- Title
- Shakespeare and the self: being true to Hamlet
- Creator
- Gouws, John S
- Subject
- To be catalogued
- Date
- 1996
- Type
- text
- Type
- article
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/457856
- Identifier
- vital:75685
- Identifier
- https://hdl.handle.net/10520/AJA1011582X_93
- Description
- Shakespeare is very definitely not our contemporary. This seems very obvious, but we have a way of forgetting it, or rather of allowing it to elude us. For all sorts of reasons we would like to read his works as if they were by the genius bloke living next door. The surest way of re-vealing that he is not is to talk about the self, because at this level Shakespeare is very unlike us. When we attempt to talk about Shake-speare or any of his contemporaries it is very easy at a conscious level to keep a proper alien distance, but we leave unguarded the one area brought unstatedly into the conversation-our insinuating selves. In much the same way, he and his contemporaries informed all their con-versation by a necessarily unexamined self, a self which informed, constituted, everything they said and did. And because we do not artic-ulate its presence, we treat it like the inscribed circuitry on a silicone chip, the software of our word-processing programme or like English grammar. In other words. we assume. mistakenly. it is the same for all of us. But each of us does not have a pentium chip. nor do we all use Word Perfect. nor does every speaker in the world use English gram-mar (and there is no Universal Grammar). I have therefore set myself a very difficult task: to talk about what is presupposed by talk. though rarely talked about.
- Format
- 9 pages, pdf
- Language
- English
- Relation
- Shakespeare in Southern Africa, Gouws, J., 1996. Shakespeare and the self: being true to Hamlet. Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 9(1), pp.32-40, Shakespeare in Southern Africa volume 9 number 1 32 40 1996 2071-7504
- Rights
- Publisher
- Rights
- Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Shakespeare in Southern Africa Statement (https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sisa/about)
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Collections
Gouws, John Stephen (Prof)
RU Department of Literary Studies in English
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details | SOURCE1 | Shakespeare and the self.pdf | 397 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |