Hamlet ’s ‘Dying’ Breaths and the Ars Memoria and Moriendi
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21687945 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stephanie Shirilan (Syracuse University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue | 4-5 |
| Pages | 56-61 |
| Publication date | 2024-07-03 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Performance Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1352-8165 • E-ISSN: 1469-9990 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13528165.2024.2510863 |
| OpenAlex | W4415282450 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
With his own dying breaths, Hamlet begs Horatio to draw his breath in pain to tell his story. This article examines Hamlet’s commission of his friend’s respiratory remembrance as the mechanism by which the play imagines an escape from the asphyxiating violence of the revenge plot. By probing the dramaturgical and religious implications of pain-drawn breath in Shakespeare’s most famously metatheatrical play and situating these in the traditions of the Western ars moriendi (at the pivotal moment of their re-assessment under pressures of the Protestant Reformation), the article shows how the fugitive spirit incarnated in the performance of the always dying breath (by what Herbert Blau called the “living/dying” actor), challenges narrative voice as the privileged instrument of spiritual remembrance in Hamlet and the performance arts it both theorizes and has been used to theorize
Breathing · MEDLINE · Respiratory Rate · Joseph Conrad and Literature · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
| Highly cited | No |
|---|