William Shakespeare still retains his authority and the contemporary celebrity status. This book throws light from a fresh angle on his plays and points out the semiotic aspects in the examination of the death theme in Shakespearean Dramas with special reference to Hamlet and Macbeth. Semiotics, the science of signs, does not confine itself to language but studies any and all signs-aural, visual and physical. The range, depth and variety with which Shakespeare presents death is kept under scrutiny. From the point of view of the reader, the first order of the present study in thematic and second is semiotic. Semiotic analysis, in turn, comprises of verbal and non-verbal aspects. The study concludes with the non-verbal approach to the plays of Shakespeare. The prime concern here is in reconstituting Shakespeare's ideas and finding new ways to extrapolate them. This book tries to seek out in Shakespeare a psychoanalysed Christianity or a christianized psychoanalysis. It develops the semiotic correlation of the Freudian, the Christian and the Shakespearean parallel semiotically and thematically.
Dr. Bhasha Shukla Sharma compeleted her M.A. in English Literature in 1994 and topped the Barkatullah University, Bhopal, in the order of merit. She received her doctoral degree from the same university in 1999. She has a teaching experience of more than nine years in the department of technical education (M.P.) and has published articles in various books and journals. At present she is a Lecturer and head of the department of Humanities in the University Institute of Technology, Rajeev Gandhi Technical University, Bhopal.
William Shakespeare still retains his authority in the idiomatic sense of cultural success, high visibility and widespread notoriety, because suppliers of cultural good have been skillful at generating a social desire for products that bear his trademark and in creating merchandise to satisfy that desire. Other literary figures may achieve canonical status within the academic community based on claims for artistic distinction, but Shakespeare is unusual in that he has also achieved contemporary celebrity status. His attitude for controversy constantly keeps his name in the public eye. This study suggests that Shakespeare's Plays represent the pathos of our civilization with extraordinary force and clarity. His characters remain interesting because we recognize what they are going through. Shakespeare's plays certainly display considerable semantic ambiguity. Shakespeare does use eloquent and powerful language. But language itself is no longer the plays' essential ingredient. It is their metaphysic, their subterranean imagery that means most to us today. We are interested in Hamlet, not because of what he says but because of the way the character connects with our own twentieth-century sense of impotence and confusion. It is his cosmic befuddlement that we respond to - not merely the literary felicities of his well phrased melancholia. And the fascination of Macbeth today is that here is a character trapped in a diabolical universe of spells and witchcraft which connects up to our own obsessions with astrology and satanism, to the ubiquitous psychotic state that we encounter every day in modern urban sanatoria. The following study is an attempt to point out the semiotic aspects in which the examination of the theme of death in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth seems to me to throw new light on the dramatist and his semiosis. I embarked on this task because it seemed to me that it might provide a new method of approach of Shakespeare and I believe I have, by a happy fortune, hit on such a method, hitherto untried, which is yielding most interesting and important results. br It enables us to get nearer to Shakespeare himself, to his mind, his tastes, his experiences, and his deeper thought that does any other single way I know of studying him. It throws light from a fresh angle upon Shakespeare's sign system and pictorial vision, upon his own ideas about his own plays and the characters in them. No one could study Shakespeare closely for years without being reduced to a condition of complete humility, and I am fully conscious of my boldness in venturing even to touch the subject for I know well that I can only scratch the surface of what it is possible to find and reveal in the hitherto uncharged treasures of this rich and varied material. My excuse is that up to the present no one has attempted seriously or systematically to examine it at all. As it appears to me to open an entirely new and illuminating vista and investigation, if what I say here lead other-better equipped to-study fresh aspects and garner further results from this vase and almost untilled field, my boldness will have been justified. universe of spells While selecting this topic I have gone through hundreds of books written on Shakespeare. Till date I have not found a single title which is based on the semiotic approach of Shakespearean drama. It is my humble request that the present work is an original interpretation of Shakespearean tragedies and it should not be ignored in the array of volumes of researches on Shakespeare. Our main concern here is in reconstituting Shakespeare's ideas and finding new ways to extrapolate them. Assumptions about the nature of Shakespeare's audience go hand in hand with ideas about the quality, scope and even meaning of his dramas. When Shakespeare was viewed as an unpolished genius, warbling "his native woodnote wild" as per John Milton, the "historical" view accompanying this perception of course held Shakespeare's audience equally primitive in their response. This "historical" awareness of Shakespeare's unsophisticated auditory in turn allowed earlier critics to take the more daring elements in the shakespearean style as condescension to these unruly onlookers.
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