Hamlet Figura

Poetry. HAMLET FIGURA is a serial work, a long poem, that constitutes a reading of, or response to, Shakespeare's Hamlet from the point of view of language. The work aims to interrogate language in philosophical terms, whether directly or indirectly. It is based on two major premises: that Hamlet is caught up with language as such, and that language in general creates world and is redemptive, whether or not the play represents this point of view. The theory of language implicit in the work is indebted to other theories of language and to theory in general. But it is based very much on my own sense of language and its centrality to the human condition. HAMLET FIGURA is an autonomous work, though one that depends on another, in this case Shakespeare's canonical text.