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Lucretius’s poem De rerum natura articulates a philosophy meant to help its adherents avoid anxiety and inner turmoil. Although Shakespeare was acquainted with and influenced by Lucretius, scholarship has neglected this influence upon Hamlet, a play whose title character is most famous for inner turmoil and melancholy. This essay argues that that the play has a Lucretian aspect, such that classical materialism is reflected in its tapestry of metaphysical anxieties. Besides Christian concerns about the afterlife, Prince Hamlet’s suffering may also, therefore, be understood in the context of a Lucretian ethics and science. Lucretius propounded a materialist view of the soul, and viewed death as the separation of the atoms of body and soul from each other. Thus, this essay points out certain scenes in the play which suggest or investigate atomic decomposition. In particular, the Gravedigger scene represents Lucretian-materialist attitudes toward death.

The diploma thesis deals with the ethical aspects we can indentify when dealing with bodies of the deceased. It describes how the deceased body is treated with respect to human dignity or human rights and also shows how the deceased's body was treated in the past and how funeral ceremonies and burials of the human remains looked like. It also deals with the evaluation of the approach to dead body these days. The procedures after death are described as well as the forms of funeral, funeral services or cemeteries. The thesis marginally deals with the funeral customs of selected ethnic minorities living in our territory. A special area is dedicated to the treatment of deceased children, the possibilities of their burial and farewell to their parents. Ethical issues in the field of organ donation are presented here also in the end.

The United States’ recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan has been widely considered a flagrant breach of international law. This illegal act gives reason to examine the relationship between the United States under President Trump and international law more generally. Unlike its predecessors, the Trump administration has not just violated international law whenever U.S. economic, political, or strategic interests demanded it to do so, it has rather challenged international law and its institutions as such, and has actively undermined them. The attitude of the Trump administration towards international law and its institutions is marked by an unparalleled contempt or disdain. This article delivers a powerful “J’accuse” against this international law nihilism.

While sampling for the Rusty Gravedigger, Lacunicambarus miltus, Taylor et al. (2011) found one or more potentially undescribed burrowing crayfish species in the genus Lacunicambarus inhabiting the area between the Pascagoula River and Mobile Bay in southern Alabama and Mississippi. Molecular analyses by Glon et al. (2018) confirmed that samples from this area were genetically distinct from other Lacunicambarus crayfishes. These findings prompted a dedicated sampling trip in January 2020. We used morphological and molecular analyses to investigate the specimens we collected and, based on our results, we describe two new crayfish species: the Lonesome Gravedigger, L. mobilensis sp. nov. and the Banded Mudbug, L. freudensteini sp. nov. Lacunicambarus mobilensis sp. nov. is sister to the Rusty Gravedigger, L. miltus, while L. freudensteini sp. nov. is sister to the Painted Devil Crayfish, L. ludovicianus. Both new species are currently known from a small number of sites in southern Alabama and Mississippi and may require conservation attention. In addition, we provide an updated key to Lacunicambarus crayfishes that includes these new species.

During his four decades of rule, Genseric appears to many Africans – Catholic and pro-Roman – as the incarnation of the Antichrist. For the African municipal aristocracy he represented the image of a greedy barbarian obsessed with power, the persecutor and the gravedigger ofRomanitas. If we look closely, Genseric had learned from the Romans how to manage strength and diplomacy, for negotiating with the Romans in particular. He sought to perpetuate his conquests by organising treaties with Ravenna and Constantinople, which did not prevent him from launching parallel plundering campaigns in Africa and along the coast that brought him respect and financial gain. First king of the vandals, he managed to create the first barbaric state on the territory of the empire. He was the type of leader who can be considered a visionary, bringing to fulfilment the material, political and spiritual conquests of a new era, theSpätantike.

Aim: The interwar period in Czechoslovakia was a time of societal anxiety. The aim of this paper is to find the central themes of societal fear, as reflected in the surrealist works of Vítězslav Nezval, a czech poet. The analysis will be based primarily on the lyric poetry from the collections: Žena v množném čísle [Woman in Plural] (1936) and Absolutní hrobař [Absolute Gravedigger] (1937). Methods: The analysis is based on the Josef Vojdovík’s anthropo-phenomenological method of exploring the surrealist perceptions of the body, which is based on vertical and horizontal anthropological dimensions and phenomenological conceptions of fears. Results: Surrealist poetry and other literary works contain images of the body that are changed by fear: deformations, metamorphoses, fragmentarisations, hybridisations, expressing the body as a collage, a mosaic, an amalgam, a phantom, a grotesque, an inlay, and as lifelessness. It undergoes multiple metamorphoses, not only within its own form, but also with regard to the categories of life and lifelessness. Conclusions: The analysis leads to the conclusion, that V. Nezval’s works show a clear tendency to portray the body as an object which undergoes a metamorphosis. The body is balanced on the edge between living and dead, organic and inorganic, it is determined by time and space. It is often shown along the narrowing-widening relation, in stupor, petrification, reduced to a flat surface or miniaturised.

More than 150 years ago, Marx predicted that the working class would become “the gravedigger of capitalism,” a seemingly prescient prediction as socialism flourished between the two World Wars. However, traditional capitalist countries are thriving, while many socialist countries have collapsed during the past quarter-century. Nonetheless, capitalism is revealing its flaws both in the developed world (e.g. recent financial crises) and in rapidly developing countries (e.g. ecological damage), leading to social unrest that is making Marx’s prediction relevant once more. Considering this situation from a broader historical perspective suggests that new social groups often evolve to fill niches left open by more traditional groups and can support the evolution of new social systems during the establishment of new industries, technologies, and institutions. Thus, they play a crucial role in initiating and guiding fundamental institutional change. Although capitalism has been surprisingly long-lived by historical standards for such systems, new systems may be evolving to push it aside. China’s rapid socioeconomic changes in recent decades provide an opportunity to watch new social groups emerge and begin to play an important role in changing social institutions. The institutional diversity created and sustained by these groups may be important for humanity’s long-term survival.

Toward the end of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), one of Irene Redfield’s good friends, Felise Freeland, comments on Irene’s apparent lack of composure: “Come out of it, Irene, whatever it is. You l...

Among Fugard's post-apartheid plays there is one that escapes the limitations of sentimental nostalgia evident in his recent turn inwards – The Train Driver (2010a). In this short play he develops a challenging sense of the country's dealings with the past by focusing upon the traumatic experience of a ‘track suicide’ remembered in morbidly excessive terms by the white driver, whose tragic story is told by a black gravedigger. The driver's hysteria, symptomatically the result of an identification with the death of the ‘nameless one’ whose burial place he seeks, is balanced by the sympathy and acceptance of the gravedigger who assists him in his quest. The dynamic between the two men, only fully graspable in performance, is at the centre of the play, which is set in a squatter camp cemetery, a liminal urban space emphasising the continuity of past wrongs in a country in which the conspicuous consumption and selective remembering of an elite masks everyday poverty and violence. What finally emerges is the c...

