Between nature and eternity: (present)ing absence in theatrical representations of Shakespeare as the ghost of Hamlet

A poem that was published in The London Magazine in the summer of 1750 depicts an episode in which the ghost of Shakespeare appears to the actor David Garrick, inciting him to avenge the wrongs done to his works by those who would mutilate his natural genius through their own vainglorious adaptations. As Michael Dobson notes in his study, The Making of the National Poet, the poem capitalized upon the popular mid-eighteenth century representations that mythologized the relationship between the ghostly poet-playwright and the actor who was doing so much to expand and promote Shakespeare’s position at the zenith of the literary pantheon as analogous to that of the famous Danish prince (incidentally Garrick’s most famous theatrical role) and the Ghost of Hamlet Senior. So celebrated was this analogy that it became the victim of parody when Garrick became the prodigal son and disobeyed his spiritual father’s orders and he proceeded to stage his own adaptations of Hamlet and the representation of Shakespeare as the Ghost of Old Hamlet was made even more explicit as he returned to haunt Garrick, chastising him for bringing his work ‘upon the stage/With all your horrible imperfections on my head!’ (cited in Dobson, 1992, 173). Garrick’s supporters retaliated with a piece called, ‘Shakespeare and Garrick, a New Dialogue, occasioned by the Alterations lately made in the Tragedy of Hamlet, as acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane’, in which Shakespeare again appears as the ghost of Old Hamlet to an awe-struck Garrick/Hamlet/Claudius: [The Spirit of Shakespeare arises] [Garr.] Angels and Ministers of Grace! – Shakespear. Proceed; And let my organs spiritually feed From those harmonious lips, whose quick’ning breath So oft hath chear’d me in the arms of death; And now by potency of magic sound Calls up my spirit from the deep profound: Speak to thy Shakespear – Garrick. Hail, much honour’d name! Friend of my life and father of my fame: If whilst I draw each weed, that idly creeps Around the tomb, where thy lov’d Hamlet sleeps, Incautiously I have forgot to spare Some flower, which thy full hand had scatter’d there, Impute it not – Shakespear. Freely correct my Page: I wrote to please a rude unpolish’d age; Thou, happy man, art fated to display Thy dazzling talents in a brighter day; Let me partake this night’s applause with thee, And thou shalt share immortal fame with me. (Cited in Dobson, 1992 175) This was not the first time that Shakespeare had appeared as a ghostly illusion – many times before the spectre of the Bard had been summoned from beyond the grave to serve as a prologue to various performances of his plays and their adaptations, and yet it was the analogy between Shakespeare’s authorship and the Ghost in Hamlet that persistently haunted the stage in the late seventeenth century and early to mid-eighteenth century. There is even a rumour, which started courtesy of Nicholas Rowe, the first editor of Shakespeare’s plays, and which is still in circulation today that Shakespeare himself was the first performer to play the role of Old Hamlet. Neither is this alignment between Shakespeare and Hamlet’s Ghost innovative in terms of more contemporary critical perspectives on the text, and Marjorie Garber in her study, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers speaks of how the authorial presence of Shakespeare persistently haunts his corpus of plays: ‘The Ghost is Shakespeare…the one who comes as a revenant, belatedly instated, regarded as originally authoritative, rather than retrospectively canonized, and deriving increased authority from this very instatement of authority backward, over time’ (1987, 176), and Garber boldly substantiates Rowe’s assertion, ‘[w]e know that Shakespeare played the part of the Ghost in Hamlet. What could not be foreseen, except through anamorphic reading, was that he would become that Ghost’ (1987, 176). Whether or not there was any veracity behind Rowe’s claim, the alignment between author and spectre draws explicit attention to the uncanny function that both entities bring to the act of theatrical performance. This essay will explore the connotations of this association between ghost and author when each entity simultaneously enacts both its presence and absence in the liminal realm of representation, wherein ghost becomes author; author becomes ghost, and performance becomes a kind of séance, conjuring up the spirits of the dead and materializing them through the performer’s body. In order to do this, I will explore the extent to which stage representations of Old Hamlet from the sixteenth century onwards have been haunted by contemporary appropriations and attitudes towards the playwright. In so doing, I argue that the production choices made regarding the appearance of the Ghost of Hamlet’s father say less about contemporary attitudes towards the supernatural than they do about existing perspectives and exploitations of Shakespeare, his authorial status and how it is permitted to haunt the theatrical event. In so doing I confess that I make no attempts to present a comprehensive history of Hamlet in performance. Such a task is beyond the remit of a single essay. However, the present project is offered to the reader to be accepted as a provocation to inspire further thought rather than to be received as an end in itself. I must further stress that my study consciously recognises its limitations, and for this reason I have confined my focus to a study of productions of Hamlet on the English stage. This is not to disparage future considerations of the representation of the Ghost on more international stages and in wider global contexts

