Hamlet and the Art of RevengeA Text Set Analysis of the Play Within the Play

“Seemingly endless retelling and

adaptations by others” (Thomas and Taylor,

74).

“….the possibility that literary adaptations are

at once cinema and literature” (Leitch, 63).

“The notion that adaptations ought to be

faithful to their ostensible source texts”

(Leitch, 64).

Adaptation vs. Appropriation

Adaptation

“Signals a relationship between the original source text and it’s original” (Sanders, 26).

Appropriation

“Frequently affects a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain that may or may not involve a generic shift” (Sanders, 26)

A little bit of both…

The Play Within the Play And Revenge

“The Mousetrap”

“The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King"

Revenge:initiated by the play, executed by

an amateur

“But am I Pigeon-livered and lack gall”

What’s significant about the “Mousetrap”?

“Rich Iconographical Associations”

• Title of the play within a play is a “symbolic microcosm” of the entire play• Commonly used symbol• Mousetrap connotations• gluttony• corruption and dirtiness• Augustinian conception of the mousetrap• Saint Augustin – the cross as a mousetrap on which the devil was ensnared

What else does culture tell us, dawg?

• Deeper meaning in some lines• Hamlet’s vagueness contributes to his insanity• Yet he actually tells us exactly what he means more than the modern audience might think• This is through puns•“Get thee to a nunn'ry” (III, i, 120). • Double-entendre• Nunnery was slang for ‘brothel’ in Elizabethan England