Зеленогайський археологічний комплекс один з найбільших курганних некрополів у Східній Європі. Тут у різні часи мешкали представники різних культур: роменської, давньоруської тощо. Але ця археологічна пам’ятка ще потребує подальшого вивчення.

Metaphors of the camera eye are among the oldest and most powerful tropes to depict human vision and subjectivity. As a proto-cybernetic metaphor that lends itself both to anthropomorphic and mechanomorphic readings, the camera eye has become a double agent of subjectivity. It has served as midwife for a modern philosophy of the subject in Rene Descartes's discourse on Optics and as a gravedigger for classical notions of subjectivity in Dziga Vertov's radically constructivist aesthetics of the kino-eye. By looking at Descartes's early modern and Vertov's modernist notions of the camera eye as two paradigmatic case studies, this paper sets out to explore the intricate relation between subjectivity and mediality. It examines figures of the camera eye as conceptual metaphors that construct subjective relations to orders of discourse and media spaces. Drawing on Joachim Paech's reflections on the dispositif for a theory of the order(ing) of media, I will review the concept of the dispositif as strategic place...

Cambarus (Lacunicambarus) miltus (Rusty Gravedigger Crayfish) is a primary burrowing crayfish known from a limited portion of the Gulf Coastal region of the United States. The lack of form I males in collections has in the past prevented species-level identifications and hampered conservation reviews. We conducted an intensive status survey for C. miltus during 2007 and 2008. Our results suggest that the species is much more widespread than previously known and that conservation attention is unwarranted. Preferred habitat for the species is ephemerally flooded and thinly wooded floodplains of small streams and swamps.

The idea for my novel came ten years ago, in the churchyard of Inkberrow, Worcestershire, as my brother and I searched the headstones for Smiths. We'd grown up in this village. Before we reached ad...

Parish burial records and those of Coroner's courts can be an excellent source of factual background material when researching into the historical context of Shakespeare's plays. However, factual accuracy does not, in itself, guarantee relevance. This issue is explored, together with an examination of the Early Modern Coroner's court practice over the exhumation of corpses as it pertains to suicide. Following from this, questions of how audiences of the period would have understood Hamlet's actions in the ‘gravedigger’ scene are considered.

"They mought have killed us but they aint whupped us yit air they?" --Wash Jones in Absalom, Absalom! Although his appearance in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! spans, strictly speaking, no more than a dozen pages, Wash Jones is a pivotal character whose actions have far-reaching impact upon the outcome of the Sutpen story and whose plight, along with that of his granddaughter, Milly, extends beyond an individual tragedy to reveal the delusions and helplessness of the "poor white trash" in the Civil War South. After Rosa Coldfield has rebuked his crude proposition, it is to the Jones family, specifically to Milly, that Thomas Sutpen turns in a last desperate attempt to accomplish his "design" for a dynasty with a male heir. Sutpen's dynastic failure becomes cruelly definitive and attains horrific dimensions when Wash murders Sutpen and then proceeds, in a rampage borne of inconsolable humiliation and despair, to cut the throats of both his granddaughter arid her out-of-wedlock child (by Sutpen) immediately after the infant's birth. Rosa and Jason Compson relate the incident at different times, yet the person whose veracity we are actually called upon to trust is Wash, for he is putatively (in Shreve McCannon's speculative reconstruction) the only first-hand witness to the central event of the novel: Henry Sutpen shooting Charles Bon. Wash reports it to Aunt Rosa: "'Air you Rosie Coldfield? Then you better come out yon. Henry has shot that durn French feller. Kilt him dead as a beef'" (133). Thus, Wash Jones assumes a significance far greater than his mere physical presence in the novel would suggest. He cuts down Sutpen, thereby smashing the Colonel's design and quest for immortality, and is so disillusioned that he even ends his own ancestral line in the annihilation. Beyond the Coldfields, the Compsons, and the members of other more respected families, Wash is the ultimate authority for the circumstances of Charles Bon's death. Therefore, merely in the novel's basic narrative facts, Wash plays a role of crucial importance. Accordingly, this essay illumines Faulkner's art by examining Jones not simply as a reporter of events but as an analogue and foil to Sutpen, both of them tragic Innocents of approximately the same age and sharing the same poor white southern tradition. Even though Sutpen exemplifies the southern nouveau riche aristocrat and Jones the white "riffraff"--the latter relegated to a similar social stratum to southern blacks and ridiculed by the slaves themselves--the circumstances of Sutpen's and Wash's origins, lives, and deaths contain many parallels. Their fates, as Wash laments inarticulately, shortly before his death, do seem inextricably bound together. Faulkner's repeated, vividly descriptive images of young Sutpen and old Wash, and later of Ellen Coldfield and Milly Jones, invite comparison because he draws them in precisely similar language. Wash resembles the young Thomas Sutpen, who never discovers his innocence, but the parallel ceases with Sutpen's unpardonable degradation of Milly. When Sutpen jokes cruelly that Milly would have been more valuable to him if she had been a mare, Wash does not sulk and vengefully conclude that he must form a materialistic design, as did young Sutpen after being confronted by the "monkey nigger" butler (189). Jones's reaction, the response of a poor white rather than a planter, is blurred, uncomprehending, impotent moral outrage. Wash, an enraged old man with a scythe, lashes out and cuts down Sutpen. The scene is richly symbolic: Time ultimately "kilt" the Sutpen design, but it cannot teach a doubting Thomas his real mistake. Who is Wash Jones? According to Quentin's and Mr. Compson's imaginative reconstruction of events, Wash Jones is "a gangling malaria-ridden white man" (183). He is more than sixty years old by the time of his death in 1869 and has lived with his granddaughter for fourteen years as a squatter and handyman in Sutpen's "abandoned and rotting fishing camp in the river bottom" (125). …

Presentation of the first interdisciplinary research on Szlamek (Szlama Winer), his family and his social (underground) circle. Collation of the existing knowledge about the author of the testimony on the Holocaust in Wartheland (“Szlamek’s testimony”, the “Grojanowski Report”) in the context of its importance for the Warsaw ghetto underground and the Polish Underground State, but the refugee’s genealogy well-documented in sources. The author has examined and analyzed the existing information on the compulsory gravedigger in the extermination center at Kulmhof, and compared the extant literature with archive research results, which makes it possible to broaden our knowledge of the most enigmatic conspirators of the Holocaust era as well as his closest relations. The historical and biographical investigations undertaken here and, consequently, verified, methodologically prepared historical data are to eliminate not only the spelling of the witnesses’ name accumulated and notoriously repeated errors in Holocaust historiography, but they are to serve as a supplement to the existing biographical entry, barely outlined on the basis of a surviving testimony and a fragment of the Warsaw–Zamośc correspondence kept in the “Ringleblum Archive”

In this essay, Gary Leason advances a sweeping theory of religion as a specific technology of power which dissolves its own conditions of possibility. Religion, simply put, is its own gravedigger because the strategies employed to impose patterns of consistency and control on the messy reality of contradiction and contingency must eventually succumb to unmanageable paradoxes.

Hamlet Presented by the East West Center at the National Theater, Sarajevo, Bosnia. Summer 2007. Directed by Haris Pasovic. Set by Amir Vuk Zec. Costumes by Kao Pao Shu. Design by Trio. Choreography by Toni Cots. With Amar Selimovic (Hamlet), Damjana Cerne (Gertrude), Frano Maskovic (Claudius), Miodrag Krivokapic (Hamlet's Father's Ghost, Player, Gravedigger), Sabina Bambur (Fortinbras, Player, Gravedigger), Slaven Knezovic (Polonius), Zana Marjanovic (Ophelia), Damir Markovina (Horatio), Aldin Omerovic (Guildenstern), and Armin Catic (Rosencrantz). Othello Presented by Chamber Theater 55, Sarajevo, Bosnia. Premiered June 2nd, 2007. Directed by Rahim Burhan. Lights by Elvedin Bajraktarevic and Nino Brutus. Costumes by Arena Kunovac-Zekic. Sound by Edin Hajdarevic and Dina Hajdarevic. With Mirsad Tuka (Othello), Admir Glamocak (Iago), Dzana Pinjo (Desdemona), Mehmed Porca (Cassio), Men Muratovic (Rodrigo), and Mirela Lambie (Emilia). What does one do with Shakespeare? Another Othello? And, oh my, yet another Hamlet? Of course, nobody needs another one, but we can't really do without another one either and so, luckily, people do bother. But if art is meant to contribute something that was not there before, this requisite is particularly heavy when it comes to staging Hamlet once again. Probably why is always much clearer than how to any director taking on the challenge. As Haris Pasovic (b. 1962, Sarajevo, Bosnia), who recently directed his own version of Hamlet in Sarajevo, put it: "I always knew that one day I would do Hamlet. I lived with Hamlet the way you live with your parents. You love your parents, even if you don't tell them this everyday ... One day I woke up and said: It's time to take on Hamlet." The impulse is clear enough, but with so many Hamlets having come before, the question must always be: how will you make yours count? In many ways Pasovic's approach--transposing the story of Hamlet to an Ottoman court, converting the Danish Prince into a Muslim Sultan--does more to articulate the problem than it does to offer a solution: the staging, which is remarkable, and elaborate, seems to keep shrugging at its own ornateness. Is this new enough? But is it also true enough? Even as Hamlet, dressed in the royal attire of an Ottoman Sultan, begins to dance to the sounds of a live oriental band, despite the beauty of the music, despite the sincerity and seriousness of the production, one can still hear that refrain creeping in: What does one do? What does one do? Part of the problem is, oddly, that Pasovic's Hamlet is such a very good production. It's immensely enjoyable and extremely well acted; smart, loving, and very faithful, even across translation, to the text of Hamlet. Only the titles of characters are changed, Princes become Sultans, and religious references altered to convey a Muslim setting. By every conceivable measure it is an excellent production; hearing the well-known speeches, those high watermarks of civility, spoken in a production that is the joint effort of Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Slovenian artists and governments cannot fail to have its own special resonance here. And the Ottoman setting does, to a large degree, make perfect sense; Hamlet, after all, calls for the structure of empire, since it is the disregard for the supernatural ground of empire that articulates the severity of Claudius's actions and the severity of Hamlet's stupefaction. The Ottoman empire works very well in this regard, taking a related structure and allowing Bosnia to be drawn into the weightiness of Shakespeare's Denmark, in a manner that is both locally and historically resonant, particularly in Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital, which clearly shows the markings of its Ottoman roots (the city's old Turkish core, Bascarija, is sometimes described as a little Istanbul). The play's transposition to a Muslim setting is further relevant within Sarajevo, a multicultural city with a large Muslim population. …

Hamlet: Blood on the Brain Presented by Intersection, Resident Theatre Company Campo Santo, and California Shakespeare Theatre at Intersection for the Arts Theatre, San Francisco, California. October 26-November 20, 2006. Script by Naomi Iizuka. Directed by Jonathan Moscone. Set by James Faerron. Costumes by Raquel Barreto. Lighting by Russell Champa. Sound by Ted Crimy. Properties by Kehran Barbour. With Margo Hall (G), Donald E. Lacy Jr. (C, Chorus), Ricky Marshall (Ghost of H's Father, Chorus), Ryan Peters (O, Chorus), Sean San Jose (H), and Tommy Shepherd (L, Chorus). The California Shakespeare Theatre joined with Intersection Theatre's Campo Santo company in producing this new version of Hamlet by Naomi Iizuka, set in modern Oakland, California, in the violent year of 1989. One of CST's goals is to create new plays inspired by classic literature, as part of its New Works/New Communities program. San Francisco's Intersection for the Arts concentrates on new and experimental work. Naomi Iisuka's works have been staged nationally and internationally. The director, Jonathan Moscone, in 2003 redeployed Julius Caesar to evoke his father's assassination as San Francisco's mayor. This production of Hamlet resulted from three years of community engagement via interviews with Oakland residents, historians, artists, and community groups such as Alameda County Juvenile Hall, and Oakland public schools. It was a fresh attempt to expand CST'S outdoor summer program at Orinda through a winter season, using a small indoor theatre in an urban setting. The script avoided close verbal and structural parallels, and attempted a bold re-siting of the relationships in Shakespeare's tragedy, mutated to suit modern Oakland's gangland culture and high murder rate. The values of this gangland replaced those of the saga society of Shakespeare's Old Hamlet. Each omerta--of the Scandinavian eddas and of our gangland culture--involves a systematic brutality, which the plays' heroes strive to transcend. The stage was bare throughout. The back wall had a sliding door, flanked by an open corridor stage left, which ran by the audience to the theatre entrance, providing access to the stage. The script used the brutal language of street gangs with fuck and shit in nearly every sentence, challenging to any middle-class theatre-goers, but amusingly authentic to the largely youthful mix of ethnic, economic, and age groups. As in Shakespeare, music, song, and dance were crucial, with G[ertrude] excelling in these skills at a party scene that included a choric rap session by the four male characters. The music was harsh but apt, like the garish ballroom lighting and abrupt blackouts. The characters, with single-letter identifications, were compressed to six through fusions and doublings. L[aertes], brother of O[phelia], a compound of Horatio, Rosencranz, and Guildenstern, killed his sister by mistake while trying to execute H. on the orders of C[laudius]. Analogues to Shakespeare's play were witty: H[amlet] "graduated" not from some modern radical Wittenberg (say, U.C. Berkeley), but from prison (San Quentin, perhaps). H wryly refused to follow the Ghost's advice to kill C, because he did not wish to spend eternity in hell with him, as a fellow murderer! The Ghost of H's dead step-father returned as the "gravedigger" sweeping up human ashes, including O's, at a crematorium. At O's funeral, African-American evangelical religion plausibly surfaced, providing a traditional ethical norm through the ritual's use of the 23rd Psalm, which served as a salutary corrective to the otherwise amoral characterization. …

In one of modern Arabic literature's most genuinely pessimistic poems, "Haffār al-Qubūr" ("The Gravedigger"), Badr Shākir Sal-ayyāb depicts a shattered world seen from the perspective of a lascivious misanthropist who earns his living as a grave-digger. While a majority of critics have interpreted the poem in psychological terms as a reflection of al-Sayyāb's tormented ego, this paper offers a radically contextual deconstructionist reading that relates the gloomy condition of the poetic persona's life not merely to its author's personal sufferings, but to the socio-historical circumstances and economic conditions of the Iraqi society in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The fundamental postulate of this study is that although al-Sayyāb's poetry always revolves around personal and abstract issues, it reflects the economic reality of its time in a manner that is not just mimetic or reproductive of dominant ideologies, but deeply ironic and critical of the contradictions inherent in those very ideologies.

In a prior report we described human remains from the Neolithic cemetery at Gebel Ramlah, Egypt, with evidence of purposeful tooth replacement. Two crania, which were apparently disturbed by later burials, were found to contain several teeth that had been incorrectly reinserted into the jaws. Such treatment was suggested to be unique. Recent work at the site revealed a similarly unusual find. Two adult male skeletons, evidently displaced in antiquity, also had several teeth loosened from their jaws; however, instead of attempting to reinsert them, the Neolithic gravedigger(s) placed the teeth into the right orbit of one cranium and the nasal aperture of the other. Such placement, as well as the general state of these burials, ruled out subsequent looting or taphonomic factors as causative agents. We previously speculated that tooth replacement represented an attention to detail while attempting to re-inter the remains in as complete a state as possible. This assumption may hold true for the present situation, but there are other plausible interpretations; for example, it might indicate animosity toward the individuals, an attempt at humour, or perhaps something less purposeful (e.g. they provided convenient receptacles). Whichever the case, the cemetery continues to yield heretofore unknown, and valuable, information about mortuary and other data relating to these prehistoric desert peoples. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

After a decade of revolutionary changes Russia is returning back toward traditionalism. Vladimir Putin is trying to modernize Russia through forming bureaucratic authoritarian regime. But his authoritarianism is weak being constrained first of all by apparatus, the major gravedigger of all Russian reforms. Russian stability is fragile being based on the presidential ratings and lack of alternative. Russia's economic growth is hardly sustainable when the economy is not diversified. Russian modernization can't be achieved without changing the way Russia is being ruled. So far Putin has proved that he is not ready for this task which means that Russia is doomed to face stagnation or crisis. And the goal of Russian liberals to prepare ground for new reformist agenda.

A man stands in a graveyard. This is a man whom we have previously become accustomed to associating with ruminations on death and suicide. This is a man who when we first encountered him on the stage was dressed all in black (‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, cold mother, / Nor customary suits of solemn black…’, Hamlet , 1.2.77–8), a figure of melancholy and grief, someone deeply associated in our minds with notions of mortality. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (for the man is he) comes then already laden by the fifth and final act of this play with associations on the part of the audience with ideas of death, but these are undoubtedly heightened, brought to a kind of performative peak, by the fact that at this particular moment he holds a specific stage property: a skull. The skull has been quite literally thrown up onto and into the stage space by the gravedigger's excavations of a new plot (which we will later realise is for the drowned Ophelia). It is one of several different skulls produced by the gravedigger's labour and all of them provoke the philosophical Danish prince to trenchant observations on the brevity of life and the levelling effects of death: That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once…Here's fine revolution an we had the trick to see't…Why, may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddits now…? (5.1.75–6, 88–9, 95–6)

Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead Presented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Harry Sudakoff Conference Center, Sarasota, Florida. February 3 and 4, 2009. Directed by Jim Warren. Costumes by Erin M. West. Fights by Colleen Kelly. With Luke Eddy (Hamlet), Daniel Kennedy (Ghost), Jonathan Reis (Claudius), Kelley McKinnon (Gertrude), Dennis Henry (Polonius), Josh Carpenter (Laertes), Brandi Rhome (Ophelia), Rick Blunt (Rosencrantz), Ginna Hoben (Guildenstern), and others. Skull? Check. Inky cloak? Check. It was a production of Hamlet alright. The American Shakespeare Center began their performance by hawking their wares (both plays and trinkets on the merchandise table), an authentic Renaissance bit of pre-theatre and a perfect segue into their performance philosophy. The cast announced that, as with all their shows, the lights would be left on and the actors would interact with the audience because these conditions better approximate the original conditions under which Hamlet was performed. All the actors donned Elizabethan dress, and the thrust stage stood sparse, with few props and scenery, much like the Globe. From the beginning, Jim Warrens production sought to make the play accessible to novice Hamlet viewers. Before Bernardo and Francisco took the stage, the cast put on a brief song-and-dance summary of Hamlet. To keep the running time at about two hours, with no intermission, they trimmed a number of the play's more difficult bits of banter and cut most of the Fortinbras plot. Among the parts retained, the comic sections were particularly emphasized. But Warren also appeased scholars of the play's intricate textual history. In his informal preamble to the performance, Guildenstern addressed the differences in sequence between the Quarto and Folio versions (including a detailed handout). To decide which version would be performed that night, he flipped a coin (a nice symmetrical touch, considering Rosencrantz's opening scene the following night): heads for Quarto, tails for Folio. Heads it was. Performing on the thrust, with the lights on and few props, a cast of eleven played the twenty-five-plus characters, with the supporting cast doubling many roles. Daniel Kennedy first appeared as the Ghost, and reemerged later as the Player King and the gravedigger, all strategic roles that trace Old Hamlet's absent presence in the play. Kennedy, who trained as a Clown, also brought humor to each part: the Ghost pestered Hamlet with his repetitious "Swear!" causing Hamlet to roll his eyes; the Player King was frustrated by Hamlet's didacticism; and the gravedigger verbally sparred with the young Prince. He also asked a nearby audience member to hold a skaill for him. Dennis Henry doubled as Polonius and Osric. His Polonius was the bumbling senex, and he delivered his rambling, longwinded lines in such a way as to keep the audience laughing through the first two acts; his Osric, too, was a slow-witted buffoon. Josh Carpenter oscillated between the serious and the comic, as he played both Laertes and a cross-dressing player in "The Murder of Gonzago." His strong physical presence, as both protective brother and flamboyant player, added depth to his two supporting roles. Thankfully, Claudius (Jonathan Reis) and Gertrude (Kelly McKinnon) did not double parts; both appeared artificial and uncomfortable in their roles on stage--perhaps much like the figures that they played. …

