Introduction

Abstract

Although Hamlet has long been associated with Renaissance humanism, Todd Andrew Borlik’s essay, which begins the volume’s explorations of postmodern adaptations of Hamlet, argues that Hamlet has more recently become associated with the post-human. Focusing on Nam June Paik’s Hamlet Robot, Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, Emma Vieceli’s Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet, and Nick O’Donohoe’s Too Too Solid Flesh, Borlik argues that postmodern thinkers are using Shakespeare’s quintessentially humanist play to “unthink the human.” As he places Hamlet’s ideas regarding body versus machine in conversation with Cartesian mechanics, Borlik considers early modern conceptions of man/machine and what those understandings of the human mean for the postmodern man/machine. Borlik sees parody and humor as central to the postmodern vision of Hamlet, arguing that “the play’s enduring relevance in the post-modern, post-Gutenberg, and post-human age may depend on … sardonic adaptations that infuse it in varying mixtures with the agony and ecstasy of the technological sublime.” Elizabeth Klett’s essay also examines Hamlet in an unconventional medium. Her examination of Hamlet in Wheeldon’s 2007 ballet, Misericordes/Elsinore, focuses on the struggle of a choreographer who fundamentally felt that “Hamlet doesn’t make sense. ...” Klett argues that Hamlet, in large part because of its textual exhaustion, was able to play multiple (and paradoxical) roles in the piece, for Klett finds in this ballet that Hamlet is both origin (and thus textual authority) as well as a block to artistic completion. In the final version of the ballet, allusions are both absent and present, visible and invisible, as one can watch the ballet without realizing that one is watching Hamlet. Klett argues that Wheeldon’s “rejection of Hamlet was based in two convictions, both of which indicate that we are perhaps living in a ‘post-Hamlet’ moment. First, he became convinced that the play does not make sense, due to its continual contradictions and questionings. Second, he concluded that its narrative complexity made it unsuitable for ballet.” Ultimately, Klett concludes that, for this particular performance, “Hamlet is both an essential frame of reference and entirely superfluous.” Further exploring how elements of Hamlet have been turned to new and distinctively twenty-first-century concerns, Chloe Owen analyzes the ways Ophelia and imagery related to her constitutes an important part of representations of mental disability in the work of author and song writer Emilie Autumn. Owen contends that Autumn’s novel, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, engages critically with a dangerous cultural preoccupation with Ophelia’s madness, isolation, and suicide. The “Opheliac” identity in Autumn’s works reflects the potential manipulation or abuse of people with mental disabilities. Owen concludes that, by laying bare the unsettlingly romanticized aspects of Ophelia’s suffering, Autumn invites readers to question potentially damaging attitudes toward those with mental disabilities. Jim Casey’s essay examines the ways in which we are increasingly becoming “post-Hamlet” on a global level. Drawing on adaptation theory, particularly Douglas Lanier’s “Shakespearean Rhizomatics” and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s conceptual rhizomes, Casey examines the visuality of international Shakespeare films (Feng Xiaogang’s 2006 Chinese wuxia film The Banquet and Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2014 Indian crime drama Haider). This chapter argues that film is increasingly bringing us into an era in which Shakespeare has become “post-textual.” Focusing on the ways in which these two films are haunted by “ghosts of Shakespeares past,” Casey argues that they manifest their postmodern aesthetics through what he describes as “anti-pastiche.” Although many have argued for the value of Shakespeare’s language as that which is fundamentally “Shakespearean” about Hamlet, Casey concludes that authenticity is as spectral as Old Hamle