To Be or Not to Be
Published on 15. February 2007
Book
Paperback/Softback
128 pages
978-0-8264-8998-2 (ISBN)
Description
"Shakespeare Now!" is a series of short books of truly vital literary scholarship, each with its own distinctive form. "Shakespeare Now!" recaptures the excitement of Shakespeare; it doesn't assume we know him already, or that we know the best methods for approaching his plays. "Shakespeare Now!" is a new generation of critics, unafraid of risk, on a series of intellectual adventures. Above all - it is a new Shakespeare, freshly present in each volume. Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy is quoted more often than almost any other passage in Shakespeare. Parodies and advertisements show us that invoking even its first two words is enough to imply the rest of the speech - though few of us can recall much about it. For we like to think we know this speech, even as we like to think we know our Shakespeare. "To Be or Not to Be" takes this most famous speech and unpacks it's meaning to reveal the questions and problems it raises. Hamlet's speech asks us to ask serious questions about knowledge and existence. The book asks what close attention to Shakespeare's words can tell us about what we don't and perhaps can't know.
If this speech concerns what isn't knowable, what else is it about? Is it or is it not about suicide? Do the King and Polonius overhear? If so, does Hamlet know or care? What must we bring to it, as readers? What about as audience members: to what do we need to pay attention? This book reads the individual words, phrases and sentences of Hamlet's famous speech in 'slow motion' to highlight its material, philosophical and cultural meaning and its resonance for generations of actors, playgoers and readers.
If this speech concerns what isn't knowable, what else is it about? Is it or is it not about suicide? Do the King and Polonius overhear? If so, does Hamlet know or care? What must we bring to it, as readers? What about as audience members: to what do we need to pay attention? This book reads the individual words, phrases and sentences of Hamlet's famous speech in 'slow motion' to highlight its material, philosophical and cultural meaning and its resonance for generations of actors, playgoers and readers.
Reviews / Votes
"Douglas Bruster's To Be or Not to Be should delight and instruct anyone who has ever read, seen, or struggled with the central speech of Hamlet...Bruster has done a remarkable job building bridges over notoriously choppy waters, and this book is highly recommended." - Studies in English Literature, Spring 2008 -- Peter G. Platt "[A] fine contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare as artist nonpareil. I was particularly taken with Bruster's insight into the way this 'most resonant presentation of the personal in all of literature' achieves a surprising impersonality by eschewing the use of the first person, making the speech 'float above the rest of the play'." - Michael Taylor, Shakespeare Survey 61 (2008) "The ambitious project of the Shakespeare NOW series is to bridge the gap between 'scholarly thinking and a public audience' and 'public audience and scholarly thinking'. Scholars are encouraged to write in a way accessible to a general readership and readers to rise to the challenge and not be afraid of new ideas and the adventure they offer. There are other bridges the series is ambitious to cross: 'formal, political or theoretical boundaries' - history and philosophy, theory, and performance." English Vol. 58, 2009 "[Shakespeare Now! is] an innovative new series... Series editors Simon Palfry and Ewan Fernie have rejected the notion of business as usual in order to pursue a distinctive strategy that aims to put "cutting-edge scholarship" in front of a broad audience. Shakespeare Now! with its insistent appeal to the contemporary- this is fresh Shakespeare for readers turned off by the prospect of dry-as-dust scholarship-aims to reach a general audience... The book [To Be or Not to Be] commences with an intriguing conceit: Bruster imagines a Shakespeare museum with rooms for different plays. In this fantasized museum, there is an "entire gallery devoted" to Hamlet's famous soliloquy (1). What this gallery offers is a chronological sequence of overlapping performances beginning with the earliest and continuing up to the present. An oral palimpsest is created, as more and more speakers add their voices to the mixture- this idea neatly captures the enormous multiplicity of Hamlets that have come into being, but it also manages to maintain the singularity of the text, despite the differences in presentation (not only embodied performance, but gramophone, film, and video) and even language... To Be or Not To Be is a precisely rendered formalist exercise" -- Shakespeare QuarterlyMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
Introductory Undergraduate
, Postgraduate, Upper Level Undergraduate
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
204 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8264-8998-2 (9780826489982)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Douglas Bruster
To Be or Not to Be
E-Book
02/2007
1st Edition
Bloomsbury Continuum
€26.49
Available for download
Douglas Bruster
To Be or Not to Be
E-Book
02/2007
1st Edition
Continuum Publishing Corporation
€26.49
Available for download
Person
Douglas Bruster is Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, USA. He is the author of Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare; Quoting Shakespeare; Shakespeare and the Question of Culture; and, with Robert Weimann, Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre. Simon Palfrey is a Fellow of Brasenose College, University of Oxford Ewan Fernie is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London
Content
Introduction; 1. Dramatic and theatrical setting; 2. Unpacking the meaning of the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy; 3. The afterlife of Hamlet's speech (actors, playgoers, and readers); Conclusion; Index.