The Question

Hamlet's Life After Life

Authors

  • Mark Robson University of Nottingham

Abstract

Cluster: Shakespeare's Literary Afterlives

Edited by Mark Bayer

What exactly does it mean to say that Hamlet has an afterlife? Taking seriously the notion of "life" embedded in the idea of a literary afterlife, this essay pursues the living-on or, in Derrida's terms, sur-vival of Hamlet through two of its many literary incarnations: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem The Question (1882) and Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966). These texts are forms of "translation" — that is, they simultaneously ensure the survival of the source text and confirm the need for it to be carried over from one space to another. The resulting afterlives are thus best understood as uncanny; they are recognizably versions of a seemingly pre-existing text, and yet there is something unfamiliar, or even more peculiarly, strangely familiar about them.

Author Biography

Mark Robson, University of Nottingham

Mark Robson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nottingham. His recent publications include The Sense of Early Modern Writing: Rhetoric, Poetics, Aesthetics (2006; paperback 2011) and Stephen Greenblatt (2008).

Issue Cover text: B&L, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2010. Image: A woman holds an orb with a serious facial expression.

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Published

2010-05-01

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 1 (2010): Spring/Summer

Section

Articles