Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages

by David Bevington

Overview

What is it about Hamlet that has made it such a compelling and vital work? Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages is an account of Shakespeare's great play from its sources in Scandinavian epic lore to the way it was performed and understood in his own day, and then how the play has fared down to the present: performances on stage, television, and in film, critical evaluations, publishing history, spinoffs, spoofs, musical adaptations, the play's growing reputation, its influence on writers and thinkers, and the ways in which it has shaped the very language we speak. The staging, criticism, and editing of Hamlet , David Bevington argues, go hand in hand over the centuries, to such a remarkable extent that the history of Hamlet can be seen as a kind of paradigm for the cultural history of the English-speaking world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199599103
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/21/2011
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1967. He has published widely on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His recent books include The Seven Ages of Human Experience (Blackwell, 2005), co-authored with Anne Marie Welsh and Michael L. Greenwald, Shakespeare: Script, Stage, Screen (Pearson Longman, 2006), This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare's Plays in Production, Then and Now (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Shakespeare's Ideas (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). He is the senior editor of the Revels Student Editions, the Revels Plays, and of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. He is also senior editor of the Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama (2002).

Table of Contents

Introduction1. Prologue to Some Great Amiss: The Prehistory of iHamlet/i2. Actions That a Man Might Play: iHamlet/i on Stage in 1599-16013. The Play's the Thing: Ideological Contexts of iHamlet/i in 1599-16014. The Mirror Up to Nature: iHamlet/i in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries5. The Very Torrent, Tempest, and Whirlwind of Your Passion: iHamlet/i in the Nineteenth Century6. Reform It Altogether: iHamlet/i, c. 1900-19807. There is Nothing Either Good or Bad But Thinking Makes It So: Postmodern iHamlet/iNotesFurther ReadingIndex

Editorial Reviews

"A characteristically well-balanced handbook to the play...Offer[s] illuminating and amusing insights, particularly on psychoanalytic readings of the play." —Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

"There's depth...on every page...Fascinating." —ShakespeareGeek.com

From the Publisher