A Poisoned Chalice. By Jeffrey Freedman. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002.Pp.xvii, 236. $32.95. ISBN 0-691-00233-9) Jeffrey Freedman has written an engaging microhistory of an alleged poison plot in late eighteenth-century Zurich. On September 12, 1776, as many as 1200 parishioners were crowded into Zurich's cathedral to partake in Holy Communion. It happened to be the Day of Prayer and Repentance, one of only four occasions in the reformed liturgical calendar scheduled for the Lord's Supper. As the wine was distributed, however, communicants found it murky and foul-tasting. The wine was quickly exchanged and the sacrament proceeded without further incident, but the authorities suspected poisoning. Once rumors of poisoning circulated in Zurich-though not beforenumerous communicants claimed that they had taken ill. Local doctors and chemists performed chemical analyses of the tainted wine. Chemistry at this time, however, like medicine, was considered a "dirty," inexact science, as opposed to "pure" Newtonian physics. It relied on subjective evidence of the senses-smell, texture, taste-rather than objective mathematical calculation. Despite the revolution in chemical understanding brought about by Lavoisier at this time, in Zurich the analyses relied on traditional methods. Though one analysis was inconclusive, two others did find poison-though not the same poison: one identified arsenic, the other mercury. But neither arsenic nor mercury was present in high enough concentrations to cause serious harm; a pair of doves fed the tainted wine showed no symptoms. Though rumors of deaths from poisoning abounded in Zurich and abroad, the official investigation found that no deaths could be blamed on the poisoned wine. Nonetheless, the government took the poisoning as a "fact" and launched a criminal investigation. The incident almost immediately became a cause celebre, both in Zurich, where the highest government officials conducted the investigation, and in the wider German-speaking world, where the affair was publicized in the press. Freedman's reconstruction of the investigation as it played out in Zurich and in the German press sheds light on particularities of the German Enlightenment, the Aufklarung, and raises questions about the authority of science, the nature of evidence, the clashing world views of orthodox clergy and proponents of the Aufklarung, the role of the "public sphere," as well as fundamental religious and philosophical problems debated by leading figures of the German Enlightenment. The affair aroused such passions at home and abroad in part, Freedman suggests, because it evoked a "mythic narrative," bringing to mind hoary tales of host desecration, well poisoning, and ritual murder. Jews might well have served as obvious scapegoats on whom to blame the poisoning, but Jews had not resided in Zurich since they had fallen victim to mob violence in the wake of a weU-poisoning accusation in the fourteenth century.The next best choice was "gravedigger Wirz," a member of a low-status trade considered "dishonorable" in some parts of the empire, though not in Zurich. Wirz had motive and opportunity. The Antistes, Zurich's leading clergyman and one of the first to drink of the tainted wine, had previously scolded the gravedigger for his job performance, and for this Wirz harbored deep resentment. Wirz could easily have entered the cathedral by night to poison the wine, accessing the nave from the watchtower where he also served as bell-ringer. …

For no other historical figure are the ironies and paradoxes of unintended consequences so striking. Napoleon was the heir of the French Revolution yet abhorred some of its most profound hopes, notably democracy. He compromised equality by reintroducing hierarchy and hereditary titles, albeit based on service. He so narrowly described liberty that those who saw him as the gravedigger of the Revolution have a case: there was virtually no political life during the Empire except that emanating from Napoleon, no freedom of the press, assembly, or expression, France’s literary life has been accurately described as a desert, and an active and intrusive police monitored French citizens. The rule of law was frequently violated by Napoleon himself. Despite such serious incursions much of the work and the spirit of the French Revolution was preserved and survived not only Napoleon’s rule but his fall.

This essay takes as its starting point the 2008 Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamlet directed by Greg Doran in order to explore the ways in which Ophelia’s death and burial might be used to disturb dominant cultural codes. As such, it focuses upon the regulatory discourses framing three female subjects: the legal and religious rules governing suicide, in particular the inquest’s record of the death by drowning of Katherine Hamlet in 1579; the account of Ophelia’s death and her “maimed rites” in the Gravedigger’s scene; and the performance of Mariah Gale in the “mad scene.” In each case the female body is perceived to breach expected boundaries: the way in which the real girl’s death presents a series of questions about temporal and spiritual laws; the engagement of the play with those legal and religious discourses by locating the female character as a disturbing absence; and the use of the actress’s body in order to reiterate in performance the sense of threat encountered in the text. In so doing it employs the theories of the abject and the uncanny as discussed by Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva in order to locate where the text’s distorted repetitions uncover the tenuousness of the cultural codes used to regulate the Early Modern understanding of female suicide.

