Hamlet's Dreams brings together the Robben Island Prison of Nelson Mandela and the prison that is Denmark for Shakespeare's Hamlet. David Shalkwyk uses the circulation of the so-called 'Robben Island Shakespeare', a copy of the Alexander edition of the Complete Works that was secretly circulated, annotated and signed by a group of Robben Island political prisoner in the 1970s (including Nelson Mandela), to examine the representation and experience of imprisonment in South African prison memoirs and Shakespeare's Hamlet. The book looks at the ways in which oppressive spaces or circumstances restrict the ways in which personal identity can be formed or formulated in relation to others. The 'bad dreams' that keep Hamlet from considering himself the 'king of infinite space' are, it argues, the need for other people that becomes especially evident in situations of real or psychological imprisonment.

Every reader is an actor according to Rosenberg. To prepare the actor-reader for insights, Rosenberg draws on major intepretations of the play worldwide, in theatre and in criticism, wherever possible from the first known performances to the present day. The book is rich and provocative on every question about the play.

The human soul is for pre-modern philosophers the cause of both thinking and life. This double aspect of the soul, which makes man a rational animal, expresses itself above all in human action. Deadly Thought: "Hamlet" and the Human Soul traces Hamlet's famous inability to act to his inability to hold together these twin aspects of the soul. Combining careful attention to detail and interpretive breadth, noted scholar Jan H. Blits deftly illustrates how Hamlet collapses life into thought, and moral action into stage acting, and ultimately comes to see his own life as a stage play. Hamlet, the book demonstrates, epitomizes the intellectualism of the Renaissance and the modern age it began, and so becomes tragedy's first self-conscious protagonist, signaling the end of ancient tragedy. Erudite, innovative, and lively, Deadly Thought is a ground-breaking contribution that will appeal to Shakespeare scholars, political theorists, historians of philosophy, literary theorists and anyone interested in a truly fresh interpretation of this classic work.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is faced by a ghost bearing a grim message of murder and revenge, driving the prince to the edge of madness by his struggle to understand the situation and to do his duty.

This book takes a new approach to Shakespeare’s plays, exploring them as dream-thought in the modern psychoanalytic sense of unconscious thinking. Through his commitment to poetic language, Shakespeare offers images and dramatic sequences that illustrate fundamental developmental conflicts, the solutions for which are not preconceived but evolve through the process of dramatisation. In this volume, Meg Harris Williams explores the fundamental distinction between the surface meanings of plot or argument and the deep grammar of dreamlife, applied not only to those plays known as ‘dream-plays’ but also to critical sequences throughout Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Through a post-Kleinian model based on the thinking of Bion, Meltzer, and Money-Kyrle, this book sheds new light on both Shakespeare’s own relation to the play and on the identificatory processes of the playwright, reader, or audience. Dream Sequences in Shakespeare is important reading for psychoanalysts, playwrights, and students.