--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Angela Mailander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > We agreed that some interpretations are off the mark. That Hamlet is not about a picnic in Hawaii, was the example given. The full title of the play (regardless of where Shakespeare stole his material) is "The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. To interpret it as a "family drama" is to miss both the tragedy and the fact that the main character is a prince which makes it very different from mere family matters.
Sorry, but that's absurd. Royals have family dramas just as much as "commoners" do. For a contemporary example, see: "Family drama: The British royals may have weathered centuries of scandal, but their dynasty keeps on rolling along" by Michael Korda http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/050418/18royals.htm And family drama--including among royals--can certainly be tragic, as in Diana's death. These categories aren't mutually exclusive. > Tragedy and drama are literary genres. To call Hamlet a family drama is a category mistake--I believe I'm repeating myself. Obviously you have no idea what the term "category mistake" means. Look it up, please. A category mistake would be to say, for example, that Tuesday is in the key of E-flat, or that "Hamlet" is high in calories. What you mean to say is that you think I've put "Hamlet" in the wrong literary category. But that isn't the case either. Second, you're just quibbling. My point was that "Hamlet" is primarily (not exclusively) about a (tragic) drama within a (royal) family, as opposed to a philosophical discourse on the nature of enlightenment. The basic difference between our approaches is that you view "Hamlet" as a written work, as words on a page to be studied like a literary novel or a treatise or an epic poem, whereas I view it as a work of theater, as words spoken by actors on a stage to an audience. That involves vastly different dynamics, and is a significant factor in the appropriateness of various interpretations. (I spent many years working in professional theater--including on productions of "Hamlet"-- so I don't so much "read" the play as envision it being enacted, "hearing" the actors portray the characters and communicate their travails to the audience.) You're trying to do an end run around this basic difference by suggesting that the term "family drama" can only refer to something akin to soap opera, which is of course not at all how I was using it. I'll have more to say on this later on.