Work related musculoskeletal disorders (WRMSD) are diseases that question the making of the professional gesture. It said that the prevention of these multifactorial diseases needs interdisciplinary approaches. Our action is in line with the historico-cultural theory of activity (Vygotski, 1978). Research in clinic of activity organizes the subjects' action of appropriation of new means of action both on themselves and on the work situation. It always begins by an intervention within a specific professional environment. We answered the demand of the occupational medicine department of a big French city. WRMSD on the region of the shoulders and lumbers troubles have been diagnosed among municipal gravediggers. We led this intervention in psychology of work within a clinic of activity methodological frame open to interdisciplinary cooperation with ergonomics of activity and biomechanical analysis. Co- analysis of technical gestures within three gravedigger collectives has benefited from the methodological contributions of interdisciplinarity. The intervention has also allowed advances in the action of prevention initiated by managers and preventors together in a piloting committee. From a conceptual viewpoint the gesture is a physiological, psychological and social unit. In the psychological and social analysis of movement (Clot & Fernandez, 2005) this unit is comprehended in the complexity of its interfunctional dynamics (Luria, 1973). The development of the gesture is thought of in terms of qualitative reorganization of internal relations between automatism and gesture and between gesture and movement. This modelling is built on the model of the interfunctional relationships between operation and action and between action and activity (Léontiev, 1984) as well as on the model of directed activity (Clot, 1999). This theoretical route and our empirical findings show that the WRMSD are diseases linked to hypo-socialization of movement by lack of interferences between contexts of its realization. The dynamic of gestural controversies between professionals and the organization of inter-contextual interferences are analysed as indirect methods facilitating the socialization of the movement in order to prevent musculoskeletal disorders., Les troubles musculo-squelettiques (TMS) liés au travail sont des maladies qui interrogent la formation du geste professionnel. Il est admis que ces maladies plurifactorielles nécessitent pour leur prévention des approches interdisciplinaires. Notre action s'inscrit dans le cadre de la théorie historico-culturelle de l'activité (Vygotski, 1978). La recherche en clinique de l'activité organise l'action d'appropriation par les sujets de nouveaux moyens d'agir sur eux-mêmes et sur la situation de travail. Elle débute toujours par une intervention dans un milieu professionnel donné. Nous avons répondu à la demande du service de médecine du travail d'une grande ville française. Des TMS au niveau des épaules et des lombalgies ont été diagnostiqués chez des fossoyeurs municipaux. Nous avons conduit cette intervention en psychologie du travail dans un cadre méthodologique clinique de l'activité ouvert aux coopérations interdisciplinaires avec l'ergonomie de l'activité et l'analyse biomécanique. La co-analyse de gestes techniques au sein de trois collectifs de fossoyeurs a pu bénéficier des apports méthodologiques de l'interdisciplinarité. L'intervention a aussi permis des avancées dans l'action de prévention initiée par les membres de la direction et les préventeurs réunis en comité de pilotage. Au plan conceptuel, le geste est une unité physiologique, psychologique et sociale. Dans l'analyse psychologique et sociale du mouvement (Clot & Fernandez, 2005) cette unité est appréhendée dans la complexité de sa dynamique inter fonctionnelle (Luria, 1973). Le développement du geste est pensé en termes de réorganisation qualitative des rapports internes entre automatisme et geste et entre geste et mouvement (Fernandez, 2004). Cette modélisation est construite sur le modèle des rapports inter fonctionnels entre opération et action et entre action et activité (Léontiev, 1984) ainsi que sur le modèle de l'activité dirigée (Clot, 1999). Ce parcours théorique et nos résultats empiriques font apparaître que les TMS sont des maladies de l'hypo-socialisation du mouvement par défaut d'interférences entre les contextes de sa réalisation. La dynamique des controverses gestuelles entre professionnels et l'organisation d'interférences inter-contextuelles sont analysées comme des méthodes indirectes favorisant la socialisation du mouvement en vue de prévenir les troubles musculo-squelettiques.

Chester Himes’s most commercially successful novels were those featuring his Harlem detectives Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones. His creation of this surreal, violent, and “dark” series of detective novels, however, was the indirect result of the seven years he spent in prison, or rather, the result of editors’ squeamish reactions to the novel he wrote in response to his prison time. Begun in the 1940s, variously entitled Black Sheep, The Way It Was, Yesterday Will Make You Cry, Debt of Time, and Solitary, Himes’s first novel was published in 1953 (after six years of revisions) as Cast the First Stone.1. The novel was written in the Richard Wright protest-naturalist style, one of five similarly styled novels Himes wrote between 1945 and 1955. More so than any of the other five, this novel was butchered by editors at Coward McCann, who “deliberately and relentlessly” erased the complexity and “artistic aspects” of the novel to form a “hard-boiled prison novel” (Gerald and Blumenfeld 9). Yet it was this “hard-boiled” quality that eventually prompted Marcel Duhamel, the editor of La Serie Noire for Gallimard, to request that Himes try his hand at detective fiction: “start with a bizarre incident, any bizarre incident, and see where it takes you,” Duhamel told him, instructing also that he avoid “excessive exposition” and “introspective characters” and focus on the comical, violent actions of Harlemites (Margolies and Fabre 98). The result was a blend of gritty realism, surrealist absurdity, and satirical comedy that won Himes’s For the Love of Imabelle. the Grand-Prix de la de litterature policiere in 1958.

Robert Burns's poem, Death and Doctor Hornbook, 1785, tells of the drunken narrator's late night encounter with Death. The Grim Reaper is annoyed that ‘Dr Hornbook’, a local schoolteacher who has taken to selling medications and giving medical advice, is successfully thwarting his efforts to gather victims. The poet fears that the local gravedigger will be unemployed but Death reassures him that this will not be the case since Hornbook kills more than he cures. Previous commentators have regarded the poem as a simple satire on amateur doctoring. However, it is here argued that, if interpreted in the light of the exoteric and inclusive character of 18th century medical knowledge and practice, the poem is revealed to have a much broader reference as well as being more subtle and morally ambiguous. It is a satire on 18th century medicine as a whole.

Hamlet: Has this fellow no feelings of his business, that he sings at grave-making? Horatio: Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness. (Hamlet Act V, scene i) Hamlet is appalled by the gravedigger's insensitivity towards death and corpses. Horatio explains that the gravedigger is so accustomed to such things that he no longer shares Hamlet's seriousness. We contend that human dissection may make in medical students and doctors the "property of easiness" in dealing with death and the human body, and that this may have negative consequences for medics and patients. It is perhaps worth emphasising at the outset what this essay is NOT about. We do not wish to call into question the value of dissection in medical education; to charge dissection with being an inefficient or ineffective means of teaching and learning human anatomy is not our intent. Instead, we explore, through the medium of literature, experiences of dissection, and what kind of student and doctor may be encouraged or produced by the dissection room; what price might be paid for a practical, first-hand experience of human anatomy.

