Source and discourse: Readings into ``Hamlet''/readings out of ``Hamlet''
Abstract
While theoretical perspectives informing current studies of sixteenth-century literature often approach subjectivity as an exclusively cultural construction--pressing from the outside in, rather than processing from the inside outward--examination of Hamlet's linguistically restorative activity suggests that Shakespeare reconstructs such "subjectivity" within a memorially based definition of identity. Investigation of less "mainstream," yet equally legitimate, sociohistorical contexts--including those nurturing memorial culture, medieval dramaturgy, and Tudor class struggles--sheds considerable light upon the sources of Hamlet's subjectivity, sources which resist the libidinous (in the Augustinian sense) discursive contamination of Elsinore at the same time that they encourage the proactive application of an empowering caritas. When salient thematic elements in Hamlet are measured against the arresting semantic complexity of Remigio Nannini's treatment of analogous events in Orationi in Materia Civile (1561), not only do the interpolations of the Venetian friar provide an illuminating framework for more thoroughly grasping the subversive intent of Hamlet's "mad" strategies, but they facilitate keener insight both into the Prince's highly integrative, meta-cognitive deployment of numerous "sources" within his own rich memorial structure, and into Shakespeare's realignment of the dynamics of power within the frame of linguistic continuities. Recursive in its movements, the Prince's pattern of re-textualizing engenders an especial form of prudentia, rooted in Hamlet's limber reformulations of culturally conflicting gauges of subjectivity, and dependent upon Shakespeare's appropriation of contemporary intersecting discourse communities. Exploring less restrictive modes of theorizing language and of conceptualizing power, this study traces Hamlet's discursively subversive challenge to the protean abuses of court rhetoric, most consistently embodied in the Prince's repudiation of expedient "fashioning" in favor of the articulation of moral uncommon-places, singular florilegia he crafts as coordinates for his relationally evolving conscience. Ultimately, this study contends, the creator of Hamlet is a revisionist humanist who, given the choices granted within the shaping context of human "fictiveness," underscores, in Hamlet, connections to the world, and to one another, that, in their textual insistence upon the "shadowings" of similarities and differences, might very well compel current audiences to look again and hard at their own rhetorics of origins and subjectivity. ^
Subject Area
Literature, Medieval|Literature, English|Language, Rhetoric and Composition
Recommended Citation
Theresa Pia Suriano,
"Source and discourse: Readings into ``Hamlet''/readings out of ``Hamlet''"
(January 1, 1998).
Dissertations available from ProQuest.
Paper AAI9829998.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI9829998
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