THEORETICAL POSITIONS/PRACTICAL APPROACHES 80
audiences ranging from artisans to aristocracy, ‘groundlings’ to grandees (Elizabethan
theatre audiences were much more socially variegated than their modern counter-
parts). Thereafter, we must look to moments of reception (and reproduction) as
different as: early seventeenth-century foreign merchants at sea off Sierra Leone; the
Restoration and eighteenth-century court and city; the nineteenth-century Victorian
music-hall; twentieth-century Soviet, British, Italian, US and world cinemas – and any
time, anywhere that a TV has been showing one of the many acted or animated
versions. What’s more, the awesome – some would say awful – fact is that by far the
greatest number of modern ‘receivers’ of ‘Shakespeare’s Hamlet’ are to be found in
formal education. These include students, teachers, scholars, critics – in fact anyone
and everyone who has studied ‘it’ in the classroom or lecture theatre, chiefly from the
page, occasionally on the stage, and increasingly from the screen.
Relations to the rest of the world
‘Shakespeare’s Hamlet’ thus involves a wide variety of references, representations and
kinds of relevance, again in various historical moments and social contexts. These
include representations of such matters as: social and psychological order and
disorder, families, adolescence, adultery, murder, revenge, love, lust, the supernatural,
royalty, nobility, manual labour, scholarship, being a student, returning home, having
friends, being alone, and much more. Notice again that all of these issues will be
understood slightly or very differently depending on the frames of reference within
which they are realised: what they relate to in some contemporary world. These
worlds will vary between, say, the late sixteenth and early twenty-first centuries,
between post-feudal and post-industrial societies. The world-views in play amongst
readers and audiences will vary correspondingly: in religion across kinds of
Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, agnosticism, atheism, etc.; in politics across forms of
monarchy, absolutism, democracy and dictatorship; in psychology/physiology from
a vision of the mind–body based on the elements of fire, air, earth and water, along
with their associated ‘humours’, to interrelations of ‘ego’ and ‘id’, or ‘Oedipus
complexes’, desire, the ‘semiotic’, sexuality, and so on. For this reason, the most
personallypressing questions you are likely to put to Hamlet would be: ‘what are my
views and experiences of social and psychological dis/order, families, monarchy, being
a student, returning home, etc.?’ And yet inevitably, at the same time, you are likely
to wonder about the historical context: ‘what views and experiences of social
dis/order, psychological disturbance, families, etc. were available, encouraged,
prohibited or unthinkable in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London
(England, Britain, the rest of the world)?’ Similar questions quickly arise about every
other time, place and social context within which Shakespeare’s (and everyone else’s)
‘Hamlet’ has been realised.
By now it will be clear that ‘Shakespeare’s Hamlet’ is a very complex and changeable
phenomenon indeed. In fact, ‘it’ turns out to be a ‘they’: an apparently single object
turns out, on closer investigation, to be an array of products and a series of processes.
These have been plotted systematically and at length (though still far from
exhaustively) in four dimensions: texts; reproduction; reception; and relations to the
rest of the world. It has also been pointed out that all of these dimensions are
characterised by variation in time, place and social space. Consequently, just whose
‘Hamlet’ this is remains a highly fascinating and deeply contentious matter:
Theory in practice – a working model 81
Shakespeare’s? his predecessors’? his contemporaries’? his successors’? our own?
someone else’s entirely? That is one reason why we need theoretical models. It is also
why, if they are to be of practical use, we need particular materials on which to try
and test them. No model or method is universal and omnipotent. Only by bringing
materials, models and methods into dynamic relation can we really know the
potentialities of any of them.
ONE MODEL LEADS TO ANOTHER . . .
The above model of text, producer, receiver and relations to the rest of the world can be
used in three ways:
• as a practical tool to help analyse a particular text;
• as a theoretical model of how texts in general come into being;
• as a framework in which to ‘place’ particular critical movements.
Other related yet distinct models can be found in the entries on addresser–address–
addressee and text, context and intertextuality in Part Three. All are used to underpin the
‘How to practise . . . ’ sections featured in the rest of Part Two.
Activities
(a) Applying the model. Explore a text you are studying (or one of those in Part Five)
with the help of the above model of text, producer, receivers and relations to the rest
of the world (see Figure 2.1). Use the basic theoretical and practical questions on p.
73 to get started, drawing on reference books, critical editions and other resources
for relevant information. Go on to consider what aspects of the text and your response
to it are not especially addressed by the present model. Revise or replace it accordingly.
(b) ‘Placing’ theories. Look at the initial ‘Overview’ sections for a couple of the specific
approaches featured in the rest of Part Two (e.g. ‘Practical and (old) new criticism’
and ‘Feminism and gender studies’ or ‘Postcolonialism and multiculturalism’).
Consider how far that approach seems to be text-centred or oriented towards
producers, receivers and the rest of the world. Which dimensions are you currently
most interested in?
Discussion
(i) [the term] theory is often used derogatorily just because it explains and –
implicitly or explicitly – challenges some customary action.
Raymond Williams, Keywords (1983: 317)
(ii) A man with one theory is lost. He needs several of them – or lots! He should stuff
them in his pockets like newspapers.
Bertolt Brecht, in Makaryk (1993: vii)
