Hamlet, although a wonderful play, is not my personal favourite: King Lear holds that position (for the moment, anyway). Nevertheless, there are many rather interesting things about Hamlet and interpretation. With very few exceptions, the play is never performed uncut: it would be over four hours long otherwise! That means the producers or director must decide what to leave out. Also, anyone who is deeply interested in the theatre or any kind of performance art knows that from one night to the next, it is all quite different and I am talking about the actors! The audience will see a different play every night as well. It is what makes these things so full: they are never quite the same. Film, although it may seem at first to be different, really is not. Although what you see may seem to be the same each time, you are in a different 'place' (quite literally usually!) each time you see it.

Hi Dave,

As I have just posted on ActKM, I think your quote of Lakomski is accurate, however a bit of a long bow to draw for people still using older cultural models.

I hope my little review of Joe's comment and your Lakomski quote help spread the culture-as-cognition concept and lead more to investigate the traps hidden in their world-views.

Having said that, while his language and is problematic, is it possible that some of his actual techniques around knowledge management aren't quite as bad as all that, given his admission and and inclusion of the mind as a CAS? I think he's a lot closer than many IT-based practitioners out there.

Regards,

Stuart

I have been trying very hard to resist getting engaged in this debate, as I fear I will be beaten up by people who know more about linguisitcs, philosophy, complexity and cognition than I, but as ActKM strayed into one of my areas of speciality, literature, here goes....

As far as the orignal claim that one could determine a correct textual interpretation of Hamlet goes (and I note that the claim seems to be be being redefined endlessly by the original claimant), well one of my English Professors, Mac Jackson, tried to come up with an authoritative Hamlet text and failed. Well, failed is a strong verdict, but that is my opinion of his attempt based on his work. Mac's life work has been to try to analyse Shakespeare from within, to produce more authoritative versions for future posterity. The problem is that Will and his mates have made Mac's job hard by the way in which the original versions were published, haphazardly, in different versions etc. In the case of Hamlet, we have 3 original published versions of it. This is because the play, as written, was never intended for publication, but performance.

But then, as for which version is more correct? Well we know that Shakespeare changed things because of context (i.e. is Queenie coming to tonight's performance etc). So, we need to know the starting conditions, as well as have the shared context of a person who grew up speaking and listening to Elizabethan english. Sadly, that is beyond me. Joe's ambition (to have a correct Hamlet) is noble, but rather quasi-religious. In fact, his view of literature is somewhat dictatorial. If he had been in studying English with me back when, I could well have cut the length of my degree down by at least two years, but it would have been no fun.

Language - as you rightly say - is what makes this 'correct' interpretation an impossibility. More correct, yes, but never absolutely 'correct'. [BTW, it strikes me as a very Borgesian statement that Joe can stumble over the 'correct' Hamlet, but not realise it - in which case, why even make the claim?]

Moving on to the related issue of translation, one of the posters made an excellent point about translating Jabberwocky. I am reminded that Vladimir Nabokov once translated Alice in Wonderful into Russian. I can not read Russian, but by all accounts, it is a rollocking read, but as much Nabokov as it is Carroll.

That brings me on to my main point. Regardless of the linguistic aspects of this debate, we are here talking about artistic endeavours. Nabokov once wrote an interesting analysis of this (which I can not find now), especially as he was so extremely particular about the way he crafted his novels. He believed that the most interesting and significant aspect of literature occurs at the interface between the author and the reader. In other words, that the very act of consuming a piece of literature is where the content takes on meaning.

Thus, my wife's experience of Lolita is significantly different from mine. She knows (from living with a Nabokov bore) that there are lots of different layers lurking in the book, but she does not care. Her experience of the text is quite different from mine. She sees things in the book that I find hard to understand. And yet she loves it not the less than I do.

The key significance of context was brought home to me when I read the book Reading Lolita in Tehran. As a white, Anglo-Saxon male, I can not really identify with Dolores Haze's plight, I can sympathise perhaps, yet the women in Tehran can and do identify with the girl. Nabokov could never have anticipated such an audience and yet the book has recently become famous again in this way.

"Alice in Wonderland" - oh dear, I have not had enough coffee today...