Description
Drama. Literary Nonfiction. Literary Criticism. READING THE UNSEEN: (OFFSTAGE) HAMLET is about the presence and significance of offstage action in Hamlet, things we hear about in words but do not see performed physically onstage—things like King Hamlet's murder "while [he] was sleeping in [his] orchard," Ophelia's death in "the glassy stream," Hamlet's visit to Ophelia's "closet ... with his doublet all unbraced," Gertrude and Claudius having sex "in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed." In a series of brilliantly original "close readings," Ratcliffe examines how it is that passages such as these make physically absent things verbally "present," how they "show" us things we do not actually see, how they bring us face to face with the "Words, words, words" that are what Hamlet is, he argues, most of all about.
Author Bio
Stephen Ratcliffe has published more than twenty books of poetry, including SOUND OF WAVE IN CHANNEL (BlazeVOX [books], 2018), PAINTING (Chax, 2014), SELECTED DAYS (Counterpath, 2012), which won The Poetry Center Book Award, CLOUD / RIDGE (BlazeVox [books], 2011), CONVERSATION (Bootstrap Press, 2011), REAL (Avenue B, 2007), and PORTRAITS & REPETITION (The Post-Apollo Press, 2002). He has also written three books of literary criticism, Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet (Counterpath, 2010), Listening to Reading (SUNY Press, 2000), and Campion: On Song (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). Five of his 1,000-page books of poems written in 1,000 consecutive days are available at Editions Eclipse (http://eclipsearchive.org), and his ongoing series of daily poems-plus-photographs can be found at Temporality (stephenratcliffe.blogspot.com). He lives in Bolinas California.
Author City: BOLINAS, CA USA