The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.1120 Wednesday, 31 May 2000.
[1] From: Peter Holland <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 30 May 2000 15:49:20 +0100
Subj: Re: SHK 11.1114 Re: Senile Dementia
[2] From: Terence Hawkes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 30 May 2000 13:35:46 -0400
Subj: Senile Dementia
[3] From: Yvonne Bruce <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 30 May 2000 14:53:42 -0400
Subj: Senile Dementia
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Peter Holland <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 30 May 2000 15:49:20 +0100
Subject: 11.1114 Re: Senile Dementia
Comment: Re: SHK 11.1114 Re: Senile Dementia
My apologies if I am repeating something already suggested elsewhere in
this long thread (not all of which I can now recall) but...
I greatly admired one Polonius who used the opportunity of his own
digression to check whether Reynaldo was really listening and paying
attention. It was not a call for a prompt by a character who had
forgotten what he was saying but a careful checking by a brilliant
politician of whether a subordinate was doing his job properly. Not the
only reading but one that intelligently combined the representation of a
man whose mind does wander off in other directions with a man who was
justifiably used as chief courtier by Claudius.
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Terence Hawkes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 30 May 2000 13:35:46 -0400
Subject: Senile Dementia
It's perfectly clear that 'Hamlet' in its own time is not in the least
concerned with senile dementia. What the PLAY says and does is always
more significant than anything the CHARACTERS say and do. To suggest
otherwise pulls it into our time as part of an ongoing project of
domestication, reducing the play to a series of current 'issues' that we
can 'discuss' and thus exorcise. Why not? Home is where the art is.
Terence Hawkes
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Yvonne Bruce <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 30 May 2000 14:53:42 -0400
Subject: Senile Dementia
Perhaps of interest to the original poster of this topic (sorry, I
didn't save the message) as well as to some of the responders: Luce
Irigaray's first book, <Le Langage des dements> (<The language of
dementia>, 1973), not overtly feminist (though it uses many of the
Derridean tools for reading that inflect her later feminism). I don't
know it personally; Toril Moi calls it "a study of the patterns of
linguistic disintegration in senile dementia."
Sincerely,
Yvonne Bruce