Shakespeare and the self: being true to Hamlet
- Authors: Gouws, John S
- Date: 1996
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/457856 , vital:75685 , 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.
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- Date Issued: 1996
The pursuit of poetry : a defence
- Authors: Gouws, John S
- Date: 1990
- Subjects: Poetry
- Language: English
- Type: Text
- Identifier: vital:632 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020701
- Description: Inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes University , Rhodes University Libraries (Digitisation)
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1990
Shakespeare, Webster and the Moriturus Lyric in Renaissance England
- Authors: Gouws, John S
- Date: 1989
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/457869 , vital:75686 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/AJA1011582X_75
- Description: It is perhaps a commonplace that the dying will register their experience as a lingering on a threshold, but it is remarkable, in the first place, to record that awareness in a poem, and, in the second place, to insist that the poem be placed at the end of the book. As I hope to show in the course of this discussion, the notion of writing a poem in the face of imminent death is not uncommon in the Renaissance; in fact, the act of doing so is one of the manifestations of a" good death", a mode of" self-fashioning" not restricted to poets. What is unusual and innovative about the Waller example is the inauguration of the self-consciously placed poem in the collected works of a poet, an act which leads inevi-tably to the most famous instance, Tennyson's" Crossing the Bar". Two Emily Dickinson poems suggest that in the nineteenth century the genre was sufficiently established to invite variant forms. In" I heard a Fly buzz-when I died-", the speaker recounts the experience of diminishing consciousness, and in" Because I could not stop for Death-" she crosses the threshold into the next world.'The latler poem of course al-so makes use of the" Death and the Maiden"(the rape of Persephone) motif, and so goes well beyond what can be regarded as a true moritu-rus lyric.
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- Date Issued: 1989