An Investigation of the Perceptions of Community Residents and Volunteer Researchers for the Community Health of the Clarke Square Neighborhood

The study explored the similarities and differences in community residents’ perceptions and volunteer researchers’ perceptions of community health indicators in the Clarke Square Neighborhood. The study sought to identify noteworthy differences between community residents’ perceptions and volunteer researchers’ perceptions, indicating the importance of including community members in community health research. In the study, community residents in the Clarke Square Neighborhood conducted a survey that had previously been done by volunteer researchers from the Urban Ecology Center and the Medical College of Wisconsin regarding community health indicators in the Clarke Square Neighborhood. The study also included a focus group, which discussed the perceptions of community residents and volunteer researchers regarding community health in the Clarke Square Neighborhood and the role that communities play in research. The study found several noteworthy differences in the perceptions of community residents and volunteer researchers regarding community health in the Clarke Square Neighborhood

Evaluating the Mexico city policy: How US foreign policy affects fertility outcomes and child health in Ghana

US development assistance represents a significant source of funding for many population programs in poor countries. The Mexico City policy, known derisively as the global gag rule, restricts activities of foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that receive such assistance. The intent of the policy is to reduce the use of abortion in developing countries—a policy that is born entirely of US domestic politics and that turns on and off depending on the political party in power. I examine here whether the policy achieves its aim, and how the policy affects reproductive outcomes for women in Ghana. Employing a woman-by-month panel of pregnancies and woman fixed effects, I estimate whether a given woman is less likely to abort a pregnancy during two policy periods versus two nonpolicy periods. I find no evidence that any demographic group reduces the use of abortion as a result of the policy. On the contrary, rural women significantly increase abortions. This effect seems to arise from their increased rate of conception during these times. The policy-induced budget shortfalls reportedly forced NGOs to cut rural outreach services, reducing the availability of contraceptives in rural areas. The lack of contraceptives likely caused the observed 12 percent increase in rural pregnancies, ultimately resulting in about 200,000 additional abortions and between 500,000 and 750,000 additional unintended births. I find that these additional unwanted children have significantly reduced height and weight for age, relative to their siblings. Rather than reducing abortion, this policy increased pregnancy, abortion, and unintended births, resulting in more than a half-million children of significantly reduced nutritional status.abortion, child health, fertility, Foreign aid,

An exploration of the utility of GSR in locating events from personal lifelogs for reflection

Digital personal lifelogs (PLs) enable many artifacts from a person’s life to be automatically stored in a digital archive. These data sets can contain a wealth of potentially valuable information describing events from an individual’s life. A key challenge for lifelog technologies is how to develop scenarios and applications which enable people to interact with these vast heterogeneous data sources in a meaningful way. One of the areas where individuals can gain from interacting with lifelog records of their life is in the process of self reflection. To date little attention has been given to applications which automatically extract content from lifelogs to support self reflection using lifelog content. One of the significant issues with reflection from lifelogs is discerning material which may be of interest in reflection from among the huge amount of available data. One way of determining the user’s engagement with their situation is measuring their biometric response associated with their arousal level. Specifically it is known that an individual’s galvanic skin response (GSR) can vary with their level of arousal. We hypothesize that situations of marked GSR variation are likely to be more significant for self reflection than other moments. We present an initial investigation, using 3 subjects’ lifelogs, of the utility of lifelog items with marked GSR for self reflection. Our results indicate that GSR records may serve as a good enabling technology for applications supporting self reflection and awareness