We all object to stereotypes. They are oversimplified preconceptions, involving those who trade in them in lazy thinking and prejudice. They don't derive from direct experience. They are subject to fashion. And they tend to come into conflict with one another. But however objectionable they may be, on intellectual or moral grounds, we can't avoid them in our own, as well as other people's, thinking. When, in Kenneth Branagh’s film of Hamlet (1996), the Gravedigger (Billy Crystal) remarks that in England the men are as mad as Hamlet, we laugh. Not exactly uproariously, but in the way, no doubt, that the line has raised a laugh for four hundred years. We laugh at the complexity of the dramatic irony in the situation - the Gravedigger’s subject is his Prince, he is his Prince’s subject, and yet here he is literally addressing his Prince on the subject. However, we also laugh at the English playwright giving the Danish character a stereotypical characterisation of the English. And if we're English we laugh, slightly awkwardly, at the joke at our expense (not sure whether or not we recognise ourselves in it, not sure whether we're particularly proud of our great English playwright’s laboured handling of it). But when the actor saying the line is Billy Crystal, we laugh in a new way, too. Now the joke is not just a joke delivered by those traditional Shakespearean stereotypes the Common Man and the Clown, but a joke delivered by another set of stereotypes - the comic, the film star and the American. Even the nationality of the joke itself seems somehow to have changed a little. But what does 'nationality' mean? It is all very well objecting to national and racial stereotypes on the grounds that nations and races are maligned by their use. But what is it that is being maligned?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Liner Notes "Satan is Real," asserted the title of an old Louvin Brothers record, though the album cover's red plywood devil would seem to suggest otherwise. Of course, the Louvins' audience probably needed no persuading of the Archfiend's tangibility. In the South, Satan endures. Which is why so many have sung "Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down," though none of them quite like Murry Hammond, whose incantatory version suggests nothing so much as evil's intimacy, the fact that Satan's deathly kingdom looms like a brown fog in one's own breast. Son Thomas, a gravedigger by trade, knew as much. Thomas said the blues he played was "nothing but the devil." And it is true that his "Cool Water" upended Jesus' water-into-wine miracle in a particularly demonic way: "I asked for water, she give me gasoline." But the blues, Thomas's included, never simply reflects iniquity but transcends it. Listen to Pura Fe's "Going Home" if you harbor doubts that such music documents pain in order to rise above it. Or, in a different idiom, consider Nimrod Workman--coal miner, union man, veteran of the 1920s-era mine wars--eighty-seven years old in 1982 when Mike Seeger's microphone captured his gnarled voice. Workman's "42 Years" is, as Mike's half-brother Pete would have it, a "serious song" chronicling Workman's underground labor, his "broke down" lungs, the company that refused any responsibility for his ill health, and the doctors who told him that he would soon die. But Workman's song is more than a register of sorrow. This is why Mike Seeger has said that in Workman's music he hears a sound at once so common and so special that it feels sacred. This is music as transfiguration. Now, even those keen to dwell on matters of ultimate significance must sometimes contemplate life's more ordinary pursuits. Here Charlie Louvin, nearly fifty years removed from his battles with Satan, finds a more familiar tormentor: a woman. His rough voice moistened by the tear-stained tones of George Jones, Louvin begs for a moment of respite that his ex refuses to allow: "You've already put big old tears in my eyes / Must you throw dirt in my face?" A similar anguish stalks Schooner's "Married," where reverb, gauzy harmonies, and a pedal steel guitar's liquid whine serve as an audible record of heartache. The musicians in Schooner are some of the many artists included here from our own backyard. The tunes by Michael Holland, Midtown Dickens, Thad Cockrell, and the Sinful Savage Tigers certainly owe something to venerable southern roots traditions that one hears, say, on "Virginia Bootleggers," recorded in the late 1920s by North Carolina's own The Red Fox Chasers or Cecil Barfield's hypnotic "Georgia Blues," unearthed by the Grammy Award-winning label Dust-to-Digital. But these contemporary musicians, along with The Rosebuds and The Kingsbury Manx, also show how Southern Music is a category whose walls are now remarkably and productively porous. They are, shall we say, leaky. But the cool water that seeps through them proves just as refreshing as always. Cool-Water Music Track List 1 | "Georgia Blues" CECIL BARFIELD 5:12 Art of Field Recording Volume II: 50 Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum, Dust-to- Digital, dust-digital.com 2 | "Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down II" MURRY HAMMOND 3:46 I Don't Know Where I'm Going But I'm On My Way, Hummin'bird Records, myspace. …

A page and fire, grain and millstones, / the cutting edge of a poleaxe and a cut-off hair - / God preserves everything; especially words / of forgiveness and love, / as his own voice. / / In them [the words] there beats a lacerated pulse, in them can be heard a crunch of bones, / and a [gravedigger’s] spade in them pounds; flat and somewhat muffled, / since one has only one life, from mortal lips they / sound more clearly than from the cotton wool above this world. / / Great soul, greetings [literally: a bow] from across the seas / for finding them, − to you and to the decayable part of you / which sleeps in [its] native land, [that] thanks to you / acquired the gift of speech amidst a deaf-mute universe.1

"Theater is therapy; the mystery of Hamlet's metamorphosis is also ours." -George Tabori, "Hamlet in Blue" (127) In a cemetery on the Rhein, Jirgen, a young neo-Nazi, appears to deface the graves with anti-Semitic slogans and swastikas. As he does so, one of the dead, a Jewish musician named Arnold, speaks up. He wants to help Jirgen, who has apparently made a spelling mistake. "'Verrecke' mit 'ck', mein Junge," Arnold tells him. With this grotesquely comical interaction, George Tabori opens Jubildum (53). The play introduces a number of deceased characters who reenact or describe the conditions of their deaths-with one significant exception. Arnold, meant to represent Tabori himself, does not describe his own death. Instead, in the final scene, the audience learns of the circumstances surrounding the death of his father, a victim of the Holocaust, who arrives in ghost form. In addition, the young neo-Nazi, Jurgen, appears throughout the play to torment the dead and to talk with Wumpf, a gravedigger. The play was originally conceived in response to Hanne Hiob's search for a playwright to make theatrical use of her collection of anti-Semitic jokes in order to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power.1 Jubilaum premiered on that anniversary date, January 30, 1983, in the lobby of the Bochumer Kammerspiele with Tabori in the role of the ghost of Arnold's father. Marcus Sander argues convincingly that the cemetery setting serves as a model for four aspects of the Holocaust: the continuation of persecution since 1945, the situation of the survivors since that time, the relationships between the Nazi perpetrators and the victims in the historical concentration camps, and the current situation of the children of the victims and survivors, like Tabori himself (196). The cemetery setting surely symbolizes what society has buried, forgotten, and repressed; but it also recalls very concretely the renewed vandalism of Jewish cemeteries that accompanied the rise of right wing extremist and anti-Semitic groups in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Nearly forty years earlier, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno had written of the central significance of the destruction of cemeteries: "Selbst die letzte Ruhe soll keine sein. Die Verwfistung der Friedhofe ist keine Ausschreitung des Antisemitismus, sie ist er selbst" (192). Today, the relevance of the Jewish cemetery as a site of violation and violence is evident in acts of vandalism such as the December 1998 bombing of the grave of Heinz Galinski, a leader of the German Jewish community, in Berlin. As though it were not enough that Galinski's wife and mother were murdered and that his father died while imprisoned by the Nazis, or even that he himself had the number 104 412 tattooed onto his arm, a reminder of his imprisonment in Auschwitz, now his grave itself is under attack (Brenner 147). Frank Stern notes that in Germany "during the 1970s and 1980s, antisemitic attitudes and expressions reentered the public sphere, the center of political culture, in intensified form" (435). The official culture of tolerance, which had emerged after 1945 as a conscious break with National Socialism, began to give way already in the 1960s to increasingly visible signs of anti-Semitism. "During the 1970s, philosemitic symbolism and surrogate acts increasingly lost their formal functionalism and importance," but such imagery continued to make an appearance when the "moral legitimation of the Federal Republic" was at stake (434). Tabori introduces the cemetery as a site of struggle, where the hypocritical side of stereotypical and somewhat self-serving philo-Semitic discourses can be unmasked. Here the victims of anti-Semitism can confront their persecutors. As will be discussed below, in Jubilaum Tabori critically engages the German theatrical traditions for representing the Holocaust in the early 1980s; he unearths what they repress, thereby transforming both the traditions and his audience. …

