Abstract
In his history and theory of carnivalesque laughter in European culture, Bakhtin frequently praises what he considers a brilliant Shakespearean appropriation of the carnivalesque.1 Yet few specific citations to particular plays or scenes illustrate Bakhtin’s admiration for Shakespeare’s dramatic methods. Bakhtin’s most elaborate discussion of Shakespeare’s carnivalesque methods is more provocative than probing; this typical passage among the 15 references he makes to Shakespeare exemplifies the large scope of his suggestive insights and the slender specifics:
The analysis we have applied to Rabelais would also help us to discover the essential carnival element in the organization of Shakespeare’s drama. This does not merely concern the secondary, clowning motives of his plays. The logic of crownings and uncrownings, in direct or indirect form, organizes the serious elements also. And first of all this ‘belief in the possibility of a complete exit from the present order of this life’ determines Shakespeare’s fearless, sober (yet not cynical) realism and absence of dogmatism. This pathos of radical changes and renewals is the essence of Shakespeare’s world consciousness. It made him see the great epoch-making changes taking place around him and yet recognize their limitations.
Furthermore, Bakhtin’s comparisons of Shakespeare with Rabelais and the other Renaissance writers applies mainly to the festive comedies, the Falstaffian realm of exaggeration, gluttony, abuse and defiance to which Bakhtin parallels the Rabelaisian world of celebration and scurrility.2
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Notes
See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass: MIT. Press, 1968 ).
Frederic Amory, ‘The Medieval Hamlet: a lesson in the use and abuse of a myth’, Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 51 (1977), pp. 357–95;
Sir Israel Gollancz, ed. The Sources of ‘Hamlet’ with an Essay on the Legend (London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1926 );
William F. Hansen, Saxo Grammaticus and the Life of Hamlet. A Translation, History and Commentary ( Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983 ).
H. Sperber, ‘The Conundrums in Saxo’s Hamlet Episode’, PMLA 64 (1949), p. 865.
Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Macmillan, 1967), and Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981 ). Emphasizing the complex method of the carnivalesque in Shakespearean tragedy, a form which Bakhtin mentions but does not discuss, may avoid the criticism of Linda Woodbridge about the inappropriate uses of Bakhtin’s notions of carnival when discussing the festive comedies: see, ‘“Fire-in-your-heart-and-brimstone-in-your-liver”; Towards a Unsaturnalian Twelfth Night’, Southern Review, 17.3 (1984), pp. 270–91.
Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Human Culture ( 1938; Boston: Beacon Press, 1950 ).
James Calderwood, To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in ‘Hamlet’ ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1983 ).
Leon Golden, ‘Othello, Hamlet, and Aristotelian Tragedy’, Shakespeare Quarterly 35.2 (Summer, 1984), pp. 142–56.
See A. Lynne Magnuson, ‘Interruption in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly 37.1 (Spring, 1986), pp. 52–65
David J. McDonald, ’Hamlet and the Mimesis of Absence: A Post-Structuralist Analysis’, Education Theatre Journal 30 (1978), pp. 36–53.
On rupture and meaning see Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper, 1974)
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974 ).
Terence Hawkes, ‘Telmah’, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman ( London and New York: Methuen, 1985 ), pp. 310–32.
Harry Herger, ‘Bodies and Texts’, Representations 17 (Winter, 1987), pp. 144–66, defines ‘citational texts’ as those performed genres which use traditional and culturally established forms, patterns, discourses, and the like, through performances involving the presence of the body and its naturalistic powers.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, On the Margins of Discourse ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978 ), pp. 57–64, defines and discusses ‘prefabricated discourse’ as those traditional forms, such as proverbs, which we appropriate into our natural and fictive discourses.
Kirby Farrell, Shakespeare’s Creation: The Language of Magic and Play (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977)
David Leverenz, ‘The Woman in Hamlet: An Interpersonal view’, Signs 4.2 (1978), pp. 291–310, both discuss the ways the fathers and father figures (Ghost, Polonius, Claudius and the King of Norway) manipulate children and women to abdicate their own subjectivity and identity to act out patriarchal prescriptions.
