is different.  Interestingly, in looking up the definition of plagiarism the Encyclopedia Britannica defined it thus:
     The act of taking the writings of another person and passing them off as one’s own.
But also contained an intriguing closing comment that stated:

     If only thoughts are duplicated, expressed in different words, there is no breach of contract.

So, in this context is Shakespeare really a plagiarist? Or was he simply a really good reader, both of texts and audiences?