Venturing into the labyrinth: the information retrieval challenge of human digital memories

Advances in digital capture and storage technologies mean that it is now possible to capture and store one’s entire life experiences in a Human Digital Memory (HDM). However, these vast personal archives are of little benefit if an individual cannot locate and retrieve significant items from them. While potentially offering exciting opportunities to support a user in their activities by providing access to information stored from previous experiences, we believe that the features of HDM datasets present new research challenges for information retrieval which must be addressed if these possibilities are to be realised. Specifically we postulate that effective retrieval from HDMs must exploit the rich sources of context data which can be captured and associated with items stored within them. User’s memories of experiences stored within their memory archive will often be linked to these context features. We suggest how such contextual metadata can be exploited within the retrieval process

Examining the utility of affective response in search of personal lifelogs

Personal lifelog archives contain digital records captured from an individual’s daily life, for example emails, documents edited, webpages downloaded and photographs taken. While capturing this information is becoming increasingly easy, subsequently locating interesting items from within these archives is a significant challenge. One potential source of information to identify items of importance to an individual is their affective state during the capture of the information. The strength of an individual’s affective response to their current situation can often be gauged from their physiological response. For this study we explored the utility of the following biometric features to indicate significant items: galvanic skin response (GSR), heart rate (HR) and skin temperature (ST). Significant or important events tend to raise an individual’s arousal level, causing a measurable biometric response. We examined the utility of using biometric response to identify significant items and for re-ranking traditional information retrieval (IR) result sets. Results obtained indicate that skin temperature is most useful for extracting interesting items from personal archives containing passively captured images, computer activity and SMS messages

Post-Buyout Burley Tobacco Production and Trends in the Traditional Burley Regions of Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia

The 2004 federal tobacco buyout ended the longstanding tobacco quota and price support programs, and also eliminated all tobacco reporting requirements. Producers are adjusting to the free market with scant information. The 2006 Burley Tobacco Survey provides an initial glimpse of post-buyout burley tobacco production, trends, challenges, and expectations.tobacco, quota buyout, farmer survey, tobacco production, Agricultural and Food Policy, Crop Production/Industries, Q12, Q18,

Sloth: America\u27s Ironic Structural Vice

Individualism is a popular cultural trope in the United States, often touted for its promotion of industriousness and rejection of laziness. This essay argues that, ironically, America\u27s brand of individualism actually promotes a more fundamental form of the very vice it purports to oppose. To make this case, the essay defines the unique form of individualism in the United States and then retrieves the classical definition of sloth as a vice against charity (not diligence), contrasting Aquinas and Barth with Weber to demonstrate that this peculiarly American individualist impulse undermines civic charity by reaping the benefits of civic relationships while denying any concomitant responsibilities. Identifying this narrative of individualism as a structural vice, the essay proposes structural remedies for reinvigorating civic charity, solidarity, and the common good in the United States

Multiple multimodal mobile devices: Lessons learned from engineering lifelog solutions

For lifelogging, or the recording of one’s life history through digital means, to be successful, a range of separate multimodal mobile devices must be employed. These include smartphones such as the N95, the Microsoft SenseCam – a wearable passive photo capture device, or wearable biometric devices. Each collects a facet of the bigger picture, through, for example, personal digital photos, mobile messages and documents access history, but unfortunately, they operate independently and unaware of each other. This creates significant challenges for the practical application of these devices, the use and integration of their data and their operation by a user. In this chapter we discuss the software engineering challenges and their implications for individuals working on integration of data from multiple ubiquitous mobile devices drawing on our experiences working with such technology over the past several years for the development of integrated personal lifelogs. The chapter serves as an engineering guide to those considering working in the domain of lifelogging and more generally to those working with multiple multimodal devices and integration of their data

Considering subjects and scenarios in large-scale user-centered evaluation of a multilingual multimodal medical search system

Medical search applications can be required to service the differing information needs of multiple classes of users with varying medical knowledge levels, and language skills, as well as varying querying behaviours. The precise nature of these users' needs has to be understood to develop effective applications. Evaluation of developed search applications requires creation of holistic user-centred evaluation approaches which allow for comprehensive evaluation while being mindful of the diversity of users