Anne Wilson Schaef, When Society Becomes an Addict ( San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987 ), analyses our present patriarchal culture as an addictive system of denial and indirection; for me, her analysis illuminates the same tragic patterns of action between parents and children and between genders in Hamlet.
Robert R. Wilson, ‘Narratives, Narrators and Narratees in Hamlet’, Hamlet Studies 6. 1–2 (1984), pp. 30–40.
Jan Kott, ‘The Tempest, or Repetition: I. Plantation on a Mythical island. II. The Three Hours of Purgatory’, Mosaic 10.3 (1977), pp. 9–36
John T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest, Repetition and Revenge: a Speculative Reading of Faulkner ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975 ), connect repeated stories, embedded stories and revenge.
Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Mayer Barash (1958; New York: Schocken, 1979), pp. 14–22, 17–19, 23–6.
Susan U. Philips, ‘Teasing, Punning; and Putting People On’, Working Papers in Sociolinguistics, No. 28 ( Austin, Texas: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, 1975 ).
Michael McDonald, ‘Ophelia’s Rites’, Shakespeare Quarterly 37.3 (1986), pp. 309–17, takes issue with Roland Mushat Frye’s interpretation of the offensiveness of Ophelia’s funeral in The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); see also
Michael Neill, ‘“Exeunt with a Dead March”: Funeral pageantry on the Shakespearean stage’, Pageantry in Shakespeare, ed. David Bergeron ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985 ), pp. 153–93.
Carol Neely, ‘Madness, Gender, and Ritual in Shakespeare’, Seminar on Elizabethan Ritual in Shakespeare, Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Seattle, Washington, 3 April 1987. See also Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 ), pp. 132–7.
On gender and double binds in play and madness, see Anna K. Nardo, ‘Hamlet, “a man to double business bound”’, Shakespeare Quarterly 34.2 (Summer, 1983), pp. 188–92, and my essays, ’Hamlet and the Play of Knowing: an excursion into interpretative anthropology’, The Anthropology of Experience, ed. Victor Turner and Edward M. Bruner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 207–38, and ‘Hamlet and the Tragedy of Ludic Revenge’, The World of Play, ed. Frank Manning ( Westport, NY: The Leisure Press, 1983 ), pp. 111–24.
Don Handelman and Bruce Kapferer, ‘Symbolic Types and the Transformation of Ritual Context: Sinhalese Demons and Tewa Clowns’, Semiotica 30, 1–2 (1980), pp. 41–71.
For a review of attitudes of and about Bakhtin, see Mary Russo, ‘Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory’, Feminist Studies: Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986 ), pp. 213–29.
Also see discussions of Hamlet in these terms in Kirby Farrell, n. 16, above, and Michael Holstein, ‘Actions that a Man Might Play: dirty tricks at Elsinore and the politics of play’, Philological Quarterly 55 (1976), pp. 323–37.
Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and History in Early Modern Europe ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975 );
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, trans. Mary Feeny ( New York: George Braziller, 1978 );
Keith Thomas, ‘The Place of Laughter in Tudor and Stuart England’, The Times Literary Supplement (January 21, 1977), pp. 77–81;
Edward P. Thompson, ‘Patrician Society, Plebian Culture’, Journal of Social History 7 (Summer, 1974 ), pp. 382–405.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 );
Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984 );
Wayne Rebhorn, Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity In Castiglione’s ‘Book of the Courtier’ (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978);
Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981 ).
John Roberts and Michael R. Forman, ‘Riddles: Expressive models of interrogation’, Directions in Sociolinguistics. The Ethnography of Communication, ed. John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes ( New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972 ), pp. 180–210;
Phyllis Gorfain and Jack Glazier, ‘Ambiguity and Exchange: the double dimension of Mbeere riddling’, American Folklore 89 (1976), pp. 189–238.
Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. M. Holquist and Caryl Emerson ( Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981 ).
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Gorfain, P. (1998). Towards a Theory of Play and the Carnivalesque in Hamlet. In: Knowles, R. (eds) Shakespeare and Carnival. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230000810_8
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