![]() ![]() The number uses a comic tempo “to conjure up images of middle-class gentility and sentiment,” and “outrageous rhyming and increasingly bawdy imagery that Porter derives from Shakespeare’s titles” (Swain 1990, 134 136). The number stops Kiss Me, Kate so completely that Cole Porter added encore verses because “we realized that… was a ‘boff ‘ number-a show stopper” (McBrien 1998, 313–14 116). If your blonde don’t respond when you flatter ‘er, “Brush up your Shakespeare,” sings a gangster who’s hanging around backstage to collect an overdue gambling debt, “Start quoting him now …”Īnd they’ll think you’re a hell of a fella. My views have been garnered through more than three decades of studying the play and discussing it with students, all of us mulling over directorial visions and theoretical interpretations, analyzing which facet of the Prince is depicted in key behaviors and soliloquies and how his attitude differs toward the women in his life. Following is a précis of some candidates that I would recommend. Still, there may be Hamlet prototypes, versions that qualify as models of their kind: Proto-Hamlets. The man of action is not the melancholy Dane the misogynist cannot love Ophelia more than “forty thousand brothers” (V.1.272). ![]() But I doubt we can have such a Hamlet Ne Plus Ultra. To what extent is the prince suffering a mental breakdown? How does he feel about his mother, his father, his erstwhile sweetheart? What is the play really about, and how do key lines and scenes support the various interpretations?įor me an “impossible dream” is viewing the definitive Hamlet, the performance that an- swers all such questions and embodies the Platonic form of Shakespeare’s intent. Hamlet tantalizes us with questions that cannot be answered. ![]()
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