Hamlet. Presented by the Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festival at the Tom Patterson Theatre, 1994. Director, Richard Monette; Design, Debra Hanson; Music, Louis Applebaum; Lighting, Kevin Fraser; Sound, Evan Turner; Fights, John Stead; Stage Manager, Nora Polley. CAST: Marcellus/Priest, Tim Barker; Rosencrantz, Kevin Bundy; Barnardo/Lucianus, Steve Cell; Laertes, Antoni Cimolino; Guildenstern, Jonathan Crombie; Claudius, Peter Donaldson; Ophelia, Sabrina Grdevich; Player King, Roland Hewgill; Ghost/First Gravedigger, William Hutt; Prologue to "Gonzago," David Jansen; Horatio, Tom McCamus; Second Grdvedigger, Robert O'Driscoll; Reynaldo/Player Queen, Duncan Ollerenshaw; Hamlet, Stephen Ouimette; Polonius, Douglas Rain; Gertrude, Janet Wright.

No commemoration of the bicentennial of Mozart's death would be complete without some consideration of that premature yet predictable demise. Mozart's premonitions of death are well known and apparently played a role in the composition of the K.626 Requiem and perhaps other works. His death has traditionally been ascribed to infectious causes, chiefly rheumatic fever or post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis, exacerbated by intemperance and chronic penury. Pathography has been difficult because of his supposed burial in a pauper's grave, the location and contents of which were later supposedly lost. Mozart's burial place in St. Mark's Cemetery in Vienna was known and, in the parlance of the day, “reorganized” a decade later, as the occupants of plots were disinterred to make room for the more recently deceased. A skull believed to be Mozart's was saved by the successor of the gravedigger who had supervised Mozart's burial, and then passed into the collections of the anatomist Josef Hyrtl, the municipality of Salzburg, and the Mozarteum museum (Salzburg). Forensic reconstruction of soft tissues related to this skull reveals substantial concordance with Mozart's portraits. The skull suggests premature closure of the metopic suture, which has been suggested on the basis of his physiognomy. A left temporal fracture and concomitant erosions raise the question of chronic subdural hematoma, which would be consistent with several falls in 1789 and 1790 and could have caused the weakness, headaches, and fainting he experienced in 1790 and 1791. Aggressive bloodletting to treat suspected rheumatic fever could have decompensated such a lesion to produce his death on December 5, 1791.

The Alabama Shakespeare Festival is now in its eleventh year. With a firmly established reputation for solid, well-rounded productions, ASF will soon be setting up in Montgomery in a major arts/culture complex. Anniston, the home of ASF for the past ten years, will surely miss the excitement the company generates. Meanwhile, it's been business as usual. The 1982 season included two Shakespeare plays, Hamlet and Twelfth Night, as well as Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and two productions marking a new turn for ASF, Southern regional theatre-John O'Neal's Sayings from the Life and Writings of Junebug Jabbo Jones and Dudley Cocke and Don Baker's Red FoxlSecond Hangin'. Of the Shakespeare plays, Twelfth Night was certainly the better. Hamlet was unremarkable and almost conservatively dull. Although there were some good bits, the production lacked an overall drive. Michele Farr's Ophelia was one very bright spot. William Preston had a priceless routine as the First Gravedigger, illustrating the "se offendendo" speech with a cup and

N the campus of the University of Vermont this summer the Champlain Shakespeare Festival presented Hamlet, Cymbeline, and The Tempest in new surroundings, the Royall IS-IT. Tyler Theater. Named after the Vermont citizen who wrote America's first comedy to be played professionally (The Contrast), the theater is a marked improvement over the previous cramped facilities. The building itself is a tasteful renovation of a i90i basilicastyle structure which originally doubled as gymnasium and concert hall. In its better days, before being turned into offices and classrooms, the old building held such artists as Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Anna Pavlova. Now it is again possible for audiences of three to five hundred persons to view either thrust or proscenium stagings under the original wainscoted ceiling. The Festival players consisted of ten equity actors plus drama students at the university. Their acting was generally good. Although no actor performed at a consistently superb level, as has been the case in past festivals, several rendered individually brilliant scenes. On the whole, Halmlet, directed by Michael Diamond, was solid if sometimes monotonous. The opening, with its animal snarls and rumbles from hell, was a bit tedious until inspirited by Hamlet (Kenneth Gray) talking to the Ghost. Unfortunately, Gray could not seem to create an antic disposition, so the dimension of madness-feigned or actual-was missing from Hamlet's character. He did, however, admirably portray Hamlet as an angry, wounded man, and his wrath was especially marvelous in the Queen's closet scene (III. iv). Usually clear in his delivery, Gray muddled the poetry of the closing lines of the play by emoting them in a rasping death wheeze. Aided by a naturally deep and resonant voice, Robert Rovin as Claudius effectively conveyed the power of the King, although he could be faulted for slighting the King's traces of humanity. For example, he delivered the King's prayer for heaven's help (III. iii) in a flat, noncommital tone, and thus sacrificed depth of character. Ophelia was nicely portrayed by Stephanie Satie, and Gertrude adequately by Glynis Bell. John Milligan as Polonius at first merely declaimed but then gradually interacted with other characters. Dennis Lipscomb convincingly played a gentle, monkish Horatio; Andrew Jones provided a satisfactory Laertes; and Peter Covette teamed with Jeffrey DeMunn as the sycophantic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Stephan Stearns's abbreviated gravedigger scene was excellent. Although the opportunity (even temptation?) no doubt exists for a director to play Cymbeline as "camp" art-consider a bloody head to be lugged about