At the very end of Hamlet Fortinbras pronounces the following epitaph on the hero: Let four captains Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage, For he was likely, had he been put on, To have proved most royal; and for his passage The soldier's music and the rite of war Speak loudly for him. What are we to think of this? Do we think it is true? Does it matter whether we think it is true or not? Shakespeare has been thought to be rather cavalier in ending his plays. Once the protagonist is dead, the play has to be wound up as quickly as possible, and someone must say the necessary things that will allow the remaining characters to get off the stage. In this case Fortinbras says what a Renaissance prince might be expected to say of another Renaissance prince. So, is the speech merely perfunctory? Or does Hamlet's princeliness matter? Does it rightly receive the final emphasis of the play?
{"title":"Prince of Denmark","authors":"David Brooks","doi":"10.5860/choice.40-2646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.40-2646","url":null,"abstract":"At the very end of Hamlet Fortinbras pronounces the following epitaph on the hero: \u0000Let four captains \u0000Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage, \u0000For he was likely, had he been put on, \u0000To have proved most royal; and for his passage \u0000The soldier's music and the rite of war \u0000Speak loudly for him. \u0000What are we to think of this? Do we think it is true? Does it matter whether we think it is true or not? Shakespeare has been thought to be rather cavalier in ending his plays. Once the protagonist is dead, the play has to be wound up as quickly as possible, and someone must say the necessary things that will allow the remaining characters to get off the stage. In this case Fortinbras says what a Renaissance prince might be expected to say of another Renaissance prince. So, is the speech merely perfunctory? Or does Hamlet's princeliness matter? Does it rightly receive the final emphasis of the play?","PeriodicalId":391951,"journal":{"name":"Sydney Studies in English","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131728781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In March 1617 Marius Muta, a Judge of the Supreme Court of Sicily, sentenced a certain Leonardus to seven years in the galleys. It seems that Leonardus had lured his unfaithful wife outside the city walls, where he killed her, and where her body was later partially eaten by dogs. Over eighty years later, this case was cited twice by Desiderius Spreti in his defence of Guido Franceschini, a Tuscan nobleman on trial in Rome for the murder of his wife. More than two and a half centuries later the case found its way into English literature in Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868-9),4 a poem based on the Franceschini trial as recorded in contemporary legal documents discovered by the poet. Browning's defence lawyer, Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis (in the actual case Spreti had been his junior), cites the case of Leonardus: For pregnant instance, let us contemplate The luck of Leonardus, - see at large Of Sicily's Decisions sixty-first. This Leonard finds his wife is false: what then? He makes her own son snare her, and entice Out of the town-walls to a private walk:, Wherein he slays her with commodity. They tmd her body half-devomed by dogs: Leonard is tried, convicted, punished, sent To labour in the galleys seven years long: Why? For the murder? Nay, but for the mode! (VID. 809-19) Just as Spreti gave Muta's judgment new life by citing it in the context of a new case, so Browning's version brings the case to life again, and gives it new discursive and linguistic vitality by translating it, not just from Latin into English (for Browning did not have the benefit of Gest's translation), but also from legal discourse into poetry. The poem pushes the citation in the general direction of narrative fiction, and in so doing it brings law and literature into mutually illuminating relationship. The two citations, in the Franceschini trial and in Browning's poem, tell the same story in different ways, and to look at them in relation to each other is to observe law and literature grappling and communicating with each other.
{"title":"Law as Literature","authors":"S. Petch","doi":"10.1515/lal","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lal","url":null,"abstract":"In March 1617 Marius Muta, a Judge of the Supreme Court of Sicily, sentenced a certain Leonardus to seven years in the galleys. It seems that Leonardus had lured his unfaithful wife outside the city walls, where he killed her, and where her body was later partially eaten by dogs. Over eighty years later, this case was cited twice by Desiderius Spreti in his defence of Guido Franceschini, a Tuscan nobleman on trial in Rome for the murder of his wife. More than two and a half centuries later the case found its way into English literature in Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868-9),4 a poem based on the Franceschini trial as recorded in contemporary legal documents discovered by the poet. Browning's defence lawyer, Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis (in the actual case Spreti had been his junior), cites the case of Leonardus: \u0000For pregnant instance, let us contemplate \u0000The luck of Leonardus, - see at large \u0000Of Sicily's Decisions sixty-first. \u0000This Leonard finds his wife is false: what then? \u0000He makes her own son snare her, and entice \u0000Out of the town-walls to a private walk:, \u0000Wherein he slays her with commodity. \u0000They tmd her body half-devomed by dogs: \u0000Leonard is tried, convicted, punished, sent \u0000To labour in the galleys seven years long: \u0000Why? For the murder? Nay, but for the mode! (VID. 809-19) \u0000Just as Spreti gave Muta's judgment new life by citing it in the context of a new case, so Browning's version brings the case to life again, and gives it new discursive and linguistic vitality by translating it, not just from Latin into English (for Browning did not have the benefit of Gest's translation), but also from legal discourse into poetry. The poem pushes the citation in the general direction of narrative fiction, and in so doing it brings law and literature into mutually illuminating relationship. The two citations, in the Franceschini trial and in Browning's poem, tell the same story in different ways, and to look at them in relation to each other is to observe law and literature grappling and communicating with each other.","PeriodicalId":391951,"journal":{"name":"Sydney Studies in English","volume":"144 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131875383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2008-10-09DOI: 10.5040/9781474211291.ch-003
Pamela Law
How shall we read Wuthering Heights? Is it a symbolic tale of a transcendent love which far surpasses the dreariness of ordinary domestic experience, in the manner of the lines at the end of Emily Bronte's poem "R. Alcona to J. Brenzaida"- Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again? Is it a novel whose realistic framing comments on and "places" such emotional extravagance and celebrates common sense, human community and the civilized values of eighteenth-century life-what Isabella calls in her post-honeymoon letter to Nelly, "the common sympathies of human nature"? Is it what most of its first nineteenth-century readers thought it, "a powerful but imperfect book" which can't decide what kind of thing it wants to be?
{"title":"Reading 'Wuthering Heights'","authors":"Pamela Law","doi":"10.5040/9781474211291.ch-003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474211291.ch-003","url":null,"abstract":"How shall we read Wuthering Heights? Is it a symbolic tale of a transcendent love which far surpasses the dreariness of ordinary domestic experience, in the manner of the lines at the end of Emily Bronte's poem \"R. Alcona to J. Brenzaida\"- \u0000Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, \u0000How could I seek the empty world again? \u0000Is it a novel whose realistic framing comments on and \"places\" such emotional extravagance and celebrates common sense, human community and the civilized values of eighteenth-century life-what Isabella calls in her post-honeymoon letter to Nelly, \"the common sympathies of human nature\"? Is it what most of its first nineteenth-century readers thought it, \"a powerful but imperfect book\" which can't decide what kind of thing it wants to be?","PeriodicalId":391951,"journal":{"name":"Sydney Studies in English","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121506819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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