Tragic silences in "Hamlet" and Antonin Artaud.
Item
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Title
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Tragic silences in "Hamlet" and Antonin Artaud.
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Identifier
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AAI9405576
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identifier
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9405576
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Creator
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Pouchard, Line Catherine.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Fred J. Nichols
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Date
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1993
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Literature, English | Theater | Literature, Romance
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Abstract
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This study makes the hypothesis that silence is a valuable concept for the analysis of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy. It explores the dialectical relationship between speech and silence in order to account for the shaping of dramatic conventions in this drama. Antonin Artaud's "Theater of Cruelty" provides various concepts of silence which I apply to the analyis of plays of the early modern period, in particular Hamlet. On the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, dramatic silences intervene in the shaping of such conventions as the ghost, the use of disguises, soliloquies and asides, and the use of pantomimic action in dumb-shows.;For Artaud, silence plays a dual role. First, it supplies a background which gives relief to the actors' gestures, the sets, noises, music, and other elements of mise-en-scene that a play director may use. As a result, language loses its privileged position, and, in performance, the text of a play assumes no more importance than other elements. Second, silence, as it is represented in language, particularly in Artaud's writings on the Theater of Cruelty, occupies a space where the act of naming is a logical and ontological contradiction. Silence thus described performs a cruelty upon language, as it tears off language from its consensual meaning and forces it into new representations.;Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies use extensively this quality of silence, of undermining meanings, and propose figurative representations of cruel acts to their audiences. In Hamlet, two major kinds of silence are identifiable: the silence produced and designated by the word "silence," a word which appears 5 times in the play, second only to Coriolanus for instances of recurrence in all of Shakespeare's plays, and the silence implied in stage directions such as the silent entrances and exits of the ghost at the beginning of the play. The study of silences in Hamlet gives an internal epistemic context to the problem of Shakespeare's play-texts as representations of plays.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
