Abstract
Let us consider the following stage direction, from the Q1 version of Hamlet (1603):
Enter Ofelia play\ing on a Lute, and her hair down, singing. 1
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Notes
Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, 5 vols. (London: Batsford, 1927–48) 3:137.
Alan C. Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 36–37.
See The Hamlet First Published (Ql, 1603): Origins, Form, Intertextualities, ed. Thomas Clayton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992) and Paul Menzer, The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2008).
The First Quarto of Hamlet ed. Kathleen O. Irace. New Cambridge Shakespeare, The Early Quartos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 20.
On the lute in Renaissance English culture, see Matthew Spring, The Lute in Britain. A History of the Instrument and its Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
Linda Phyllis Austern, “Sing Againe Syren: The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989) 420–48
Julia Craig McFeely, “The Signifying Serpent: Seduction by Cultural Stereotype in Seventeenth Century England,” Music, Sensation and Sensuality, ed. Lynda Phyllis Austern (London: Routledge, 2002) 299–320. On women and lutes see also
Laurie E. Maguire, “Cultural Control in The Taming of the Shrew,” Renaissance Drama 26 (1995): 83–104.
All quotations from Shakespeare are from The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin, 2002).
She does, of course, and even more perversely, ends up choosing exactly the suitor her father would choose for her. See Patricia Parker, “Construing Gender: Mastering Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew,” The Impact of Feminism on Renaissance Scholarship, ed. Dympna Callaghan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 193–209.
Thomas Wyatt, The Complete Poems, ed. Ron Rebholz (London: Penguin, 1988) 129, 144.
David Scott, “Elizabeth I as Lutenist,” Lute Society Journal 18 (1976) 55.
Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, the Arden Shakespeare, Second Series (New York: Arden, 1982) 348n.
Jonathan Bate, “Shakespeare’s Tragedies as Working Scripts,” Critical Survey 3 (1991): 118–127, 122.
G. R. Hibbard, ed., Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) 52. Hamlet, perf. Helen Mirren, dir. Trevor Nunn, Royal Shakespeare Company, London, 1965.
See (among others) The Hamlet First Published (Q1, 1603): Origins, Form, Intertextualities, ed. Thomas Clayton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992); Leah S. Marcus, “Bad Taste and Bad Hamlet,” Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996)
Laurie E. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The “Bad” Quartos and Their Contexts (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Peter Stallybrass and Zachary Lesser, “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59.4 (2008): 371–420.
Ross Duffin, Shakespeare’s Songbook (New York and London: Norton, 2004) 422–24.
See Susan Signe Morrison, “Waste Space: Pilgrim Badges, Ophelia, and Walsingham Remembered,” Walsingham in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity, ed. Dominic Janes and Gary Waller (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010) 49–68.
See Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
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© 2012 Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams
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Williams, D. (2012). Enter Ofelia Playing on a Lute. In: Peterson, K.L., Williams, D. (eds) The Afterlife of Ophelia. Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation and Appropriation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016461_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016461_8
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