Shakespeare in Focus: The Art of Small Things
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15. října 2024
10:00 – 15:40 - B2.52, D21
Department of Czech Literature and Department of Czech Language Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University invites you to a lecture by
Prof. Patricia Fumerton (University of California)
Shakespeare in Focus: The Art of Small Things, in Two Parts
The lecture will take place on Tuesday 15 October, 10 am and 2 pm CET at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Arna Nováka 1, Brno. The talk can also be watched online on Zoom (link at the bottom of the invitation).
Part 1: Hamlet Locked in Miniatures
15 October, 10 am, room B2.52
This talk, the first of two parts, focuses on Hamlet’s compulsion with voicing the big, complicated problems he faces (murder, revenge, [in] justice, sex, suicide) through small artifacts, especially limnings or miniature paintings. These little paintings were typically inserted within tiny, bejeweled cases and worn at court; when not being worn or when shown, they usually resided within little cabinets which stood within the most private, innermost room of an aristocratic home—the closet.
Thus, it is that in the most famous private closet scene, where Hamlet confronts his mother Queen Gertrude, Hamlet explodes with a passion, first irrationally stabbing at the heard muted voice behind the room’s arras—killing mistakenly the busybody Polonius, not King Claudius—and then, most surprisingly, dismissing such a huge act of murder and moving literally to seize upon the miniatures he and his mother respectively wear. With these minutiae in hand, he rants to Gertrude about her tainted sex and her involvement in the tainted politics leading to and following upon the former King Hamlet’s murder. What adds power and intimacy to this closet scene, I argue, is that the period’s fashion dictated that the courtly miniatures Hamlet and Gertrude wear would have been bejeweled and encased, so that they would have to be opened by Hamlet in a moment of slow and dramatic reveal, enacting looking from the public exterior to the “within.” But I also argue that Hamlet is so dependent upon the miniature as vehicle of expression that he becomes knotted up and locked in minutiae.
Part 2: Expressions of Madness: Hamlet’s Courtly Minutiae vs. Ophelia’s Popular Ballads
15 October, 2 pm, room D21
What follows in this 2nd Part is our launching more deeply into Hamlet’s increasingly mad reliance on textual and spoken minutiae; he expresses not only the movement through public to intimate physical rooms or ornaments, but also the compressed, stand-alone passages of soliloquies within which he voices vividly and tightly linked “transference” (OED) of metaphor upon metaphor, especially seen in his “To be or not to be” soliloquy. As Hamlet becomes increasingly maddened in his reliance upon minutiae for expression, he is forced to accept not only to big issues, such as revenger, but also to all the little things in life—like the small sparrow that unexpectedly falls, dead, into one’s hands.
But Ophelia’s abrupt fall into madness draws for expression on an entirely different medium than Hamlet’s that allows her to break through court confinement. This medium is in fact multimedia, the English broadside ballad, consisting of woodcut illustrations and sung text, all compressed onto a single sheet or half sheet. Though Hamlet attains some self-awareness from incomplete his sea-voyage to England, after which he abruptly returns to Denmark, at least in his letter to Claudius, “naked,” like a new-born, with new awareness, he speaks little of what that his new “sanity” is. In the meantime, the mad Ophelia breaks out of her padded cell and self-binding street-jacket (visualized in the Branagh film version) of societal mores—to be chaste, silent, and obedient--and turns to miniature-like snippets of balladry, including broadside ballads. Vocalizing ballads is liberating for Ophelia, not confining or restraining, even if such voicing aligns her with the low feminism of the masses. Furthermore, rather than a blank slate authorities write upon, she become is full of popular graphic text, imagery, and song. The vividness of her balladry may be why 19th-century artists became so obsessed with painting Ophelia in a range of poses in madness: from naïve child to wild woman. Finally, I project an image of Ophelia as if she had never drowned, becoming a ballad hawker on the streets.
Patricia Fumerton is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and both Founder and Director of the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), 2003-present. Her central interests include sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and literature, high and popular culture, the history and practice of printing, visual culture, subjectivity, and postmodernism. She has edited nine collections of essays, and authored three monographs.
https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/93087803173?pwd=qbl6ao9kGTfwqC2NSb8bzmaGcWJkIx.1
Meeting ID: 930 8780 3173
Passcode: 963838
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