On Nietzsche and Hamlet: How Shakespeare Mirrors Sick Moderns
Our stark choice is indeed as Nietzsche puts it, says René Girard. It is a choice between Dionysus and the Crucified: between the Biblical concern for the…
Teaching Hamlet: The Play’s the Thing
Consider a famous question asked at dinner parties: If you were stranded on a desert island and had only one book, what book would that be? The…
The Presence of the Spoudaios, Spoudaic Potential, and the Spoudaic Spectrum in Western Literature From Shakespeare to the Present
The aim of this article is to propose the notion that the spoudaios, spoudaic potential, and the spoudaic spectrum are constantly recurring figures in literary texts in…
Hamlet, The Affective Roots of Decision, and Modernity
Hamlet is a play so rich in insight regarding human existence, so revelatory and reverberative, that Harold Bloom is justified in calling it a “poem unlimited."[1][2] All…
Romancing the Sources: Framing Tales in Hamlet and King Lear
1 Polonius commends a visiting troupe of players as “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, [tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,]” (II,ii,396-99).[1] We…