Hamlet Shows Shakspeare's Long-Lasting Cultural Effect

Pondering the Definitions of Popular Culture, Again.

What is Popular Culture? The definition in “The Introduction” by Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes to Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture seems like a good definition to me “cultural products created of the people… for the people.” But who are “the people?” In this introduction they say that “citizens and yeomen were frequently were frequently classed together as ‘the middling sort of people’, divided between town and country and it is these groups rather than those who ‘have no voice nor authority in our commonwealth as Smith puts it, who would usually have been referred to as ‘the people’.” To me, this is an insufficient definition of “the people.” Everyone, from the Queen down to “those who ‘have no voice nor authority’” are people and are therefore part of “the people.” Sometimes it is useful to look at the different aspects of a culture, the types of literature that make it into textbooks, films that win awards and praise while being perhaps a little too aware of their own artsy-ness and other praise-able qualities, art that is found in museums, to the generally enjoyed books, movies, and TV… and other aspects of a culture that are less snobby and may or may not have plenty of their own merits. Shakespeare wrote for and was appreciated by the snobby elite and the groundlings and the in-betweens of his own day, and he has returned (if he ever left) from the realms of the snobby elite to being accessible and enjoyable to all of the people from the snobby elites to the couch potatoes. Shakespeare’s play Hamlet has been an inspiration and a source of cultural reference points for the people that have gone before us and it still is for us, the people, now.

A Shattered Mirror is Multi-faceted

One of the most interesting, though perplexing, images in David Tennant (and Patrick Stewart and Penny Downie)'s Hamlet was this broken mirror. I recognized that it was probably an important symbol but I didn't bother trying to figure it out until today. I've come up with several theories now though. My favourite one connects to my general interest in Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, in the eyes of Popular Culture; Hamlet is one of the best remembered of Shakespeare's plays, but people remember it in very different ways and not always clearly.

A Rambling History of Reading Richard III

I'm reading Richard III as my required history play. I chose it because I could kind of remember watching part of a High School production years and years ago, and I vaguely remembered there being some interesting history around it. But I didn't get very far before I was confused. My main questions were:

A. Who are these people?

B. Why on Earth is Lady Anne even slightly tempted by this Sleemo?



Evidently Jennifer shared my second question, and it's been discussed on her blog and was brought up in class yesterday.

To answer my first question I turned to Wikipedia. I spent the next several hours examining the succession of kings, genealogies, and personal histories of the people who appear in the play. The women and the princes interested me the most. Evidently Elizabeth, Edward IV’s wife, was not born into a noble family and they had a secret marriage, despite his betrothal to a French princess. Sounds like the plot of a Romance Novel, but it’s history which makes it all the more fascinating as you don’t have to suspend disbelief, and even if you do have disbelief you can banish or suppress it permanently without being thought crazy. Then there are all the people who rose in society because they were related to her, two of whom show up in Richard III and get beheaded, including John of Norfolk who got his title, lands, and money by marrying a rich noble widow more than three times his age, and this is also interesting. I got very excited reading about so many stories, including the references to Historical Fiction based on them. It was like reading the descriptions of a dozen or more different interesting sounding fanfictions of life and history; and so I was reminded that I do actually like History, and that that is one of the main reasons I like reading Lord of the Rings, its appendices, and the Silmarillion and why I read the extended Universe Star Wars books… I like History, and the depth and breadth of the countless stories and versions of countless people and incidents throughout time.

Anyways, it was nice to feel a bit more familiar with who the people were and how they are remembered by history with all their interactions with eachother before I got into the play's account of the intrigues, relationships, deaths, and so forth. History, now, isn’t so sure that Richard III was nearly as guilty as his successors claimed (Lianna went into this with her recent blog post on him), and so it may be, for example, that his romance with the Lady Anne (whom he probably knew as a child) is not so very dreadful. Also, Clarence is portrayed as near saint-like in the play, but Wikipedia shows him more as someone looking to see which king he gains more advantage by following, more wishy-washy and ambitious seeming than noble. I wondered when Margaret started cursing people that she complimented Buckingham, as he had seemed in the article I read on him to be as likely to be a contriving villain as any of them, but then he did show that more villainous side by helping Richard out later in the play, so I guess Margaret just didn't know or didn't care about his machinations.

Anyways, my mind had lots of fun following up on different storylines and ideas, speculating on Historical fiction being like the fanfiction of History, which is itself a slightly distorted mirror of past times, and wondering things like just how beautiful was Elizabeth, Edward IV's wife, did Lady Anne want to marry Richard, who did kill the Princes in the Tower, and who really was the worst plotter, schemer, and murderer of the age.