“I Knew Him, Horatio”: Shakespeare’s Beliefs, Early Textual Editing, and Nineteenth-Century Phrenology
oleh: Bryan Adams Hampton
| Format: | Article |
|---|---|
| Diterbitkan: | MDPI AG 2019-03-01 |
Deskripsi
As Hamlet gazes into Yorick’s skull, he reassembles the quirks of the jester’s personhood and also imagines a self that he used to be, in relation to Yorick. Partially through the lens of <i>Hamlet</i>, characterized by A.C. Bradley as Shakespeare’s most “religious„ play, this essay interrogates how several eighteenth-century textual editors, and some nineteenth-century scholars and popular admirers, imagine and construct Shakespeare’s beliefs: the first, through their efforts to reassemble the textual “bones„ of Shakespeare’s works; and the second, through the rising pseudoscience of phrenology, operating in the background in the national debate to exhume and examine Shakespeare’s skull.