The project

 

 

What HyperHamlet does

HyperHamlet could be described as a dictionary-in-progress which does not tell us where phrases come from (as other dictionaries do), but rather where Hamlet's phrases have gone.

But HyperHamlet is also an unusual edition of Shakespeare's play.

• It does not try to reconstruct the best possible, authoritative text (what people used to call the "original").
• It does not try to reconstruct the way the play was first used.
• It does not try to explain what the text "really" means, i.e. what it may have meant to its author or to those who first encountered it in the theatre.
• It does not try, in other words, to remove accretions that may have settled on the play over the centuries.

Instead,

• it questions the general status of such endeavours.
• it offers material to reconstruct the cultural history of the play,^[1] of which "the dream of the master text", in Stephen Greenblatt's apt phrase,^[2] has become part.
• it documents how narratives, scenes, figures, phrases and ideas from the play have entered the discourse of periods, how they have enhanced the play's cultural status as a classic,^[3] and in turn fed back into the understanding of the play.

Parts of Hamlets cultural history are well documented in the history of editions, of theatrical performance and of critical reception. Beyond these relatively specialised areas of cultural practice we have little, even though references to Hamlet in literature, in the visual arts, in political discourse, and, more recently, in advertising and merchandising can tell us a great deal about the status and the understanding of the play. To give just a few examples: What notion of Yorick forms the basis of Sterne's use of the reference in Tristram Shandy, and how has it, in turn, affected the understanding of the play? How could Hamlet's to be or not to be ('Sein oder Nichtsein') become one of the favourite phrases of the Nazi elite? Are phrases like "foully murdered" recognized as Hamlet quotations or have they simply become part of the language, anonymous idioms? Were they indeed idioms before Shakespeare used them, and only became more "successful" by being used in such a successful text?

Intertextual work still tends to be interested in origins, sources and influences, although its theoreticians describe a synchronous universe of texts. Questions like the above, which work in the opposite direction, can contribute to the shift of attention "from the triad constituted by author/work/tradition to another constituted by text/discourse/culture",^[4] and thus move practical intertextuality studies forward.

HyperHamlet also offers a contribution to memory studies. Jan and Aleida Assmann^[5] have distinguished two types of collective memory, the cultural and the communicative. Communicative memory is based on people's personal experience and therefore restricted to the recent past; it dies along with the members of the group that have shared it. Cultural memory, on the other hand, is fixed in documents and traditions rather than individual minds and can therefore be much more enduring. Shakespeare's Hamlet is certainly part of cultural memory as such. However, it should be noted that cultural memory does not have a life of its own, but is an archive that has to be constantly re-activated by communicative memory. HyperHamlet documents such interactions. Many pieces of evidence are themselves part of collective memory, which raises the interesting question to what extent this kind of intertextuality contributes to the cultural status of individual texts.

 

What you can do with HyperHamlet

Search

HyperHamlet records references to Hamlet from the last 408 years. Allusions to individual lines (e.g. "Something's rotten in the state of Denmark") or figures (e.g. Ophelia, Yorick or the Ghost) may come from any kind of text, including musical works and paintings. Click here for information on how to search the database.

 

Research

Thanks to its inclusive contents and the multi-dimensional annotation and search options, HyperHamlet can be the basis for a wide range of potential projects.

• It provides a rich database for investigations of the use which authors and texts make of Shakespearean references.
• It stimulates new research questions.
• It offers material that is of interest for both linguistic and literary studies.

 

Teach

HyperHamlet documents "irreverent" uses of Shakespeare's most famous play which may function as ice-breakers for students who find the text too awe-inspiring to be approachable. Projects focused on a famous passage or on a popular genre could convey a sense of the continuing interest of the play.

 

Contribute

HyperHamlet is an open-ended, potentially infinite project which will never be complete but more and more useful as more entries are added. It needs all the contributions it can get from people who have been to some of the many places Hamlet has been taken to. Click here for information on how to contribute.

 

The HyperHamlet text

Hamlet exists in no less than three 'Ur'-texts that can claim independent authority to different degrees, and which are used for critical editions. Using a text which corresponds to latest scholarly insights is, however, not advisable; the basic text should correspond to a long-term consensus of use. Variants of scenes or single verses (so far just single words) will be added as references to them emerge.

A hypertext which carries this sort of data structure should, ideally, record all variants and emendations that affect the meaning and the status of the play, without – and this is crucial – privileging one version over others, as this would bring back the "dream of the master text". So the text should in no way suggest any claim to privileged status or have revisionist aspirations (as do The Oxford Shakespeare, and, to a lesser extent, The Norton Shakespeare).

The decision to use a text widely available on the internet, the Moby Shakespeare was therefore not a decision for "the best text available", but for the least bad for the purposes of this project (including the advantage of not being covered by copyright) at the moment.

 

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[1] It takes up ideas first suggested (to our knowledge) in Laurie E. Osborne, The Trick of Singularity: "Twelfth Night" and the Performance Editions. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996, xv. Osborne restricts herself to studying performance editions of Twelfth Night in establishing "the cultural history" (xv) of the play.

[2] The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997. 65.

[3] On this process, see Balz Engler. Poetry and Community. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1990. ch. 3, 42-57. This is a revised version of "The Classic as a Public Symbol," REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 6. 1988/89. 217-36.

[4] George P. Landow. Hypertext: The Conversion of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, cop. 1992. 10.

[5] See, for example, Jan Assmann. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. München: Beck, 1992.